By Authors:
Panayiotis (Panikos) Georgallis – University of Amsterdam
Glen Dowell – Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
Rodolphe Durand – HEC Paris
Interviewers:
Luise Kaufmann – Technical University of Munich
Vetrikumaran (Vetri) Ananthasayanam – University of Alabama
Article link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0001839218771550
Luise Kaufmann: Thank you very much again for attending our interview. Let’s start with a very basic question: What’s the origin of your article? How did you meet? Or how did you come up with your story? What’s the story behind the story?
Glen Dowell: Well, the meeting part is pretty simple. Many years ago, I was in Europe to attend SMS, and Rudy and I reached out to each other. I did a talk at HEC, that Rudy had graciously arranged for me to do. There, I met Panikos, and subsequently, Rudy asked if Panikos could spend a semester at Cornell. That’s a common practice that they’ve started at HEC – Faculty facilitating students to spend time in some other schools to get their students exposed to different scholars and to build a better network. Panikos spent some time at Cornell, and that’s how we all met. Rudy and I had met in various settings, of course, before that, but that’s how the trio began in terms of the origin of the paper itself. This was a paper from Panikos’s dissertation, and I think Panikos is probably the best person to talk about the ideation part and these pieces of it.
Panikos Georgallis: Yeah. Just to follow up and give you a little bit of the timeline, I think Glen’s visit was in 2012, and Rudy was very proactive in helping me organize a research visit to Cornell in 2013. So that’s when I was already in my fourth year in the PhD, and that’s where we started the project – initially with Glenn, and then soon after, we brought in Rudy because of the topic and his expertise. And I was at Cornell for probably, like a month, or maybe even less, I think already in our second or third meeting with Glenn, we were discussing ideas, and the gist of the idea came from one of our first meetings, actually (Glenn: yeah).
Rodolphe Durand: The way we tend to work with the grad students here at HEC is that, first, we work on a paper together, then we help students develop their own piece by themselves, and just for the most promising students, we help them go abroad and work with another co-author. We had in the past lots of good successes, and I could be part of the project or not at all. For instance, Paul Gouvard went to Berkeley and wrote a piece with Amir Goldberg and Sameer Srivastava – the three of them, and not me. But in this project, I think that I could bring something because of the topic itself, and having worked with Panikos on the data set for the other essay that has been published in Organization Science.
Another thing that we try to do – and Panikos, you can confirm if it’s right or not – we try just to have the essays of our students to form a coherent role, a story, either mixing through different levels of analysis or longitudinal effects, so that theoretically, there are some commonalities across different essays. Here, with this visit and the work with Glen, I think that Panikos had this part of the coherent story with the other essays as well.
Glen Dowell: My initial training and work were in organizational ecology. I worked with Anand Swaminathan and Will Mitchell. And talking with Panikos when he was hanging out here at Cornell, this really felt like a great way to take that mindset and literature and think about what they used to call community ecology studies. How does one population affect another population, not just looking within a population and understanding how the environment itself is endogenous? It’s not that we don’t just take the institutions for granted – we see how they are affected by different players. So in those conversations, I found that Panikos has a deep understanding of this context and the work he has done. That was really the way this started to evolve. And then, Rudy’s got such an amazing body of work on understanding these social dynamics and populations. Overall, I thought it was a really fun project – maybe not for Ponikos, because it was part of his dissertation. [Panikos Georgallis: It was fun…laughing] But for me, it was just a really fun experience, getting to work with Rudy, whom I have known for years, but hadn’t worked with, and also the energy that Panikos brought.
