The Handbook of Peer Production (wiley.com/en-us/The Handbook…) [Wiley] is out, containing our chapter "User Motivation in Peer Production" by Sven Niederhoefer & me.
The best part of the Lean Startup Method is the push for experiments. The weak part of the Method is that it doesn’t do enough to help you pick & design experiments by building a testable theory of why you think your startup will win. This paper will help! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
Finding breakthroughs at large companies: A/B tests at Bing show most tweaks have tiny benefits requiring large tests to identify. Instead, run more small & less accurate tests: the top 2% of ideas are responsible for 74.8% of the gains. You can screen for radical ideas quickly!
If you want to undermine innovation in your company, pay managers based on their short-term performance & fire those who fail.
However, this paper shows that you can encourage real innovation by tolerating early failure & paying for long-term performance. businessinnovation.berkeley.…
Greenland:
1. ice sheet now beyond tipping point and expected to completely disappear due to global warming of more than 2°C which will hit around 2030 - 2040
2. ice loss: 1/4 trillion tons per year
3. melt acceleration is exponential
4. sea level rise feedback has begun
This paper shows why failing big companies can actually lead to high quality startups. When companies are financially distressed, the best workers leave to be founders for two reason: they don’t want to be on a sinking ship, plus the failing company stops enforcing non-competes.
This vital paper by @drlisadcook shows how political violence against African Americans suppressed innovation and entrepreneurship for decades - 40% of the patent output of talented black inventors was lost. She also highlights an illustrative story... 1/2 msu.edu/~lisacook/pats_paper…
This study asked college instructors, administrators, and instructional designers to take a quiz on "neuromyths" - stuff people assume is true about how we learn. In this first tweet, you can take the test yourself, answers (and who got them right) as well as links follow... 1/3
This is a paper I often think about when speaking to companies. Marketing & R&D operate in different “thought worlds” - they literally have different ways of understanding, leading to massive issues. (To solve it, put the same number of marketers & engineers on new product teams)
Teaching businesspeople ethics really does make them more ethical! This cool study looks at changes to an exam for financial advisors and finds those who had more ethics training were 25% less likely to engage in misconduct & more likely to quit unethical firms. Via @iioannoulbs
Interesting finding on how negative feedback affects your creativity. Getting negative feedback from followers or subordinates makes you more creative, getting it from peers or supervisors decreases your creativity. Most feedback in organizations comes from the wrong direction!
The danger of social media, in a paper: the Illusory Truth Effect says that repeated statements seem more true than new ones (even if they aren't). That's bad.
Worse: Knowing something is false is no protection. A repeatedly heard lie still seems true, even if you know better.
Compared to reward crowdfunding (like Kickstarter), which leads to winning startups, the value of equity crowdfunding (selling shares in your company to the crowd) has been unclear. This paper says that equity crowdfunding has attracted low-quality startups & is linked to failure
One of the most consistent findings in social science is the s-curve of technology adoption. It describes 100 years of technological development! A study of 10k patents shows the s-curve is faster for tech that recombines old ideas, slower for novel ideas voxeu.org/article/technology…
Crowd science takes on the corona virus: folding@home, which uses processor cycles on your idle computer to model complex protein folding, has started an effort to under and the protein spike that makes COV-19 infectious. It can be downloaded now foldingathome.org/2020/02/27…