A Q&A with Ting Xiao, Assistant Teaching Professor in Technology Management

By Jamie Hu

Our department is thrilled to introduce the newest addition to our faculty lineup, Assistant Teaching Professor Ting Xiao! She recently joined our team in July of 2025, and will be providing her expertise to our students on innovation and strategy, with a focus on AI.

A Brief Introduction to Ting Xiao

Ting Xiao is a scholar specializing in innovation and strategy. She holds dual undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from China, and received a PhD in Business Administration from The Ohio State University in the US. While pursuing her PhD, she simultaneously completed a master’s degree in Economics and a minor in Statistics at OSU. Upon graduation, she joined the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University as an assistant professor. After the COVID pandemic, she moved to the US, with a particular interest in California, to continue her academic career in research and teaching.

When asked about what made her want to start the next leg of her career in the Technology Management Department at UCSB, Ting enthusiastically quoted Warren Buffett, who stated, “You want to associate with people who are the kind of person you’d like to be. You’ll move in that direction. So it's important to associate with people who are better than yourself.” She stressed that she’s particularly excited about joining our faculty lineup and that she was impressed with the students in our programs, who she described as highly talented, creative, thoughtful, and humorous.

“Since arriving, I’ve received generous support from both faculty and staff,” she told us. “Therefore, I consider myself very lucky to join the team and am excited to learn from everyone as I grow into the person I hope to be.”

In her research, Ting explores how firms search for knowledge, recombine it, and leverage networks to drive innovations. To do this, she draws from big data analysis, machine learning, and AI. She describes Technology Management as the ideal environment to advance her work, citing its deep expertise and collaborative culture as particularly exciting paths to contribute to her own research and the broader UCSB campus community.

“The research and teaching mission of the TM department emphasizes how to manage and create value through technological innovation,” Ting said before diving into the connection to her own work. “As my own research and teaching focus predominantly on innovation strategy, they are perfectly aligned with this mission.”

As for Ting’s next steps, she’ll be teaching with us starting in Fall 2025. To learn more about her research interests, teaching experience, and what has her so excited to get started, we sat down with her in the following Q&A!

Tell me about your research interests.

Q: How did you first get interested in your research topic?

A: I have a deep passion for understanding innovation, especially how it comes about. When immersing myself in scholarly papers or books that explore successful innovation, I experience immense joy and often lose track of time, even forgetting to eat. These moments of exhilaration, where I can feel my heart race with excitement, have solidified my desire to conduct research centered around innovation and associated strategies. Along this journey, I have grown to appreciate Joseph Schumpeter’s knowledge recombination perspective, which posits that “innovation combines components in a new way, or that it consists in carrying out new combinations.” I am particularly fascinated by how new connections among existing knowledge components are created and how they give rise to new innovations.

Q: Describe a current project you’re working on.

A: I am interested in understanding innovation architecture, or the way different pieces of underlying knowledge are recombined to create an innovation. For example, building a smartphone involves similar foundational knowledge in components like processors, memory, displays, batteries, and input/output systems. However, firms like Apple and Samsung understand the relationships among these components differently and combine them in distinct ways, resulting in unique architectures. Such combinations can give the firm a competitive advantage that is difficult for others to copy, because the underlying relationships are often opaque. With the advancement of big data and AI, the possibilities for linking knowledge in novel ways have greatly expanded and evolved. My work aims to uncover how a firm can best structure these linkages to enable breakthrough innovation for a sustainable competitive advantage.

Q: What would you say is the most surprising thing about your research?

A: Even firms themselves struggle to change their own innovation architectures. The linkages among components of an innovation can be so opaque and complex that recombining them in a purposeful way is extremely difficult. However, when a firm does manage to change its innovation architecture, the payoff is huge. It creates a competitive advantage that’s not only powerful but also very hard for rivals to accurately decode and imitate. Another surprising finding in my preliminary studies is the role of women. Firms with greater female representation in top management or key inventor teams appear to be more successful at driving these architectural changes. I’d say people are also often surprised to learn that I started out in CS and Math before moving into business for my PhD. At first glance, it seems like a big pivot. However, I rely on those technical foundations every day in my research. What excites me is how my work on innovation and strategy brings new life and meaning to my earlier training, blending the precision of math and coding with the creativity of business. It’s a combination that continues to surprise and delight me.

Q: What do you think has been your greatest contribution to your field so far?

A: As Isaac Newton said, we all stand on the shoulders of giants when building knowledge. Schumpeter’s ideas about innovation have been foundational, but further legitimizing this theoretical perspective requires crystallizing and developing its essence. My coauthors and I have worked to do so by differentiating various theories that explore innovation and showing how the knowledge recombination perspective offers something unique. It zooms in on the internal process of innovation—how distinct, seemingly disconnected pieces of knowledge can be combined into a coherent whole. We hope this knowledge recombination perspective can serve as a useful framework for other scholars studying innovation.

Q: What is a current topic important in the world right now that your research speaks to?

A: Large language models. Different firms build these innovative models using different architectures—different ways of combining underlying knowledge components. Which approaches work best, and why? That’s where the knowledge recombination perspective comes in. My work can help identify the core features that influence these architectures and, ultimately, their success. With AI and big data evolving so rapidly, the world right now offers an incredibly exciting opportunity for me to push this research further.

Tell me about your teaching experience.

Q: During your career, what has been your favorite class to teach?

A: I loved teaching summer courses that blended classroom learning with field trips. I greatly appreciate this format because students not only learn theories in class, but also immediately get to see those ideas in action. It makes the learning experience more vivid, memorable, and fun for all of us. Of course, it requires flexibility and extra commitment from both students and faculty, but the payoff is worth it. I would be thrilled to bring this kind of hands-on learning to UCSB whenever possible.

Q: Can you talk about the classes you’ll be teaching in Fall 2025?

A: I’ll be teaching two courses: Business Strategy and AI in Business. Business Strategy is a classic one that I’ve been teaching since my PhD days. The core theories or frameworks are timeless. The magic happens when hundred-year-old theories elegantly explain and even guide complex challenges in today’s business world. AI in Business, on the other hand, is brand new for me and feels especially timely in this era. We’re all navigating the impact of AI together, and I’m eager not only to share insights but also to learn from the diverse perspectives students will bring to the class.

Q: How do you bring your research into the classroom?

A: One of the great things about teaching in TM is that our courses are already closely tied to what’s happening in the real world of innovation. For example, in my course on AI in Business, there isn’t a “classic” textbook or golden rule to follow, as the field is changing too quickly. Instead, I draw heavily on my own research to develop the course. I see it as a shared exploration: the students and I learning together, hunting for insights in a world where AI is evolving every day. My goal is for the classroom to feel less like a lecture and more like a journey of discovery together.

Q: If you could tell your students just one thing, what would it be?

A: Keep learning and never stop. The job market today is far more competitive than when I graduated, and knowledge and skills are evolving at a breathtaking pace. But don’t be intimidated. The essential value of your education isn’t only what you learn in class, but the habits of logic, curiosity, and independent thinking you develop. As long as you keep learning, you’ll be ready not only to succeed in your career but also to thrive in life.

Q: What are you most excited about when it comes to teaching in our department at UCSB?

A: I’m very excited about the diversity of the students. They don’t all come from a traditional business background, but instead bring perspectives from different disciplines across campus or from unique richer industry experiences. What an amazing gift! It means I also get the opportunities to learn from each of my students just as much as they learn from me. I can’t wait to begin that shared learning journey at UCSB.