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 world while others never do?

Every innovation has to pass through three stages: they are generated, they are evaluated by someone who decides they are worth pursuing, and only then do they spread. I study all three, and increasingly, I ask how AI and the changing nature of expertise are reshaping each of these stages. I work with organizations like 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.

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