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AOM 2017 PDW
THE DIRECTION OF INNOVATION & SCIENCE: Advances in Tools, Measures, & Methods
Time: Saturday, Aug 05 2pm-4:30pm
Location: Hyatt, Piedmont
Co-Organizers: Jeff Furman (Boston U), Valentina Tartari (CBS) & Florenta Teodoridis (USC)
Speakers: Scott Stern (MIT-Sloan), Alex Oettl (Georgia Tech), Samantha Zyontz (MIT-Sloan), Kyle Myers (Wharton), Michaël Bikard (London Business School), Florenta Teodoridis (USC) & Jeff Furman (Boston U)
Overview:
In 2011, Peter Thiel, the high profile founder of PayPal and Palantir turned technology investor, famously published an investment manifesto with the subtitle, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." This provocative remark on contemporary technological evolution highlights a first order question of why innovation takes the direction that it does.
Interest in the factors that affect the rate and direction of technical change has been sustained for more than a half century because of the central importance of knowledge for economic growth and because of the interest of public policy in supporting the accretion of ideas-driven growth. However, since the NBER's seminal publication of the volume, The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity in 1962, researchers have made more progress in studying drivers of the rate than the direction of inventive activity.
In this PDW, we will bring together scholars who are addressing this deficit through the use of tools that leverage advances in empirical methods, computing power, and text-based analysis. The tools, techniques, and research approaches we will discuss in the PDW are pushing to develop approaches to measure the progress of knowledge in "ideas space," i.e., along varying knowledge trajectories.
Program
· 14.00-14.15
· Welcome & overview: Valentina Tartari, Florenta Teodoridis, & Jeff Furman
14.15-15.45
· Five 15-minute presentations, including 2-3 minutes of transition time and 2-3 minutes of clarifying questions
· Presenters (in alphabetical order) & tentative topics:
o Michaël Bikard (London Business School)
§ on the use of simultaneous discoveries to provide a window into the direction of research trajectories at the level of a single idea
o Florenta Teodoridis (USC) & Jeff Furman (Boston U)
§ on the use of natural language processing (e.g., Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) analysis & Dynamic LDA) for measuring individual research trajectories, using the example of motion-sensing research
o Kyle Myers (Wharton)
§ on the use of curated library materials (e.g., MeSH headings, the PubMed Related Articles algorithm (PMRA), and the NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) to measure the location of articles in "research space" and to measure the distance between researchers' bodies of work
o Samantha Zyontz (MIT-Sloan)
§ traces the impact of the introduction of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique on the research trajectories of strategically-acting laboratories as they seek to maximize their research impact and on the research choices and financing of biotech companies
o Alex Oettl (Georgia Tech)
§ will describe a tool developed along with Christian Catalini (MIT-Sloan) and Nico Lacetera (U Toronto) for identifying "negative citations," i.e., references to prior work that question or criticize rather than affirm prior research; this tool has potentially valuable application for considering the directions pursued by follow-on research
15.45-16.30
· comments & panel discussion, led by Scott Stern (MIT-Sloan), with the goals of synthesizing the presentations, formulating questions to the panelists, and, most importantly, facilitating discussion from the PDW participants
Valentina, Jeff and Florenta
Florenta Teodoridis
Assistant Professor, Strategy
Marshall School of Business, USC
701 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90089
213-821-0852