Postdoc challenges – For a few weeks now, Nature has been talking about the issues that postdocs have been facing. As a postdoc myself, I can relate to the issues of uncertainty about the future. Despite this, I have been lucky to find a position in a great research group during the pandemic. I am really worried about how academia would proceed moving forward, so we’ll see.

Lab, Gig or Enterprise? How scientist-inventors form nascent startup teams – groups the startup formation strategies by scientists into three clusters. For some inventors, their startup is basically an extension of their academic laboratories where they can experiment with the commercial applications of their research. The gig model occurs when inventors want to pursue an idea quickly and see if it would be viable enough to be an exit. The enterprise model emphasizes creating a team that would enable the creation of a real sustainable business.

Management Research that Makes a Difference: Broadening the Meaning of Impact – every now and then, I have to remind myself what is the point of management research. This editorial provides five forms of impact: scholarly, practical, societal , policy and educational.

Converting inventions into innovations in large firms: How inventors at Xerox navigated the innovation process to commercialize their ideas – a study from June. Really interesting idea of innovators going around other departments to find a more amenable evaluation criteria so that they can later acquire further resources

The Matthew effect and the halo effect in research funding – The Matthew effect refers to the idea taken from the bible that the rich tend to get richer. The Halo effect is the idea that positive impressions in one area can also lead to positive evaluations of other areas. The study shows that researchers gain cumulative advantages, in that getting a funding grant can lead to them getting another one.

Bridging the gap between invention and innovation: Increasing success rates in publicly and industry-funded clinical trials – a study on the role of PI’s expertise on the success of clinical trials. Fascinating that they find that broad experience across multiple disease fields reduce success rates.

Fiction lagging behind or non-fiction defending the indefensible? University–industry (et al.) interaction in science fiction – My first time to come across a study like this. The study explores how science fiction novels view academia-industry interactions, using these novels as kind of a mirror to how society views such interactions. They find that science fiction has been critical of such relationships.

Developing Improvisation Skills: The Influence of Individual Orientations – another unique study using Live Action Role-Playing as the data collection method. As someone who is not really good with thinking on my feet, I found their three types/stages of improvisation skills useful. Imitative improvisation refers to merely taking inspiration from others. When you can then create an original response guided by some structure, you then evolve to reactive improvisation. When you do not need anymore external triggers and can just easily break existing structures, then you are at the generative improvisation stage.

The sandwich game: Founder-CEOs and forecasting as impression management – with so many people posting about their successes on social media, impression management is becoming more and more relevant. In this study, the authors argue that founders are less likely to oversell their company’s forecasts due to their concern with their long-term relationship with investors. I find this quite unintuitive especially when my top of mind founder CEOs are Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes.

Applying advanced technologies to improve clinical trials:
a systematic mapping study – comprehensive review of technologies used in clinical trials. I appreciated Table 3 which talked about the possible contributions of a research paper, adapted from Shaw 2003, which I didn’t know before.

The Emergence of New Knowledge: The Case of Zero‐Reference Patents – when we think of science, we talk about standing on the shoulder of giants. Apparently, there are patents that are just so pioneering that they do not reference previous patents.

Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production? – cool study on serendipity. Researchers were randomly selected to interact with other researchers. Their publications and citations were then tracked afterwards.

Organizing Crisis Innovation: Lessons from World War II– talks about the role of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development led by Vannevar Bush during World War 2 in spurring innovations such as radar, atomic fission, penicillin, and malaria

The long wave of the internet – traces the history of the internet and the paradigms occuring across each phase of its development

Do policy makers take grants for granted? The efficacy of public sponsorship for innovative entrepreneurship – Study finds that while public grants may help in securing further private investment capital, they do not help with revenue over time.

What matters more for entrepreneurship success? A meta‐analysis comparing general mental ability and emotional intelligence in entrepreneurial settings – IQ vs. EQ? This study shows that both are important for entrepreneurship, with emotional intelligence being more crucial.

There are some more articles from AOM that I am looking forward to read but I cannot currently access. I list them here:

• Research movements and theorizing dynamics in management and organization studies
• Heuristic methods for updating small world representations in strategic situations of Knightian uncertainty
• Doomsdays and New Dawns: Technological Discontinuities and Competence Ecosystems

What makes dynamic strategic problems difficult? Evidence from an experimental study – an experimental study showing that “people do poorly even in this complete information condition, and importantly, they show limited improvement compared to the more complex conditions that require complex learning.”

Behavioral Visibility: A New Paradigm for Organization Studies in the Age of Digitization, Digitalization, and Datafication – A lot of people are working online now. The study then explores how we can become “visible” in this digital age. I can identify with the paradoxes they enumerated in their paper: Connectivity paradox where employees who want to connect with their colleagues may cause interruptions. Performance paradox where people who spend time working hard on a task may not have time to make their work visible. Transparency paradox where organizations which want greater communication can end up obscuring activities.

Theorizing Actor Interactions Shaping Innovation in Digital
Infrastructures: The Case of Residential Internet Development
in Belarus – shows the various interactions that occur during infrastructure development. They made a 2×2 matrix mapping these interactions as symbiotic generative, symbiotic mutualistic, parasitic complementary and parasitic competitive

The coauthorship networks of the most productive European researchers – prolific researchers publish with other highly cited collaborators. Not super surprising. Yet, this is something that I always have to remind myself. You have to find productive collaborators who will help you push your research forward.

Sources of innovation for new medicines: questions of sustainability – describes the decline of the pharmaceutical industry. It shows decreasing new company formation, and decrease in number of companies involved in R&D

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.