Elizabeth Long Lingo

In her research, Elizabeth examines how leaders, producers, and entrepreneurs imagine, negotiate, and implement creative projects and innovative ventures. She is particularly interested in how claims to control, legitimacy, and expertise are negotiated in the collective creative process and the relational brokerage work involved in harnessing expertise across disciplines, organizations, and networks. Elizabeth has examined these fundamental questions in three distinct contexts: 1) the Nashville country music industry, 2) an effort by national performing arts leaders to develop a collective action agenda for their struggling, fragmented field, and 3) higher education initiatives focused on creativity and innovation.

While Elizabeth has spent the last three years putting her research into practice—developing academic, scholarship, and campus-wide programs at Vanderbilt focused on innovation and creativity, she has continued to publish her research in top journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Poetics, and The Handbook of Conflict Management Research.  Her research on what she calls “nexus work”—or brokerage of creative projects—was published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2010 and chosen in 2012 for the ASQ Editor’s Choice Collections as one of the top papers focused on networks and knowledge.

Elizabeth consults with colleges and universities across the nation on transforming their campuses around creativity and innovation.  She has also consulted to Fortune 500 companies on issues of trust, risk taking, speaking up and customer loyalty, and to the nonprofit and for-profit performing arts sectors on innovation and collective action.  Elizabeth was a graduate fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School in 2003-2004. She holds a master’s degree in sociology from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Learn more about the Curb Creative Campus Initiative and the Curb Scholars Program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership.