Efficiency vs. Effectiveness: Reflecting about Academic Research in the Social Sciences
I am a doctoral student in social sciences. I am working on social networks and innovation in the U.S. snowsports industries. During the last months, I have met quite a number of PhD students from both the US and Europe, whom I have been able to talk about the sense and non-sense of being a PhD students.
We came to the following conclusions
(1) Life as a researcher is great, although the boundaries between working day, weekends, holidays are extremly blurred. One simply never stops thinking about research. When reading a "normal" book, one tends to think like "I should have read this last scientific article instead"
(2) Life as a researcher is also frustrating, because you spend hours, days, and even weeks on a single argument in a paper. The odds of changing the world with this argument are very minuscule, because researchers always think in terms of "incremental contributions".
(3) It often happens that after 2 months of work you find that your argument does not work, because in the 115th paper your read somebody showed why it cannot work. So you come to the conclusion that your work was "for nothing".
However, although we all went through tremendous "ups" and "downs", we are happy to be researchers. But we are also very much looking forward to the moment, when we'll have the PhD certificate in our hands.
Any thougths?
Brainstorming at Boston Commercial Wharf
I just came back from a Rotary meeting with Steve Demeranville and David Manzi from the Boston Rotary Club at Joe's Amercian Bar and Grill (
Commercial Wharf, Boston). We have been continuing our thought process about the future of Rotary. We came up with two main conclusions:
(1) There is disconnect between young Rotarians (scholars, GSE, youth exchange) and the "real" Rotarians, which is a due to varying interests in the respective stage of life.
(2) Becoming a Rotarian and attending club meetings is currently not attractive for young adults, who have to make a career in their business lifes.
Our new plan of action is to work on a business plan of how we can revive the Boston Rotary Club and turn into a community of professionals, who are on the one hand willing to serve the ideals of Rotary International and who are on the other hand having fun meeting on a regular basis!
Presentation at the Boston Rotary Club
Tomorrow (05/24/2006) I'll be speaking at the
Boston Rotary Club. I'll give a little presentation on who I am and what I do. The idea of this meeting is also to continue thinking about the future of Rotary. I am very much looking forward to that. Here is the link to the
pdf document of my presentation.
How Hong Kong looks like from a non-tourist perspective
I just found the
link to the blog of a friend of mine. She is working in Hong Kong right now.
If you are interested in finding out how Hong Kong looks like from a non-tourist perspective, check out Eva's blog under the latter
link.
Cape Cod Conference - Ambassadorial Scholar 2005/2006 Presentation
I just came back from the Annual District Conference of the 7930 Rotary District. We had a great Saturday morning with some good discussions on the experience of our Ambassadorial Scholars. We furthermore reflected on future of the scholarship as well as on the the future of Rotary. Please find the pdf documents of the *.ppt presentation by clicking on the following links:
(1)
Inbound Scholars 2005/2006.
(2)
Outbound Scholar 2004/2005.
The following two pictures provide you with a small imporession of how it was like today in Cape Cod.
This is the busy preparation of our presentation at the conference ...
.. and this has been a snapshot of our presentation:
Among the conclusion of our talk was that we start thinking about fostering interclub and inter-scholar networking activities in order to prepare the Rotary for another successfuly century.
Rotary District Conference: Cape Cod (05/19-05/21)
Two Rotary friends of mine and I have been sitting together this afternoon in order to prepare our presentaion at the
Rotary District Conference in Cape Cod next weekend. We have been brainstorming a lot and have come up with two main points, which we would like to emphasize, namely the
Future of the Ambassadorial Scholarship and the
Integration of Young Rotarians into Rotary International.
We agree that we had a fantastic year here in Boston and that we are extremely grateful to Rotary International and each Rotarian's support, which we have received. We came to the conclusion that we collected so many ideas and thoughts throughout this year, which might help Rotary to shape its mission and strategy, that we need to address them during the District Conference.
The Rain keeps coming down
It's been raining for seven days in row. Cambridge, MA is becoming a little frustrated right now since we did not see any sun in the last week. Last night we need to call sum plumbers, because in the basemment of our house here in Cambridge, MA we had more than 20 cm's of water.
