A skill that is useful for many types of jobs is web scraping. It is useful especially if the data you want to collect is available online but is spread across different pages. Then, instead of just copy and pasting the information one by one, you can then just use a script to automate the task. Based on this pooled data, you can then get some insight into whatever industry or domain that you are interested in studying.

Please note though that before you engage in this, make sure that the website permits this. You probably would not want to have yourself banned if their system detects your activities as abusive. If you want to learn how to do it, I suggest to just search for the term Beautiful Soup on Google (need basic knowhow of Python). There are many quick tutorials on how to use it online. The basic workflow is to retrieve the page, explore the page to find the tags that are associated with the data that you are trying to capture, save the relevant data and then organize the data into some dataframe. Throughout the process, it is just a matter of experimentation to ensure that you are actually downloading the things that you are interested in.

The applications of web scraping are endless. In the past, I have used it to collect the job postings in the specific field I was studying in the pharmaceutical industry every week. The idea was that the job postings would somehow reflect the research priorities and trends in the industry. With the textual data such as the job description, the type of company and the specific instruments used in the job requirement, you can derive many insights about how hot the field is and what directions it is taking. Too bad though that I did not end up pursuing more this area as I had other promising areas that I pursued.

Another application of web scraping (which I have a paper under review) is in order to get a quick overview of the landscape of companies in your niche. You can then scrape the product and service pages of companies. By doing some standard natural language processing techniques (you can google TF-IDF or LDA), you can then get an overview of the words used within the niche and how companies relate to one another. Through this mapping, you can then get a big-picture overview of the types of offerings within the industry.

A (Re)view of the Philosophical Foundations of Strategic Management – explores four meta-paradigms around strategy research: contemporary positivism , contemporary realism, interpretive and critical postmodernism. I’ll be honest, I could only wrap my head around the first and second approach partly.

Social selectivity in aging wild chimpanzees – humans tend to have fewer but stronger relationships as they age. This has been speculated to be our way to cope with the fear of impending mortality. This study suggests that probably this is not the case especially if chimpanzees indeed could not imagine their future death.

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development – comprehensive overview of the vaccine development landscape.

Are Inventors or Firms the Engines of Innovation? – ” inventors’ human capital is 5–10 times more important than firm capabilities for explaining the variance in inventor output”

The rise and rise of creativity – Great overview on how society’s conception of creativity has evolved over time. It’s striking how prevalent the term is now. All firms now are creative firms. Apparently, the term only started to take off in the 1950s, being virtually absent before.

The genesis of public-private innovation ecosystems: Bias and challenges – The article mentions that there tends to be a value creation bias towards incumbent firms. As I was part of a Marie Curie ITN and also was involved in setting up one in drug discovery, I can see why this can be so. Large companies add legitimacy to a consortium.

Why Do High-Status People Have Larger Social Networks? Belief in Status-Quality Coupling as a Driver of Network-Broadening Behavior and Social Network Size – people behave differently according to whether they believe that their status is a good measure of their quality. Could not access the article itself but found the idea fascinating.

The second study from my PhD entitled Innovation in Pharmaceutical R&D: Mapping the Research Landscape is out in the journal Scientometrics. It is open access. So, for anyone who is interested in carrying out management and innovation studies on the pharmaceutical industry, it would be a helpful overview.

This study almost took two years to get published. The paper transformed a lot from the first draft to the later revisions. The first draft was really a mess and I’m grateful for the reviewer’s comments that allowed me to improve the draft considerably. I honestly was anxious throughout the process, always thinking that it could just get rejected at any point. Nevertheless, I’m thankful as I learned a lot from the process. Before this, all my previous publications were in natural science journals and it is a different ball game. In the social sciences, form and theory matter so much more.

With this publication, I can say that I have completed my transition to the management sciences. Looking forward to having more of my research published in the future.

Scientific process as red tape – A blog post about how, perhaps, for many researchers, the scientific process is merely an annoyance to get to the results that they have already envisioned beforehand. They already know the truth that they want to come out from their studies. The scientific process is merely a game that everyone has to play to later, advance their careers.

