Although I read through the new publications every week, I have not posted on my blog for quite a while. Nonetheless, hope to resume again this week.

Let me restart by focusing on research impacts. Two weeks ago, I was lucky to visit Bologna and attend a workshop on entrepreneurship with some of the top scholars, especially in the sub-field of academic entrepreneurship – one of the ways by which research creates impacts.

Here are some of the nice articles I’ve read recently:

Becoming an academic entrepreneur: how scientists develop an entrepreneurial identity – introduces the idea of liminal venturing to explore how individuals who have established a strong identity as academic scientists develop their identities as entrepreneurs.

Managing individual research productivity in academic organizations: A review of the evidence and a path forward – a review of levers impacting research productivity including resource allocation, structural choices, organizational culture and task environment

Incentivizing Effort Allocation Through Resource Allocation: Evidence from Scientists’ Response to Changes in Funding Policy – studies the unintended impacts of policy change on research. They specifically examined how stem cell scientists in the US responded to funding restrictions in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. They find that this reduced these scientists’ output even in non-hESC areas, with the top scientists being most affected.

Reaching for the stars: When does basic research collaboration between firms and academic star scientists benefit firm invention performance? – explores academic stars collaborating with pharmaceutical firms. They find that the outcomes of collaborations as measured by patent citations only superior if various conditions are met – if the star scientist is dedicated to the collaboration by not having other simultaneous engagements with other firms or when the collaboration extends beyond basic research toward translational research.

Strategic framing of enabling technologies: Insights from firms digitizing smell and taste – explores the phases in the framing of enabling technologies.

1. “General and novel” – communicate about novelty, universality and broad applications of a new technology.
2. “Specific and familiar” – focus on flagship application domains and establish resonance within these domains.
3. Transversal framing – cutting across multiple applications with a unique point of reference.

Living up to the hype: How new ventures manage the resource and liability of future-oriented visions within the nascent market of impact investing – explores – explores how entrepreneurs leverage hype while staying flexible. The authors mention that following hype can constrain new ventures’ ability to pivot from one category to another and also delay the realization of their long-term vision. Entrepreneurs then have to leverage cultural and relational practices that later then translate to social proof.

The role of expectation in innovation evolution: Exploring hype cycles – integrates the Gartner hype cycle with the S-curvey of innovation diffusion. They do this by distinguishing between emotional and logical expectations. “Emotional justifications associate and encourage meanings with little shared specification and vague time horizons, often among people who rely more on beliefs than on rational inquiries. On the other hand, logical justifications stimulate specific understandings about matters in a non-distant future among more deductive inquirers than those who rely more on beliefs.”

Dissecting diffusion: Tracing the plurality of factors that shape knowledge diffusion – compares diffusion of recombinant DNA (rDNA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technologies. The study finds that PCR outperformed rDNA due to factors including “organizational origin, the technologies’ licensing strategies and complementary assets, the stage of the industry, and social networks around the original inventors.”

Categories and Narratives as Sources of Distinctiveness: Cultural Entrepreneurship within and across Categories – studies narratives in AirBNB listings and their effect on price premiums. The study suggests that listings in categories that are not distinct enough should portray themselves as moderately distinct. In contrast, when a listing is already in a distinctive category, they can benefit the most by depicting themselves as either highly similar or highly distinctive against others within the category.

Technology Legitimation: A Product-Level Examination Across the Technology Lifecycle – explores legitimacy of products across the lifecycle of a technology. The study distinguishes between the firms’ legitimation behavior and the customers’ legitimation emphasis. These were the stages explored (adding to Utterback and Abernathy’s famous model):

• fluid stage – characterized by radical innovation, where no standards are still present. Firms experiment around a new technology, focusing on improving performance
• Transition stage – dominant design emerges leading to the expected characteristics of the products to stabilize. Firms focus on sales
• Specific stage – technology matures leading firms to focus on cost reduction and improving productivity
• Reto stage – mature technologies maintaining their competitiveness as niche products

Inside the technology showroom: Sequence of technology demonstrations and willingness to collaborate – researchers explore what inspired people to collaborate with presenters in a technology showroom. First time I’ve heard of the theory on construal levels, which refer to whether people think abstractly or concreteley. The authors find that technical people tend to like projects with complementary resources, less-technical ones tend to prefer emerging technologies.

How fast is this novel technology going to be a hit? Antecedents predicting follow-on inventions – a patent study showing that “combining dissimilar technological components with strong science-based content are associated with trajectories showing a long take off time but with a high technological impact.“

Corporate entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review and future research agenda – a straightforward review of corporate entrepreneurship, exploring its antecedents, dimensions and consequences

Inside-Out, Outside-In, or All-in-One? The Role of Network Sequencing in the Elaboration of Ideas – introduces the concept of inside-out network sequencing wherein individuals elaborate and improve their ideas through feedback from their inner-circle before developing it further with their outer-circle. It’s impressive how they were able to gain access to the performance data of scientists in a multinational company, on top of survey responses.

Digital product innovation management: Balancing stability and fluidity through formalization – explores the relation of the formalization in digital projects with performance and novelty of resulting digital products. The study finds that formalization enhances these two but just with positive marginal returns (better than a U curve). Formalization also benefited older firms more.

Innovation nudging—A novel approach to foster innovation engagement in an incumbent company – always found nudging fascinating to apply in innovation. This study explores how a company introduced nudging for innovation management. They identified four enablers within this company: digital workflow tool, collective foresight radar, topic campaigns and curation.

Multilevel optimal distinctiveness: Examining the impact of within- and between-organization distinctiveness of product design on market performance – an innovative study comparing images of the frontal designs of cars to explore optimal distinctiveness. They find that being too different from the other designs within an organization hurts market performance (measured in sales). In contrast, being distinct from other organizations can help.

Hyperspecialization and Hyperscaling: A Resource-based Theory of the Digital Firm – puts forward a theory of scalability, which describes “how the value derived from a firm’s resource bundle in a focal activity changes as the size of the bundle increases.” A firm’s resource bundle is scalable if its value per unit of output increases as the size of the bundle increases.

When Do Novel Business Models Lead to High Firm Performance? A Configurational Approach to Value Drivers, Competitive Strategy, and Firm Environment – a configurational study exploring when novelty in digital startups actually lead to better performance. They explore four themes of the business models:

• Novelty – introduce new combinations of products and services and new ways to connect customers, and partners
• Efficiency – transact in a scalable manner, removing market imperfections
• Lock-in – create switching costs to retain customers
• Complementarity – add value to the core offering by accompanying with other products and services

Is There Opportunity Without Stakeholders? A Stakeholder Theory Critique and Development of Opportunity-Actualization – when academics talk about opportunities in entrepreneurship, they just cannot avoid debating whether it is discovered or created. Adding to this conversation is the idea that opportunities are actualized, which emphasizes the role of market stakeholders.

Organizing Form, Experimentation, and Performance: Innovation in the Nascent Civilian Drone Industry – the role of communities in innovation has been oversold due to their presumed lower costs, creativity in experimenting, flexibility and ability to solve problems in a modular manner. However, in nascent industries, as this study argues, firms may be better positioned to coordinate towards more directed problem solving.