Last week, we organized at ESADE the socioeconomic impact projects for ATTRACT. The main message from the workshop is the need for researchers to experiment and try other methods for impact evaluation, beyond traditional measures.

In line with this, let me go through some interesting articles I have read in the past weeks.

Entrepreneurial experimentation: a key function in systems of innovation – during the ATTRACT workshop, one of the core propositions is that we can systematize serendipity to turn ideas into impactful solutions. Digging deeper, the perception of serendipity arising can just be the side effect of extensive experimentation by entrepreneurs. The successful experiments are the ones that seem like serendipity.

Why the agile mindset matters – agile is one of those terms that are thrown around everywhere. Agile mindset was characterized by the following: learning spirit, collaborative exchange, empowered self-guidance and customer co-creation.

Reconceptualizing Imitation: Implications for Dynamic Capabilities, Innovation, and Competitive Advantage – questioning the current assumptions on imitation:

• imitation is easy (vs. imitation is hard)
• weak firms imitate (vs. strong firms imitate)
• uncertainty promotes imitation (vs. uncertainty hinders imitation)
• there is only one imitation strategy (vs. many imitation strategies)

Structuring the Start-up: How Coordination Emerges in Start-ups through Learning Sequencing – by following five startups over 2 years, the study finds how coordination emerges through the following learning sequence: anticipatory learning (anticipate early coordination problems), vicarious learning (copying ideas and practices from other startups), experimental learning (rolling out new mechanisms and scaling them up when successful), and trial-and-error learning (combine different coordination mechanisms and simplifying them).

Tradition as a resource: Robust and radical interpretations of operatic tradition in the Italian opera industry, 1989–2011 – a cool study of how reinterpretations of Italian opera affect ticket sales. The authors distinguish between different forms of interpretations. Robust interpretation involves preserving the most familiar aspects of a tradition but changing features like time/location. On the other hand, radiccal interpretation means modifying the core features such as altering the dramatic composition. The study finds that season-ticket holders are more likely to enjoy robust interpretations, while single-ticket holders are more likely to enjoy radical interpretations.

Although I read through the new publications every week, I have not posted on my blog for quite a while. Nonetheless, hope to resume again this week.

Let me restart by focusing on research impacts. Two weeks ago, I was lucky to visit Bologna and attend a workshop on entrepreneurship with some of the top scholars, especially in the sub-field of academic entrepreneurship – one of the ways by which research creates impacts.

Here are some of the nice articles I’ve read recently:

Becoming an academic entrepreneur: how scientists develop an entrepreneurial identity – introduces the idea of liminal venturing to explore how individuals who have established a strong identity as academic scientists develop their identities as entrepreneurs.

Managing individual research productivity in academic organizations: A review of the evidence and a path forward – a review of levers impacting research productivity including resource allocation, structural choices, organizational culture and task environment

Incentivizing Effort Allocation Through Resource Allocation: Evidence from Scientists’ Response to Changes in Funding Policy – studies the unintended impacts of policy change on research. They specifically examined how stem cell scientists in the US responded to funding restrictions in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. They find that this reduced these scientists’ output even in non-hESC areas, with the top scientists being most affected.

Reaching for the stars: When does basic research collaboration between firms and academic star scientists benefit firm invention performance? – explores academic stars collaborating with pharmaceutical firms. They find that the outcomes of collaborations as measured by patent citations only superior if various conditions are met – if the star scientist is dedicated to the collaboration by not having other simultaneous engagements with other firms or when the collaboration extends beyond basic research toward translational research.

Strategic framing of enabling technologies: Insights from firms digitizing smell and taste – explores the phases in the framing of enabling technologies.

1. “General and novel” – communicate about novelty, universality and broad applications of a new technology.
2. “Specific and familiar” – focus on flagship application domains and establish resonance within these domains.
3. Transversal framing – cutting across multiple applications with a unique point of reference.

Living up to the hype: How new ventures manage the resource and liability of future-oriented visions within the nascent market of impact investing – explores – explores how entrepreneurs leverage hype while staying flexible. The authors mention that following hype can constrain new ventures’ ability to pivot from one category to another and also delay the realization of their long-term vision. Entrepreneurs then have to leverage cultural and relational practices that later then translate to social proof.

The role of expectation in innovation evolution: Exploring hype cycles – integrates the Gartner hype cycle with the S-curvey of innovation diffusion. They do this by distinguishing between emotional and logical expectations. “Emotional justifications associate and encourage meanings with little shared specification and vague time horizons, often among people who rely more on beliefs than on rational inquiries. On the other hand, logical justifications stimulate specific understandings about matters in a non-distant future among more deductive inquirers than those who rely more on beliefs.”

Dissecting diffusion: Tracing the plurality of factors that shape knowledge diffusion – compares diffusion of recombinant DNA (rDNA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technologies. The study finds that PCR outperformed rDNA due to factors including “organizational origin, the technologies’ licensing strategies and complementary assets, the stage of the industry, and social networks around the original inventors.”

Categories and Narratives as Sources of Distinctiveness: Cultural Entrepreneurship within and across Categories – studies narratives in AirBNB listings and their effect on price premiums. The study suggests that listings in categories that are not distinct enough should portray themselves as moderately distinct. In contrast, when a listing is already in a distinctive category, they can benefit the most by depicting themselves as either highly similar or highly distinctive against others within the category.

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: 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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