Yes, it is a riff on Gartner Magic Quadrant, but instead aimed at an academic career.
As some of you know, this week we had the Third Online Doctoral Workshop on Supply Chain Analytics, and I was invited (by Feryal Erhun, my PhD student, now MSOM President as I wrote in an earlier post) to be on a panel (moderated by Sri Talluri, and organized by Yao Zhao) – with Sunil Chopra, David Simchi-Levi, Kalyan Singhal, Tava Olsen and Hemant Bhargava – on:
Developing a Research Portfolio.
I put together 3 content slides (you can see above), as we each were given about 7 minutes to present, before opening up to Q&A. Among the key questions we were asked to think about – the audience being about to graduate/recently graduated PhD students aspiring to an academic career – were the following:
- Successful research models / stories
- Importance of thematic focus
- Supply Chain Management: From roots to contemporary problems
- How to identify a high-impact research topic?
I focused on these topics by exhibiting how I found important problems (answer: from Fortune 500 companies like IBM, GE and Caterpillar) in a thematic fashion (answer: supply chain problems like multi-stage inventory planning, lead time quotation, managing product variety, production planning and designing a responsive supply chain, to name a few), and then provided a framework on how I think – both as a research faculty as well as an editorial board member – on publications: this is the Tayur Novelty Quadrant.
Indeed, related to this, Tava had (independently) created a slide that we have decided to call:
Olsen Trade-off Curve.
I also wanted the audience to think about Professional Growth: starting from a PhD student (without any real-world experience, like me, when I graduated) and building capabilities, through collaboration, to transcend from:
Analyst to Advisor (to CEO).
I did not have time to further discuss how to expand from a wage-earning consultant to a profit-sharing capitalist (see Top Fun). Indeed, just yesterday, Vendia (‘Serverless Blockchain”) announced their Series B ($30 million), where I am an advisor (and, also an investor, as a LP of Neotribe Ventures, that has had two IPOs in the last 6 months, the most recent one that I posted in Look! Another IPO!):
Thank you so much for your support and partnership in this funding round. From the Vendia side, we will be publishing a blog post and amplifying on social. We’d love your help to further amplify our news across your channels. If you would be able to re-tweet or share my posts or Tim’s posts on announcement day – or better yet, publish your own original post we would very much appreciate it.
Best,
Shruthi
It was also great to see all the old friends – Sunil, Kalyan, Tava, Hemant – after so many years. David, as you know, from my post on KaRmA, and I have met frequently, both at his new place in Newport (RI) and in NYC (when we have been both there, separately and independently, working on our own stuff with companies).
As I was wrapping up the post, I received this email from Ansys:
Greetings Professor Tayur:Hope you had a nice long weekend – for a change, the weather cooperated in Northern New England, and we had lots of sunshine.Thanks for engaging with us last Friday – what you had to share with us was very well received by our team.I would like to follow up and process the unrestricted gift from Ansys in support of your work.
For what work? Quantum. Yup:
Novelty.
