One result of my stay in Columbia during the academic year 2010-2011, has been an ongoing collaboration on new ways to study organizational innovation. More precisely, how to connect the tradition of qualitative and quantitative methods in the sociology of innovation and organization with methods related to intensive data mining from sources inside and outside an organization.
The interesting approach that the COI follows is that the connects a qualitative approach based on the idea of complex assemblages of people, tools, media an systems in a vein close to Bruno Latour's (who is affiliated with COI by the way). The notion of agency as something that i is not strictly human is not strange for someone, like myself, with a background in artificial intelligence. The COI approach also is connected to a specific view of networked elationships within and outside an organization.
I am fortunate enough to put all these approaches to test with a real case. Thanks to an agreement with Telefonica I+D, I will be collaborating with Pilar Opazo, who will work on her PhD thesis at Columbia on this research (I will be part of her PhD Committee). We will study the transition from elBulli to elBullifoundation in terms of innovation in organization.
We presented the roadmap for our research today at the GastroTech Days that took place in Barcelona.
Today we just shared one dimension of research, namely the ues of codified language for creativity and innovation at elBulli. For us it is one of the components of their a solid platform for creativity and innovation.
We are still on the phase of completing the discourse analysis but we showed how it will seed other phases of the research. We are sticking to a strong committment to combine qualitative and quantitative tools in our toolbox to have a better idea of the main contributions to innovation and creativity from the organizational perspective and how they can give more general lessons not just for the gastronomy sector.
This is a project that we hope that will give Master and PhD students both in Sociology and Computer Science the opportunity to engage in new challenges and to learn both about their respective disciplines and how to be more creative and innovative as well.
But this is just one of the projects that I am starting this year. There are others about the mutual and enriching relationships between different disciplines: art, science, design and technology.