Prestigious journals going political – Nature mentioned this week that they will publish more articles on politics. The editorial in this week’s Science also criticizes Trump against the backdrop of the uninspiring US presidential debate. I just draw parallel with what’s happening with the New York Times, where they are supposed to have been getting more subscribers with the election of Trump. Perhaps, these journals are also moving according to market demands? On another related note, the cryptocurrency company Coinbase decided that they will not be political, offering employees a generous severance if they leave the company if they don’t share its values. I don’t really have much stance on this topic but it is really scary how polarized we are in politics. Before, I never really had much interest this sphere, but seems like politics has taken over everyone’s lives.

The brokering role of technology transfer offices within entrepreneurial ecosystems: an investigation of macro–meso–micro factors – a multilevel exploration of the various roles played by TTOs as brokers in the innovation ecoystem.

Toward the Emergence of Entrepreneurial Opportunities: Organizing Early-Phase New Venture Creation Support Systems – I’m involved in the ATTRACT project which aims to support the evolution of ideas from research to new ventures. The article identifies openness, self-selection, visibility and connectivity as aspects facilitated by such support systems.

Destabilization and consolidation: Conceptualizing, measuring, and validating the dual characteristics of technology – Technology can be categorized as either competence-enhancing or competence-destroying. This paper shows that a technology can be both at the same time. Digital photography, for example, consolidated electrical technology and disrupted film photography.

Design as an Isolating Mechanism for Capturing Value from Innovation: From Cloaks and Traps to Sabotage – To stop others from copying a company’s innovation, top of mind for many is to resort to legal avenues. However, companies also employ other tactics in the design of the innovation itself. The article enumerates these six topics in a 3×2 framework. Three tactics do not require modification of the original innovation: careful coordination to only reveal parts of the innovation, full manifestation of the innovation to the public to establish legal claim and tracking/cloaking through techniques such as watermarks. The remaining tactics require modifying of the underlying innovation such as modifying a part to misdirect competition, rendering the original unintelligible or defective against tweaking and shipping the innovation with additional features to prevent unsanctioned usage.

The failure to fail smartly – a third of clinical candidates fail the phase III to approval phase. The article attributes it to three factors: lack of expertise among the team members in critical areas, poor execution in planning the trials and selecting the end-points and deficient knowledge of the underlying science. It’s a funny coincidence though that this week, Science published an investigative journalism piece on how the FDA has not been enforcing clinical research regulations effectively.

Whether, How, and Why Networks Influence Men’s and Women’s Career Success: Review and Research Agenda – The gender pay gap has been attributed to various factors such as discrimination in the workplace, unfair norms, differences in inclinations, to name a few. Network science also has a perspective to offer. In this review, the researchers explore how networks affect disparately the careers of men and women. They investigate two areas whether they have different network characteristics like structure and composition or they just have different returns from their networks.

Beyond the Tipping Point: The Role of Status in Organizations’ Public Narratives to Mobilize Support for Change – When I moved to Europe, I was surprised by the lack of need to tip in general. Using a status lens, this study examines the efforts of some restaurants in the mid-2000s to challenge the culture of tipping. If you’re interested in reading more about tipping, I also recommend the Freakonomics episode on tipping.

Europe is building a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to revolutionize climate forecasts – It’s going to be an exciting future. Just recently, Microsoft flight simulator has enabled anyone to visit any place they wanted from the comforts of their home.

Delivering a difference – In Science careers, the author talks about how he transitioned from being a virologist to a mailman. This article really hit me hard as it forced me to reflect on the value I provide to society. Last week, I was arguing with some academic about some ultimately pointless thing. These lines really struck me:

“It’s ironic that although I’m trained as a virologist—surely an essential skill these days—it is in my new role that I am considered an “essential worker.” I certainly hope I’m helping in the fight against COVID-19 by delivering election ballots, medicines, and checks (among the bills, too, of course). Truth be told, I believe I am making a more direct and positive impact on people’s lives now than when I was in science.”

