Private Innovation in the Public Interest

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.

103: Chris Yenkey. You cooperate as a driver in profoundly complex ways, yet if you sometimes speed, you’re engaging episodically in corruption.

Professor Chris Yenkey studies corruption, political violence, misconduct, and bribery.  In this impassioned conversation with Anita, he gives us deep insight into what constitutes corruption, and how it gets produced by people who want things that are important to them.   Chris describes how this problem is changing on a macro level, and what it’s going to take to address corruption at scale.   In the end, he finds optimism inthe ways in which we cooperate every day on the streets.

102: Deepak Somaya. Tech firms get advantage by attracting and retaining committed people – both as employees and as customers

Professor Deepak Somaya has studied the ways that technologies influence the competitive advantages of firms in one way or another ever since he was an undergraduate in engineering.   As a Professor at the University ofIllinois, his expertise now is in the ways that technology amplifies the strategic importance of employee retention and mobility.  In this conversation, Deepak describes forAnita why tech firms in pursuit of long-term scale-based advantages race in the short run to attract coders that can create superior customer-facing experiences.   It’s theinteraction between employee insight and customer experience that really matters, and it is the potential for exponential improvement in our quality of life that keeps Deepak going.

101: Colleen Cunningham. Guardrails + Incentives - Excessive Competition = Innovation

Professor Colleen Cunningham studies why and how companies accomplish innovations that benefit the public, such as in pharmaceuticals and alternative energy.  She sees a role for government in clarifying the guardrails on what’s allowed, but that’s not enough to get great outcomes.  It’s also important for government – and for civil society at a broad level – to make sure that the incentives reward innovators given the risks they must endure.  Yet even that’s not enough.  It’s also important to make sure that the right amount of competitive behavior arises.   You want some secrecy as innovators protect against imitation, but enough knowledge-sharing for insights to accumulated.   The formula:  Guardrails + incentives – excessive competition.