AoM highlights

Most of the highlights of this conference include friends and their odd perspectives (remember, they are all researchers!). It’s great. A professional development workshop on evolutionary economics and communities of practice last Sunday brought together a group of great researchers including Raghu Garud, Natalia Levina, Joan Allatta and John Seely Brown. I Iearned a lot for our own work and the practice perspective we frequently use as a reference point. Today I listened to Jim March talk about novelty and creativity and to Daniela Blettner and Dirk Martignoni about optimism for entrepreneurs.

These days weigh heavy on the brain and cry for other activities: luckily one of the most inspiring and regenerating sessions I ever attended at this conference was yesterday’s tango workshop that not only drew parallels to leadership and management through the presence needed to work with a specific moment – the workshop actually included a beginner’s lesson in tango. Dancing quite successfully (!) with a stranger for a while we forgot to introduce ourselves… only the moment counted.

Academy of Management started

Since yesterday, our research group roams the Anaheim Convention Center: Zeynep, Peter, Matthias, Martin, and I. Disneyland is next door and California greeted me with some of the expected treats and threats: donuts, palm trees, sunshine, excessive air conditioning, and as we experienced today, pedestrian challenges.

Phillip Tuertscher and I naively joined friends for a reception at some museum: a bus took us there. When we got there, the charge for spontaneous guests was 85 USD and the bus was gone. Stranded on a parking lot behind a warehouse in Orange County, a few miles miles from our hotel, we decided to check out public transportation (and walking). It worked just fine, the climate after 6 p.m. is actually friendly and we ended up spending a great evening in a New Orleans style restaurant in Downtown Disney. I feel native here again.

Working sessions

Long days and long working sessions at the Wallins’ place in Varberg: thanks for the excellent location including such gadgets as bikes, a huge freezer, design furniture, and funky neighbors.

Halland on Midsummer Eve

After the DRUID conference ended in Copenhagen, Martin and I took the train via Malmö to Varberg. An approaching thunderstorm at around 9 pm created colorful skies, rainbows, and then sunshine again. Malmö was completely dead on this Friday evening: all shops and restaurants were closed, a lot like on a Sunday early morning. Apparently, the Swedes leave for the countryside to celebrate Midsummer Eve. However, riding along the countryside we spotted no suspicious clusterings, wild forest gatherings or similar going-ons. I think it’s a scam.

The DRUID conference was a great experience. Not only did the organizers at the Copenhagen Business School manage to attract a large number of bright speakers both from Europe and the US, they also convinced me with inspiring debates. Today, Sidney Winter, Dan Levinthal, Bruno Cassiman, and Peter Zemsky discussed the value of game theory for questions of business strategy against or in favor of a “motion” and a plenary vote to declare game theory useless for the purpose. It was great also to meet old friends from Trento, Marion Pötz and Francesco Rullani from CBS, Lars Fredriksen, Cristina Rossi, and others.

EURAM 08 in Ljubljana

EURAM 08 proves again to be an excellent opportunity to hook up with old friends from other European countries and discuss current research. I must admit, however, that I’m not totally convinced of the quality of some of the work presented. The conference organizers did a great job inviting wild-cards as keynotes including Slavoj Žižek, a mad Slovenian philosopher who provoked us organization scholars (dubbed: managers) with refreshing (if strenuous and sketchy) digressions. Last night, the organizers took us to Bled, a beautiful town on a lake in the middle of the hill country.

Our track, organized by Cristina Rossi and Lorenzo Benussi (and J.M.Dalle), united a number of cool people who do research in various “open content – open innovation” settings including Wikipedia, BigChampagne, Gstreamer, Crowdspirit, and others. Our Machinima research fit right in.

Transactions and modularity

In a recent insightful paper that appeared in Industrial and Corporate Change, Carliss Baldwin explains where transactions come from. The design of transactions involves decisions about what to exchange, how to evaluate it and how much to pay for it. Firms (and online communities such as open source software development communities) create transaction-free zones where exchanges and transfers occur freely (help among colleagues, trials and errors, improvisation). The difference between the two forms of organizations is how the boundaries are managed: are you allowed to take out things for free? Who may enter and exit and under what conditions? We should also ask what the boundaries imply for the motivation to share and reuse knowledge. And, if boundaries remain open to outside scrutiny and reuse, how and why would insiders like to facilitate access to outsiders? As Baldwin shows, modularity creates “thin crossing points”, i.e. links between tasks that are most conducive to the exchange of information. Building modules thus generates access points (interfaces, shared functionality, etc.) at lower costs.

For students of innovation, and theories of the firm I can warmly recommend this paper because it digs one level deeper than many classic works in the area: under changing technology, transactions are designed and managed rather than simply representing inevitable costs.

New conference acceptance record

All the doctoral students who have been in our group for more than a year, the post-docs and of course the professor, we all submit papers to the Academy of Management conference every January, a big conference that requires full paper submissions and usually rejects more than half the submissions it receives. I got rejected before, it’s not really easy. The good news is that this year, our group achieved a 100% acceptance rate, which is a new record we should be very happy about: unless I miss something that’s 7 papers out of 7 submitted scheduled for presentation in Anaheim CA next August!

Android

Matthias Stuermer organized a workshop here at MTEC where we met with Karl Piteira and Markus Zehnder from esmertec. I learned a lot about the android platform for mobile devices and about the mobile phone industry in general. Google initiated this alliance that brings together operators and handset manufacturers and currently runs the developer challenge that wins the best application for the platform 10m USD. One of the fascinating aspects of the role of open source software in the mobile device industry is that it connects both user-developers and traditional players in a B-to-B world. Lots of research needed…

Open innovation and B-to-B

Great presentations by Erich Ruetsche, Roberto Busin, Michael Lindemann, Abdel Labbi, Dieter Jaepel and other researchers and consultants from IBM (@Rüschlikon) inspired discussions about what open innovation can mean in a business-to-business context. Other guests included managers from Clariant. Some takeaways

• Advanced data mining techniques appear to need expert help to fly in a large company.
• Digital natives (<34 years) tend to behave differently than digital immigrants (such as writing messages to authorities without hesitation). Management consequences include customer contacts as well as people issues inside the firm.
• IBM regards open standards and proprietary innovation as two sides of the same strategy that need to be in balance for the developments of new businesses
• The term “community” can literally mean anything: more precision needed, I think. Same for “service innovation”. Totally cryptic.
• Lindemann presented 4 “archetypes of innovation” that describe how firms approach innovation: market for ideas (e.g. google), visionary leader (e.g. apple), rigor (e.g. pfizer), and collaboration (many start-ups)

Your academic correspondent felt a strong undercurrent of sales efforts in the room. The Red vs. Blue clip was wild off context but well received.

Institute for Prospective Technological Studies

This morning I talked to researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in Sevilla: Yves Punie, Marcelino Cabrera, David Osimo, Stefano Kluzer, Sven Lindmark and others. They provided valuable feedback on our research. One of the challenges, besides the 4 hour duration of the training, was the mending of disciplinary perspectives on the topic of innovation models and social computing – sociologists, economists, and management scholars sometimes differ in their points of interest and their expectations as to what should be covered in research. Maybe some parts got lost – hope not too many.