Bonjour!

Welcome to my personal website.

Welcome to my personal website. I am currently an Assistant Professor at ESSEC Business School since September 2024. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Business School and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

What drives my research is a simple question:
Why do some new ideas make it into the market while others never do?

Every innovation entails different stages: ideas are first generated, they are then evaluated to decide whether they are worth pursuing, and only then they can be executed at scale and diffuse into the economy. My research studies all three phases, from generation to diffusion, and increasingly, asks how AI and the changing nature of expertise are reshaping each stage. My work leverages collaborations with organizations such as NASA, Zapier, MIT Solve, and Procter & Gamble, combining field experiments, applied econometrics, and economic modeling to uncover the incentives and mechanisms that govern how innovation is produced and diffused across universities, companies, funding agencies, and research institutions alike.

Please see my research page for more information.

My academic journey began in France, where I completed a double degree between Centrale Paris and ESSEC Business School, followed by a master's degree in Mathematics (Probabilities and Statistics) at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) and a master's degree in Economics at Université Paris Sud. After a couple of years of experience in the energy industry and in strategy consulting, I went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Economics of Innovation at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, before joining LISH as a postdoctoral research fellow.

Email: charlesayoubi13[at]gmail[dot]com