Practical Challenges of Managing a Research

Pipeline

Russell J. FunkAssistant Professor

Carlson School of ManagementUniversity of Minnesota

rfunk@umn.edu

August 7, 2015

Roadmap

I My background

I Dilemmas of time

I Specific challenges

A little bit about me. . .

I PhD from MichiganSociology, 2014

I Assistant Professor,Strategic Managementand Entrepreneurship,Minnesota

I interests incommunication andinformation networks inorganizations

I focus on health care andR&D settings

I use di↵erentmethodologicalapproaches, mostlyquantitative or archival

Time is a central challenge in managing a pipeline

Time is a factor in a few ways. . .

I On the one hand, we need to contendwith classic issues of timemanagement—The amount of time wehave to devote to research at any givenmoment is small.

I On the one hand, we also need need tocontend with issues around managingprojects over long periods of time—Theamount of time needed to get a paperthrough the pipeline is big.

A personal illustration. . .

April 26, 2010 First preliminary draft completedJuly 1, 2011 Sent to the American Journal of Sociology

September 26, 2011 Got an R&RJanuary 29, 2012 Submitted a revisionJune 1, 2012 Rejected from the American Journal of Sociology

June 16, 2012 Sent to Administrative Science Quarterly

October 19, 2012 Got an R&RJanuary 3, 2014 Submitted a revisionApril 2, 2014 Got a conditional acceptanceMay 1, 2014 Submitted a revisionJune 2, 2014 Got an acceptanceSeptember 18, 2014 Submitted final correctionsOctober 6, 2014 Paper posted online in advanceNovember 3, 2014 Paper published

May 25, 2013 Sent to Academy of Management Review

July 20, 2013 Got an R&RMarch 31, 2014 Submitted a revisionJune 10, 2014 Got another R&RFebruary 12, 2015 Submitted a revisionApril 28, 2015 Got a conditional acceptanceJune 25, 2015 Submitted a revision

Split into two papers

I The first draft of this paper (with Dan Hirschman) wascompleted in April, 2010

I During the review process, on the advice of reviewers, wesplit the paper into two

I The first paper appeared in late 2014, the second is justfinishing up now in 2015

I From start to finish, the process took 5 years, and thatexcludes early drafting

Challenges

Challenge 1—Remembering what you’ve done

I When you’re deep into a project like yourdissertation, it’s easy to feel like you’ll neverforget important details

I You just spent 6 weeks cleaning a controlvariable, how could you ever not recall yourprocess?

I But it happens!

I You want to guarantee you’ll be able to useyour data long into the future

Don’t be this guy when areviewer asks you to rerunan analysis 3 years later!

Develop a habit of building good documentation

I The best system is whatever one you’ll use regularly

I Want to include all details necessary to replicate your process yearslater—file names, locations, versions, urls, contact information

I Things that seem obvious now are easy to forget as time passes andyou start new projects

I Some possible tools: Excel, Word, any text editor, Google Docs,Evernote, automatic generators for code (e.g., pydoc, roxygen2)

Here’s a more extended example: https://github.com/russellfunk/icos/tree/master/matching

Challenge 2—Staying e�cient

I As you become involved in more projects (and other things) your timestarts to disappear

I Invest in learning software (e.g., qualitative data analysis, referencemanagers, spreadsheets), programming, and/or other tools that canextend your capabilities and make your workflow significantly moree�cient

I Finding the time can be hard, but it pays to go slow now soyou can go fast later!

My favorite tool. . .

Python

I a general purpose programming language; huge communityof users

I great for web scraping and pulling data from online sources

I also excellent for automating things like online datacollection

I resources for data analysis, visualization (geographic,network, textual)

Challenge 3—Staying at the frontier

I It’s useful to think about yourself as anentrepreneur and your research as your“products”

I You want spend some time thinking notonly about your current pipeline, but alsodevoting time to considering what’s next

I Similarly, what kinds of things can you doto best prepare for changing environmentsand to take advantage of futureopportunities?

I It’s easy to let demands of the present takeprecedent over preparing for the future

My approach to staying at the frontier

I Attend lots of professional development workshops and similarconference events

I Take advantage of great online courses and resources (e.g., Coursera,Codecademy)

I Make it a rule to learn one new thing (however small) whenever youwork on a project (e.g., a new literature, method, software tool)

I Adjust the scope of what you want to learn to the scale of the project

. . . for example. . .

A concrete example

I As a goal for preparing my AoMpresentations this year, I wanted to learnhow to make a few plots in a newvisualization package

I It took a little longer to make someslides and I could have made the plotsusing tools I already know

I But now I have an option in the futurewhen I need to do something thatcouldn’t be done with other tools

Challenge 4—Clogged pipelines

I Part of what makes research fun is that the more you do the moreyou see opportunities to do more

I Given pressures to publish, it’s also very tempting to fill your pipelinewith many projects

I Make sure your pipeline doesn’t get clogged!

My suggestions for keeping the pipeline flowing

I Adhere to the “No Paper Left Behind” policy

I Focus on projects that are complementaryI Minimize switching costs

I Collaboration is great, but be mindful of the time and energyinvestments necessary for successful collaborations

I Be careful not to spread yourself too thin

. . . and finally. . .

“People think focus means saying

yes to the thing you’ve got to focus

on. But that’s not what it means at

all. It means saying no to the

hundred other good ideas that

there are. You have to pick

carefully. I’m actually as proud of

the things we haven’t done as the

things I have done. Innovation is

saying no to 1,000 things.”

Thank you!