Cyrille Grumbach

Professor of Economics

School of Global Policy and Strategy

Cyrille is PhD Candidate in AI, Strategy, and Innovation at ETH Zürich’s Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation, and affiliated with the ETH AI Center, where he has conducted research with Prof. Georg von Krogh since Fall 2022. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School and affiliated with its external pageLaboratory for Innovation Science (LISH, D^3), where he has worked closely with Prof. external page Jacqueline Ng Lane since Fall 2024.

His research focuses on innovation processes, examining how exposure to diverse external inputs shapes individuals’ problem-solving and evaluation, and ultimately, innovation generation and selection. He was drawn to this question by observing that innovation seldom arises in isolation; instead, it emerges as individuals are exposed to and integrate external input with their own efforts. Today, individuals increasingly turn to AI, rather than human experts, as a source of external input, raising new questions about how these technologies influence innovation processes. This has sparked his research interests in problem-solving, organizational learning and search, knowledge sharing, innovation evaluation, and human-AI collaboration. He investigates these topics by conducting field experiments (i.e., field-based randomized controlled trials) in innovation contests and hackathons. He seeks to provide answers to the question: How and why do different external inputs shape which innovations are generated and which are ultimately selected?