Delivering a difference – In Science careers, the author talks about how he transitioned from being a virologist to a mailman. This article really hit me hard as it forced me to reflect on the value I provide to society. Last week, I was arguing with some academic about some ultimately pointless thing. These lines really struck me:

“It’s ironic that although I’m trained as a virologist—surely an essential skill these days—it is in my new role that I am considered an “essential worker.” I certainly hope I’m helping in the fight against COVID-19 by delivering election ballots, medicines, and checks (among the bills, too, of course). Truth be told, I believe I am making a more direct and positive impact on people’s lives now than when I was in science.”

Dennis Macejak

Ig Nobel Prize 2020 – I especially liked the Management prize. It was given to 5 Chinese hitmen who subcontracted the job to each other, with each one taking their cut.

Scientists use big data to sway elections and predict riots — welcome to the 1960s – just when we thought that we are in unprecedented times, historians come to spoil the fun. This article talks about Simulmatics Coporation which was doing what the Russian hackers were supposed to be doing with Facebook as early as the 60s.

What Are the Odds of Finding a COVID-19 Drug from a Lab Repurposing Screen? – drug repurposing has received a lot of hype, especially to quickly find a drug to address COVID 19. Unfortunately, the odds may be stacked against us as commented too by Derek Lowe. This Nature Biotech article also comments on the need for a rigorous process to ensure that we don’t make any mistakes that can destroy the trust in science.

Information Frictions and Entrepreneurship – Something that has been regurgitated in many self-help books is that A-students typically end up working for C-students. There seems to be some truth to it in this article where they show that entrepreneurs are typically smarter than employees but employees are better educated.

A Text-Based Analysis of Corporate Innovation – they used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze a large corpus of analyst reports. I toyed with this method too during my PhD to map the pharmaceutical industry. NLP is something that I am not surprised to see being used more in the management sciences.

The strategic use of artificial intelligence in the digital era: Systematic literature review and future research directions – A great review on the role of AI in businesses. They talk about how AI can support four areas: decision making, customer and employee engagement, automation and new product development.

EU 2020 Strategic Foresight Report – a report containing colorful figures about how the EU can secure various materials that are important for its supply chain

I normally post on my blog every Friday but the last Friday was a holiday here in Catalonia so I decided to take a break. It was also my birthday week so I wanted to take the time to reflect too on my life and the things I want to achieve moving forward. Anyhow, this are my top reads of the last week:

A hypothesis is a liability – compares day science (where ideas are tested) with night science (where ideas are generated). When we focus on testing a hypothesis, we may be blinded from exploring other important facets of the data. I especially liked the experiment where they asked students to analyze a certain dataset. If you simply plot the dataset, you will see a gorilla. However, most students miss this as they are too focused on running the regressions, without adequately conducting data exploration.

Learning from nature – Biomimicry innovation to support infrastructure sustainability and resilience – fascinating paper on how innovations in the natural world can be applied in developing infrastructures. The tables showing examples of biomimicry in different engineering products, processes and systems are really interesting.

What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers – a blog post by someone who skimmed tons of social science papers to participate in a replication market. A replication market is a market where one can predict whether a paper will replicate or not. Among the different fields, economics had the highest expectations of replication. Management and marketing ranked the lowest (honestly, unsurprisingly).

Illuminating the dark spaces of healthcare with ambient intelligence – a review in Nature on how sensors and artificial intelligence can improve the health of individuals in both hospitals (ICUs, operating rooms and even lobbies) and daily living settings (elderly homes, chronic disease management and mental health monitoring).

From Necessity to Opportunity: Scaling Bricolage across Resource-Constrained Environments – bricolage refers to working with what is available. Normally, this concept is applied to startups which may not have access to many resources. In this work, the researchers explore how a social enterprise was able to scale to different countries with bricolage.

Coevolution of cyberinfrastructure development and scientific progress – explored how developing cyberinfrastructure can impact progress in research, specifically in the field of biodiversity and ecology. The researchers show that the coevolution between this data infrastructure and the field itself led to evolutionary progress in terms of increasing both collaborations and democratization in this research community. Moreover, it also led to revolutionary progress in terms of connecting this field with other scientific disciplines.

On democracy – The current issue of Science has a special section dedicated to democracy Articles cover a wide range of topics including immigration, inequality and activism. Just last week, Economist also had a plot showing the increasing support towards autocrats by people in weaker democracies. In the plot, my country the Philippines has increased support for “Having the army rule is good.” Scary times ahead. It’s difficult to not feel powerless in this situation. Yet, I’m hopeful that the brilliant social scientists working on this topic could come up with ways to better support democracy.

Is disruptive innovation in emerging economies different? Evidence from China – When we think of disruptive innovation, it is natural to think of the Ubers and the Netflixes of the world. However, disruptive innovation can manifest differently in emerging economies. The authors argue that, in China, disruptive innovations emerge by improving value propositions through cost innovation, quickly iterating to improve the quality of their offerings, launching directly to mass-market and placing efficient production processes.

Conceptualising technology, its development and future: The six genres of technology – Creates a typology of technology based on various combinations of relationships between humans and artefacts. It’s interesting how they weave the coming AI apocalypse throughout the article.

The impact of technology transfer and knowledge spillover from Big Science: a literature review – Big science refers to this phenomenon where scientific experiments require larger and larger groups of scientists, needing funding from groups of governments. The term is associated with organizations/projects like CERN, NASA and the Human Genome Project. The outcomes of these experiments impact society in real, tangible ways as documented by this review.

Does the merger of universities promote their scientific research performance? Evidence from China – universities around the world have become so conscious of their ranking. France for instance has been featured in the Economist recently for their Paris Saclay initiative which combines many of their research organizations in Paris to improve their rankings. In China, however, these mergers have not proved to be too successful due to difficulties in cultural integration and reaching economies of scale.

Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies – It still fascinates me how researchers can study phenomena of all kinds. This one is interesting considering how prevalent gossip can be yet how understudied they are in general.

Being Extraordinary: How CEOs’ Uncommon Names Explain Strategic Distinctiveness – Reminds me of this episode on Freakonomics exploring how names can influence the career paths that people take (like people named Dennis become dentists). In a similar vein, CEOs with uncommon names pursue uncommon strategies.

A history of insatiable intellectuals – A review of the book The Polymath by Peter Burke. I listened to the podcast episode where the author gives a lecture about the book. It was really fascinating to see how polymaths and the tension between specialization and being a generalist have evolved over time.

The Strategic Allocation of Inventors to R&D Collaborations – they find that companies send their inventors with strong IP protection to collaborations. These inventors serve to balance value creation with value protection.

Mapping technological trajectories and exploring knowledge sources: A case study of 3D printing technologies – Maps 3D printing technologies using patents. I like their path analysis showing the contributions of the different countries in the development of this technology. I explored this technique in a previous post.

Optimal distinctiveness in platform markets: Leveraging complementors as legitimacy buffers – This studied optimal distinctiveness by comparing MOOC platforms. They found that “a standard deviation increase in distinctiveness (from low to moderate) increases the expected number of platform users by 1.7 million (+55.1%) for platforms with an above-average share of high-status complementors, but decreases the number of users by 2.9 million (-53.5%) for platforms without high-status complementors in their ecosystem.”