Dr. Jana Thiel

Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at EDHEC Business School | Entrepreneurship, Innovation, & Strategy

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

I was extremely delighted by our engaged BBA students in my #entrepreneurship class at @EDHEC_BSchool who delivered a super-engaging final pitch about @hylight_aero - a fantastic innovation in the French Tech ecosystem!

[EDHEC_BSchool @EDHEC_BSchool]

Dans le cadre de leur cours d’entrepreneuriat, des étudiants de l’#EDHEC ont eu l’opportunité de pitcher pour #HyLight, une #startup innovante qui réinvente l’inspection #durable des infrastructures.
Un grand merci à la professeure @thielja ✨ https://t.co/ZTy2lEdXBN

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

Indeed. @rescuetime: this new version is majorly annoying. You don't know what is focus and what is not focus time in my line of work. The "productive-distracting" scale was much more useful. Not to talk about the unfortunate color scheme. How can I get back the classic version?

[Joost @almodozo]

@rescuetime I'm sorry, but I hate this new classification scheme.

The old scale was linear and intuitive: Very productive > productive > neutral > distracting > very distracting.

But now the scale mixes up degrees of productivity with the nature of activities, and it's a mess.

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

@AndrewPierno send

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

What I like about SMS so much is the regular and appreciative exchange with practice! Grear discussion this morning at the Lifetime Achievement Award and Panel Discussion with Susan Black on “Executing Strategy in a VUCA, Net-Zero Woke World”! #SMS2023 @Strategic_Mgmt

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

Thanks @crischicho for organizing and leading this panel symposium, and thanks to my co-panelists: @PerkmannM, @fgiones, @SWS53345553, for sharing new insights. And of course, big thanks go to the attendees who engaged so actively in the discussion!

[cristobal garcia-h @crischicho]

Insightful Panel @AOMConnect re evolving field of #corporate #acceleration #startup engagement, different #experimentation modes, #weaksignals and strategic #agility and the design parameters of such novel org units. Thanks @PerkmannM @fgiones @thielja
@SWS53345553 @ImperialBiz

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

Thanks @ETHSPH for having me! Great discussions!

[ETH Student Project House @ETHSPH]

Yesterday, @thielja hosted our #IdeaspaceWorkshop on #EntrepreneurialFinance.

At the beginning, the most important aspects were discussed and general questions from our students were answered. Then there was time to discuss specific projects and for feedback and support.

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

@FlySWISS Hi Lucy, just letting you know that ended up working ultimately. Appreciate the support!

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

@FlySWISS 5 days in: Delayed baggage report says it was located but since then - zero update! That's bad service. I really need the stuff! If it is at ZH airport (which I assume), happy to come myself looking for it - I've seen the "graveyard" of luggage standing there! Many thx!

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

It was a great pleasure to be part of this panel - I learned so much from my co-panelists. Great perspectives on the theme! Thanks @crischicho & @LaurensVdweghe for bringing this together! @ImperialBiz, @eth_en

[cristobal garcia-h @crischicho]

It was an insightful and fun Panel on #Corporate #Acceleration. Someone told me afterwards: “This is the best Panel I have attended so far #AOM2022 @AOMConnect @AOM_TIM Thanks @thielja @PerkmannM @eautio @ImperialBiz @SWS53345553 @LaurensVdweghe and Audience. Stay tuned 🤓

[cristobal garcia-h @crischicho]

It was an insightful and fun Panel on #Corporate #Acceleration. Someone told me afterwards: “This is the best Panel I have attended so far #AOM2022 @AOMConnect @AOM_TIM Thanks @thielja @PerkmannM @eautio @ImperialBiz @SWS53345553 @LaurensVdweghe and Audience. Stay tuned 🤓

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

@digitec_de Liebes Digitec Team, eigentlich sollte meine Bestellung gestern mit Blitzlieferung von @notime_ag kommen; heute immer noch unversendet? Da wäre normale Post besser gewesen, weil die ist immer verlässlich am nächsten Tag da! Wann kommt denn nun die Sendung? Danke!

[EPFL CDM @epflcdm]

Congrats to @MarcBGruber @EPFL_en for his nomination as the first European Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Journal @AOMConnect https://t.co/F3QuEx0g0M

[Peter G. Klein @petergklein]

Twitter too!

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

@FlySWISS Also liebe Swiss, wer hat denn Euer neues Booking interface designed! Ich will doch nicht erst kalkulieren müssen, ob ich nun 7, 8, oder 10 Tage reisen werde. Ich weiss das jeweilige Datum der Reisetage - das muss genügen...

[EPFL Innovation Park @EPFL_Park]

Bravo! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Adaptyv Biosystems secures funding from Y Combinator https://t.co/GthnTOqYVG via @EPFL_en #Swisstech #VDtech

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

Especially interesting are the responses below this article! Definitely a win for open science.

[Data Colada @DataColada]

Colada98 - Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty
https://t.co/R1wemJfemq

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

Finally! Saw a presentation a few years back and have been waiting for this paper ever since! Great work.

[Dr. Jana Thiel @thielja]

Found also @AudraQuinn's comment important on "familiarity", "interpersonal attraction," & "homophily" -- maybe each team has its specific "homophily factor" it selects on?

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

As @HowardAldrich points out in a panel I am on: homophily is a powerful default for human groups - we are naturally drawn to people who are like us. A diverse entrepreneurial team is therefore a sign of founders being able to act rationally in order to overcome cognitive biases.

[GypsyPolitico @warrior_covfefe]

@tom_peters More leaders need to focus on these 3 things:

1-Raise the skill levels of everyone that works for you
2-Raise the income of everyone that works for you
3-Raise the joy of working for the organization of everyone that works for you.

And let the chips fall with everything else