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Egypt Cooking

Posted on April 11, 2021

We cooked two dishes from Egypt yesterday. Miriam’s family loved everything (giving it 10/10) but they’re biased for these dishes. Here were the two:

  • Ta’ameya – Egyptian falafel. My first time to make one. We added salad and tahini dressing. 7/10. But Miriam’s family loved it so much and gave it 10/10. Recipe here.
  • Qatayef – Arabic pancakes with cheese filling. They tasted wonderful. 9/10. Recipe here.
  • Ta’ameya
  • Qatayef

Making the most of (Weekly Reads – Apr 9)

Posted on April 11, 2021

From trash to treasure: A checklist to identify high-potential NPD projects from previously rejected projects – In my opinion, the ultimate value of management research is to provide employees and companies with actionable checklists to guide their decisions. In this research, they do just that, providing a checklist to help identify previous failed projects that are worth revisiting

The impact of public funding on science valorisation: an analysis of the ERC Proof-of-Concept Programme – Being involved in the ATTRACT project, this is an interesting study which explores another proof of concept grant by the ERC. They find that:

 “By all measures of valorisation success that we employed – licensing, start-up creation, research contracts, and consulting, as well as access to follow-on funding – projects that had received the grant performed significantly better than those that had not. “

Explaining Ignoring – Working with Information that Nobody Uses – fascinating study on why people ignore data that they themselves produce. They describe rationales for ignoring data including people thinking that it is not their responsibility, people worrying that they may be interfering with others’ business, people uncertain about the data’s usefulness in the current context and people believing that they may be worse off if the current system is disrupted.

Getting the Picture Too Late: Handoffs and the Effectiveness of Idea Implementation in Creative Work – When employees are made to implement an idea without having much input in their prior development, they tend to create less creative final output. Reminds of the not-invented-here syndrome where employees tend to not leverage well technologies that are not developed in-house.

Science Mesh Poster

Posted on April 9, 2021April 9, 2021

I’ve been attending the Open Innovation in Science conference this week virtually and it has been a blast to be introduced to this wonderful community. I presented our poster on the Science Mesh in the conference:

Gambia Cooking

Posted on March 28, 2021

We made two dishes from the African nation of Gambia.

  • Domoda – peanut stew with meat. I’ve tasted something similar in an African restaurant before. 7/10. Recipe here.
  • Chakery – couscous with milk. It’s arroz con leche but instead of using rice, uses couscous. We topped it with mango. 8/10. Recipe here.
  • Domada
  • Chakery

Bahrain Cooking

Posted on March 28, 2021

We cooked two dishes from Bahrain:

  • Machboos – rice dish with chicken. Quite similar to the other Arabic rice dishes we’ve made in the past. 9/10. Recipe here.
  • Om Ali – Egyptian bread pudding topped with nuts. 9/10. Recipe here.
  • Machboos
  • Om ali

Commercializing Science (Weekly Reads – Mar 19)

Posted on March 19, 2021March 19, 2021

The fall of the innovation empire and its possible rise through open science – research output has been maintaining a steady-state progress despite the exponentially increasing cost. Meanwhile, economic growth from innovation has also been decreasing, attributed to the following:

  • We have already picked the low-hanging fruits in science, making novel discoveries much more difficult to find.
  • Incentives lead researchers away from high-risk, high reward breakthrough research.
  • Tensions between the ideals of open science and the rewards from closed science.

The author recommends open science partnerships as a solution to reinvigorate research impact to the commercial realm.

Attention to Exploration: The Effect of Academic Entrepreneurship
on the Production of Scientific Knowledge
– normally, we explore how scientific knowledge impacts academic entrepreneurship. In this study, they study the reverse and explore how entrepreneurship affects academics’ research directions. Through an attention-based perspective, they find that “entrepreneurship prompts a shift of an academic’s search toward new topics, which enables them to produce better and more impactful science.” This seems intuitive since engaging in more activities, leads to more collisions and higher chances of serendipitous interactions.

Fundamental elements in Technology Transfer: an in-depth analysis – lays out all the components that make up technology transfer. It’s a good reference just by the illustrative models that they have compiled from previous publications.

