How are We Faring? Reflections on Coronavirus and its Effects on the Innovation Management Scholarly Community
本文基于对《产品创新管理杂志》16位副主编的调查，反思COVID-19疫情对创新管理学者个人与职业生活的影响，并探讨短期、中期和长期效应，为学者应对危机和适应新常态提供指导。
2020 has, without question, been an unprecedented time for our world. With economies and daily lives disrupted globally, it is no surprise that the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic (“COVID” hereafter) has also impacted scholars and their activities throughout our innovation management community. At the time of this writing, roughly 0.5% of the world’s population has tested positive for the disease with a fatality rate of about 2.5% of confirmed cases, amounting to over one million lives lost. While infection and fatality rates are understandably the most important metrics to track and manage, the pandemic has come at a time when academic (business) research has been more collaborative and globalized than ever. These trends have played out on the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) pages as well, with our author teams becoming more diverse in terms of geographical location. As a result, our community of scholars has had to adapt to a loss of personal contact with colleagues, challenges in field data collections, and an inability to use traditional behavioral laboratories, among other issues. All this comes on top of the personal challenges every one of us must wrestle with during this difficult time, which might include children and/or elderly to care for, living quarters that have been adapted to accommodate home office and learning spaces and, of course, the stress that comes from fears of catching the disease. At the same time, it is important for our scholarly community not only to reflect on the challenges we face, but also to look toward those less fortunate than us, whose livelihoods have been destroyed or disrupted by this pandemic, and how we might assist. As we look around us, we may recognize that many of our students and staff with their families might be greatly affected by the pandemic. Fortunately, many of our home institutions have provided support to those in need through extra funds allocated and flexibility offered. In this essay, we reflect on COVID with regards to our community of innovation management scholars in several ways. First, we use personal accounts of our associate editors to examine the immediate impact of the pandemic on professional and personal lives, with a look to the future and implications for our discipline. Next, we reflect on the near-, medium-, and longer term effects of this crisis on researchers and their paths to success. We follow this with some observations of institutional innovation in university settings and how our field might help that cause. Finally, we close with a discussion of approaches to incenting and rewarding meaningful research in the field. Overall, the goal of this work is to reflect on how the broader environment has been shaped and altered by COVID and how our community might draw upon the challenges to explore new ways of thinking, researching, and teaching. We hope that our reflections provide those in our community some understanding and guidance in these difficult times along with a thoughtful base from which to consider both navigating the crisis and emerging from it into a “new normal,” whatever that may be. To explore how the pandemic has (re)shaped our professional lives, we first engaged our excellent associate editor (AE) team, a group of seasoned and highly successful scholars. Through a short survey of this group, conducted in June 2020, we hoped to find answers to several timely questions that many of us currently wrestle with, including: These three questions were posed directly to JPIM’s 16 AEs through an online survey instrument distributed in a controlled manner. Anonymity was ensured across participants, so no identifying information was collected. Thus, we do not know who the specific respondents were for the comments you will see below, nor their gender. After completion, the open-ended responses were loosely coded for discussion purposes. Given the small sample, this work was intended merely to gather anecdotal insights; therefore, we did not follow the rigorous coding protocols we would expect in a research paper adopting qualitative methods. Despite the modest sample size, we saw strong themes emerging and frequent alignment across our respondents. In some cases, we perceived the answer to a posed question as better associated with a different question and report it as such. The dominant themes which emerged in response to our questions are described next. Because of imminent new teaching arrangements like online teaching, class preparation and system adaptation became stressful and took more time than before. This might have affected the time to “think” about new ideas for research in general and, consequently, research productivity. I believe many people had to adjust to on-line teaching. Indeed, for those with many teaching obligations, this past semester might have been “hell”. I have kids. I have basically been at home since March. I have zilch interaction in person with my colleagues, and I am barely scraping together enough time not to abandon projects. Moving to online teaching and keeping the family together are my main priorities at this point. Frankly, I haven't gotten time to really think about new research ideas. Without childcare, I have very little time left for work, and I can only manage to handle the most urgent tasks. There is indeed a real challenge with having the whole family at home and being a female academic in terms of “care responsibilities” and the impact this has on productivity. On the negative side, company representatives are unavailable for interviews or other forms of data collection or are too distracted with their current situation to think deeply about anything else, including participating in our research. We need to take into account that we will be in an economic recession for quite a while and this will affect research results. The economic recession will also impact, perhaps, the ease with which data can be collected in the first place as industry partners might have “better” things to do than engage in research activities. Despite the clear distress felt by many relying on active corporate engagement for their research, other researchers seemed to find the situation less challenging, as evidenced by the following comment: “The individual level factors and mind mechanisms I study are not affected much by COVID-19.” It seems that two issues that our community has to contend with are reflected in the above comments. First, it is possible that there are differential effects of the pandemic for behavioral versus strategy researchers in terms of data acquisition disruptions. For projects that explore individual consumer phenomena with experimental methods, for example, data collection through online respondent platforms (such as mTurk) might be minimally disrupted. On the contrary, projects that investigate organizational actions and decisions