The first assignment for a course I teach on managing innovation in organizations asks students to compose a 1000-word essay (i.e. the much maligned five paragraphs) where they theorize an innovation-related issue in a given podcast. The 'rules' for the assignment are pretty clear: use theory from class (i.e. theory that your reader also knows), … Continue reading Theorize

There is absolutely no doubt that the organizations on the frontlines of responding to the Corona Pandemic have been faced with immense challenges over the past year, and many still are. Mia Hartmann and I have a new paper out on what these challenges might mean for police organizations in particular, building on the work … Continue reading Frontline innovation in times of crisis

I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for a piece about the (maybe) declining quality of entrepreneurship in the US, based on a recent working paper. It's a good piece with a nicely nuanced take: it highlights an interesting fact to be explained and understood, raises some (methodological) issues with the state of that … Continue reading Six theories of why fast-growing start-ups are disappearing

Today, I interviewed Dan Kärreman of Copenhagen Business School about academic reading. We talked about why reading academic papers is difficult (by design, almost), the different genres of academic papers and how papers are actually meant to be read. In these times, where the interactive parts of university education are locked-down and studying is homework … Continue reading How to Read

There is (US) data to suggest that young firms are not growing as fast as they used to. There is also data to suggest that young (US) firms increasingly intend to grow. The ‘quality’ of entrepreneurship in other words, is declining: despite young firms wanting to grow, they seem increasingly unable to do so in … Continue reading Conspicuously consuming entrepreneurship

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