Rodolphe Durand: I was also working at the same time on the revision of the next phase of population ecology that Michael Hannan and Glenn Carroll were themselves actually pursuing, starting in the early 2000s, around categories. And it was a super easy conversation, just to try to dialogue with this population ecology spirit, as Glen just said. This project also sheds some new light on the population ecology under the former category purity or impurity as a factor that affects how policymakers actually act and react to the demands, when an industry is morphing from just pure player with nascent, small competitors to something that becomes of interest for the incumbents and when incumbents become less pure in the game. This internal endogenous dynamics that Glenn just mentioned was actually very interesting. I just tried to disentangle it on a conceptual level, and I was on the empirics as well, but on the empirics, it was Panikos who did a superb job at actually tracking all the different firms operating in Europe over the almost two decades.
Panikos Georgallis: If I can add to this, first of all, it was definitely fun to work on this project. I really enjoyed it. One of the things that I remember more fondly is that for the few months that I spent at Cornell, I spent a lot of time digging into this literature on population ecology, which I hadn’t known well before. I probably had only a couple of sessions in a doctoral seminar, and was also looking at the literature on institutions and how institutions emerge, and how policy is an indicator of endorsement or legitimacy of a sector. And then we felt like we were transitioning naturally to this newer literature on categories, which Rodolphe is and was already one of the most prolific scholars in the area. So it felt like a natural fit, I would say.
Vetrikumaran Anantha Sayanam: It’s amazing to know how this project started. We would like to delve a little bit into the content of the article. You have mentioned in the article that emerging industries lack economic and political power, while this may be true, there are also these venture-backed firms which get huge investments these days, and some of these firms are also from very fast-moving and fragmented categories. The VCs who fund these firms can also be considered as some organizations with huge political power. Do we then need to consider emergent industries that are largely venture-backed and that are from fast-moving and fragmented categories differently from other emergent industries?
Panikos Georgallis: Well, I think one of the things that we noticed by looking into the setting in more detail, and that was something that was key here, is that there was not a lot of strong lobbying opposing feed-in-tariffs. That was not because there were no strong sectors that might be against them. Actually, on the contrary, they didn’t really take it very seriously. So we considered lobbying explanations, and essentially, the results that we found were not really consistent with those, and they were more consistent with the idea that as the industry grows, as the number of players grows, it becomes recognizable. So the government comes to accept that there is a new industry. And I would argue that we could also look at VC as an audience. Venture capitalists do back more risky investments sometimes in less-settled industries. But even they have to recognize that there is a product market that’s going to be accepted in order to spend their money, even if they might be less risk-averse compared to policymakers.
Vetrikumaran Anantha Sayanam: The VCs could also be a force in generating policy interests and, on behalf of the firms in which they invest, they could push policies, right?
Rodolphe Durand: Yeah, definitely, but we need to keep a few things in mind. First, the context is Europe, and secondly, the time we’re talking about the private equity or VC industry, it was not the same as post-2020. Thirdly, the issues you’re referring to are a bit of the same. Almost independently of who owns whom, for the policy decision maker, it’s a question of what they allow to be a legalized category, and what money could be transferred from the public, state-based money to a private interest. And so I would say this is not because you will have a very powerful VC fund that would like to try to lobby for the recognition of, say, the cryopreservation of human bodies as an industry. It is the public interest, as represented by the government or the state, that accepts that the industry is what matters.
I tend to say that although the forms that are maybe currently known could differ perhaps from what we saw in our context, I think the theory still remains valid in the sense what you may have in cryonics – pure players, who just do cryonics and maybe, say, an energy company that thinks that if they generate extra kilowatts, they can use this to have fridges where they put people in it and see a diversification. So, should states allow that, or is it better just to favor pure players? When is it that the industry is really taking shape – when you have two pure players or five small pure players and one big company diversifying in this new activity, are the questions that remain the same? The theoretical reasoning or the questions we have, perhaps of who owns (completely 100% independently but 80% independently) these new activities, is still valid.
Glen Dowell: Yeah, I agree. If you think about VC-backed ventures, it may shift things a little bit if we picture two populations where one was heavily composed of VC-backed ventures, and the other was more independent. The five of us getting together and backing a firm, certainly that might have a little bit faster policy support when you’ve got the large VC firms, but I think that it’s not changing the story around coherence and purity. That is because I don’t think you would look at the VC-backed firm and say, well, it’s not a pure one that the five of us founded, because it’s not the same as Exxon deciding to build a solar arm.
