in an iPod world

Evolution of Digital Camera and Unbounded Innovation

With Kalle Lyytinen, Veeresh Thummandi, and Aaron Weiss, I wrote a paper that analyzes the unbounded nature of digital innovation, drawing on the history of digital camera. It was a fun paper to write and I am glad that it was accepted for a presentation at the Academy of Management this summer.

AOM2010 Digital Camera.pdf

Tenure is not the problem.

Yesterday, on my Facebook I posted a quote from a recent article by Lamar Alexander published on Newsweek. Among other things, he points out that tenure system in American universities is not working. Here's what he wrote:

Within academic departments, tenure, combined with age-discrimination laws, make faculty turnover—critical for a university to remain current in changing times—difficult. Instead of protecting speech and encouraging diversity and innovative thinking, the tenure system often stifles them: aspiring professors must win the approval of established colleagues for tenure, encouraging likemindedness and sometimes inhibiting the free flow of ideas.

To this post, my former colleague at Case, Susan Helper whom I respect a lot, posted the following comments:

tenure may discourage some small innovations, but also protects the development of big, unpopular ideas (imho!). As Dick Boland has said, every academic should, at least once in their career, do something they would have not been able to do without tenure!

To this I responded:

I totally agree with Dick. The challenge is that human mind is habitual. It is very hard to break away from the pattern of behavior that you acquired while you are working very hard to get tenured.

being a management scholar

Today, I explored what it means to be a management scholar with my doctoral students. One of the questions I asked them is why do we see this quandary of being in two different worlds: practice and academia. Several theories were suggested as to why we have it. And few suggestions were offered as to what to do about it. Of course, this is a quandary that will not go away as by definition, we (management scholars) are caught in between these two worlds. In a way this is precisely where we need to be. Sometimes, we put a convenient blind so that we can focus on one while ignoring the other. Sometimes, we tend to do better in one than the other. Therefore, no answer will be satisfying and that is good. We don't want to exactly figure out his problem: the moment we think we figure it out, we will be stuck in that moment, while the world around us is moving on.

Video of the Talk at Viktoria Institute

Last November (on Thanksgiving Day), I gave a talk at Viktoria Institute on a topic "Open Innovation in a Digitized World." Here is the link to the presentation. Below are the slides that I used for the talk.

open innovation in a digitized world

View more presentations from Youngjin Yoo.

mobile trends in Asia-Pacific region: now available through Amazon

If you are interested in what's going on in Asia-Pacific region with mobile technology, here's a good place to start. The book covers 10 different countries with the evolution and history of their mobile industry.

Trends in Mobile Technology and Business in the Asia-Pacific Region

I received a copy of the front cover of the book that I edited. The book contains case studies from nine countries focusing on the history of mobile industry evolution since the 1G. It also shows the latest developments in market place, regulations, and technology in each of the countries. I am happy with the way it came out.