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Weekly Reads – Nov 6

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What makes dynamic strategic problems difficult? Evidence from an experimental study – an experimental study showing that “people do poorly even in this complete information condition, and importantly, they show limited improvement compared to the more complex conditions that require complex learning.”

Behavioral Visibility: A New Paradigm for Organization Studies in the Age of Digitization, Digitalization, and Datafication – A lot of people are working online now. The study then explores how we can become “visible” in this digital age. I can identify with the paradoxes they enumerated in their paper: Connectivity paradox where employees who want to connect with their colleagues may cause interruptions. Performance paradox where people who spend time working hard on a task may not have time to make their work visible. Transparency paradox where organizations which want greater communication can end up obscuring activities.

Theorizing Actor Interactions Shaping Innovation in Digital
Infrastructures: The Case of Residential Internet Development
in Belarus – shows the various interactions that occur during infrastructure development. They made a 2×2 matrix mapping these interactions as symbiotic generative, symbiotic mutualistic, parasitic complementary and parasitic competitive

The coauthorship networks of the most productive European researchers – prolific researchers publish with other highly cited collaborators. Not super surprising. Yet, this is something that I always have to remind myself. You have to find productive collaborators who will help you push your research forward.

Sources of innovation for new medicines: questions of sustainability – describes the decline of the pharmaceutical industry. It shows decreasing new company formation, and decrease in number of companies involved in R&D

Bahamas Cooking

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This week, we tried Bahamas cuisine. Here were the dishes we cooked:

  • Conch fritters – I’ve not eaten conch before. It’s sea snail. We made fritters through this recipe. Miriam’s family loved it. For me, it was too rubbery. 6/10.
  • Rice and peas -This was easy to cook. We followed this recipe. In theory, it should be with pigeon peas. Since there was none in the supermarket, I substituted it with green peas. Apparently, lentils or beans would have been a better substitute. It tasted great. 9/10.
  • Guava duff – a pastry with guava. Instead of being baked in the oven, it is steamed. Recipe here. It tasted wonderful. 9/10.
  • Conch fritters
  • Rice and peas
  • Guava duff

Top-down and bottom-up learning

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In any skill you want to learn, it’s always useful to explore it from two views: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach starts breaking down the problem into components and then trying to understand how each of these building blocks fit. In contrast, the top-down approach starts from the big picture to get a good survey of the landscape and working down from there. It is advantageous to use these two lenses iteratively to ensure that you do not miss important considerations in decision making. Iterating through the two can help you converge to a better understanding of the field.

Let’s say that you are trying to learn a skill like programming. You can start by working top-down. This means that you try to get a general idea of what the skill entails. Perhaps, it is about trying to create a website. From day one, you then start creating the website. You learn the different skills involved in creating the site as you go along. If you want to put a yellow bar on top of the page, you google just to find how to do that. You look at the code of other websites to see how they implemented these features.

On the other hand, the bottom-up approach starts from learning how to code itself. You learn about the different functions, typically from a book or a guided lecture. After learning these building blocks, you then integrate them to larger components.

The challenge with the top down approach is that the learning process may seem too scattered that you may have some important gaps in your knowledge. While you may end up producing an output that “works,” it may all be based on bad foundations. In the end, the output you get may be in such a bad architecture that it may have to be redone again with experts who are well versed with the bottom up. However, the good thing about the approach is that you get something out of it quickly. You then get a mental picture of what you need to work on next. You create your own map of the learning journey you need to take.

On the other hand, the challenge with the bottom-up approach is the difficulty to motivate yourself to continue along. If you don’t see any product for a long time, you might just give up and see no point to studying the details. However, the bottom-up approach can be rewarding as you have a great understanding of each component. You do not see the field merely as a black box.

The two approaches require balance. You need to work top down to see how each component fits together. You also have to go bottom up to ensure that you know each component well enough.

The Magic of Web Scraping

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A skill that is useful for many types of jobs is web scraping. It is useful especially if the data you want to collect is available online but is spread across different pages. Then, instead of just copy and pasting the information one by one, you can then just use a script to automate the task. Based on this pooled data, you can then get some insight into whatever industry or domain that you are interested in studying.

