Professor Florenta Teodoridis studies what makes scientists more productive and more creative AI, quantum computing, and a range of other tools relieve experts from having to perform tedious tasks. They lower coordination costs and reduce barriers to communication. All this adds up to freeing experts to be more creative by broadening the directions of innovation that they pursue. Florenta envisions that this creativity can be deployed to solve intractable problems and improve lives in critically important ways.
Professor Aline Gatignon is passionate about both solving big problems–such as food insecurity and other Grand Challenges–by making organizations of all types more effective. She's particularly focused on how companies can work with non-governmental organizations like non-profits to innovate more and innovate better. In this fascinating conversation, Aline describes example after example of how this has occurred in the Brazilian Amazon, in Egypt’s densest urban areas, and in the wake of natural disasters around the globe.
Professor Christine Nolder’s breakthrough research on the mindsets of financial auditors focuses on the extraordinary conflicts of interest between the duty to client service and their duty to sustain independent judgement. What does it take for auditors to do their work effectively? Acting with integrity in this profession depends on a slate of understandings about the role of the auditor, the supplied information, and the culture of the audit firm. We need much more information to know what’s needed about whether compromises are occurring.
Professor Lars Frederiksen’s insights as a scholar of innovation have led him to leadership in the field of technology strategy. What he wants now is to understand how our humanity leads us to actin open-innovation communities, such as the CASP and LegoPage competitions, and on open source development platforms. The incredible diversity of these communities–and the differences in the interests of their members–can lead to governance challenges that are as difficult to address as they were in conventional heritage technologies. We need to get on top of this for AI now so that we can develop the norms and regulations that we need to deploy AI beyond LLMs in ways that make us more collaborative and broadly constructive. Once we do that, we can deploy AI to address our biggest challenges, such as environmental degradation and climate change.
Professor Sophie Bacq has studied social entrepreneurship for twenty years. For the first fifteen, she focused on the social entrepreneur as an individual: whether to take on an initiative; how to fund it; how to succeed. For the past five years, though, Sophie has increasingly focused on what it takes to improve lives on terms that are important to those you are seeking to serve. Often the beneficiaries of the largesse of social entrepreneurs don’t want competitive advantage, or to win, or to beat their local rivals. Often they want better and deeper communities. Maybe the best way to have social impact is to broaden the basis of community to include shared interests, practices, identities and fates.
Professor Julian Birkinshaw is a renowned authority on the ambidexterity of incumbent firms that face disruptive innovations. His newest book, co-authored with Pearson’s John Fallon and entitled Resurgence, provides a roadmap for companies in this position. The core message is that AI and other disruptions need not create Kodak moments for large incumbents. Great firms can find strength in their portfolios of capabilities and build strategies to respond.
Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disasters that at first appear to be natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. These events become disasters when communities are not prepared to respond to them effective in the immediate, short-term and long-term. There are many layers to what creates an effective response, but two jump out from Beth’s scholarly work. The first is the ability of a well-formed community to pivot by using the relationships and values that it has established in new and creative ways. And the second is in the building of communities to create that ability.
Professor Lamar Pierce studies the tension between employee performance and misconduct. High-powered incentives to sell more stuff, for example, can lead salespeople to lower prices or even misreport what they have sold. It is this kind of misconduct (and much worse) that Lamar studies.
What does it take to rout this out? Lots and lots of time to get the right people and systems in place, and then the discipline to get out of the way.
Professor András Tilcsik studies the dark sides of organizations: discrimination, disasters, crises. His scholarly work demonstrates, for example, that companies must analyze comprehensively where discrimination is arising in their hiring practices if they want to root it out. Adopting a new approach to the recruiting of applications, a go-to improvement, is typically insufficient to address the problems behind the problems. Truly great organizations learn how to present disasters by doing a blameless post mortem before the unwanted outcome actually occurs.
How can we change the structure of our company to avoid a disaster? The key is to learn how to hear dissenting voices and to respond to them effectively.
Professor Andrew Foley thinks of entrepreneurship as a social process rather than as a programmatic exercise. Motivated by his experiences as a Venture for America Fellow in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Andrew studies why exposure to the classic formulas for successful entrepreneurship often leave the entrepreneur high and dry.
Success as he sees it depends on getting the community around an organization to help the entrepreneur develop an idea into fruition. That requires awareness of the downsides of accepting high-status capital and endorsements. You need the people behind you to have your back.
