- Potatoes au Gratin – Potato with tons of cheese. 9/10. Recipe here.
- Coq au vin – Chicken in wine. The alcohol taste disappears when you cook it long like this. 9/10. Recipe here.
- Pain perdu – French toast. We originally planned to make a chocolate mousse but this turned out to be too difficult to make given our time. We then resorted to the famous and easy french toast. 9/10.
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Morocco Cooking
It’s been a while since I uploaded anything. Just have been forgetting to update the site. I’ve been to Morocco before and I really enjoyed my trip there. In Amsterdam, there is a famous restaurant called Bazar and I used to eat there a lot.
- Chicken Tagine – chicken stew in spices. It’s a bit sweet due to the cinammon and honey. I’ve tasted this before in Morocco and it was great. Ours were ok but not quite like the original. 8/10. Recipe here.
- Couscous – couscous with vegetables, almonds and chickpeas. I have always loved and cooked couscous. 9/10. Recipe here.
- Meskouta Orange cake – the cake had a very subtle orange hint. For someone who doesn’t like orange in desserts, I really liked it. 9/10. Recipe here.
Couscous Tajin Orange Cake
Acceptance of Novel Technologies
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 (Weekly Reads – Jan 14)
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.
Scaling New Ventures (Weekly Reads)
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.
Chile Cooking
- Pastel de Choclo – corn and beef cake. Enjoyed this one, good mixture of sweet and savory. 8/10. Recipe here.
- Pastel de Jaiba – crab cake. I’m not really used to eating crab so this required a lot of effort but it tasted great. 7/10. Recipe here.
Pastel de Choclo Pastel de Jaiba
Sweden Cooking
- Köttbullar – Swedish meatballs. Like Ikea, we also added mashed potatoes and raspberry jam (didn’t have lingonberry). I made the mistake of added too much flour to the sauce, making it super thick. But, I loved it still. 9/10. Recipe here.
- Kladdkaka – sticky chocolate cake. Reminded me of volcano cakes. 9/10. Recipe here.
Kottbullar Kladdkaka
Somalia Cooking
- Suugo Suqaar – somali pasta. It’s like pasta but with extra spices. 7/10. Recipe here.
- Kashata – coconut candy. It was too sweet. 5/10. Recipe here.
Suugo Suqaar Kashata
Estonia Cooking
- Kiluvõileivad- sprat fish on bread. Nothing too special here but I love fish. 7/10. Recipe here.
- Küpsisetort – cookie cake using sour cream. Really great but we had to use jam since we couldn’t find strawberries. 9/10. Recipe here.
Kiluvoileivad Küpsisetort
Theory, theory, theory (Weekly Reads – 21 Nov)
Phenomenon-Based Theorizing – where do ideas from phenomenon-driven papers come from? The authors mention personal experience, curious observation, data complication, facilitating conversations and uncovering examples.
Achieving Fit and Avoiding Misfit in Qualitative Research – one of the biggest challenges with qualitative research is connecting the different parts into one coherent whole. The research question must fit with the data collection, which then must fit with the analysis which then should fit with the interpretation.
Bridging Art and Science: Phenomenon-Driven Theorizing – insightful model of how art and science work together to make theories. Conceiving the theory requires discovery and prescience, constructing the theory requires imagination and logic and communicating the theory requires storytelling and scripting.
The nuts and bolts of writing a theory paper: A practical guide to getting started – very useful guide on how to write a paper (even beyond theory papers). It gives actual exercises that one can do to frame the paper and guide its further development.
The Quest for Innovation in Information Systems Research: Recognizing, Stimulating, and Promoting Novel and Useful Knowledge – the article shows the different ways that papers can contribute to research.
- filling a literature gap
- filling a problem gap
- bricolage (rearranging extant knowledge in search of new insights)
- distinguishing between subsets of population
- changing levels of analysis or stakeholders
- extending current models
- examining the evolution of technology and its effects
- applying another theory base
- using different methods
- future-oriented studies
- blue ocean transformation by challenging assumptions
- shifting perspectives