Sen Chai
- Doctorate in Technology and Operations Management, Harvard Business School
- Master in Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
- Bachelor in Electrical Engineering w/ minor in Management, McGill University
Innovation, Strategy, Entrepreneurship
Sen CHAI is an associate professor of Strategy and Organization at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management and a Desautels Faculty Scholar.
Sen’s research examines the entire lifecycle of creative innovation—from idea conception to commercialization—with the aim of helping managers and policymakers better support innovation while anticipating, avoiding, and managing failure. Her current projects include studying the role of anticipation in failure management in crowdfunding campaigns, investigating how multi-segmented nascent industries emerge and legitimize themselves as well as exploring how AI tools affect idea generation in research.
Prior to McGill, Sen taught at ESSEC Business School in Paris and completed a post-doc at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. Before her doctoral studies, she worked in the San Francisco and Seattle offices of Deloitte Consulting LLP helping clients optimize their business processes. She has also passed all three levels of the CFA curriculum.
Sen grew up in Paris, NYC and Montreal, and is also fluent in French and Mandarin. She enjoys sailing and traveling during her free time.
- MGPO 460 - Managing Innovation
- BUSA 465 - Technology Entrepreneurship
- MGPO 630 - Managing Strategy & Innovation
- Chai, S., Doshi, A., Silvestri, L. and Zuzul, T. (2026). The Promise–Risk Balance: Recalibrating Design Choices and Strategic Framing Following Catastrophic Innovation Failure. Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming.
- Zhou, S., Chai, S. and Freeman, R. (2024). Gender Homophily: In-Group Citation Preferences and the Gender Disadvantage. Research Policy, 53(1).
- Chai, S., Doshi, A. and Silvestri, L. (2022). How Catastrophic Innovation Failure Affects Organizational and Industry Legitimacy: The 2014 Virgin Galactic Test Flight Crash. Organization Science, 33(3), pp. 1068-1093.
- Mell, J.N., Jang, S. and Chai, S. (2021). Bridging Temporal Divides: Temporal Brokerage in Global Teams and Its Impact on Individual Performance. Organization Science, 32(3), pp. 731-751.
- Chai, S. and Menon, A. (2019). Breakthrough Recognition: Bias Against Novelty and Competition for Attention. Research Policy, 48(3), pp. 733-747.
- Chai, S. and Freeman, R. (2019). Temporary Colocation and Collaborative Discovery: Who Confers at Conferences. Strategic Management Journal, 40(13), pp. 2138-2164.
- Chai, S. (2017). Near Misses in the Breakthrough Discovery Process. Organization Science, 28(3), pp. 411-428.
- Chai, S. and Shih, W. (2016). Bridging Science and Technology through Academic-Industry Partnerships. Research Policy, 45(1), pp. 148-158.
- Chai, S. and Shih, W. (2016). Why Big Data Isn’t Enough. MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(2), pp. 57-61.
