Tag: Markus Baer

Academia is turning the next generation of scientists into “research managers,” not bold scientific thinkers. So says Markus Baer, professor of Organizational Behavior at Olin.

He lays out this argument in The EMBO Journal: Conditions that encourage scientists to engage in relentless, creative exploration of the unknown are becoming harder to find.

“For one, finding new ideas appears increasingly difficult,” Baer and coauthors write in “Creativity as an antidote to research becoming too predictable.”

US data suggest groundbreaking research in many fields, including medicine, is declining. Yet the number of papers published each year has increased, with some unfortunate side effects.

Calcification

“Scientists focus their attention on work that is already well-cited rather than on new ideas or ideas on the fringes of the scientific mainstream,” Baer said. “This leads to a calcification of the intellectual structure of a field, slowing down progress over time.”

Funding sources for research grants often make matters worse. The norm now in many fields: Grant proposals must provide substantial data supporting the proposed theories and hypotheses. Basically, funding agencies reward work on previously established topics.

“A journey into the exploration of the unknown has been replaced with a ticket on the Shinkansen bullet train: Destination known and always on time.”

Baer

Researchers are responding by playing it safe, Baer says. “There’s a tendency to minimize risk.” Many chase ideas that, from the outset, are likely to be publishable to ensure a constant stream of papers.

“I certainly have had my fair share of encounters with, for instance, journals who reject an idea because it is novel and does not fit the current scientific mold,” Baer said.

Baer is known for his research on creativity and innovation. He wrote the article as a follow-up to a symposium organized by the Biotech Research & Innovation Centre at the University of Copenhagen. Baer was an invited speaker with the mission of offering ideas for how to inject more creativity into scientific inquiry.

Covid test

Gone are the days when scientists could explore Yellowstone National Park without knowing what would come of it, Baer says. There, in the late 1960s, microbiologist Thomas Brock discovered heat-resistant bacteria in the Mushroom Spring.

Guess what? Brock’s discovery eventually led to the development of the chemical process behind today’s Covid test.

Sadly, today’s pressure to produce often means budding researchers are recruited onto preexisting projects with already defined milestones and deliverables.

Fortunately, researchers at Olin don’t face the same pressures as medical researchers. Those scientists are profoundly dependent on grant money for labs and other necessary expenses, Baer says.

“I think our approach to training doctoral students allows students to inject creativity into the research process. Erik Dane teaches a course in the PhD curriculum that tries to provide students the tools to do exactly that.”

Bullet train redesign

One strategy is to encourage early-stage scientists to immerse themselves in similar problems and the solutions they may inspire, Baer says.

Years ago, the Shinkansen bullet train created an ear-splitting sonic boom as it raced out of tunnels. A group of engineers was tasked to redesign the train to make it quieter.

One of the engineers was a bird watcher. He made a connection. Birds diving into the water to catch prey faced a similar challenge to the zooming through a tunnel. The new design of the train’s front? It was based on the shape of the Kingfisher’s beak. That bird dives at high speed from one environment, air, into another, water, with barely a splash.

Researchers should be encouraged and allowed the time to pursue topics other than those they’re actively investigating, Baer says. They should join collaborations with scientists from other domains and even disciplines who are investigating analogous problems.

‘Stay in the cloud’

For research to flourish, it’s imperative to rethink the knowledge production process to allow for the occasional detours, setbacks and dead ends, Baer says.

The bottom line: Research leaders may want to embrace the values of autonomy and novelty more courageously—and embolden early-stage researchers to do the same. Also, academic institutions should take a hard look at themselves. Do they need to increase the breathing space and time for scientists to engage in the exploration of new ideas and research avenues?

“Uri Alon, professor and systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, talks about the notion of the research cloud—the boundary between the known and unknown,” Baer said.

“It seems to me that we are not encouraging young scholars to stay in the research cloud long enough to truly cross over into the unknown. In fact, the notion of having one’s heads up in the cloud has a negative connotation.

“We need to encourage the next generation of scholars to stay in the cloud and tolerate the feeling of not knowing where this journey may lead.”

Post-it Notes, Spanx, the iPhone, two-day Prime shipping. From unique gadgets to revolutionary business ideas, the most successful inventions have one thing in common: creativity. But sustaining creativity can be difficult.

New research from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, has identified one reason some first-time producers struggle to repeat their initial creative productions while others go on to continually produce creative works.

Markus Baer, professor of organizational behavior at Olin, and Dirk Deichmann, of the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, discovered that recognizing first-time producers of successful novel ideas with an award or recognition can significantly decrease the likelihood that they will produce future creative work.

“In our study, we found that people who develop novel ideas and receive rewards for them start to see themselves primarily as a ‘creative person,’” Baer said.  