in close collaboration with firms or even through online surveys, data acquisition is likely to be significantly hampered. Second, the data we collect now (whether in organizational or consumer contexts) might not be fully representative of the contexts and questions we intended to explore originally. It seems plausible that COVID-19 will create new organizational phenomena that merit study, but the theories that will explain those phenomena and help improve product innovation management will not have COVID-19 in their names. This is just an event in human history. I have always been interested in digital innovation, but this has made me more certain about the need to understand the digital domain and how digital technology is changing everything. Changes in customer preferences, channel relationships, and IT dependency after COVID-19 will provide interesting topics to study. I felt as a negative element the absence of in-person meetings with collaborators and co-authors. Online interactions are great and efficient, but they are not rich as personal interactions. The main effect has been more time for research due to less travel. In sum, the immediate effects on our scholarly community in the way we work, live, and interact are manifold and diverse, bringing both opportunities as well as challenges, and affecting each of us in perhaps very different ways. As one AE put it: “… schools with resources will retain their research excellence by reducing course loads (1–2 per year), while less wealthy schools will likely adjust research expectations.” In our role as stewards of JPIM, we recognize these differing situations our community faces and strive to support our authors, reviewers, and associate editors to the best of our ability. It seems unlikely that teaching expectations will return to pre-Covid-19 standards. Downward pressure on enrollments and revenues, already palpable before the pandemic, has increased. Student expectations have changed, as have those of parents paying for the education. Moreover, employment and salary levels will recover at a more measured pace than the stock markets. Online instruction will become more popular, and the hi-flex model is the most likely long term normal. That approach requires more preparation and execution time and energy. Work on relevant research problems that are strategic … since data analytics consultants have better access to large databases for tactical decision making than academics do … and learn to write in a manner that practitioners can understand so that they find value in what you are doing. We need to recognize the disruption in academia that is being dramatically accelerated by our current situation (COVID19+Recession/unemployment/economic woes + severe social/political unrest). As universities’ business models change, what happens to the traditional academic research enterprise in the business discipline? Be patient, and focus on the things we can control. Maybe it could be helpful to develop a coherent research program that can help the junior person to be identified and distinguished in the context of a difficult market. Times of darkness and uncertainty are not good for decisions about long term goals and objectives. The COVID-19 pandemic will end, and life will return to a more predictable (albeit different) trajectory. My suggestion is to “stay the course” with research ideas and foci, and to continue working on the most promising projects. Pretty much the same advice as always, with minor adjustments: (1) Don't panic, (2) Find out how you work well (from desk setup to working hours) and do your best to work that way, (3) Work on something you find interesting. Working on COVID right now may not be the best choice, (4) Find mentors who actually care (5) Exploit COVID—most schools have moved their seminar series online, so it's quite easily listening to great scholars and seeing how they work. Travel budgets also are no limitations right now. (6) Be even more precise & interesting: if you present yourself, give a job talk, etc., you have a little less to work with than usual. Practice. Do a little each day. Have realistic goals. If looking for a position, then I would say: look globally as universities in some countries have hiring freezes (like US, UK, Australia), while others seem less impacted (universities in continental Europe). The job market is certainly going to be impacted. But I am really not sure a doctoral student could manage these challenges in addition to the traditional advice on how to build a strong profile for the job market. If a student is still early in the program, it may be possible to choose research topics that are more relevant to the field after the pandemic. But if a student is already working on his/her dissertation, I am not sure how to overcome this bad luck really. As mentioned at the beginning of our essay, the global nature of our community might be a particular strength that we can further foster, such as continued engagement of both European and North American scholars through conferences, including the IPDMC and JPIM Research Forum. As our AEs point out, a global network might be of increasing importance for younger scholars. We further reflect on these broader considerations in our next section. [on permanent changes] Not really … I think the new normal will be pretty much like the old normal. I am not sure whether there will be a “permanent” change, but it will have an impact. To be honest, no. If anything, this crisis has shown us the value we all put on working together in person, which not the least applies to students. Next, we reflect more broadly on the impact of COVID, building on the insights that emerged from the AE responses described above. In the course of our reflections, we attempt to chart a course forward for individual innovation management scholars and for the discipline as a whole. Our deliberations in the next section are embedded in broader shifts we observe around us, reaching beyond our immediate scholarly community. A broader and more long-term view on COVID-related impact on our scholarly community necessarily includes zooming out and considering other trends and dynamics that are shaping academia. Below we consider the interplay between broader trends and COVID effects across three levels: faculty, universities, and discipline. More specifically, we identify questions that individual faculty members, universities, and the discipline must consider, relating to individual and institutional innovation. As some of our comments have illustrated, and anyone working in higher education sees clearly, the current pandemic has created shorter term challenges and longer term choices for innovation scholars. The most pressing dilemmas are likely facing junior scholars (doctoral students and recently appointed professors). Many doctoral students are facing interruptions in their dissertation data collection efforts. Some corporate partnerships and face-to-face data acquisition plans have been put on hold due to the COVID crisis. 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