Ying Li joined Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as an assistant professor in 2024. Before that, she was an assistant professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) for two years. She earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The central question that drives her research is: Why is an innovation categorized or interpreted differently by different audiences (e.g., those in different regions), and what is its consequence for entrepreneurship rates or firm/product performance?

In her dissertation that is recognized with multiple awards, she used the American movie theater industry (1896-2020) as the empirical context to investigate how the different interpretations of the meaning of a new technology (e.g., movie projection, sound synchronization, TV broadcasting, and streaming technologies) in different geographic communities shape localized dynamics of the movie theater industry's emergence and evolution. Situated at the intersection of technology, culture, and local communities, her research brings geographically bounded audience cognition to the foreground in innovation and entrepreneurship research. She is particularly interested in settings of cultural and creative industries.