Hugo Leenders (PhD’25)
Faces of Leeds Snapshot
Name: Hugo Leenders (PhD’25)
Hometown: Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Leeds Division: Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Upcoming Position: Assistant Professor of Management at New Mexico State University
Leeds Mentors: First and foremost, Janet Bercovitz. Tony Tong and Jeff York have also been great teachers, mentors and inspirations.
Highlight: Successfully defending my dissertation has been the greatest accomplishment of my professional life. Nothing comes close to it.
Research Inspiration: Initially, I was inspired by scholars around me. Later on, my own experiences as a former entrepreneur started to play an increasingly important role.
“Successfully defending my dissertation has been the greatest accomplishment of my professional life. Nothing comes close to it.”
Dissertation: “Conflict and Competitive Tensions in R&D Alliances”
Summary: My dissertation examines how firms strategically manage the risk of knowledge misappropriation and other exchange hazards inherent in R&D alliances, with a particular focus on the influence of partner reputations.
Why is this research impactful?
Reputations are self-enforcing and firms rely on them to make inferences about each other's current and future behaviors, especially when they have imperfect information about each other, which is generally the case in the R&D alliance context. We can thus expect reputations to play an important role in this context. However, this topic has not been researched enough, which is why I pursued this in my dissertation. In addition to contributing to theory, my research also has important practical implications, as it may help firms make better decisions with respect to partner selection, design, and overall management of their R&D alliances.