TisEM - Jochem de Bresser

Marco Testoni

  • TiSEM - Marco Testoni

    Marco Testoni

    Assistant professor Department of Management

    ‘By providing new insights on corporate strategy decisions and their consequences, I hope my research can better inform managers and policy makers’

Marco’s single-authored paper, entitled ‘The Market Value Spillovers of Technological Acquisitions: Evidence from Patent-Text Analysis’ has been accepted for publication in the Strategic Management Journal.

What is the main goal of your research?

The goal of my current research is to provide novel insights on fundamental questions in corporate strategy: What drives corporate expansions through acquisitions? How do firms select their acquisition target? What affects the price they pay? How do acquisitions affect the valuation of other firms? To provide new insights on these fundamental questions, I use new sources of data, including smartphone geolocational data, transportation network data, patent text, and news sentiment.

How does your research contribute to societal problems?

The wellbeing of many people depends on the quality of firms’ decision making at the corporate level. Poor corporate strategy decisions can have important consequences on companies’ stakeholders, including threatening job security of employees and destroying value to shareholders. By providing new insights on corporate strategy decisions and their consequences, I hope my research can better inform managers and policy makers.

What is your main motive?

Curiosity. I get genuinely excited when I have a research question and I look forward to getting the data to try to give an answer to such question.

What is important to you in teaching? What do you want your students to remember?

I teach a Master of Science course named Strategy Analytics, designed to teach students machine learning methods to solve business problems. My goal is to prepare students for their future career, given the rising importance of data-driven decision making for organizations. While teaching, I try to convey my excitement for these techniques and stimulate the students’ curiosity by showing them applications also from my own research. The types of problems that can be tackled by data analytics methods are countless: too many to have a ready-made solution for each of them. What I would like students to remember is an approach to solve these problems, by decomposing complex issues into logical subcomponents, being prepared to face the many bottlenecks a data scientist typically encounters, and having the stamina required to troubleshoot one problem after the other.

Who is your role model?

It would be hard for me to identify a single role model. I try to learn something from whomever I encounter in my path, inside or outside of academia, and across study fields in academia. There is some fraction of my role model in many people I have met.

Academic profile Marco Testoni