This is by the way an amazing finding for Europeans in the U.S. . It seems to me as if houses are mostly built out of wood and directly onto the ground withough having a solit cement-based fundament. In our house, we just have a couple of brick-walls, which are directly built on the clay-type of ground. In consequence, in situations of heavy rain, the water will always find ways to get into the house.
I'll try to post some pictures pretty soon!
Unknowability: Implications of Darwinian Preadaptions for Economic Growth and Policy
Yesterday we had a very interesting talk at the Kenendy School of Government. Stuart A. Kauffman, a
professor emeritus from the at the Santa Fe Institute, presented the results of his life long research on economic growth.
He argues that Darwinian preadaptations are the results of recombination processes. In other words, two functions compare result into a third function, which has not been known before. As an example from
my research in the US ski industry. The Norwegians developed skis to improve their hunting capabilities during winter-time. The function of a ski was thus to move during winter. Today, a new skiing movement emerges:
newschool skiing. The skiers use their skis to slide down rails and stairs. This new function is a combination of skiing in the Norwegian sense and the function of rails or stairs. However, although newschool skiing does exist today, we did foresee it a couple of years ago.
In consequence, it is one the one hand very difficult to predict or foresee the future, because nobody can really foresee what a next Darwinian preadaptation might be. On the other hand, it leaves a huge space for economic growth, technological innovation, and societal development, because new functions emerge as the recombination of existing functions (see the work of
Schumpeter on
Creative Destruction).
These findings also have important implications for our daily life. By looking at the
Rotary Foundation for instance, we might have to ask ourselves how we can use the existing Rotray resources and functions in order to create new ideas, new projects, and generate impetus for Rotary's contribution to the world in the 21st century.
A spontaneous ideas might for instance be to take the established global network of our Rotary Foundation and couple it with the fresh ideas and drive-for-action of the young Rotarians. This might become a powerful melange, which on the one hand benefits from Rotary's rich resources and which on the other turns Rotary into a strong and powerful social enterprise
social enterprise.
For more information on Stuart A. Kauffman's talk on Darwinian preadaptations, please visit our
research centers website.
The summer has arrived in Cambridge
I spent a great day today in Cambridge, MA and eastern Massachusetts. The weather has been great and we made a biketour to Silver Hill and back to Cambridge.
We made a nice stopover in Weston, MA and had a coffee! Now its 7.30pm and I’ll spend a couple of more hours in the office at the Kennedy School to think about my research!
Future Blogging
I will use this blog to keep you (and the world :-) ) updated on my life as a PhD student, as an ambassadorial scholar, and as globetrotter who loves getting to know many different places on the world. This has been the start and I have already set my Outlook reminder to keep you posted!
Who am I and What am I doing?
I am currently a visting fellow at the
Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University. I am working on my dissertation on
social networks and
technological innovation. Particulary, I am interested into the individual level mechanisms of innovation, which means that I study informations sharing and knowledge creation processes among individuals in organizations (e.g., firms, public sector organizations, online communities etc.).
I will get my degree from
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Switzerland (EPFL). I am working a the
College of Management of Technology for Professor Christopher Tucci, who is director of the
Chair for Corporate Strategy and Innovation.
Besides being a doctoral student at EPFL and Harvard University, I am also an Ambassadorial Scholar of the
Rotary Foundation. Rotary is a global network of volunteers, who dedicate their free time and part of their energy to promote world peace and understanding. My sponsor club is the
Rotary Club Erding in Germany and my host club here in the US is the Rotary Club of Amesbury here.
At the moment I am working on a paper about the effects of social network structure on information sharing and knowledge management in intrafirm networks. I am also preparing an online social network survey, which I will launch very soon on the
newschoolers.com website. I summarize my research results on my personal website, which is
www.technological-innovation.com. I am also an active blogger at the
KSG PNG blog.
This is me
This is me in lovely Switzerland. This picture was taken in Tessin last year. The Tessin is part of the Italian speaking region in Switzerland.
Being A Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar
The objective of this blog is to start blogging about the life of a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. Although my year is almost over now, I finally started this project to shed some light into my life, the Rotary Foundation, and the global network of people who are somehow in touch with Rotary.
