in an iPod World

Evolution of Digital Materials | WAMC

Back in October, I made a short radio recording for for Academic Minute, a program made by WAMC - Northeast Public Radio. Last week, my show was finally aired. You can listen to the show and read the transcript here.

Dr. Youngjin Yoo, Temple University – Evolution of Digital Materials | WAMC

The research that was mentioned in this show was funded by in part by Fox School of Business, National Science Foundation (grant # 0943010 and 1120966) as well as a grant from CIGREF. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of mine and do not necessarily reflect the view of the funders. 

IT value in education

Recently, New York Time had an article on evasive nature of value of IT investments in classroom. Kyrene School District in Arizona spent roughly $33 million since 2005 on various forms of information technology in classroom. Yet, the reports says, scores in reading and math have stagnated in the district, while the statewide scores have risen. The articles goes on to offer several different perspectives as to why it might have happened. One perspective says that technology spending for education is waste. Another perspective says that we have wrong measures. The third perspective is that we need to change other things to see the impact of IT spending.

This feels almost like deja vu. This is exactly the question that the entire MIS community has been trying to answer in the business context. It was called IT productivity paradox. There were people who believed that it was a matter of better technology. They believed that if we designed the system better, we would see the impact. Then, there were people who believed that it was a matter of user acceptance. They believed that individual users needed to be convinced about the usefulness of the tool so that they would accept the tool. Other believed that we needed to implement it better. They believed that if we had more user engagement, top management support and better training, we would see the value from IT investment. Out of this, we had so-called "change management" consulting practice. Then, there were people who believed that it was about changing the organizational routines and organizational structures. They believed that we needed to mangers need to pay closer attentions to existing norms and rules as they tried to bring technology into the organizations. Finally, there were people who believed that the measurement was the problem. In other words, they felt that simply if we could measure the outcome better, we would see the improvements in business performance through IT investment. All of these provided very rich understanding of how IT may or may not help organizations improve their performance.

Perhaps, people who are trying to solve this paradox can read this very rich body of research before they start spending their time and efforts to understand what is going on here. I am pretty sure we can learn a lot from just reading them.

research, technology

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.