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Innovation Workshop Sessions
Session 3: Data Collection — New Modalities
Goal, Rationale and Outcomes
The goal of this session is identify innovative ways of collecting qualitative and quantitative data on innovation and business activity.
The reason is that the study of such a complex area as innovation requires new approaches to collecting data. Fortunately, survey research and rapid changes in information technology have generated new and improved ways of collecting data from human beings, including introducing cognitive learning, adapting new tools (RFIDs , "smart dust"), and creating new measures (biomarkers, social networks). The changes also offer new opportunities to analyze data, including text and video analysis and visual analytics.
The approach is to feature visionary speakers who will highlight different approaches to collecting data. The presentations are intended to sketch an outline of an approach; the choice of presentations represents an illustrative, rather than exhaustive, set of approaches to collecting data.
There are two expected outcomes. One is the stimulation of a set of small group discussions of what activities can be measured within organizations, and the second is of how measures can be collected. The second is the background information for this section of the white paper.
Background Reading and Brief Description
1. Community Innovation Survey
Innovation surveys have been implemented in most other developed countries, including all 27 member states of the European Union, Canada, Norway, Iceland, Japan, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa and several Latin American countries. The European Union coordinates the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS), which are now implemented every two years. Five have been completed to date, with planning underway for the sixth survey in 2009. Anthony Arundel will provide a brief summary of lessons learned from how the survey has changed and adapted.
Project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Innovation_Survey
Person: http://www.merit.unu.edu/about/profile.php?id=14
2. Surveys of businesses
During the Summer of 2006 a team of 47 MBAs and postgraduates at the Centre for Economic Performance (LSE) surveyed around 4000 firms in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Greece, India, Japan, Korea and China, to collect data on management practices and organizational structures and behavior. Nick Bloom will summarize the lessons from their "double—blind" approach to collecting data from firms.
Project: http://www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/index_files/Page371.htm
Person: http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/bloom.html
3. Innovative Frames
Three National Organizations Surveys have been fielded using data derived from the General Social Survey (GSS). A 2009 National Organizations Survey is planned, derived from the 2008 GSS with funding to be determined. It will be based on issues related the development of three topical modules: globalization, technology and work, and innovation. A planning workshop was held in Boston in May 2007. Clair Brown will summarize the salient features.
Person: http://www.iir.berkeley.edu/faculty/brown/index.html
Project: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR/STUDY/04074.xml (2002 Survey)
4. Collecting Video Data on Individuals
This presentation will describe a large—scale experiment that examines the ways in which artifacts and tools contribute to innovative design. The experiment collected a massive database of design activities, consisting of approximately 3,000 hours of video from approximately 60 undergraduate and graduate—level engineering design teams using cyber—infrastructure for video collection. The video is then strategically sampled to unpack the causal path from design/tools artifacts in the environment, to core cognitive processes underlying design, to dimensions of design creativity, to the ultimate success of the designed object. In addition, new engineering design innovativeness metrics are developed, validated, and refined. Chris Schunn will summarize what has been done.
Project: http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/schunn/research/spatial.html
Person: http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/schunn/
5. Scraping the Web
The Cornell project "Next Generation Cyber Tools" is an attempt to create a novel laboratory for social—science research based on the vast Internet Archive. The 40 billion pages of the archive represent snapshots of the Web that have been captured and stored every 2 months for nearly 10 years—everything from corporate web pages to news groups and blogs. The archive is thus a remarkably rich and detailed record of societal events and dynamics over that time. The challenge is to access that record and make sense of it. To meet that challenge, the Cornell team has been building an intelligent front—end for searching the archive, an effort that will require cutting edge research in natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, as well as next—generation technology in privacy preservation. These front—end cyberinfrastructure tools, operating on Cornell's NSF—funded Petabyte Data Storage facility infrastructure, represent an entirely new scale and new methodology for social science research. Daniel Huttenlocher will describe the project.
Project http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/SIN/cybertools/
Person: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~dph/
6. Jeannette Blomberg
IBM Research is engaged in a number of projects to develop new approaches to collecting, analyzing and visualizing qualitative and quantitative data on organizations — their performance, reputation, employee relationships, and workplace practices. The approaches include mining corporate databases to show relationships among employees based on the output from activities in which they participate (e.g. authoring reports, membership on task forces, patent activity and more); analyzing unstructured text that is ubiquitous in organizations to understand business performance issues and opportunities (e.g. trends in customer interactions, employee sponsored innovation areas, employee views of corporate direction and more); and using large data sets to visualize various aspects of organizational operations and activities so that people can orient themselves to complex information landscapes (e.g. social networks, software development activity, content of deliverables and more). The approaches are being combined with more traditional interviewing, and they are being adapted in response to today’s highly distributed, global organizations and their increasing reliance of business partnerships where strict organizational boundaries rarely circumscribe the focus of inquiry. Jeanette Blomberg will provide a brief overview of IBM’s research on these new approaches.
Projects: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/ssr/spractice/index.html
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/projects/biw/biw-index.shtml
http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/index.html
Person: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/ssr/spractice/people.shtml
Innovation Workshop
Overview