I am presenting our paper on the Science Mesh this week. FAIR data through a federated cloud infrastructure: Exploring the Science Mesh – it is a research-in-progress on the potential of FAIR data in unlocking new collaborative workflows.

Entrepreneurial space and the freedom for entrepreneurship: Institutional settings, policy, and action in the space industry – a study of the space industry where the researchers introduce the concept of entrepreneurial space. Great play on words. They define entrepreneurial space as the room for entrepreneurial change, which is often limited by policy and institutions.

Never the twain shall meet? Knowledge strategies for digitalization in healthcare – explores digitalization in healthcare through the lens of knowledge strategy. The researchers followed a hospital for almost a decade and then explored how they digitalized, exploring the following components:

• Vision – top management’s understanding of the role of knowledge in the organization
• Knowledge strategy objectives – goals for the organization and the role of knowledge management towards these goals
• Knowledge management tools – methods to enable the creation, application, leveraging and sharing of knowledge
• Implementation support mechanisms – organizational aspects including culture, structure, HR practices

Ecosystem policy roadmapping – combines innovation ecosystems with technology roadmapping. It’s a paper filled with cool illustrations of different frameworks to guide roadmapping. In the end, I really think the value of management research is providing frameworks for thinking about things and this is a great addition to that toolbox.

From ‘publish or perish’ to societal impact: Organisational repurposing towards responsible innovation through creating a medical platform – explores how an academic research project transformed itself to create larger societal impacts. I find it amazing how management academics can see any phenomenon in new light and make everything sound interesting. Definitely will be an inspiration for future studies that I do.

Digital transformation: What we have learned (thus far) and what is next – important review of digital transformation. They identify the following areas needing further research: measurement of success of DT initiatives; skills required for DT; organization of DT and societal impact. They also identified emerging research avenues including: the role of technology, the interaction between physical and digital environment, the interaction between technologies and organizing at a global scale.

The role of skill versus luck in new venture survival – instead of seeing entrepreneurs as gamblers, it’s better to see them as sailors. They cannot change the weather but they can adjust how their sails are positioned, motivate their crew and redirect their ships if needed.

Rapid Validity Testing at the Front-End of Innovation – Researchers explore RVT which aggregates lean innovation, prototyping, design thinking and pretotyping into one framework. It’s the first time I’ve heard of pretotyping which is the stripped-down version of a product to enable rapid testing. RVT’s components include:

• Problem framing
• Prototyping as test
• Prototyping as communication
• User integration
• Product iteration
• Commercial learning
• Business model iteration

Learning on knowledge graph dynamics provides an early warning of impactful research – A paper that got a lot of attention from reddit. The paper aims to predict which papers would be breakthroughs, by aggregating 29 metrics including from author and journal data, paper citations, and network characteristics. Using the method retrospectively, they were able to identify 19/20 seminal biotechnologies from 1980 to 2014. I need to spend more time reading the paper but the first thing that popped into my mind is this joke about economists predicting nine of the last five recessions.

Prestigious European grants might be biased, study suggests – In the study cited in the Nature article, the authors find that “applicants who shared both a home and a host organization with one panellist or more received a grant 40% more often than average.” Not really surprising. Scientists and grant funders are humans in the end.

Waiving IP – I’m teaching a class on life science patents and it’s impossible to talk about patents without discussing the various calls to waive patents for COVID vaccines. I’m also of the opinion that to some extent, patents can be beneficial to society.

Making the hard problem of consciousness easier – the idea of adversarial collaborations is really interesting. It’s when two groups with opposing ideas collaborate to come up with the experiment to test which theory is correct. In this case, it’s two groups having different theories of consciousness. I wouldn’t claim to understand global neuronal workspace theory and integrated information theory though.

Here are the interesting articles I’ve seen in the last 2 weeks.

The effects of university–industry collaboration in preclinical research on pharmaceutical firms’ R&D performance: Absorptive capacity’s role – study based on bibliographic, patent, financial and clinical trial data of big pharma firms. The researchers relate university-industry collaborations to firms R&D performance. Probably, not very surprising considering that big pharma is known to be reliant on public research institutes.