Please note though that before you engage in this, make sure that the website permits this. You probably would not want to have yourself banned if their system detects your activities as abusive. If you want to learn how to do it, I suggest to just search for the term Beautiful Soup on Google (need basic knowhow of Python). There are many quick tutorials on how to use it online. The basic workflow is to retrieve the page, explore the page to find the tags that are associated with the data that you are trying to capture, save the relevant data and then organize the data into some dataframe. Throughout the process, it is just a matter of experimentation to ensure that you are actually downloading the things that you are interested in.

The applications of web scraping are endless. In the past, I have used it to collect the job postings in the specific field I was studying in the pharmaceutical industry every week. The idea was that the job postings would somehow reflect the research priorities and trends in the industry. With the textual data such as the job description, the type of company and the specific instruments used in the job requirement, you can derive many insights about how hot the field is and what directions it is taking. Too bad though that I did not end up pursuing more this area as I had other promising areas that I pursued.

Another application of web scraping (which I have a paper under review) is in order to get a quick overview of the landscape of companies in your niche. You can then scrape the product and service pages of companies. By doing some standard natural language processing techniques (you can google TF-IDF or LDA), you can then get an overview of the words used within the niche and how companies relate to one another. Through this mapping, you can then get a big-picture overview of the types of offerings within the industry.

Procrastination cycle

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I am prone to having periods where I am extremely productive and periods where I have to push myself to start working. It seems like I am always in one of those two modes, never just right.

While this has been an ongoing struggle, I have found ways to better cope with my tendency to procrastinate. The one that has made all the difference for me was learning more about the research on procrastination by the researcher Tim Pychyl. Instead of being a problem of time management or lack of discipline, his group’s research explains that procrastination is a problem with emotional regulation. Procrastination is due to some discomfort associated with a task. This framework  by the Centre for Clinical Interventions explains this best.

In their framework, they show that procrastination begins with a task or goal such as those related to work, family, health or self-development. However, even before we begin doing these tasks, we might have already made some assumptions, both correct and incorrect, about the task. These unhelpful rules include the fear of failure, the fear of catastrophe, having low self-confidence, wanting to seek pleasure, needing to be in charge and feeling depleted energy.  These assumptions then drive discomfort. Wanting to avoid these discomforts, we then think of excuses for delaying the task. We resort to doing something else more comfortable. The problem is that this creates both positive and negative feedback loops. On one hand, working on the unrelated task makes us feel better. On the other hand, avoiding the actual task gives us more discomfort and further reinforces our wrong assumptions. At some point, the actual negative feeling of the task is replaced by our associated negative feeling with the task. This then restarts the cycle of procrastination.

Document your journey

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One insight that I just thought of recently, that I should have probably done even before, is to document whatever grand, a long-term endeavor that I am currently pursuing. For instance, if you are writing a book, instead of just publishing everything in the end, it is better to just post parts of it online as you go through it. If you cut your book into parts and talk about it along the way, you can test in advance whether the idea you have makes sense. Perhaps, through comments by strangers online, you can already have a quick idea if the big goal that you are pursuing even makes sense. This is similar to the idea of the “minimum viable product”, where you try to create the smallest possible prototype of your product so that you can get feedback as soon as possible.

Especially, now that publishers are too risk-averse that they only want to bet on writers with already a following online, publishing parts of your book through a blog or talking about its parts through a podcast would be helpful as a way to gain an early following.

Another example are people who want to learn a new language. Many people make the mistake of spending all of their time just learning through apps or signing up in structured classes. Perhaps, they will even complete the entire track on Duolingo. However, by the end of it, many will realize that they did not really learn how to communicate. Completing these puzzles in an artificial environment is a completely different task compared to actually talking with a person, who speaks the language as their native one. Learners are probably better off to shift into “production mode” as early as they can. They can write blog posts in their language of interest. They can record videos and upload them to Youtube. They can even try to commit to giving speeches in their foreign language.

I remember when I was in Amsterdam, I was a member of the Toastmaster’s club. It is a club that helps to improve communication skills by letting its members give TED-like talks in front of others. My club was in English and it was filled with ex-pats. There was one member who wanted to improve her Dutch. She then joined another Toastmaster’s club but in Dutch. She gave speeches in Dutch to practice. By the end, she had improved so much that she even competed in the interclub competition in Dutch. If you know how ex-pats are like in the Netherlands, you would know that just a small amount of people actually end up learning Dutch.

