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. 

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.

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:

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.

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.

Attentional Engagement as Practice: A Study of the Attentional Infrastructure of Healthcare Chief Executive Officers – I just learned about the attention-based view of the firm a week ago, and now, I’ve been seeing more about it in my casual reading of the literature. Quite fitting to have the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon when we’re talking about attention. This ethnographic research is quite fascinating, they shadowed seven CEOs from NHS organizations and explored the CEOs continuous struggle to prioritize and manage various attentional demands. I feel like it somehow mirrors the Eisenhower matrix of classifying tasks to urgent/not urgent and important/not important.

A New Measurement Conception for the ‘Doing-Using-Interacting’ Mode of Innovation – proposes alternate measures to innovation. Previously, when innovation is measured, it typically aims to capture formal innovation processes in R&D. However, innovation goes beyond that and also occurs in informal processes of doing, using and interacting. The researchers proposes measuring knowledge flows and facilitators.

Why Are Firms with Lower Performance More Volatile and Unpredictable? A Vulnerability Explanation of the Bowman Paradox – first time I’ve heard of the Bowman paradox. It was the finding from empirical data that firms with lower accounting performance also took higher risks. This was paradoxical in that it went against the prevailing assumption that individuals would only take risks if it might correspond to higher rewards.

The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology – introduces the concept of fragmenting cycle where a general purpose technology evolves into loosely-related siloes towards divergent applications. The problem is that improvements might only occur in popular application areas, leaving behind other areas. This cycle occurs when technology advancement slows down, which then causes slower adoption from users, which then makes improving the technology much more expensive.

Patent Quality: Towards a Systematic Framework for Analysis and Measurement – researchers compared different measures of patent quality and find disagreements among them. Thus, the measurement of the quality of a patent should always be tied to context.

What can Strategy Learn from the Business Model Approach? and A Business Model View of Strategy – Two papers that respond to one another about the whether the concept of business models offer anything new to strategy. The response was that business model literature focuses on these questions:

What activities should be connected? How can we develop interdependencies among activities that cannot be imitated? How can we develop superior interdependencies, especially when resources and capabilities are widely available and not differentiated?

Current trends in, and future potential of, crowdfunding to finance R&D of treatments for neglected tropical diseases – Couldn’t access the article but found it fascinating. Reminds me of the meme on how GoFundMe has become the main healthcare provider in the US. Memes aside though, with the number of societal challenges facing society, we need to explore all possible funding mechanisms to develop technologies to address them. Is crowdfunding the best way to solve neglected tropical diseases? Probably not, but they are better when you have no other alternative.

Strategic and cultural contexts of real options reasoning in innovation portfolios – Options thinking is something I’ve heard a lot recently. From what I understand, it’s about maximizing a company’s flexibility in making decisions, trying to delay committing into something as much as possible. This article is a good introduction to what it is about. They explain that it includes three main aspects:

• Approval of project budgets per phase instead of the entire project
• Setting of project goals is based on demonstrating feasibility to inform whether opportunity is worth committing
• New and ongoing projects should compete for resources

Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors’ R&D Failures – firms can integrate outside information to avoid making the same mistakes that other firms are doing. As the study finds: “competitor failure news from within the same market and same technology area [leads to ] more than doubling their propensity to terminate drug development projects in the wake of this type of information”

Avi Loeb podcast interview on Skeptic Michael Schermer’s show – Avi Loeb recently published a book on Oumuamua, hypothesizing that it’s evidence for alien life. Therefore, he argues that more resources should be allocated to fund this type of research. This interview is witnessing science as a process live. Michael and Avi are debating his claims in the context of the Sagan standard – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Economic inequality – Is entrepreneurship the cause or the solution? A review and research agenda for emerging economies – Entrepreneurship has been pushed by many policymakers as the solution to societal challenges. However, it is important to also stop and reflect whether entrepreneurship can also cause new problems previously unanticipated. This review finds for instance that:

“Within emerging markets, entrepreneurship within the formal sector tends to benefit those who are already advantaged, while exclusionary institutions prevent those in the informal sector from participation.”

Why Do Wealthy Parents Have Wealthy Children? – Typical explanation is good genes, better parenting and safety nets. This study however controls for genes by studying children born in Korea but adopted by Norwegian parents. I cannot access the article itself but the abstract is already informative: “We show that family background matters significantly for children’s accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children and the parents raising them.”

A wealth of discovery built on the Human Genome Project — by the numbers – It’s the 20th anniversary of the human genome project. Researchers are then revisiting its impacts on science and medicine. This article notes that instead of researchers exploring widely the genome, attention was given only on a few promising ones (probably responding to incentives). As always, the visuals produced Barabasi’s group are incredible to look at.

Global citation inequality is on the rise – Following the Matthew principle. the rich becomes richer, also in the sciences. The study finds that the most cited scientists (top 1%) have grown their share of citations from 14% to 21% from 2000 to 2015. Not really surprising considering successful researchers are able to attract better collaborators, brighter graduate students, more funding and goodwill from publishers. The only problem though is when these inequalities hinder more novel research areas from being explored.

Reinventing Innovation Management: The Impact of Self-Innovating Artificial Intelligence – the author introduces the concept of self innovating AI, which refers to the use of AI to create or improve new products from continuously assembling and analyzing data from multiple sources. With data attracting more data, this is once again a source for future inequality across firms. Those who are already leveraging data now would be better prepared for this future.

Deep Tech: The Great Wave of Innovation – just a great primer on deep tech by Hello Tomorrow and BCG. With deep tech going to transform the future, businesses and governments needs to invest in these technologies to avoid getting left behind.