嘉宾简介：

Shaker A. Zahra教授现任美国明尼苏达大学卡尔森管理学院Robert E. Buuck创业学讲席教授，也是美国管理学会（AOM）、国际商务学会（AIB）等专业学术组织的会士。他曾担任院系主任、霍姆斯创业中心主任、Carlson Ventures Enterprises学术联席主任，以及明尼苏达大学综合领导力中心联合创始主任。在赴明尼苏达大学任职前，他曾担任百森商学院Paul T. Babson创业学杰出教授、乔治亚州立大学战略与创业学教授，并曾在欧洲、亚洲和中东多所高校担任访问教授。

作为国际创业研究领域最具声望和影响力的学者之一，Zahra教授长期引领公司创业、技术创业、国际创业与创新战略等重要研究方向，他在Academy of Management Journal、Strategic Management Journal、Organization Science、Journal of International Business Studies、Journal of Business Venturing等国际顶尖期刊发表了大量高水平成果，相关研究对创业与战略管理领域的发展产生了重要影响。他还长期积极推动和参与国际学术共同体建设，曾在25种以上学术期刊编委会任职，担任20余个专刊的客座编辑，并在全球学术会议上作90余场主旨演讲，在创业研究的国际传播、学术组织与青年学者培养方面均作出重要贡献。此外，Zahra教授荣获全球创业研究奖（Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research），并获得比利时、意大利、德国、西班牙和瑞典多所大学授予的7个荣誉博士学位。

讲座简介：

Certifications issued by authoritative institutions enhance organizational standing and facilitate access to resources for innovation. We argue, however, that when certification functions as a maintained status – a time-limited position contingent on continued compliance – the recurring evaluation required to preserve it generates conformity pressures that redirect innovation search toward familiar domains. Drawing on institutional theory, we show how ongoing monitoring and standardized evaluation criteria favor outcomes that are legible and verifiable within fixed review cycles. We further argue that these effects vary with firms’ technological prestige and the local institutionalization of certification. Studying China’s High and New-Technology Enterprise certification program using coarsened exact matching, an extended two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences design, and in-depth interviews, we find that certification reduces search in unfamiliar technological domains. This effect is attenuated among high-prestige firms and amplified where certification is widely institutionalized. These findings advance understanding of how evaluative regimes shape where firms search for new knowledge.