---
id: "pisquared:interview/tripsas-mary"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Mary Tripsas"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/tripsas-mary"
date: "2026-07-14"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Mary Tripsas"]
summary: "Mary Tripsas is the Sheldon Family Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Department of Technology Management in the College of Engineering at UC Santa..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1213441737"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Mary Tripsas

Mary Tripsas, Sheldon Family Professor of Entrepreneurship, UC Santa Barbara · 14 July 2026

## About the guest

Mary Tripsas is the Sheldon Family Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Department of Technology Management in the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara, Tripsas served on the faculties of the Wharton School, the Harvard Business School, and Boston College. She holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and her MBA from Harvard Business School. Mary’s scholarly work focuses on technological innovation and entrepreneurship. She studies how organizations can best adapt to new technologies that disrupt industries and ecosystems, with an emphasis on how the interplay of organizational capabilities, organizational identity, and managerial mental models shape strategic responses to technological shifts. She has studied the evolution of technology and competition in a diverse range of both established and nascent industries including photography/digital imaging, typesetters, air taxis, music synthesizers and publishing. She has published in our leading journals, holds important editorial positions, and has been elected into leadership positions in our academic Associations.

## Reflections from the interview

**Professor Mary Tripsas **has been studying radical industry change over the course of her entire legendary career.   In this conversation with Anita, she explains what allows incumbents to retain their relevance through generation after generation of new ideas.  Mary describes why and how many musicians are not reaching back into analog synthesizing for the nuanced creative opportunities that you can’t get with digital.  And she analogizes this to the problems that we’re all having with the austere prose of AI-generated LLMs.   Where’s the beautiful writing going to come from if we all concede writing to machines?  Mary’s work is about the ways in which organizations restructure themselves to give us the best of both worlds:   high-touch expertise and low-cost access to new ways of doing things.

## Related resources

- [Mary’s website at UCSB](https://tmp.ucsb.edu/people/mary-tripsas)
- [Google Scholar on Mary](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HuYSHuAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao)
- [Mary’s recent paper on nested platforms](https://re.public.polimi.it/retrieve/54c2d595-a5f7-47d3-8845-8ba8b80b5dbc/how-nesting-changes-platform-strategy.pdf)
- [Mary’s paper in ASQ](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00018392231163178)
- [Mary’s paper on technological inertia](https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_378)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1213441737

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/tripsas-mary · Licence: none stated