The contribution of Design Thinking to the R of R&D in technological innovation – in the past, design thinking has generally only been applied to the later phases of development. In the article, the researchers introduce the approach called proxemics which they say can be more useful for research (not intended to find product market). It has the following steps:

• scouting
• identification of interaction domains
• design of interaction scenarios
• ideation of interaction concepts
• development of interaction prototypes

Unveiling the role of risk-taking in innovation: antecedents and effects – very counterintuitive finding that having well-established innovation processes lead to worse risk-taking and innovation performance. Authors speculate that “innovation processes can include overly rigid gates and selection criteria, thereby blocking innovation ideas.” Instead, resources, support and clear goals were found to enable it.

Prospective collaborative sensemaking for identifying the potential impact of emerging technologies – I have heard of sensemaking in the past but never really looked much into it. Their article introduced me to the Stigliani and Ravasi (2012) framework on prospective sensemaking:

• Noticing and bracketing – individuals take environmental cues and determines whether these are worth noting.
• Articulating – actors organize information to gain a better understanding of the new situation
• Elaborating – group of actors interact iteratively to give meaning to the cue
• Influence – actors take the collectively created interpretation

Predicting social tipping and norm change in controlled experiments – It’s fascinating how social change can happen quickly, such as the acceptance of gay marriage and the weakening sensitivity towards privacy issues. I remember listening to a podcast episode from 80,000 hours and the theory put forward by the guest on why such changes can be unpredictable was really interesting. This sudden change is attributed to people not sharing their real preference and people having different thresholds of how much action they want to see from others before they themselves act.

Prospera – an experimental city of the future, libertarian paradise, being built on an island in Honduras. It’s based on the concept of charter cities proposed by Nobel prize economist Paul Romer. The idea is that less developed countries can lend a part of their land to countries with stronger institutions or companies who can then develop the land. A really exciting idea that hope works out.

The Invisible Cage: Workers’ Reactivity to Opaque Algorithmic Evaluations – Very timely article as algorithms continue to control our lives – from Youtube recommendations to Google search engine rankings. The article introduces the term Invisible Cage (a nod to Weber’s Iron Cage) which refers to “a form of control in which the criteria for success and changes to those criteria are unpredictable.”

Co-creative entrepreneurship – Having attended the OIS conference, I was introduced to the term co-creation, which refers to a design process where stakeholders like consumers are highly integrated. In this case, the authors depict co-creative entrepreneurship to “interactively construct both supply and demand, gradually resolving uncertainty.”

The role of Proof-of-Concept programs in facilitating the commercialization of research-based inventions – With one of my projects, ATTRACT, being a proof-of-concept fund taken to the next level, this article caught my attention. It highlights three roles of POCs:

• Relational – bridge gap between the stakeholders in tech development and users
• Structural – lower barriers to research development in their specific context
• Cultural – give space to think about external applications and overcome old beliefs

“Who are you going to call?” Network activation in creative idea generation and elaboration – an experimental study exploring which kind of ties (strong or weak) are more important for different phases of idea generation and elaboration.

The art of discovering and exploiting unexpected opportunities: The roles of organizational improvisation and serendipity in new venture performance – a straightforward quantitative study on the role of improvisation and serendipity towards performance. It’s very exciting that there’s so much interest on serendipity in the academic literature recently.

Beyond bricolage: Early-stage technology venture resource mobilization in resource-scarce contexts – a great example of a qualitative study that any researcher should aspire to do in the future. The amount of data they collected and the way they analyzed and presented them through graphs is just very admirable.

Distilling and renewing science team search through external engagement – follows a medical technology research team for 5 years to see how they engaged with the external world including clinicians, patients and industry actors. They found three processes including “devising and coordinating external engagement, assimilating external engagement, and distilling external engagement.” Very similar to absorptive capacity but in the context of research groups.