Mack Institute Senior Fellow Sarah Kaplan, author of The 360° Corporation, discusses how businesses can approach trade-offs as sources of innovation, creativity, and even long-term profitability.…Read More
Instead of bias training or efforts that focus on “fixing women,” Mack Institute Sr. Fellow Sarah Kaplan argues for treating the problem of gender inequality like an innovation challenge.…Read More
Organizing for interdisciplinary research must overcome two challenges to collaboration: the cognitive incommensurability of knowledge and the political economy of research based in the disciplines. Researchers may not engage in interdisciplinarity because they would have to invest in new knowledge unrelated to their discipline or risk losing career-related rewards.…Read More
Conventional wisdom says brainstorming works best when people from different departments or groups come together to think of new ideas or solve problems. But research from Senior Fellow Sarah Kaplan shows that diversity is not enough.…Read More
A new study reveals the surprisingly pivotal role that narratives play when organizations forge a new strategic direction.…Read More
We explore the double-edged sword of recombination in generating breakthrough innovation: recombination of distant or diverse knowledge is needed because knowledge in a narrow domain might trigger myopia, but recombination can be counterproductive when local search is needed to identify anomalies.…Read More
‘Nanotechnology’ is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, determining what nanotechnology means, whose research counts as nanotechnology, and who gets to speak on behalf of nanotechnology is a highly political process involving constant negotiation with significant implications for funding, legislation, and citizen support.…Read More