So, celebrate the small wins. Document your learning journey. Even if you are a beginner, others who are a step or two behind you still can always learn from you.

Iceland Cooking

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This week, we randomly selected Iceland to try out cooking some recipes from. We didn’t really know a lot about Iceland except for the recent parody movie about Eurovision. We didn’t really have a lot of expectations before going into their cuisine. But, we were pleasantly surprised in the end with what we ended up cooking:

  • Hotdog – quite funny that if you search for food you need to try in Iceland, hotdog seems to be one of the top ones. We braised it in beer as in this recipe. 6/10.
  • Plokkfiskur – fish stew. This reminded me of the Portuguese dish Bacalhau com natas. We left the potatoes as larger chunks as we preferred it like that. 8/10. Recipe here
  • Skyrterta – Skyr is an icelandic dairy product. Since we couldn’t find one here, we replaced it with Greek Yoghurt as it was recommended as a substitute. The cake was not too sweet. 8/10. Recipe here
  • Hotdog
  • Plokkfiskur
  • Skyrterta

Weekly Reads – Oct 23

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A (Re)view of the Philosophical Foundations of Strategic Management – explores four meta-paradigms around strategy research: contemporary positivism , contemporary realism, interpretive and critical postmodernism. I’ll be honest, I could only wrap my head around the first and second approach partly.

Social selectivity in aging wild chimpanzees – humans tend to have fewer but stronger relationships as they age. This has been speculated to be our way to cope with the fear of impending mortality. This study suggests that probably this is not the case especially if chimpanzees indeed could not imagine their future death.

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development – comprehensive overview of the vaccine development landscape.

Are Inventors or Firms the Engines of Innovation? – ” inventors’ human capital is 5–10 times more important than firm capabilities for explaining the variance in inventor output”

The rise and rise of creativity – Great overview on how society’s conception of creativity has evolved over time. It’s striking how prevalent the term is now. All firms now are creative firms. Apparently, the term only started to take off in the 1950s, being virtually absent before.

The genesis of public-private innovation ecosystems: Bias and challenges – The article mentions that there tends to be a value creation bias towards incumbent firms. As I was part of a Marie Curie ITN and also was involved in setting up one in drug discovery, I can see why this can be so. Large companies add legitimacy to a consortium.

Why Do High-Status People Have Larger Social Networks? Belief in Status-Quality Coupling as a Driver of Network-Broadening Behavior and Social Network Size – people behave differently according to whether they believe that their status is a good measure of their quality. Could not access the article itself but found the idea fascinating.

Planning as a Hobby

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Browsing through productivity posts in Hacker News and productivity subreddits, it seems like planning has become a hobby for many people. Admittedly, this has also been a thing for me. I love conceptualizing grand plans for myself. I love reading strategies on the most efficient ways to achieve some goal. I love learning for others how they plan. I love designing dashboards to track my objectives.

For instance, I am pushing myself to write 300 words per day on two books that I wish to have finished. I’ve created a tracker on Excel. I track the number of words I write per day:

By tracking this, I can do some data analysis. I can track what is my actual rate of writing. I can track how many days will I finish given the projected number of words the books will have (my current estimate for the two is around 109,500). Finally, if I slack, how many words do I need to write for the current day to catch up.

The problem with me in general though is that planning has become a hobby to the point that sometimes I spend more time designing these trackers, instead of actually doing the actual work. Planning has been my way of procrastinating, of convincing myself that I am doing actual work instead of distracting myself.

I don’t really know how to end this post. But, I’m writing just to reflect on my tendency to fall into these habits.

Innovation in Pharma R&D

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The second study from my PhD entitled Innovation in Pharmaceutical R&D: Mapping the Research Landscape is out in the journal Scientometrics. It is open access. So, for anyone who is interested in carrying out management and innovation studies on the pharmaceutical industry, it would be a helpful overview.

This study almost took two years to get published. The paper transformed a lot from the first draft to the later revisions. The first draft was really a mess and I’m grateful for the reviewer’s comments that allowed me to improve the draft considerably. I honestly was anxious throughout the process, always thinking that it could just get rejected at any point. Nevertheless, I’m thankful as I learned a lot from the process. Before this, all my previous publications were in natural science journals and it is a different ball game. In the social sciences, form and theory matter so much more.

With this publication, I can say that I have completed my transition to the management sciences. Looking forward to having more of my research published in the future.