Luise Kaufmann: Thank you. Very interesting. Our next question is about causality. Your paper does an excellent job of explaining and analyzing the simultaneous causality, showing that the industry coherence drives policy support, and not the other way around. The question is a two-part question – the first part of the question is, how did you handle that problem, and how did you discuss that in a team? And the second part is that causality is always a problem or concern in every single paper. Do you have any general tips on how young scholars can work around that?
Panikos Georgallis: I’ll start with the last one. I took a course on instrumental variable methods just for this. But you know, to answer your first question, this was something that we had in mind from the beginning. Because we started with the idea that we’re treating regulation as exogenous, but it’s not. We were very well aware that, yes, if you have a supportive policy in place, more companies will enter. That’s something that we were discussing as a team from the very beginning of the project (Dowell, Durand: yes, yeah). But I don’t think that we addressed it necessarily well from the beginning. It’s something that improved a lot during the review process. I do remember one of the things that the reviewers pushed us on was precisely this, but the editor we had was a fantastic editor, not only in terms of being developmental and challenging us, but also giving us enough freedom. And one of the things that he pushed us to do is to be very clear about articulating the trade-offs of what the sources of endogeneity are. What can we do in this setting, and what are the things we can do simultaneously, and how does that lead to the choices that we made? This process was really helpful, and we are thankful to Dev Jennings (University of Alberta), the editor.
Rodolphe Durand: Having a very good editor can change the life of a paper. (Both Dowell & Panikos: Yeah, absolutely, yeah). On the other part of the question, coming from Europe, I would say that my advice is ‘don’t be obsessed with causal identification’. The most important thing is the question you are addressing. Because I see and read so many junior scholars’ papers that do address causation and actually find a completely uninteresting result, it’s a matter of positioning the quality of the question versus the quality of the method and not to compromise a good question. And if you have editors who are understanding, they can in the interest of the question and of the phenomenon ask you to acknowledge the fact that this is correlational and you can perhaps push the slider a little bit just to try to get at some decomposition of the variants – using lagging variables, subsampling things that are not working on evidencing, trying to find an instrument variable, doing some matching for rebalancing the distributions. It’s not fighting against endogeneity, but it can help have a better indication of the coefficients and the significance of the coefficients. It’s better just to have a very good question that is puzzling than just have a perfect method. It’s like having an extraordinary hammer but a very small nail – that’s my take on it.
Glen Dowell: That’s perfect. This is why he’s as good as he is. Find good questions and acknowledge – I think that’s the right step. Pretending that the causality is not an issue and that you have a perfect test is going to get you in more trouble. Acknowledging and saying these are the limitations, here’s why the work is still interesting, and here’s what future work can do is important. And that if you can’t get the quasi-experimental situation that some people have been very good at finding, for example.
Luise Kaufmann: Okay, thank you. That sounds easy, just finding the good questions, how do you do that?
Rodolphe Durand: No, it’s not easy. First, you need to know the literature well and try to go deep into the underlying assumptions of any theory or framework that has been used by your predecessors. This means that you need to read, try to question, and have some critical spirit – say, this footnote says that the paper is valid under this condition, but if I relax this condition, what happens? Is this realistic, just to have this condition? Typically, it could be, but empirically, is it really realistic? Questioning the seminal papers that have led to probable streams of research could further lead to questions like ‘How do the follow-up papers actually use the theory?’, ‘Are they loyal to the underlying assumptions?’, ‘Are they changing the hypothesis about the rationality of the agents?’ These are the things that you need to do, and go speak to practitioners when you’re studying. Panikos is an excellent example of someone who knew about the industry before. So when reading footnotes or when doing all the different activities he had to do just to compile all this data. He had a good understanding of what could be interesting or not interesting. Having this knowledge, he can compare with the category literature or the population ecology literature, reducing the empirics to some categories and constructs. Is there a space between what I know in the field and what people tell me about how they act in the field? Can I deploy this logic as the theoretical arguments?