Training across the academy: The impact of R&D funding on graduate students – explores how receiving funding from the US NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship program affect the careers of the awardees. The researchers find that “the award increases degree completion, placement in a post-doctoral or academic research position, research productivity and impact, and network size.” Inspired by Caplan’s book The Case against Education, An interesting follow-up would be trying to understand whether these effects are from signalling, selection effects or from human capital development. I suspect that a large chunk of its benefits come from the cumulative halo effect that awardees receive from winning already a prestigious grant.

Andorra cooking

Posted on March 14, 2021March 14, 2021

We cooked food from our neighboring micronation Andorra. Their cuisine was very much similar to Catalonia’s.

  • Trinxat – Mashed potato and cabbage with bacon. 8/10. Recipe here
  • Ensalada (de Achicoria) – Chicory salad. But, we were not able to find chicory so we had to substitute it with kale. Probably, the worst substitution we’ve done so far as it loses the point of trying chicory. But, kale tasted great. 7/10. Recipe here
  • Torrijas – Spain’s response to French toast. 9/10. Recipe here
  • Trinxat
  • Ensalada (de Achicoria)
  • Torrijas

Colombia Cooking

Posted on March 14, 2021

We cooked food from Colombia last weekend:

  • Empanadas – cornmeal empanadas filled with ground pork and beef. We made the dough too thick, so there was more dough than filling. 7/10. Recipe here
  • Aji – the sauce for the empanadas. Recipe here.
  • Aborrajados – banana balls filled with cheese. It was difficult to make them look like balls so they became flat in the end. 8/10. Recipe here.
  • Flan de coco – flan with grated coconut and coconut milk. 9/10. Recipe here.
  • Empanada
  • Aji
  • Aborrajados
  • Flan de coco

Entrepreneurship Notions (Weekly Reads – Mar 5)

Posted on March 7, 2021

Fatal attraction: A systematic review and research agenda of the dark triad in entrepreneurship – The dark triad has been getting a lot of attention in the recent years. It refers to these three related traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. In this review in the field of entrepreneurship, the researchers find that people who score high on the dark triad are likely to be drawn to entrepreneurship. This is unsurprising since these individuals can thrive in highly competitive and ambiguous environments where questionable tactics are allowed or even rewarded. Despite having high entrepreneurial intention, however, those who score highly in psycopathy and Machiavellianism do not seem to have ventures that perform as well. While they can get a way in one-off transctions, business is built on trust and thus, disincentivizes destructive behaviors over time.

Adaptation or Persistence? Emergence and Revision of Organization Designs in New Ventures – quite an extensive study on how organization designs (task division, task allocation, reward distribution, information exchange and exception management) evolve over time. Tracking eight ventures, they find that the founders tend to entrench their logics of organizing despite feedback indicating that they should not. What they tend to update frequently however are the design solutions, though these changes are incremental.

The impact of managerial job security on corporate entrepreneurship: Evidence from corporate venture capital programs – managers won’t risk doing something so innovative if it would cost them their jobs. As the study finds: “firms are more likely to launch a CVC program after their state enacts antitakeover protection.” Although it may seem that guaranteeing job security may make people more complacent, this study finds that it would actually make people experiment more.

Syria Cooking

Posted on February 28, 2021

We cooked food from Syria yesterday and Miriam was excited for it given her Arabic background. We cooked the following:

  • Mukloubi bi lahmi – upside-down lamb rice cake. It’s not really a cake but the idea was to flip it upside down after cooking it. We did not dare to do the flip but it ended up great. 9/10. Recipe here.
  • Muhammara – red pepper dip. Not a fan of dips in general coz I’m not used to them but Miriam’s family loved it. 6/10. Recipe here.
  • Halawet El-Jibn – sweet cheese rolls. It was difficult to fill it with cheese and make it stay in shape. It tasted great nonetheless. 9/10. Recipe here.
  • Maqluba
  • Muhammara
  • Halawet el jibn
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About This Site

I am Angelo, an assistant professor in innovation management at ESADE Business School. In this blog, I share my learning adventures.

Recent Posts

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