Deepak Somaya

Dianne and Steven Miller Professor of Business Administration
Faculty Affiliate

Website / dsomaya@illinois.edu

Faculty profile photo

Dr. Deepak Somaya is the Dianne and Steven Miller Professor of Business Administration in the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also holds appointments in the Illinois College of Law and Discovery Partners Institute. His research interests lie in "big picture" strategic management questions related to knowledge assets (including intellectual property, human capital, and relational capital), digital assets (data, software, AI), and scaling.

Recent Publications

  • Hemmatian, B., Keshmirian, A., Ramamoorthy, S., Jahadakbar, M., Khuri-Reid, E., Wang, J., Hadjarab, S., Veum, S., Gupta, P., Somaya, D. and Varshney, L., 2026 (July). Two-Player Alternate Uses Test: A Controlled Testbed for Interactive Human-AI and Human-Human Co-Creation. Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 1416-1422. https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3816851
  • Somaya, D., and You, J. 2024. Scalability, Venture Capital Availability, and Unicorns: Evidence from the Valuation and Timing of IPOs. Journal of Business Venturing, 39(1), p.106345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2023.106345
  • Giustiziero, G., Kretchmer, T., Somaya, D., and Wu, B. 2023. Hyperspecialization and Hyperscaling: A Resource-based Theory of the Digital Firm. Strategic Management Journal, 44(6): 1391-1424. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3365
  • Somaya, D., and Varshney, L. 2020. Ownership Dilemmas in an Age of Creative Machines. Issues in Science and Technology, 36(2), Winter: 79-85. https://issues.org/ownership-dilemmas-in-an-age-of-creative-machines/
  • Somaya, D., and Varshney, L. 2018. Embodiment, Anthropomorphism, and Intellectual Property Rights for AI Creations. Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, New Orleans, LA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3278721.3278754

Current Research Projects

  • How Data Privacy Affects the Scalability of Digital Firms (with Jingya You). A project that examines the impacts of data privacy on the ability of digital firms to scale, wherein the affects of data privacy (examined using the GDPR shock) on the AI data flywheel is found to significantly reduce the scalability of affected firms.
  • Human-AI Co-Creation (with Babak Hemmatian, Lav Varshney, and other collaborators). A project that uses a controlled interactive test-bed to conduct lab experiments on human-AI co-creation with the goal of examining when and why they produce better creative outcomes, and especially in contrast with human-human collaborations.

Collaborators

  • Ronnie Chatterjee, Duke University and Chief Economist at OpenAI. Strategy / Entrepreneurship / Economics.
  • John List, University of Chicago. Economics.