I notice that there is perhaps a tendency of grad students just to go and find data, scrape the data, apply techniques, and then have some findings, and then say, Oh, my God, I found something. Then they ask what would be the theory, what would be the framework I could use? I think it’s more complicated actually to do it this way, than the opposite, i.e., spending some time just to find the right question, then looking for the data that actually helps you try to answer the question, and finding what you find. Sometimes it’s contradictory to what you were expecting, but that’s fine. I think it’s fine because when you need to rework and you present the paper, people will try to help you – say, you have an endogeneity problem, but wouldn’t you use this? Then you are on a more solid ground, just to improve your paper incrementally. Whereas if you just have the data and the result first, each time people will try to make sense of the results – If you speak to someone who did market categories, they will refer to market categories, and someone who did social identity will refer to identification theory, and people will answer to your questions with their own lens. It will be hard for the researcher to find the best path. Finding the right questions will have you in more solid ground from the start.
Panikos Georgallis: I couldn’t agree more with this. Keep reading, do a lot of reading and have a good understanding of the literature. And about the other thing that Rudy mentioned – getting to know the context – you can study the industry or the topic or just talk to people, read the industry press, look up at how it’s discussed in the media, can also go to some industry conferences. These, I think, are really important especially for industry studies. What has benefited me a lot is this iteration between the theory and understanding the theory and looking back at the setting. In this case, for example, there was this prevalent idea that the photovoltaic industry was built by public policy. But then, when I was looking at the setting, it was clear that in many countries, there was an industry before there was policy. So I was like what’s going on here?
Rodolphe Durand: Yeah, theories first, and then you go to the empirics. Then empirics to theory, and you spiral. But theory is first.
Panikos Georgallis: I don’t remember which philosopher said this, but there is this idea that we do research in the context of discovery and in the context of justification. To paraphrase what Rudy said earlier, I think many times we jump too quickly into the context of justification, in which we’re coming up with something and trying to test it immediately. When research is done in the context of discovery, in which we’re trying to understand the phenomenon and trying to understand how it fits with the theory, before we go more deeply into specific hypotheses and testing.
Glen Dowell: Yeah, I hadn’t heard about this justification part, but I think the thing I hear from a lot of younger scholars often is ‘no one has looked at x’. When I’m in my kinder moods, I point out gently that it’s not enough. When I am in a rush as an editor or reviewer, sometimes I’d be like ‘no one’s looked at it, because no one cares’. Research in the end is a conversation, right? You’ve got to picture walking into the big conference or the ballroom at the Academy, and people are broken up into different little clusters. And you think, which cluster am I trying to join, and add to that conversation? The question we need to answer is, why would what I have to add be interesting to that cluster of people? This comes back to reading, going to conferences, and talking to people, and stress testing your ideas before you really get to the point of submitting something. I may think that something is interesting, and it adds to the conversation that Luise and Vetri are having. But until I’m actually out there with it, it’s not 100% clear.
Rodolphe Durand: To give you an idea and to push the metaphor forward, imagine that you are in this battle room, and you have conversations going on in clusters. If you go into a cluster and say, ‘Hi, I’m Rudy, and nobody has looked at this item.’ Do you think that people will be interested? – It’s not the way to start the conversation. (Glen Dowell: Yeah, exactly. Thanks, Rudy. Bye. ..Laughter)
Luise Kaufmann: Thank you. That makes sense.
Rodolphe Durand: The better way is to say, what you did in this paper is super interesting and I think it answers these questions very well. Maybe one way of tackling the same issue could be this other thing, would you find this interesting? Then you’re into a conversation, but you’re saying that nobody has looked at the right thing.
