Amisha Miller, PhD ’23 Wins TIM Best Dissertation Award

PhD alumna Amisha Miller ’23 won the AOM Technology & Innovation Management (TIM) Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation “Changing the system, not the seeker: Explaining how investment organizations can produce gender disparities in startup funding”.  

Reviewers noted that Amisha’s thesis “makes extremely valuable contributions to understanding the funding gap for female and minority innovators…it sheds light on often hidden processes and offers strong implications for both theory and practice.” 

The research found that female founders typically raise fewer resources from investors. However, when an organization changed its evaluation framework, prompting investors to seek consistent information across all founders and assess startups dynamically, it eliminated, and in some cases even reversed, the gender gap.