Inna received her PhD in Strategic Management from the University of Vienna, Austria (with undergraduate and master studies in Computer Science). Dr. Smirnova is an organizational scientist who explores the design of modern work in creative, knowledge-intensive fields like technology and academic science. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, she studies how strategic design choices—such as incentives, evaluation processes, and task structures—impact individual motivation and productivity among knowledge workers, shaping organizational output and fostering innovation. She examines these topics in settings ranging from online communities, including GitHub and Stack Overflow, to academic science, using methods ranging from quantitative data analysis to survey-based studies to online and field experiments. Dr. Smirnova’s work has been presented at several Management and Computer Science conferences and has been published in scientific journals like Organization Science, Research Policy, and Information Technology and Management.