Panikos Georgallis: I’ll just add one more thing that I think is also important when we think about where good ideas come from. A lot of the research on creativity tells us that it depends on the diversity of the input that you have. In our case, it means that you don’t just read from your own discipline. You might read from sociology, economics, or natural sciences. Also, looking at different sources, newspapers, or how the industry talks about things are other ways. Having this diverse input helps to think about new things that you may not have considered just by reading a very narrow range of journals. (Glen Dowell: Great point.)
Vetrikumaran Anantha Sayanam: Awesome. That’s some great advice for students and young scholars like us. Moving on to the next one. Dr. Durand spoke about practitioners and this is related to practice. In emerging tech fields like AI, quantum computing, or blockchain, there’s so much uncertainty and experimentation going on. Do you think striving for coherence in those early stages could actually be counterproductive and may even limit exploratory thinking and innovation? And categories also become bigger – there are many subcategories that could be added, and that category itself could become like an umbrella category. Would coherence also hinder that process of industries becoming an umbrella category?
Panikos Georgallis: May I add something to the first point that you made, and then, then I’ll pass it to Rudy, because I think he’ll have more to say about the categories aspect. I think one of the things that we have with this paper is that we looked at an industry in which, if the government pays attention to it, it’s more likely that it will institute some kind of support. In this case of feed-in tariffs, there were incentive schemes to support the industry. But you could also think that as an industry grows in numbers and attention, it might also be more likely to be regulated, so some industries might actually want to fly under the radar. I think the boundaries of the mechanism are broader than just industries that have pro-social implications. For the other part of the question, Rudi might answer better.
Rodolphe Durand: What I wanted to say is that what you are pointing to is an interesting phenomenon, that perhaps the way we have thought through market categories is not completely adequate to answer your question. We were just talking before about finding good questions – I think that this is a good question. I think that this could be transformed into a research question. I would say, let’s study what happens when you have so many divisions within and across categories. How does the aggregate make sense, and for whom, for which stakeholders? Is it for the clients, to the markets, to the people who buy? Is it for the investors, so the people who invest, or is it for the public policy makers who just need to regulate the behaviors of these herds of new beasts that spawn and develop? I would say that perhaps this is a new phenomenon that nanotech studies or the other studies by Nina Granqvist and some others did not cover. Yeah, Stine Grodal. I will go and read all these papers and ask what they missed. The answer is not so different from the phenomenon we just discussed. I will go and speak to, depending on the audience, say the investors. They would say this is once again the old story of nanotech, when everybody was having this bubble and nothing new. Or they could say completely different things – The scale of the investment is different, or whatever. Then you start seeing that perhaps the models, the simple models, the way they were developed, for explaining category emergence, category creation, might not be completely well-suited. And so then, you have a good idea, you have a setting, and you start the empirical process.
Vetrikumaran Anantha Sayanam: Awesome. I read the one by Dr Grodal. I’ll try and read the other papers that you mentioned. Thank you.
Luise Kaufmann: And we were also very intrigued by the role of narrative, because if you need support, you also have to communicate that need. In your study of the solar sector, were there specific framings or language that helped to build this coherence and win policy support, or maybe a little bit more broadly, how important is storytelling in this process?
Panikos Georgallis: One of the things that we didn’t start with necessarily, but emerged during the review process (that required going back to the context and interviews that we had from before) was the idea that you need to have this kind of salient enemy to push solar PV forward. And that’s one of the things that led us to look into the concentration of the rival interest. My PhD was in France, and Rudy was and is there. In France, it’s a very prominent example of the nuclear sector that has a lot of power. But at the same time, when you have these concentrated sectors, it kind of leaves space at the periphery. And if you contrast that with countries like the UK, where you have coal power, nuclear, and oil, it was harder for the proponents of solar to promote it because they didn’t have a salient enemy. They didn’t say, we need to get rid of nuclear and go for solar, and in Germany, they didn’t say we need to get rid of coal and go for solar. It was harder in other countries where there’s a bit more dispersion, and that’s where we also look into the context a little bit more – the narratives that people were looking for and were using.
