Francesco Castellaneta

I am Full Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at SKEMA Business School, Université Côte d’Azur (GREDEG). I was Chairperson of the Competitive Strategy Interest Group at the Strategic Management Society (2025–2026) and hold the UCA JEDI Chair of Excellence. I directed the PhD management specialization from 2017 to 2023. Previously, I was Assistant Professor at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics (2011–2017) and International Faculty Fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management (2014).

Drawing primarily on quasi-experimental designs and archival data, my research investigates how organizational experience translates into performance and how institutional rules determine who captures the resulting value. In corporate development—private equity buyouts, M&As, and venture capital—I study why experience sometimes produces learning and sometimes inertia, depending on activity load, feedback delays, and knowledge codification. I then examine how the institutional environment shapes value capture: trade secret regimes and the inevitable disclosure doctrine alter information asymmetries that affect firm valuation and investor behavior. Extending this logic to labor markets, I study how entry deregulation and employment protection rules create mobility threats that redistribute value between startups and incumbents, reshape gender gaps in entrepreneurial hiring, and drive wage dispersion within established firms. My current work extends these themes to artificial intelligence, studying how humans and machines jointly produce knowledge in organizational settings, and how firms’ strategic framing of AI risk reshapes competitive dynamics.

My work has been published in Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Industrial and Corporate Change, Long Range Planning, British Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, and other journals.