Industrial Research Institute Annual Meeting
Jacomo Corbo will be speaking at the Industrial Research Institute Annual Meeting on May 24th in Philadelphia. We’ll be in Philadelphia from the 22nd until the 25th so come say hello.
Here’s an abstract of the talk, entitled ‘What Information Networks Reveal About Productivity: Strategies for Building Data-Driven Innovation’:
Measuring productivity remains a notoriously difficult problem in R&D. Feedback on the progress of projects and the performance of workers is scant, highly uncertain, and collected either too infrequently or too slowly. Yet such information is indispensable to the efficient allocation of resources to innovation projects. These challenges are all the more acute for companies involved in complex product innovation, where performance hinges critically on an organization’s capacity to constantly and consistently innovate.
At the same time, information captured by the firm has generally gone from scarce to superabundant, affording an unprecedented opportunity for companies to monitor information flows, observe worker interactions and organizational structures, and estimate individual and organizational performance. Effective R&D decision-making is therefore increasingly underpinned by data-driven insight.
We present research about how organizational productivity and project performance can be ascertained and forecasted principally from social network information. We show how such estimates and forecasts provide a near real-time picture of the health of an R&D organization and how, in turn, such measurements can be deployed for resource allocation. By way of exposition, we show how these methods have been applied to monitor and forecast aerodynamic development in Formula One (F1) teams. Along the way, we discuss strong relationships observed between communication behaviours and organizational performance, and what this suggests for resource allocation and organizational design strategies.