Vetrikumaran Anantha Sayanam: That’s a perfect segue to our next question. Would the argument that the presence of contrasting industry players dilutes the coherence of the emerging industry hold for all industries? For example, in the plant-based meat industry, there are contrasting players, such as Tyson Foods, and there are other established players, such as Nestle and Kellogg, playing alongside pure plant-based meat product firms, such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Would the presence of established players and contrasting players undermine the coherence of other industries as well?
Glen Dowell: Undermines is a strong term. At least if we stick with our paper, which was looking at the effects on policy support. ‘Undermine’ – how broadly are you wanting to use that word? So market development can be different from policy support, for example. Acceptance by other groups can be different from support that is formally offered by a government body. I think that that itself might be, again, an interesting question to look at. In your specific example, I do think there has been some challenge to this setting that is partly brought about by the fact that there are these large companies that have a massive stake in traditional meats, both trying to legitimize the space for plant-based meat alternatives and also keeping more than one foot firmly in the meat business. Which sounds similar to the dynamics that Panikos just outlined and we’ve outlined in this paper. Whether it translates into broader effects or if we should stick with what we looked at in terms of policy boards is a different question. I’ll turn it over to the other two here in a second. But the other thing I would say is, I don’t think a good researcher would ever answer that something always holds, which was your starting point of the question. We always expect that, but that’s a trap I’m not going to fall into. Of course, we’d have to think about where the limitations might be and wonder under what circumstances we’d expect to see the dynamics we found play out. So, the easy answer is, No, we wouldn’t expect it always, but then we can talk about scope conditions.
Rodolphe Durand: Actually, it happens that with Jade Lo and Eunice Rhee, we just had a paper accepted on plant-based meat at Org Sci. And the interest of this example lies in the fact that you have what we coined a transmutation of the category – in a sense that whereas a kilowatt produced by solar energy, wind energy or oil based energy remains exactly the same thing and therefore the justification for sponsorship by state or bidding tariff or whatever other economic mechanism is justified of the process to get to the kilowatt. In the plant-based meat category, which we call category transmutation, it’s the category itself that is changed. Because when you say meat these days, you have to say whether it’s animal meat, plant-based meat, or fungi-based meat. This is a phenomenon that leads to decomposing the attributes of the meat, in terms of proteins, in terms of other kinds of minerals, and different kinds of salt, etc, that we find inside the meat. You can recombine it, but it’s a different product that is a perfect substitute with higher moral values that are indisputable in the sense of not growing and killing animals just for the sake of eating them. I think the plant-based industry does not exactly have the same issue as a state giving subsidies to establish the market, as in the case of solar energy, because without the subsidies, all these scale economies create monopolies in many energy markets. Here, in the plant-based meat, there is more to reconsider what meat means, and you could have plant-based meat and animal meat, which 10 years ago we didn’t even have, or maybe, maybe 15 years ago, we barely considered it as being possible.
Luise Kaufmann: Thank you very much for your answer. As we approach the end of our interview, we have a last question for you. It’s about you giving us advice, and in particular, your collaboration. You bring together different backgrounds and perspectives, which is very interesting to get research that can be published in ASQ, because it’s relevant. And what advice would you give young scholars to engage with similar research, or how to build productive collaborations that actually create meaningful research?