Professor Jillian Chown studies how physicians make choices that may shape patient outcomes for the rest of the patients’ lives. What she finds is that doctors make core decisions–like whether a baby will be born by C-Section–to a significant degree through the influence of the peers within whom they recently speak. This effect is greater for generalists than for specialists. At the same time, the performance of superstar physicians on the organizational practices of their clinics may persist for decades. Either way, the choices made by your doctor may be deeply dependent on the environment in which the doctor works.
Professor Chris Eaglin studies how small-and medium-sized companies respond to strategic opportunities in low-income countries, and particularly how drivers in the minibus industry of South Africa deal with the pressures they face. Minibuses take a quarter of all South Africans to work each day. While the system is far from perfect, it is critical to the economic health of communities. The commitment of drivers to get their fares to where they need to go requires overcoming all sorts of problems: equipment repairs, excessive competition, debt repayment requirements, and sometimes criminal interference. There’s a lot for us to learn from these drivers about resilience and adaptability.
Professor Keyvan Vakili studies what makes scientists creative. He has done work on governmental policy, team selection, research design, and the balance of specializations that come together to support profound scientific achievements. What Keyvan lands on as he reflects on the trajectory of his research program is the idea that AI has been trained to be persuasive rather than scientifically accurate. This persuasiveness is so compelling that it can get us to change our minds about the right answers to simple math problems so that we endorse what is clearly wrong.
What’s at stake here is that we need to deeply understand how we know what is true scientifically–beyond the frontier of what AI can reliably help us with.
Professor Carlos Inoue studies how people in different types of organizations–public companies, state-owned companies, private companies, governmental agencies, NGOs–solve a problem in ways that reflect the constraints and priorities of their employers. Physicians in public hospitals, for example, may not have access to the same kinds of equipment or even patients as their peers in private hospitals. By rotating personnel across organizations of different types, we can unlock complementarities as personnel learn from each other.
Professor Leandro Nardi studies pathways for achieving outstanding social and economic performance. He has examined the reasons for the persistently mediocre financial and social performance that can arise from CSR initiatives. Much of the problem has to do with the complications that arise with enfranchising the previously marginalized. Disabled persons, for example, are not rewarded with career advancement even after their inclusion in many companies. While the average company is not great at anticipating these consequences, truly outstanding companies distinguish themselves both financially and socially through creative long-term investments.
Professor James Orbinski accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999 as the International Council President of Medicins Sans Frontiers. He talks with Anita about the essence of humanitarianism and the ways in which principles of mutual understanding, listening, dialogue and connection shape the public good. Citing Socrates, he reflects on how dialogue requires dignity-infused listening and a willingness to change our minds.
Professor Jim Lavery has been a professor and advocate of healthcare for the poor for his entire life. What has he learned?The equitable distribution of drugs depends as much on the development of health systems as on new medicines. And decisions by companies to incur development costs are only one step in a cascade of constrained decisions that shape who gets essential medicines.
Professor Donal Crilly studies the ways in which business decisions are influenced by the concepts of time employed by managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders interested in achieving important outcomes.
In this conversation, he describes how an emphasis in negotiations on a shared vision of the future–in which good outcomes arise and devastatingly bad outcomes are averted–can reshape how stakeholders work together. Once we agree on a vision for the future, then we can get much better outcomes in our negotiations over the hard work we need to take today to get there. As Donal explained, this approach changed the Northern Ireland Peace Process, for example. And it can change the ways that executives invest for climate sustainability and other important social goals.
Professor Pinar Ozcan is a superstar researcher, superstar teacher, and superstar thought leader. Among her many activities, she runs Oxford’s Said Entrepreneurship Centre and its FinTech Initiative. Ask her where she sees the greatest opportunity for addressing the world’s most pressing problems, and she’ll talk about innovation in investing through FinTech that can enable breakthrough tech advances, including through AI, that generate prosperity for everyone through social entrepreneurship. This insightful, optimistic, hopeful view opens our eyes to a whole new way of envisioning what is possible.
Professor Russ Coff is a pioneer in our thinking about strategic human capital and its importance to the competitive advantage of firms. So why do firms train employees in broad skills that make them more employable elsewhere? And why do the relationships that we develop with colleagues and with our employers matter so much to our decisions about whether to quit?
In this conversation, Russ explains some of the paradoxes that arise in employment relationships, and how our perceptions and understandings rest on a lot more than what we are paid.