Technology management assistant professor Sukhun Kang has received a Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship (RJFF) from UCSB’s Academic Personnel Office to support his project, Redefining Innovation Measures in Strategy Research.
The fellowship provides $7,500 to advance the work of promising early-career faculty, enabling them to pursue new lines of research and strengthen their academic trajectories. Kang’s project addresses a long-standing challenge in innovation research: how to measure innovation in ways that truly capture its impact.
“Empirical work relies largely on patent counts and citations, which give a narrow, firm-centric view of innovation,” he explained. “Those traditional metrics overlook other meaningful outcomes such as consumer adoption, societal benefit, or improvements to quality of life.”
To broaden the field’s understanding, Kang is conducting a comprehensive study that combines a literature meta-analysis, qualitative case studies of firms and sectors, and quantitative tests of alternative metrics — such as consumer adoption rates, societal indices, and quality-adjusted life-years (QALY) in pharmaceuticals. The goal is to build a multidimensional measurement framework that better predicts both firm performance and social impact.
“The recognition associated with this fellowship validates the project’s novelty and enables the planned data collection and firm engagement,” said Kang. “Personally, it boosts my confidence in pursuing novel projects and assures me there will be future funding opportunities like this. Professionally, it strengthens my external funding record and accelerates progress toward publishable results and tenure.”
As an assistant professor, Kang sees awards like the RJFF as essential.
“They buy protected research time and fund research assistants, data purchases, and fieldwork,” he said. “They also provide external validation that improves competitiveness for larger grants and tenure review.
By expanding how innovation is measured, Kang’s work stands to influence not only academic research, but also managerial decision-making and public policy.
“Better metrics lead to better strategy and better outcomes,” he added. “This project helps ensure that when we talk about innovation, we’re measuring what truly matters — the ideas and technologies that make a real difference.”
Kang received his PhD in strategy and entrepreneurship from the London Business School. His research has garnered several awards including the Sumantra Ghoshal Research and Practice Award from the Academy of Management (AOM), the Distinguished Best Paper Award from AOM’s Strategy and Management Division, and the Industry Studies Association’s Rising Star Best Paper Award.
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This article was adapted from a piece originally written by Andrew Masuda for the College of Engineering. For a detailed overview of the award and information about additional recipients, visit the original article:
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