How industry projects can stimulate academic engagement: an experimental study among U.S. engineering professors – one current research interest in our group is how to incentivize researchers to engage in industry collaborations. This study is a perfect example of what we want to do in the future.

From tensions to synergy: Causation and effectuation in the process of venture creation – Causation and effectuation are two approaches to entrepreneurship. Effectuation looks at the current resources one has and then thinking what can be achieved from those means. On the other hand, causation refers to starting from the desired outcomes then working backwards to find the means to get there. This study explores these two through a diary study of entrepreneurs.

Converging Tides Lift All Boats: Consensus in Evaluation Criteria Boosts Investments in Firms in Nascent Technology Sectors – One major problem faced by new fields is the lack of criteria to evaluate their benefits. Investors don’t know how to properly assess them and thus, are discouraged from investing in them. In this mixed experimental-archival study, the researchers show the relation between consensus in evaluation criteria and investments in new fields.

Scaling up in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A comparative study of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Life Science – lists different firm and ecosystem factors crucial to scaling up.

• growth orientation
• technological expertise
• management competence to scale up
• business model and infrastructure for growth
• funding
• presence of global firms
• human capital
• support organizations
• local growth culture
• hospitals and universities

The long-term consequences of entrepreneurship: Earnings trajectories of former entrepreneurs – Former entrepreneurs earn 27% less when they return to typical wage work. This can be mainly attributed to their tendency to work less number of hours and to a lesser extent, employers paying them less per time worked.

The Impact of False Investigators on Grant Funding – To stand out, grant proposals tend to add names of famous researchers from prestigious institutes, even when these researchers would not really be involved in the actual project. And, it works! These applications tend to receive 70% more funding.

How do non-innovative firms start innovation and build legitimacy? The case of professional service firms – A QCA study of the factors related to service innovation in law firms. They looked at the following factors related to innovation stimulated by collaboration with clients or imitation from competitors:

• fostering internal innovative culture
• using mixed teams
• structural internal units
• partners’ leadership
• technology innovation

The Grand Tour: The Role of Catalyzing Places for Industry Emergence – Fascinating case study of how the town of Arco, Italy enabled the emergence of the sport climbing industry. The novelty of their paper is recognizing that industries can emerge without agglomeration in a geographic region.

Mitigating not-invented-here and not-sold-here problems: The role of corporate innovation hubs – Fascinating study on the NIH and NSH syndrome. As its name suggests, NIH refers to the negative attitude researchers tend to have when they work with externally generated knowledge. On the other hand, NSH refers to researchers’ negative attitude towards transferring a firm’s knowledge to be exploited by another firm.

Taking scientific inventions to market: Mapping the academic entrepreneurship ecosystem – Bibliometric review of academic entrepreneurship. They propose a conceptual framework containing the following processes: research insight (discovery), unlock value (validation), commercialize (customer acquisition/creation) and create impact (scaling/company building).

Learning to Manage Breadth: Experience as Repetition and Adaptation – unique in that it studies the toxic waste management of manufacturing companies. The researchers find that increased breadth undermines performance, but this can be overcome with more experience.

The role of digital artefacts in early stages of distributed innovation processes – I always say to my team at Embiggen to just produce something as soon as they can and we can just iterate later on. As this study finds in the open source software community, ” (1) the presence of initial code release limits the divergence of team members’ representations and (2) limiting the divergence of team members’ representations triggered by initial code release implies a higher probability that the project survives”

The myth of the flat start-up: Reconsidering the organizational structure of start-ups – hierarchy is not automatically a bad thing. It depends on what you are trying to optimize for: is it creative or commercial success? The two may not generally be the same.

Asymmetries between partners and the success of university-industry research collaborations – differentiates between two types of success: programmatic and relational. Programmatic success relates to whether the current collaboration is meeting its objectives while relational success concerns whether the parties would still consider future collaboration. So, success in the end can really be about the friends we meet along the way.

Technology legitimacy and the legitimacy of technology: The case of chronic kidney disease therapies – explores how dialysis became an accepted, widespread treatment for chronic kidney disease while another treatment dietary protein restriction became marginalized.

Managing the Development of Complex Product Systems: An Integrative Literature Review – comprehensive review on how to develop new complex products, integrating various perspectives: people, process and product. Research opportunities included:

• People: analyzing communication patterns across team
• Process: managing design projects
• Product: defining product architecture
• People-Process: allocating resources
• People-Product: aligning product with organizational structure
• Product-Process: aligning processes with product performance
• Intersection of all: improving organizational performance through integration

In the past few weeks, there have just been tons of interesting articles published in technology management. Instead of giving a summary for each article, I’ll just dump all these fascinating articles I’ve seen. I might revise this blog post in the future and write extended comments on each paper in the future.

Science commercialization

Our paper entitled Systematizing serendipity for big science infrastructures: The ATTRACT project just got published in Technovation. In this paper, we explore how scientists from large research organizations like CERN, EMBL and ESO find alternate applications from their research.

What drives university-industry collaboration? Research excellence or firm collaboration strategy? – not universities’ quality of research but the firms’ inclination to participate

Innovation-driven entrepreneurship – “the markets, technologies and business models employed by these entrepreneurs are such that the nature and parameterization of the probability distribution of outcomes is entirely unknown.”

Dynamics of Disruption in Science and Technology

Careers

Long-term effects from early exposure to research: Evidence from the NIH “Yellow Berets” – exposure to a two-year training program led to sustained impacts on the careers of the participants.

Do Looks Matter for an Academic Career in Economics? Unsurprisingly, yes.

Management

Contextualizing Management Research: An Open Systems Perspective

Navigating the New Normal: Which firms have adapted better to the COVID-19 disruption? – firms that have good internal R&D / good management practices and younger agile firms are more likely to adapt to COVID challenges.

Telling “white lies” within the entrepreneurial firm: How rationalized knowledge hiding between founder CEO and founder CTO influences new product development – Certain types of knowledge hiding by CTOs from their CEOs can help accelerate these firms’ innovation of new products.

Start with “Why”, but Only if You Have to: The Strategic Framing of Novel Ideas across Different Audiences

Digital Transformation

We’re engaged! Following the path to a successful information management capability – information management capability refers to a “firm’s ability to leverage IT, data, and people’s information usage behaviors to provide accurate and valuable information for the firm to improve its business performance”.

Re-examining path dependence in the digital age: The evolution of connected car business models

Applying digital technologies in technology roadmapping to overcome individual biased assessments – a very visual article on how digital technologies can augment roadmapping.

Data sharing

Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines. Social sciences tend to decline requests for data sharing the most. Top reasons for declining across all disciplines include: no time to search data, data lost, data protected by agreements, privacy and people moving.

Governance of data sharing: A law & economics proposal