“This newfound identity, which is special and rare, is then in need of protection. Essentially, once a person is in the creative limelight, stepping out of it — by producing a novel idea that disappoints or pales in comparison to earlier work — is threatening and to be avoided. One way to do so is to stop producing altogether. You cannot compromise your identity and reputation when you do not produce anything new.”

In other words, fear of failure the second time around can cause producers to avoid taking risks that would threaten their creative identity.

“Harper Lee is a perfect example of this phenomenon,” Baer said. “Her first book, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is one of the bestselling and most acclaimed American novels of all time. Yet she didn’t publish again until 55 years later. And her second book, ‘Go Set a Watchman,’ written in the mid-1950s, is considered to be a first draft of her legendary one hit wonder.”   

About the research

To study the effect receiving an award or recognition had on first-time producers, Baer and Deichmann first conducted an archival study of 224 first-time cookbook authors in the United Kingdom. According to the study authors, the cookbook market is an ideal context to examine sustained creativity because cookbooks are creative works and a labor of love. From this sample, they found only about 50% of first-time cookbook authors went on to produce a second cookbook. Interestingly, they also discovered that the more novel the initial cookbook was, the less likely the author was to produce a second cookbook.

Next, Baer and Deichmann conducted an experiment with business school students. Participants were asked to develop a concept for a potential cookbook. Half of the participants were told that their idea was “highly original and novel,” while the other half were told their idea was “very solid and traditional.” A subgroup of participants was also told that their ideas were “among the ideas most likely to make a big splash in the food community.”

Finally, participants had the option to develop a second cookbook concept or to build upon their original idea with a marketing plan. The experiment showed that when people produce a highly novel, award-winning idea, right out of the gate, they’re less likely to produce a follow-up idea.

A second experiment built upon the original and allowed the authors to more precisely pinpoint the psychological mechanisms at play. In the two experimental studies, the percentage of first-time producers who decided to develop a second idea, as opposed to exploiting the first idea, was 21 and 34, respectively.

“Participants experienced a greater threat to their creative identity when producers of award-winning, novel work were confronted with the possibility of having to continue on their creative journey by having to produce original work yet again,” the authors concluded.

Rethinking how managers recognize creativity

Creativity is most likely to blossom in environments where producers are motivated primarily by the challenge and meaning of the work itself — i.e., the problem they are trying to solve — and have some creativity-specific skills, such as associating or combining ideas from different knowledge domains, Baer said.

Previous research has focused on the benefits of awards, but Baer and Deichmann found that winning an award can, paradoxically, temper the creativity of producers because it introduces an extra layer of stress to the creative environment.

“Awards are only bad for people producing novel stuff because they make the creative identity of such people salient, causing them to feel threatened by the prospect of compromising this identity with mediocre work,” he said.

Baer offered the following strategies for avoiding the potential negative effects of awards and instead using them to encourage creativity: 

1. Make sure that rewards and recognition are not only offered for the outcome of the creative process — a new product — but also for the process of developing the outcome. For example: Have we challenged key assumptions? Have we tested our prototype properly?
2. Reward both success and learning from failure. What becomes a success is difficult to predict and often entails a fair amount of luck. Thus, success and failure often lay close together. Learning from failure can be immensely beneficial and should be encouraged.
3. Do not glorify someone who had one creative success by offering an outsized reward. If you want to glorify people, celebrate those who can produce creative work repeatedly. 

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Many employers have already begun transitioning employees back to the office, while others plan to resume in-office work in the coming months. But after more than a year of working from home, is returning to business as usual even possible? Or desirable?

Employees have changed amid this pandemic. The more a company can match employee preferences and the optimal work conditions required for a given role, the better off they’ll be in terms of hiring and employee retention, according to Peter Boumgarden, an organizational behavior expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Working from home has a level of flexibility that is hard to match in a traditional environment,” said Boumgarden, the Koch Professor of Practice for Family Enterprise at Olin Business School. “Research by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues suggests that employees value this benefit, even seeing it as equivalent to the value they would get from a non-significant pay raise.”

And it’s not just flexibility that employees want.

“We know that autonomy — especially perceived autonomy — is a huge driver of employee satisfaction,” said Markus Baer, professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School. “Just having the sense that you have control of your schedule and when to do certain tasks can boost motivation.”

Of course, there are benefits to working in the traditional office setting for individuals and teams. Interdependent work that requires coordination and input from multiple people is easier to accomplish in person. So are nonlinear tasks like brainstorming. Being co-located also helps employees feel connected to the team and provides networking opportunities that can help them advance their careers. This kind of rich social connection can be hard to mimic online, Boumgarden said.

Despite some of the benefits, some employers are seeking a return to more traditional working conditions.

