Over this semester, I am going to be doing a series of interviews with Thomas Basbøll of Copenhagen Business School, author of the (excellent) Inframethodology blog, about the practice of academic writing. The first interview is up here, where I'll also post the coming ones.

Last week, I was invited to give a talk at Copenhagen Business School. The Department of Management, Society and Communication organizes a seminar on Blended Learning, where I presented some ideas on teaching without lectures and moving towards a more tutorial mode of higher education teaching, based on two of the courses that I'm involved … Continue reading Teaching without lectures

I have begun uploading work-in-progress chapters for an innovation management textbook that I am working on. The idea of the textbook is to provide an introduction to foundational ideas in innovation management (it is described here in more detail) and you can see the evolving manuscript here.   The book is going be composed of … Continue reading An in-process textbook and a sample chapter

I just finished teaching part of a course called "From innovation to operations", where I talk to engineering students about the tensions that can exist between operational excellence on one hand and innovation and/or flexibility on the other. It's all very short, with only four actual teaching sessions (and very enjoyable because the students are … Continue reading Teaching foundations

One of the most ingrained ideas in the field of management and organization is that bureaucratic organizations struggle to innovate. Organizations tend to drift towards bureaucratization over time because it is (arguably) the most efficient way to get routinized work done, but a whole range of defining features of bureaucracies (focus on standardization, dependence on hierarchy, … Continue reading Bureaucracy and innovation

Update: The published version of the paper is available here until January 16, 2018. _ _ _ _ There's a lot of talk about makerspaces these days, and deservedly so. Makerspaces tend to include a lot of the prototyping technologies that people are excited about (especially 3D printers) and Makerspaces are getting set up in … Continue reading Makerspaces and innovation

Russ Roberts recently podcasted an interview with Elizabeth Pape of clothing company Elizabeth Suzann over on EconTalk*. At one point (somewhere around 20 minutes into the conversation), Russ says: This is such a 2017-, 21st-century story. And especially, given your price point and your production model, it's really quite extraordinary that you seem to be … Continue reading New business like it’s 2017

To understand one of the interesting questions of the interesting time we live in, James Bessen has done us a great service of applied historical analysis by delving into the historical connection between technological change and employment and wages to shed light on how the technological changes that we're currently seeing might impact employment and wages in the long(er) run.

So we've covered the (anxiety-prompting) prospects for job destruction by technology and the (anxiety-dampening) history of job creation. Now, we'll turn to the role of context and firm-level strategies in deciding the actual effects of technology's potentials.

David Autor in his imminently readable piece points out that labor-saving substitution and technological job destruction has been going on since at least the Industrial Revolution. And yet we still have jobs. Why?