I’ve been attending the Open Innovation in Science conference this week virtually and it has been a blast to be introduced to this wonderful community. I presented our poster on the Science Mesh in the conference:

The fall of the innovation empire and its possible rise through open science – research output has been maintaining a steady-state progress despite the exponentially increasing cost. Meanwhile, economic growth from innovation has also been decreasing, attributed to the following:

• We have already picked the low-hanging fruits in science, making novel discoveries much more difficult to find.
• Incentives lead researchers away from high-risk, high reward breakthrough research.
• Tensions between the ideals of open science and the rewards from closed science.

The author recommends open science partnerships as a solution to reinvigorate research impact to the commercial realm.

Attention to Exploration: The Effect of Academic Entrepreneurship
on the Production of Scientific Knowledge – normally, we explore how scientific knowledge impacts academic entrepreneurship. In this study, they study the reverse and explore how entrepreneurship affects academics’ research directions. Through an attention-based perspective, they find that “entrepreneurship prompts a shift of an academic’s search toward new topics, which enables them to produce better and more impactful science.” This seems intuitive since engaging in more activities, leads to more collisions and higher chances of serendipitous interactions.

Fundamental elements in Technology Transfer: an in-depth analysis – lays out all the components that make up technology transfer. It’s a good reference just by the illustrative models that they have compiled from previous publications.

Training across the academy: The impact of R&D funding on graduate students – explores how receiving funding from the US NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship program affect the careers of the awardees. The researchers find that “the award increases degree completion, placement in a post-doctoral or academic research position, research productivity and impact, and network size.” Inspired by Caplan’s book The Case against Education, An interesting follow-up would be trying to understand whether these effects are from signalling, selection effects or from human capital development. I suspect that a large chunk of its benefits come from the cumulative halo effect that awardees receive from winning already a prestigious grant.

Fatal attraction: A systematic review and research agenda of the dark triad in entrepreneurship – The dark triad has been getting a lot of attention in the recent years. It refers to these three related traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. In this review in the field of entrepreneurship, the researchers find that people who score high on the dark triad are likely to be drawn to entrepreneurship. This is unsurprising since these individuals can thrive in highly competitive and ambiguous environments where questionable tactics are allowed or even rewarded. Despite having high entrepreneurial intention, however, those who score highly in psycopathy and Machiavellianism do not seem to have ventures that perform as well. While they can get a way in one-off transctions, business is built on trust and thus, disincentivizes destructive behaviors over time.

Adaptation or Persistence? Emergence and Revision of Organization Designs in New Ventures – quite an extensive study on how organization designs (task division, task allocation, reward distribution, information exchange and exception management) evolve over time. Tracking eight ventures, they find that the founders tend to entrench their logics of organizing despite feedback indicating that they should not. What they tend to update frequently however are the design solutions, though these changes are incremental.

The impact of managerial job security on corporate entrepreneurship: Evidence from corporate venture capital programs – managers won’t risk doing something so innovative if it would cost them their jobs. As the study finds: “firms are more likely to launch a CVC program after their state enacts antitakeover protection.” Although it may seem that guaranteeing job security may make people more complacent, this study finds that it would actually make people experiment more.

Attentional Engagement as Practice: A Study of the Attentional Infrastructure of Healthcare Chief Executive Officers – I just learned about the attention-based view of the firm a week ago, and now, I’ve been seeing more about it in my casual reading of the literature. Quite fitting to have the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon when we’re talking about attention. This ethnographic research is quite fascinating, they shadowed seven CEOs from NHS organizations and explored the CEOs continuous struggle to prioritize and manage various attentional demands. I feel like it somehow mirrors the Eisenhower matrix of classifying tasks to urgent/not urgent and important/not important.

A New Measurement Conception for the ‘Doing-Using-Interacting’ Mode of Innovation – proposes alternate measures to innovation. Previously, when innovation is measured, it typically aims to capture formal innovation processes in R&D. However, innovation goes beyond that and also occurs in informal processes of doing, using and interacting. The researchers proposes measuring knowledge flows and facilitators.

Why Are Firms with Lower Performance More Volatile and Unpredictable? A Vulnerability Explanation of the Bowman Paradox – first time I’ve heard of the Bowman paradox. It was the finding from empirical data that firms with lower accounting performance also took higher risks. This was paradoxical in that it went against the prevailing assumption that individuals would only take risks if it might correspond to higher rewards.

The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology – introduces the concept of fragmenting cycle where a general purpose technology evolves into loosely-related siloes towards divergent applications. The problem is that improvements might only occur in popular application areas, leaving behind other areas. This cycle occurs when technology advancement slows down, which then causes slower adoption from users, which then makes improving the technology much more expensive.

Patent Quality: Towards a Systematic Framework for Analysis and Measurement – researchers compared different measures of patent quality and find disagreements among them. Thus, the measurement of the quality of a patent should always be tied to context.

What can Strategy Learn from the Business Model Approach? and A Business Model View of Strategy – Two papers that respond to one another about the whether the concept of business models offer anything new to strategy. The response was that business model literature focuses on these questions:

What activities should be connected? How can we develop interdependencies among activities that cannot be imitated? How can we develop superior interdependencies, especially when resources and capabilities are widely available and not differentiated?

Current trends in, and future potential of, crowdfunding to finance R&D of treatments for neglected tropical diseases – Couldn’t access the article but found it fascinating. Reminds me of the meme on how GoFundMe has become the main healthcare provider in the US. Memes aside though, with the number of societal challenges facing society, we need to explore all possible funding mechanisms to develop technologies to address them. Is crowdfunding the best way to solve neglected tropical diseases? Probably not, but they are better when you have no other alternative.