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18 BizEd JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2015 research+insights books THE INNOVATOR'S METHOD It used to be standard for an entrepreneur to write a business plan before launching a new venture, say Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer. But such a plan is useless when the product is so new or different that the entrepre- neur can't predict demand or be sure the technology will be adopted. In that case, Furr and Dyer recommend a four- step process that begins with customer insight and ends with a working model. The two BYU professors provide case studies that show this process works for all kinds of companies, from one-person ventures to 8,000-person behemoths. (Harvard Business Press Review, US$30) FROM GREAT TO GONE Established companies selling fast-moving con- sumer goods (FMCG) are rapidly failing in today's economy. Why? They're not innovating fast enough, according to Peter Lorange and Jimmi Rembiszewski of the Lorange Institute. They note that these struggling companies haven't realized that they constantly have to offer some- thing new to restless, hyperconnected early adopters. And sometimes when they do innovate, they guess wrong. For instance, during the early days of mobile phones, Nokia "focused on better phone functionality and smaller phones at a time when Apple chose ease of use com- bined with a multitude of novel func- tions." We all know how that scenario ended. (Gower, US$85.45) TEACHING ENTREPRENEURSHIP Babson professors Heidi Neck, Patricia Greene, and Candida Brush emphasize that students need to be developed in five ment, and Thomas O'Neill, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. Donia and O'Neill will use the grant to study how virtual teams can fos- ter cooperation and improve performance through peer feedback, similar to how face-to-face teams do so through informal and nonverbal feedback. "Several studies show that virtual teams underperform face-to-face teams, and cooperation is a core issue: It does not develop sponta- neously," says Donia. In phase one of the study, Donia and O'Neill plan to run an experimental study involving several hun- dred small teams of student participants; in phases two and three, they plan to test how well a peer feedback model fosters cooperation on different types of work teams in real-world organizations. MEASURING RISK The European Research Council has awarded a grant of £553,293 (approxi- mately US$870,400) to Emre Ozdeoren, a professor of economics at London Business School in the United Kingdom. Part of a three-year research program, the grant will support Ozdeoren's study into innovative ways to measure systemic financial risks. TWITTER AND MIT SEEK SOCIAL SOLUTIONS The MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has opened the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM). The new lab is dedicated to iden- tifying the patterns that drive communication across social media platforms and other digitally driven content. The lab is funded by a five- year US$10 million grant from Twitter. In addition, Twitter will provide LSM researchers with full access to its real-time public stream of tweets, as well as to its archive of every tweet posted since the first in 2006. The lab's main goal is to create solutions for social problems that "cannot be solved manually or through automation alone," says Deb Roy, an associate pro- fessor who will lead the LSM project. He also is a chief media scientist at Twitter. LSM plans to develop more effective tools and mobile apps to enable new forms of public communication and social organization. For example, among its first projects is an analysis of social and mass media surrounding the 2013 Bos- ton Marathon bombing that discovers more about how rumors are spread. LSM researchers also will be studying Jun, a small town in southern Spain, where the government has pioneered the use of public social media to support greater connections between residents and public officials. Finally, the LSM team is evaluating the applications of its research for the cre- ation of efficient and responsive systems to support development efforts in India. Visit socialmachines.media.mit.edu for more information.