Private Innovation in the Public Interest

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.

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.