You  are cordially invited to the lecture organized by Department of  Management (DM), Faculty of Business and Management (FBM). Details of  the lecture are as follows:

Topic: From Foundation to Frontier: How Cross-Border Network Infrastructure Boosts Firm Innovation

Speaker:  Ms.Yang Li, Ph.D. candidate in Information Systems at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University

Time: 2:00-3:00pm, 25 March 2026

Venue: T1-108

Speaker:

Yang Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Systems at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. She holds an M.S. in Business Analytics from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in Accounting from Sun Yat-Sen University. Prior to her Ph.D., she worked at ChinaCache North America, Inc., where she led cross-functional collaboration across global teams and gained hands-on experience in CDN analytics and business intelligence. Her primary research interests center on digital innovation, digital platforms, and firms’ digital strategy. She examines how digital connectivity shapes corporate innovation and value creation, with a particular focus on the strategic roles of digital infrastructure, enterprise systems, and AI innovation in influencing firm performance and cross-boundary collaboration. Methodologically, her work integrates large-scale panel data analytics, text mining, econometric models, and configurational analysis to uncover the mechanisms through which digital technologies transform organizational outcomes.

Abstract:

Cross-border network infrastructure plays a critical role in shaping firms’ innovation outcomes in a digitally interconnected world. More than just improving digital connectivity, such network infrastructure can reconfigure how inventors collaborate and access knowledge within a firm and how firms compete globally on the innovation landscape. This study investigates the impact of content delivery networks (CDNs)—a foundational layer of cross-border network infrastructure—on firm innovation. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the emergence of CDNs significantly increases the firms’ innovation productivity. More importantly, our findings reveal that the increased innovation productivity is manifested by the quantity rather than the quality of firms' innovation outcomes. Further analysis shows that the mechanism underlying these innovation gains is an increase in global coverage of R&D teams within a firm, instead of making collaboration across each border more productive. Our results also unveil that CDNs can promote radical innovation and interestingly, AI-related innovation, when a firm exhibits high global coverage of its R&D teams. Taken together, these findings contribute to the IS literatures on ICT infrastructure and digital innovation by uncovering how digital connectivity is intertwined with organizational R&D scope to shape innovation outcomes. Practically, it provides timely implications against today's trend of deglobalization by highlighting the strategic importance of organizing for innovation on a global scale and the facilitating role of cross-border network infrastructure.

Please scan the QR code in the poster for registration.