“In my view, the return to office is driven by some mix of companies trying to recapture some of those lost elements, the desire to use expensive office real-estate set up for this strategy and, perhaps, because the old world still feels a bit more familiar,” he said. 

No one-size-fits-all approach

The question should not be whether to return to the office, continue working remotely or some hybrid option, but rather: What is the nature of the employee’s work? That’s what should drive return-to-work plans, Baer said.

For individual contributors, going into the physical office is less essential. In fact, many people have found over the past year and a half that they are more productive working at home without the typical office disruptions.

However, co-location becomes increasingly important as work becomes more interdependent and complex — especially when frequent communication is required, Baer said. Collaborative tasks such as ideating or coordinating projects are accomplished more efficiently in person.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean employees need to be in the office full time. For many teams, the ideal arrangement will change week to week based on current work needs, Baer said.

“There’s some research that shows that teams do really well when they have bursts of activity. I could envision teams coming together for a week or a block of intense activity to solve a problem and then disband when the problem is solved and it’s clear who is going to do what. Once those tasks are complete, the team can reconvene,” Baer said.

Hybrid challenges

From a productivity standpoint, a well-planned hybrid arrangement offers the best of both worlds: time in the office to plan and coordinate work, and uninterrupted time at home to complete tasks. Hybrid arrangements also enable employees to retain an office footprint while keeping some of the flexibility they’ve enjoyed over the past year and a half. For these reasons, Boumgarden believes hybrid work will be the future for many organizations. However, the challenges of hybrid work are significant, perhaps even more so than traditional in-person offices and fully remote work environments, he said.

“There’s some research that shows that teams do really well when they have bursts of activity. I could envision teams coming together for a week or a block of intense activity to solve a problem and then disband when the problem is solved.”

Markus Baer

“Very few of our offices are technologically or socially set up for a world where half of the workers are in the office and half are working from home,” Boumgarden said. “Managers needs to be thinking very hard about workflows required to drive efficiency and innovation in this new set-up. Overcoming these challenges will require investment of time and capital on the part of leaders.”

There are also employee management issues to overcome in a hybrid model. For example, if one person decides to work from home more frequently and another stays in the office, will they be seen equally by their superiors?

“I would argue that true clarity of expectations is critical. Workers should know both what the stated expectation is, but also what is the implicit norm,” Boumgarden said.

Lessons learned

For those who plan to return to a traditional office work arrangement, there are still lessons to be learned from the great work-from-home experiment. For starters, leaders need to revisit how frequently they schedule meetings, Baer said.

“When people are co-located, it’s easy to call a meeting to discuss something, but oftentimes these meetings are unproductive and nothing is really accomplished that couldn’t have been done in a simple email exchange,” Baer said.

The same communication tools that kept teams running while working remotely — such as Microsoft Teams, Skype or Slack — can still be used to inform employees or collect information without forcing them to sit through yet another meeting.  

Boumgarden hopes the experience of managing remotely will ultimately change how leaders do their jobs when they’re back in the office.

“For managers, I hope there are lessons learned about how one manages toward outcome versus micromanaging process alone,” he said. “Let’s start by acknowledging true contribution cannot be linked to minute and hours alone. For example, I might have an exceptionally productive hour that is equivalent to my typical four hours of output. The next day, I might have four hours of time that distill down to less than an hour of true ‘productivity.’ Or what about the breakthrough that occurs on a run or while lying awake at night? How should this be managed? Does it count as work time? These are the questions our next generation leaders should be asking.

“All this said, as soon as we realize that contribution does not neatly map onto time blocks, our way of assessing work should evolve,” Boumgarden continued. “I hope managers start to think about how they might creatively evaluate progress toward goals, while at the same time realizing that people work in different ways to reach this value.

“By not being able to micromanage over the last year-plus, I think many people had a realization that their actual management was much more superficial than truly additive of value,” he added.  

But perhaps the most important lesson we all learned over the past year and a half is the importance of remaining flexible.

“I think there is value in saying new models are still experiments. A company might roll out one approach to hybrid for some time and then adjust back as the data gives insight around what is and is not working,” Boumgarden said.

Forget the 30,000-foot, big-picture view. When faced with a cutting-edge technological idea, business leaders who approach the idea in more concrete “how” terms — rather than in abstract “why” terms — are less likely to be deterred by its novelty and more likely to recognize its utility, which increases their propensity to invest, according to new research from Olin.

This method of information processing, known as a low-level construal, is especially useful for leaders who lack technological expertise.

In today’s rapidly changing world, companies that are willing to embrace new technologies often have an edge over the competition. Yet decision-makers who are out of their depth with a novel technology often reject it because they lack the expertise to make sense of the technology, resulting in a sense of uncertainty and general unease with the idea.

