Complexity, Innovation, Knowledge and Learning: A quantum interpretation of management

Innovation: thanks, you are "done"

Busy few weeks, so I am not able to write an "intelligent" post. Our MBA program started in Marseille; our MBA program in Shangai starts tomorrow; I had my scientific council; the Euromediterranean Management Approach course started again (and can soon be followed via the Wikis of the students, accessible via the discussion page of my blog). But I want to share with you a story that I recently heared and that is typical for innovation.

A person is asked for an interim job in a company, in order to innovate a complete division (that is in trouble for years). A creative an undertaking person as he is, he succeeds (to the surprise of some and to the joy of many) in a year's time to get the division out of the red figures.  People are motivated again (we sometimes forget it, but that is of course the clue for all change and improvement, not the numbers), the results are coming, and the entire company appreciates his efforts.  A member of the board even suggests that it would be a good idea if he would join that board.  And indeed, why not.  Invited by his boss a few weeks later, he even gets a haircut before, buys a new suit, since he thinks they might want to talk about another (board) position.

The immediate boss congratulates the guy and then says: good job, "you are done now". The guy, who sees many more possibilities for further improvement and innovation answers: of course not, we could go much further.  But his boss repeats that "he is done".  The guy did not understand and asks what he precisely means.  Simple, that you are finished with your assignment. The guy recalls that he has a contract for one more year and to his astonishment the boss responds: we will pay you for that additional year, don't worry, but you are done now. Thanks.

You will not belief this, but the same person gets another assignment, elsewhere, and he gets exactly the same experience. He is just a creative and innovative entrepreneur, nothing else.

Despite the fact that many companies ask for innovation managers and creative intrapreneurs, many companies are just not ready for it. And once the success is coming, the company moves back to "business as usual": we manage the figures. As long as we define innovation as a procedure to create innovative products or services, and intratrepreneurs as risk loving creators that have limited managerial skills, innovation will remain a very theoretical concept.  We will decrease the CO2 emission of our cars with 1% per year, at a high R&D cost, but we will never find a solution for sustainable transportation systems.

Innovation is a state of mind, a learning process, that is a never ending story of creation and interaction. For those interested, I have edited a book around this view on innovation, together with a number of my PhD students that I have had.

Is peer review to decline?

Glenn Ellison (MIT and NBER) published a paper in 2007, titled "Is peer review to decline?". The author suggests three possible reasons for his observation that economists of high ranked economic department seem to avoid publishing in top economic journals. A positive interpretation could be that more talent (of less reknown institutes?) pushes out the publication ratio of the top institutes. Another suggestion is that journals need too much time for reviewing and therefor they become less interesting to publish in.  Allow me to observe that it are often the same top economists that are the reviewers for these top journals, hence they would cause themselves the problem they would suffer from. I think therefor this second cause is not necessarily a realistic one.  Having said this, it does suggest that there is an inner crowd, where the "peers" review the "peers". The third suggested reason is that the overall quality of the journals would decline.  In my opinion, this does suggest that only top economists of top economic institutes would be able to publish quality, which for me is such an elitist assumption that it can not seriously be true. Within the choice Ellison gives us, I go for the first one (the optimistic one; there is hop, Johanna, ...)

It would not be me if I would not have another suggestion to do.  And what if the only message that Ellison's calculations give us is that where publishing (the numbers) has been the issue for years, maybe eventually the innovative quality of the research would start to matter.  Isn't it true that mainstream economics is hardly innovative, or even relevant according to some (see my earlier posts)? And as long as a limited group of likeminded review the same group of likeminded, innovation in subjects, research methodologies, etc, is far from being granted. Maybe we just witness a slow shift of research that becomes more and more interested in searching and no longer in re-searching (searching what already has been searching, and then finding what already has been found; no surprise). Economics and management science along, could certainly use a bit of new blood, new ideas, new research approaches that are already common place in many of our neighboring sciences, but didn't reach yet the Newtonian economists.

I have learned a new word: evolutionary economists. I hope it will produce some real evolutionary economics. 

Euromed's progress concerning Global Compact

It should have been done earlier, but I have put our UN Global Compact Communication on Progress, concerning the academic year 2005-2006 on line. I hope it can inspire you.