EURAM roundup

Yesterday was an excellent EURAM today, the Open Innovation track I participate in, is really interesting. Most of the presentations are very good, with some exceptions (it’s generally a bad sign when you have to resort to call every statement on your foils as provocative, when they are doubted).

Like Stefan, I was intrigued by the article from Francesco Rullani, although I got a little agitated when I had to review it previously, and sent him 2 pages of harsh feedback. I am happy to see that he has changed many of my issues since then already. He uses Dosi’s (1982) metapher of Technology Trajectories in order to explain Exploitation vs Exploration of those trajectories, Exploration being measured by the number of new project foundings at SourceForge. The discussion lateron focused a little on whether founding a project for a fork would be legitimate or needed to be filtered out. The consensus seemed to be that the need to be filtered out. I disagree here, forking a project is in my view a perfect example of exploration of new directions when people feel uncomfortable in the old Technology Paradigm, but whatever…

It’s a pity that I missed out Joel West‘s second presentation, which I was looking forward too. We had missed the first bus and the next bus left only 2 hours later, taking 70 Minutes to go to the conference location at HEC. It’s a pity that it is so far away.

Another highlight was Jean-Michel Dalle‘s presentation on simple.wikipedia.org, which they analyzed. It looks into who contributes and who applies the tag “unsimple” to (which) pages. Very cool analysis and I hope the Wikimania conference will be happy. This is one of the Economics who do credible work which does not oversimply too much (as can happen so easily in Economics).

It was also cool to get to know Linus Dahlander who is a nice guy doing excellent research, although he is way younger that I would have imagined. Finally, I got to know new people, such as Lars Bo Jeppesen and Lars Frederiksen and “old” ones like Karim Lakhani.

In the evening, we went to a nice little restaurant, called “Le vin sobre” which had been recommended by a Parisien participant. Although the final bill was impressive too, we enjoyed the nice atmosphere and the excellent food. A good tip indeed!

I am sorry, that I won’t be able to listen to Linus’ presentation and to Karim’s Keynote. I guess we have to invite both to ETH to give a talk there at some time…

All in all, was this year’s EURAM a big success for me. P.S. Please cut the plenary sessions a little next year or at least make them a little bit more interesting.