Panikos Georgallis: Well, if I can start, I think one thing that is important in terms of collaborations, and something I appreciated in this work with Rudy and Glen, is that you need to have a combination of compatibility and complementarity – compatibility in terms of your view of theories and your view on methods. It’s more about the underlying assumptions of how you think organizations and market organizers behave and markets operate, and complementarity is in terms of skills. As a PhD student, when I started this project, I benefited a lot from working with people who were much more experienced than me in terms of writing a paper, not only in terms of thinking about the common traps that one goes through in the review process, but also in terms of knowledge. Glen was coming from an organizational ecology background, which he is very knowledgeable about, even though a lot of his work is not necessarily only on that. Rudy, of course, is an expert on the categories and institutions research. We all had a common interest in sustainability. So, I think there was a really good balance of having compatibility in terms of what we’re interested in and how we see things, and complementarity in terms of what we can bring to the table.
Rodolphe Durand: To add to this, a paper is a collective work. And so are you making friends, being friends, having tea or coffee in the morning or beer in the afternoon, whatever drink you would prefer, depending on the time, the location, and the temperature, is what matters. Don’t work with people you think you will not get along well with, or who don’t behave well with you, and are passive-aggressive. It’s a difficult job, so don’t be hurt by mean people.
Glen Dowell: Yeah, that’s great. I think it is not only about what you bring intellectually, but it’s also about partnership. This project actually went very smoothly, and I would rate this among the top few in terms of how smoothly it went through, if I think about the many papers I’ve submitted over the many years I’ve been doing research. Research is stressful, especially having a co-authoring relationship in which you will work productively and constructively with each other and work through issues as they arise. This paper didn’t get rejected and had to be repackaged somewhere else, but I’ve been in many circumstances where that has happened. Being able to step back and help each other manage that process and work through the challenges is where the real test of a co-author relationship often happens. Rudy’s right, building a personal rapport with your co-authors, as well as bringing the professional skills that Panikos brought out, are really the key things.
Luise Kaufmann: Thank you. These were some inspirational notes. In the end, it’s not just about the hard work, it’s also about the fun that you carry with you and also share with your scholars.
Rodolphe Durand: Thank you. Do you have many professions where you can have long careers, make friends, and be happy just to meet these people over and over again? It’s just one of the kind professions in which we are working on very interesting questions and people are trying to help you in your own reflection and efforts. On sharing ideas, it’s great when people just want to try to add to the paper, and not just to be mean to you. Research scholars are an amazing international community.
Luise Kaufmann: I think we are very fortunate with our jobs.
Panikos Georgallis: I just want to add that it is not only as we mentioned, we had a great idea, but we also had the reviewers who helped us a lot to bring out what was best from the ideas that we had. Speaking of the international community that Rudy mentioned, I counted today in acknowledgements, when I was getting ready for the interview, that there were 11 schools or conferences where this project was presented, and there are probably some that we forgot to mention. On getting feedback from people, again, like Rudy said, there’s no other industry where you go to competitors and say, ‘I’m trying to make this product. Help me out’, and they will.
Glen Dowell: It is unique, and that’s how you test whether it’s a good idea. It’s a great idea in your head, and you can even fool a pair of co-authors into thinking something’s a great idea. It’s hard to fool five or six different audiences as you’re presenting a paper. I often find that I don’t know what I have until I’m getting ready to present it. You can write a paper, but until I’m getting those slides ready to talk to an audience of smart people who’ve got different perspectives, I really don’t know what I have. Do that as much as you can.
Luise Kaufmann: Thank you very much for the amazing final words.
Vetrikumaran Anantha Sayanam: You’ve all been very kind. You all agreed to this interview, and it came together very well. Thank you so much. That’s a lot of learning.
Interviewer Bios:
Vetri is a second year PhD student in management at the University of Alabama. His research interests are in search and change processes of startup and large firms. He is also interested in research on category dynamics. He can be reached through his Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/vetriananthasayanam
Luise is a PhD candidate and research associate at the Technical University of Munich, exploring how technologies like AI shape the way we live, work, and relate to one another. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction, especially in entrepreneurial settings. Employing a mixed-method approach, her work explores how we can design technology that collaborates with humans efficiently, ethically, and inclusively. Link: www.luisekaufmann.com