Private Innovation in the Public Interest

108: Herman Aguinis. Know your tools. And use them for impact.

Professor Herman Aguinis is a pre-eminent scholar, educator, and leader in the field of Management.  With more citations, accolades, and leadership responsibilities than just about anyone else in our field, Herman remains lighthearted, optimistic, and incredibly productive.    In this engaging talk, he characterizes research methodologies as tools that must be mastered to achieve the impact to which we all aspire.

107: Felipe Csaszar. Just as computers replaced human elevator operators, AI may replace Strategy executives.

Professor Felipe Csaszar of the University of Michigan is an eminent scholar with extensive publications on managerialcognition, organizational decision-making, and the ways in which AI is reshaping the process of strategizing.  In this conversation, he explains how the hard-core analytical work of strategizing may be much more effectively done by AI than by human analysts.   Yet in the end, this will be a balancing act in which human prosperity stays squarely in our sights as thecentral goal of strategizing.

106: Aparajita Agarwal. The local agents delivering mobile money in low-income communities aren’t in it to maximize their incomes

Professor Aparajita Agarwal of INSEAD was a successful executive in consulting and digital tech firm when she decided to step away from her top-flight career and enter into a PhD program in Strategy.  Fast forward fifteen years, and her research now shows how large firms – like those she once advised – cannot succeed by taking for granted that high-powered financial incentives will motivate local agents to deliver profitable banking products in low-incomecommunities.   It turns out that, like Aparajita herself, money is not the main motivator for the work that these agents do.

105: Hyunjin Kim. Sure, AI is widely available, but organizations vary a lot in their capabilities for using it

Professor Hyunjin Kim is at the frontier on understanding how organizations – and particularly entrepreneurial companies – build the capabilities to use AI to improve their performance.   Her research demonstrates that, at this early stage, there’s a great deal of variation even in AI uptake to improve workflows.  But what really excites her is how organizations can be designed from scratch to use AI in entirely unprecedented ways.

104: Mabel Abraham. Let’s talk about how inequality gets produced inadvertently by unbiased people

Professor Mabel Abraham has built her career around understanding how inequality in employment practices getsproduced by people who want to do the right thing but end up with biased outcomes.   Mabel has studied how biasesemerge unintentionally through interactions between individuals, such as evaluators and job candidates; within triads, such as through referrals; and within networks and systems.    What tends to work depends a great deal on the historical experiences of the people involved, and on the micro-structure of decision processes.   If you want to learn more about what it takes to rout out bias, this episode gives you insight into this eminent scholar’s research findings.