Miaomiao Zhang

PhD Candidate

Harvard Business School

Miaomiao Zhang is a PhD candidate in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research explores the early stages of innovation process in an entrepreneurial context. Leveraging field experiments in collaboration with crowdsourcing platform, venture competition and accelerator sites, she studies how AI technologies interact with human creativity, judgment and decision-making during idea generation, evaluation, and execution. She works with computer scientists, venture capitalists, and other domain experts to design and implement technology-enabled entrepreneurial support systems that mitigate biases, guide entrepreneurial experimentation, and structure expert feedback in uncertain or pre-market environments. Her past and current projects include using large language models to broaden ideation search, structuring evaluation training to focus on the problem definition, and examining platform design changes to reduce knowledge frictions. Her future work aims to focus on the execution stage of the entrepreneurial process, particularly how entrepreneurs source and interpret demand-side signals. Her research combines causal inference, large-scale archival data, and natural language processing to uncover the mechanisms behind human-AI collaboration and knowledge production.