Dennis Macejak

Ig Nobel Prize 2020 – I especially liked the Management prize. It was given to 5 Chinese hitmen who subcontracted the job to each other, with each one taking their cut.

Scientists use big data to sway elections and predict riots — welcome to the 1960s – just when we thought that we are in unprecedented times, historians come to spoil the fun. This article talks about Simulmatics Coporation which was doing what the Russian hackers were supposed to be doing with Facebook as early as the 60s.

What Are the Odds of Finding a COVID-19 Drug from a Lab Repurposing Screen? – drug repurposing has received a lot of hype, especially to quickly find a drug to address COVID 19. Unfortunately, the odds may be stacked against us as commented too by Derek Lowe. This Nature Biotech article also comments on the need for a rigorous process to ensure that we don’t make any mistakes that can destroy the trust in science.

Information Frictions and Entrepreneurship – Something that has been regurgitated in many self-help books is that A-students typically end up working for C-students. There seems to be some truth to it in this article where they show that entrepreneurs are typically smarter than employees but employees are better educated.

A Text-Based Analysis of Corporate Innovation – they used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze a large corpus of analyst reports. I toyed with this method too during my PhD to map the pharmaceutical industry. NLP is something that I am not surprised to see being used more in the management sciences.

The strategic use of artificial intelligence in the digital era: Systematic literature review and future research directions – A great review on the role of AI in businesses. They talk about how AI can support four areas: decision making, customer and employee engagement, automation and new product development.

EU 2020 Strategic Foresight Report – a report containing colorful figures about how the EU can secure various materials that are important for its supply chain

I normally post on my blog every Friday but the last Friday was a holiday here in Catalonia so I decided to take a break. It was also my birthday week so I wanted to take the time to reflect too on my life and the things I want to achieve moving forward. Anyhow, this are my top reads of the last week:

A hypothesis is a liability – compares day science (where ideas are tested) with night science (where ideas are generated). When we focus on testing a hypothesis, we may be blinded from exploring other important facets of the data. I especially liked the experiment where they asked students to analyze a certain dataset. If you simply plot the dataset, you will see a gorilla. However, most students miss this as they are too focused on running the regressions, without adequately conducting data exploration.

Learning from nature – Biomimicry innovation to support infrastructure sustainability and resilience – fascinating paper on how innovations in the natural world can be applied in developing infrastructures. The tables showing examples of biomimicry in different engineering products, processes and systems are really interesting.

What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers – a blog post by someone who skimmed tons of social science papers to participate in a replication market. A replication market is a market where one can predict whether a paper will replicate or not. Among the different fields, economics had the highest expectations of replication. Management and marketing ranked the lowest (honestly, unsurprisingly).

Illuminating the dark spaces of healthcare with ambient intelligence – a review in Nature on how sensors and artificial intelligence can improve the health of individuals in both hospitals (ICUs, operating rooms and even lobbies) and daily living settings (elderly homes, chronic disease management and mental health monitoring).

From Necessity to Opportunity: Scaling Bricolage across Resource-Constrained Environments – bricolage refers to working with what is available. Normally, this concept is applied to startups which may not have access to many resources. In this work, the researchers explore how a social enterprise was able to scale to different countries with bricolage.

Coevolution of cyberinfrastructure development and scientific progress – explored how developing cyberinfrastructure can impact progress in research, specifically in the field of biodiversity and ecology. The researchers show that the coevolution between this data infrastructure and the field itself led to evolutionary progress in terms of increasing both collaborations and democratization in this research community. Moreover, it also led to revolutionary progress in terms of connecting this field with other scientific disciplines.

On democracy – The current issue of Science has a special section dedicated to democracy Articles cover a wide range of topics including immigration, inequality and activism. Just last week, Economist also had a plot showing the increasing support towards autocrats by people in weaker democracies. In the plot, my country the Philippines has increased support for “Having the army rule is good.” Scary times ahead. It’s difficult to not feel powerless in this situation. Yet, I’m hopeful that the brilliant social scientists working on this topic could come up with ways to better support democracy.

