This week was a little slow for interesting management articles. I’ll just add fascinating podcast episodes and discussions from the web.
Scientific novelty and technological impact – Tries to find the connection between the novelty of scientific publications and technological impact through resulting patents. Novelty was related to how new the mix of journals referenced in the paper is. Surprise surprise, the highly novel scientific advances result to novel patents.
The Role of Individual and Organizational Expertise in the Adoption of New Practices – Study at the interface of cognitive psychology and organizational sciences exploring how expertise at the individual and organizational level affect the diffusion of practices within an organization. They find that individuals who have gained expertise through deliberate practice not only adopt new practices faster themselves but also influence their colleagues to adopt.
Sam Altman’s interview on Conversations with Tyler – As a researcher of entrepreneurship, I find his take that he can judge the potential of a would-be entrepreneur fascinating. To quote:
These personality traits of determination and communication and the ability to articulate a vision for the world and explain how you’re going to get that done — I used to think that that was so hard to assess in 10 minutes, it was maybe impossible to try, and YC interviews used to be like an hour. I now think that most of the time, we could get it right in five minutes.
Reddit thread on unemployed PhDs – While rants about how difficult the academic market are not new, it seems like this post has gotten more traction than usual. My opinion is that like any other track in life, one should not only consider whether they are passionate about it but also look at the financial viability of such pursuits.