“The further removed decision-makers are cognitively from an idea, the less likely they are to invest in it,” said Markus Baer, professor of organizational behavior and study co-author. “Keeping up with the rapid pace of technology can be especially challenging. But missed opportunities and failing to keep up, technologically speaking, is a recipe for failure.”

What’s a business leader to do?

“Research suggests that managers tend to undervalue ideas that fall outside their area of expertise and overvalue ideas that are squarely in their wheelhouse,” Baer said.

“And it gets worse. The further removed they are intellectually from the idea, the more likely they are to view it as too ‘out-there’ and as less useful, both of which make it less likely that decision-makers will financially commit to the idea.”

To overcome this expertise gap, previous research has suggested managers should engage in a type of deliberate cognition that involves drawing on prior experience with similar ideas to evaluate new technological ideas. However, that’s not possible when the idea is truly novel.

Baer — along with Matthew P. Mount of Deakin University and Matthew J. Lupoli of Monash University, both in Australia — wanted to better understand the ways in which managers process information about novel technological ideas and how that influences their interpretation and likelihood to invest.

Their research findings, forthcoming in Strategic Management Journal, offer a way for business leaders to overcome organizational inertia and recognize new technological opportunities.

Abstract vs concrete?

Baer, Mount and Lupoli conducted two experiments to study how expertise distance and information-processing style influence perceptions of novel technological ideas and likelihood to invest.

The first experiment took place “in the field” and involved 300 senior R&D and innovation investment decision-makers who work for organizations that were exploring Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) as a novel cybersecurity technology. QKD is a secure communication method that relies on cryptographic protocol involving components of quantum mechanics. Participants were given information about the technology and then were asked to rate how novel and useful the technology was. Finally, they were asked to specify the proportion of their annual disposable income they would be willing to invest to bring QKD to market.

The second experiment, an online survey, included nearly 500 middle- and upper-level managers. Participants assumed the role of a senior executive of a fictitious, application-based taxi company “AppCab” faced with the prospect of investing in a fleet of self-driving cars. They were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions — expert/concrete thinking, expert/abstract thinking, non-expert/concrete thinking or non-expert/abstract thinking.

Respondents in the expert groups were given detailed information about the self-driving cars, while respondents in the non-expert group were given general background information about the taxi industry. Respondents in the high-level construal groups were asked a number of “why” questions to switch their thinking to an abstract mode, while respondents in the low-level construal groups were asked “how” questions to shift their thinking to a more concrete mode. They also were asked questions about the perceived novelty and usefulness of the technology. Finally, they were asked to rate how likely they were to invest in the fleet of self-driving cars.

“Across our two studies, we show that decision-makers who are distant from a highly novel technological idea in terms of domain expertise are less likely to invest in it. However, our results also show that the effect of expertise distance is entirely dependent on how abstractly vs. concretely they approach the idea,” the authors wrote.

Shifting managers’ perspectives

As the current research demonstrates, how decision-makers process information influences their interpretation of novel technological ideas, which ultimately shapes their investment decisions.

“Highly novel ideas, when evaluated by decision-makers who have no expertise in the relevant domain, are perceived as too uncertain and too risky,” Baer said. “Changing how they approach the idea can help managers mitigate the negative effect of expertise distance.”

Many leaders believe they need to focus on the big picture and leave the day-to-day tasks and small details to lower-level managers and employees. Indeed, there can be benefits to this high-level perspective. Decision-makers engaged in high-level thinking are future-oriented and tend to focus their attention on abstract, broad information related to distant goals.

However, when it comes to evaluating novel technology, this type of high-level construal thinking can hold leaders back.

“Most decision-makers have a preference for rationality and predictive accuracy over the uncertainty inherent in novel technological ideas,” Baer said. “When leaders focus only on the high-level, abstract features of the technology, they tend to over-emphasize the novelty and risks of the idea, which, in turn, decreases their likelihood to invest.

“Our research shows this type of thinking can compound the negative effects of decision-makers’ expertise distance on the propensity to invest in novel ideas.”

In contrast, decision-makers using low-level construal are present-oriented and tend to focus their attention on concrete, narrow information related to the benefits and feasibility of adopting the novel technology. By focusing on the idiosyncratic, technical details of highly novel ideas and aspects of feasibility, decision-makers may be more inclined to perceive the idea as being useful and, by extension, less novel and risky, Baer said.

Ultimately, the research highlights the unique value of adopting a more concrete way of thinking when faced with radical technological change.

“By shifting the way in which they evaluate novel ideas — from abstract to concrete — managers will improve their ability to recognize the potential value of groundbreaking ideas, maintaining a technological edge on the competition,” Baer said.