Is disruptive innovation in emerging economies different? Evidence from China – When we think of disruptive innovation, it is natural to think of the Ubers and the Netflixes of the world. However, disruptive innovation can manifest differently in emerging economies. The authors argue that, in China, disruptive innovations emerge by improving value propositions through cost innovation, quickly iterating to improve the quality of their offerings, launching directly to mass-market and placing efficient production processes.

Conceptualising technology, its development and future: The six genres of technology – Creates a typology of technology based on various combinations of relationships between humans and artefacts. It’s interesting how they weave the coming AI apocalypse throughout the article.

The impact of technology transfer and knowledge spillover from Big Science: a literature review – Big science refers to this phenomenon where scientific experiments require larger and larger groups of scientists, needing funding from groups of governments. The term is associated with organizations/projects like CERN, NASA and the Human Genome Project. The outcomes of these experiments impact society in real, tangible ways as documented by this review.

Does the merger of universities promote their scientific research performance? Evidence from China – universities around the world have become so conscious of their ranking. France for instance has been featured in the Economist recently for their Paris Saclay initiative which combines many of their research organizations in Paris to improve their rankings. In China, however, these mergers have not proved to be too successful due to difficulties in cultural integration and reaching economies of scale.

Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies – It still fascinates me how researchers can study phenomena of all kinds. This one is interesting considering how prevalent gossip can be yet how understudied they are in general.

Being Extraordinary: How CEOs’ Uncommon Names Explain Strategic Distinctiveness – Reminds me of this episode on Freakonomics exploring how names can influence the career paths that people take (like people named Dennis become dentists). In a similar vein, CEOs with uncommon names pursue uncommon strategies.

A history of insatiable intellectuals – A review of the book The Polymath by Peter Burke. I listened to the podcast episode where the author gives a lecture about the book. It was really fascinating to see how polymaths and the tension between specialization and being a generalist have evolved over time.

The Strategic Allocation of Inventors to R&D Collaborations – they find that companies send their inventors with strong IP protection to collaborations. These inventors serve to balance value creation with value protection.

Mapping technological trajectories and exploring knowledge sources: A case study of 3D printing technologies – Maps 3D printing technologies using patents. I like their path analysis showing the contributions of the different countries in the development of this technology. I explored this technique in a previous post.

Optimal distinctiveness in platform markets: Leveraging complementors as legitimacy buffers – This studied optimal distinctiveness by comparing MOOC platforms. They found that “a standard deviation increase in distinctiveness (from low to moderate) increases the expected number of platform users by 1.7 million (+55.1%) for platforms with an above-average share of high-status complementors, but decreases the number of users by 2.9 million (-53.5%) for platforms without high-status complementors in their ecosystem.”

Government royalties on sales of biomedical products developed with substantial public funding – The pharma industry has faced a lot of criticisms due to the increasing drug prices and privatization of research funded by taxpayer money. This paper proposes how royalties can be a better alternative compared to price controls by not decreasing investment in R&D.

The authenticity premium: Balancing conformity and innovation in high technology industries – A study on authenticity, putting their own spin to the idea of optimal distinctiveness. They looked at the balance between differentiation and conformity in three signals given by firms – network, governance and narrative.

Post-Failure Success: Sensemaking in Problem Representation Reformulation – failures normally spring from a faulty representation of the problem. A reformulation of these wrong assumptions is the key then to steer one’s trajectory, ultimately turning the initial failure into a success.

Organizational Resilience: A Valuable Construct for Management Research? – Resilience has become a buzzword during the pandemic. The paper clarifies a lot of things about what it really is about and how to measure it. They identify behavior, resources and capabilities as relevant components which aid to have a resilient response which then leads to organizational growth.

Managing intrapreneurial capabilities: An overview – an introduction to a special issue on intrapreneurship and dynamic capabilities. They identify different research streams in the intersection of these two topics.