Nataliya Wright of Columbia Business School was a recipient of the 2025 Research in Strategic Management Grant program. Learn more about their work:
What is your research question/topic?
This research examines how local resource environments influence startups’ strategic market positioning—collaborative versus competitive—and how this choice shapes their organizational scaling.
What are you hoping to accomplish through your research?
Using a combination of observational and experimental field studies that leverage new methods enabled by large language models (LLMs), this research seeks to uncover how external market choices that emerge across resource environments shape the acquisition and management of internal venture resources critical to scaling. In doing so, it seeks to shed light on whether—and how—such strategic market choices contribute to systematic differences in entrepreneurial scaling across geographies.
What impact could this research have more broadly on the field of strategic management?
This research investigates how strategic market choices can fundamentally shape not only startups’ access to external resources such as funding, but also the development of critical internal resources—especially human capital—needed for scaling. This highlights how demand-side (market) and supply-side (employee) forces interact in entrepreneurial growth, a linkage that is central yet under-explored in prior work. By combining observational and field experimental studies with scalable methods enabled by large language models (LLMs), this work also seeks to expand the scope of firms typically studied in entrepreneurial strategy and reveal how scaling dynamics vary across resource environments worldwide. In doing so, it may uncover new mechanisms through which market choices shape ventures’ scaling trajectories.
What SMS resources (members, workshops, events, etc.) were helpful to you during the application process?
The SMS Annual Conference paper sessions on entrepreneurial strategy and scaling were incredibly valuable for understanding emerging research on firm growth and identifying opportunities for new contributions.
Who inspires you the most to do this work? (whether that is professionally or personally).
My interest in understanding the barriers that limit the growth of promising ventures around the world—and how they can be overcome—emerged from my startup experience, policy work at the World Bank and the White House, and extensive international exposure. From my birth city of Kyiv to field sites in Warsaw, Delhi, and Nairobi, I have encountered startups with the ambition and potential to scale globally and generate meaningful impact. Yet scaling remains disproportionately concentrated in hubs such as Silicon Valley. While prior scholarship largely attributes these disparities to structural ecosystem differences—such as regulatory environments, venture capital availability, and infrastructure—my research instead examines startups’ strategic market and technology choices, including the processes through which these choices are formed and executed. In doing so, this work seeks to explain how entrepreneur-level decisions give rise to market-level scaling disparities, and why, in a world of increasingly accessible digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) that lower traditional geographic barriers, strategic choices—particularly market positioning—can become central drivers of global performance differences.