People

“HBS offers unparalleled opportunities to partner with companies to advance research on critical questions.”

Doctoral candidate Dafna Bearson’s (she/her) interests lie at the intersection of technology, human capital, and business strategy. “How do businesses adjust in the face of new technologies? Why might similar businesses make different deployment decisions? How do their decisions affect their workforce and business performance? These are the kinds of questions that challenge and excite me,” she explains.

Dafna first discovered her passion for business strategy while studying economics at UC Berkeley. She was drawn to the way that economic tools and models can be used to explain complex phenomena—and make meaningful predictions in rapidly changing global markets. In particular, Dafna gravitated toward questions related to the challenges new automation and digital technologies pose to job security and businesses. “Historical evidence and economic theory offer valuable guidance, but so much remains uncharted territory,” Dafna explains. “I have the opportunity to pursue actionable research impacting real phenomena we read about in the news every day, and to contribute to state of the art knowledge about issues that matter for people’s livelihoods and business outcomes.”

After earning her Bachelor’s degree, Dafna continued as a research analyst at the UC Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy studying these topics. Once she realized she wanted to direct her own research agenda, Dafna decided that a PhD would be the perfect avenue to do so. She chose HBS for several reasons: “I love the interdisciplinary academic environment at HBS,” she said. “I am in classes alongside peers studying public policy, education, public health, and beyond. We each bring a unique perspective to the classroom, which creates rich academic environments and, importantly we form connections that generate productive research collaborations. Taking courses in other disciplines enhances my skills in complementary fields such as data science.” Dafna also appreciates the chance to take ownership of her academic path at HBS, and collaborate with professors whose work she greatly admires. “I wanted to dive into the black box of the firm to ask about management practices, the governance of the business, workplace culture, and more so that I can learn how the collection and intersection of these factors affect work and business performance—this brought me to the Strategy program.”

Research

During her first year, Dafna was thrilled to join the Digital Reskilling Lab at the Digital, Data, and Design Institute under the direction of professors Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo. As digital tools become ubiquitous—and automation displaces and complements certain tasks—businesses encounter gaps between the skills that employees have and the skills they need to address modern challenges.

Through one Lab project, Dafna is working with a team of scholars and industry partners to explore the implementation of a reskilling initiative to develop digital skills—skills that employees may not rely on today, but are likely to become increasingly vital to their work in the future. Dafna says, “We are interested in helping employees build valuable new skills, while also thinking broadly about the context of these efforts. What are the implications for employee well-being and business productivity? And how can programs be designed such that there is not a zero-sum relationship between the two?”