Mostafa Khoshbash of UC Santa Barbara was a recipient of the 2025 Will D. Mitchell Dissertation Research Grant program. Learn more about their work:
What is your research question/topic?
Open-Source AI Ecosystem Building: Foundation Models, Openness, and the Nature of Innovation
What are you hoping to accomplish through your research?
I want to extend our understanding of how foundation models are shaping innovation ecosystems, identifying their innovation performance indicators, and examining how they enable various downstream innovations.
What impact could this research have more broadly on the field of strategic management?
Studying AI ecosystems and the innovations within them broadens strategic management theories by showing how frontier AI firms build advantage by attracting complementors and diversifying innovation while balancing openness with control (e.g., through architecture and governance mechanisms).
What SMS resources (members, workshops, events, etc.) were helpful to you during the application process?
I primarily relied on guidance from my advisor, Mary Tripsas, and I drew heavily on articles published in the Strategic Management Journal to frame and refine my proposal.
Who inspires you the most to do this work? (whether that is professionally or personally).
I’m most inspired by the intellectual environment around me. My PhD program is in a Technology Management department, where understanding how technologies are developed, adopted, and commercialized sits at the center of what we do. My advisor, Mary Tripsas, has been especially influential; her deep experience studying nascent industries has helped me identify relevant and important questions to ask and guided me in shaping a clear research path for AI technology development, a rapidly evolving, high-impact field. I’m also consistently energized by the OpenLab community led by Frank Nagle, which keeps me engaged with the open-source and AI economics world and pushes my thinking about ecosystems and the future of work. Together, these influences motivate me to pursue this work and keep raising my ambition for it.