- Buuz – meat dumplings. Nothing too special here. 6/10. Recipe here.
- Budaatai Khuurga – beef fried rice. Just learned that the Mongolian rice bowl that’s quite famous in Asia is not Mongolian but Taiwanese. This more authentic version we cooked was also quite good. 8/10. Recipe here.
Blog
Pursuing Ideas (Weekly Reads – Nov 12)
Sowing the seeds of failure: Organizational identity dynamics in new venture pivoting – pivoting when you are still establishing an identity can be difficult. This study identifies co-development of business model with the investors, professionalization of recruitment and implementation of routines based on the planned milestones as steps to help stakeholders cope with such pivots.
Organizing Entrepreneurial Teams: A Field Experiment on Autonomy over Choosing Teams and Ideas – Teams that can choose which ideas to work on or which members to work with outperform those that do not have any choice at all. As the article explains, this can be attributed to team members selecting ideas that may interest them or team members selecting according to their prior networks. What’s fascinating is that when teams are free to choose both ideas and members, these benefits disappear.
Evaluating Ambiguous Offerings – it’s difficult to evaluate a novel technology if you don’t have any reference or baseline to compare it to. In this research, they find that higher evaluation is given to ambiguous product if it is primed by goal-based categorization. This is since the perceived utility of these unclear attributes is made clearer through such categories.
Heuristic methods for updating small world representations in strategic situations of Knightian uncertainty – small world representations refer to situations where a decision is simplified to a set of acts that lead to certain consequences. To update this representation in the implementation phase, the authors recommend counterfactual thinking to address confirmation bias, explore imaginable scenarios, and act on black swans.
Building greener motorhomes: How dual-purpose technical and relational capabilities affect component and full product innovation – first time I came across dual-purpose capabilities. These refer to capabilities like product modification, manufacturing, supplier and customer relationship which can not only serve current business needs but also create future business opportunities.
Business Research Meta (Weekly reads – Oct 29)
Are FT50 journals really leading? A comment on Fassin – The FT50 list which reflects the journals that business schools value has its own faults. As this editorial mentions: these journals have too many reviews and the citations of these journals can be gamed following Goodheart’s law.
Business and management research: Low instances of replication studies and a lack of author independence in replications – Nothing too surprising here. Management research in general is not really interested in getting things right. Fame and prestige go to people who come up with new terms and methodologies.
The Theory Crisis in Management Research: Solving the Right Problem – the thing that took a long time to click for me in management research is the role of theory and how it seemed that papers do not really accumulate to a larger whole. This article reflects on this by distinguishing between unit theories and programmatic theories.
- Unit theories – frame empirical data on specific aspects of a phenomenon
- Programmatic theory – builds on settled science, which emerges collectively from unit theories
Entrepreneurs as scientists: A pragmatist approach to producing value out of uncertainty – This is one of these studies that seems very obvious once you’ve heard of it. The study frames entrepreneurship as a process of belief formation, belief testing and response.
Deep Tech Paper Development Workshop
We are hosting a paper development workshop at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) to be held in Austin, Texas this December. The title of the workshop is DEEP TECH: EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES IN INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP.
Deep technologies, usually referred to as technologies based on cutting-edge science with long research and development processes, are receiving increasing attention from investors and policy as a means to solve the most pressing societal challenges, leverage new business opportunities, and increase global economic growth.
Despite its potential and the recent rise of the term, deep tech remains a ‘black box’ for both practitioners (i.e. traditional investors who associate deep tech with high risks, long gestation periods, and uncertainty of their development paths), but also for IS and management scholars who have lagged in assimilating what deep tech is and the innovation processes producing deep tech. Scholarly literature defining deep tech and exploring its challenges and opportunities is scant, at best.
To respond to the increasing need to fundamentally understand deep tech, this PDW sets out to establish a shared understanding of the unique nature of deep technologies and to shed light on its implications to innovation and entrepreneurship. The PDW will start with a panel discussion with Michel Avital, Richard Baskerville, Samir Chatterjee, and Meltem Ballan, representing diverse perspectives from academia and industry.
The panel will be followed by semi-structured roundtable discussions with participants to shape emerging research opportunities for future deep tech research. All participants will give and receive feedback on their ongoing research from senior scholars and peers.
To participate in the Professional Development Workshop, please read the description found here: https://t.co/YluU7G6WfT?amp=1
If you are interested, please submit your applications to Laia Pujol Priego (lpujolp@iese.edu).
Angelo Romasanta, Ramon Llull University, ESADE Business School
Laia Pujol Priego, IESE Business School
Jonathan Wareham, Ramon Llull University, ESADE Business School
Hannes Rothe, ICN Business School
Becoming kinder
Yesterday, I was walking along Passeig de Gràcia with a new acquaintance. And all of a sudden, she asked me if we could stop and ask the homeless man on the street how he was doing. She said that she had seen him many times in the past and that he looked worse today. And that she was too shy to do it alone. So, I said yes and we spent the next half hour or so just chatting with the old man.
This small event really touched me and together with all the other encounters this week, it made me reflect on kindness. Years ago, my default assumption was that, until proven wrong, people are only kind because they have something to get out of you. It was not hard to develop that mindset, coming from a background where there is so much poverty and crime. I’ve had my laptop and phone stolen in the past. There were many times that people would try to help me (like helping me look for an item in a shopping district, helping me find a place when I was lost) but actually had other intentions. Due to all these experiences and all those I’ve heard from my other friends, it was just difficult to trust other people by default. If somebody is overly kind, you have to start suspecting. My instinct is to check my pocket if that stranger is taking my wallet already.
But, over the years, I’ve really changed. I’ve become kinder and more trustful of people. It has even surprised me that some colleagues comment how nice I have been to them.
Reflecting on it, one of the early reasons for this transformation was having met my girlfriend, who has been the kindest person I’ve met. But, more than her, I’ve been lucky to have experienced a lot of kindness from strangers since moving to Europe. Throughout my travels, there have been countless times that people helped me without asking for anything in return.
These days, I’ve been interviewing venture capitalists, accelerators, managers and CEOs. It still surprises me how generous they can be with their time and insights despite not receiving anything in return. I’m just a random stranger contacting them anyway. Similarly, I’ve met many academics who are just so kind in sharing their expertise and giving advice.
Not really sure how to end this piece. But, it just made me reflect also on the relation between nice-ness and success. It seems like they are not really independent. So far, the most successful people I’ve met have also been some of the nicest. There’s probably some study there that explains what causes what. Is it that richer countries / people can afford to be nicer since they don’t have to worry to much about certain things? Or is it that to be successful you have to be nice?
Mexico Cooking
- Quesadilla – no need to explain this one! We made the 10 minute version and it turned out great. 9/10. Recipe here
- Enchilada – meat wrapped in corn tortilla with red sauce. 8/10. Recipe here.
- Fried ice cream – Not really fried but just smartly covered with cornflakes. We used vanilla ice cream and topped it with dule de leche. 9/10. Recipe here.
Enchilada Fried ice cream Quesadilla
Croatia Cooking
- Peka – a meat stew slowly cooked over fire. We made it with chicken instead of lamb. 6/10. Recipe here.
- Strukli – dough filled with cottage cheese. I still remember this from my trip from Zagreb many years ago. We topped it with blueberry jam. 10/10. Recipe here.
Peka Strukli
Weekly Reads (Oct 8)
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
Weekly Reads (Sept 17)
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.
Weekly Reads (Sep 3)
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”