Russell J. Funk discusses some practical challenges of managing a research pipeline as an assistant professor. He outlines four main challenges: 1) Remembering what you've done over long research projects, and developing good documentation habits. 2) Staying efficient as your time is limited by learning new software tools. 3) Staying at the frontier of your field by continuously learning. 4) Avoiding a clogged pipeline by focusing on a few complementary projects and minimizing switching costs between projects. He provides examples from his own research experiences to illustrate tackling these challenges.

1. Practical Challenges of Managing a Research
Pipeline
Russell J. Funk
Assistant Professor
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota
rfunk@umn.edu
August 7, 2015

2. Roadmap
I My background
I Dilemmas of time
I Specific challenges

3. A little bit about me. . .
I PhD from Michigan
Sociology, 2014
I Assistant Professor,
Strategic Management
and Entrepreneurship,
Minnesota
I interests in
communication and
information networks in
organizations
I focus on health care and
R&D settings
I use di↵erent
methodological
approaches, mostly
quantitative or archival

4. Time is a central challenge in managing a pipeline
Time is a factor in a few ways. . .
I On the one hand, we need to contend
with classic issues of time
management—The amount of time we
have to devote to research at any given
moment is small.
I On the one hand, we also need need to
contend with issues around managing
projects over long periods of time—The
amount of time needed to get a paper
through the pipeline is big.

5. A personal illustration. . .
April 26, 2010 First preliminary draft completed
July 1, 2011 Sent to the American Journal of Sociology
September 26, 2011 Got an R&R
January 29, 2012 Submitted a revision
June 1, 2012 Rejected from the American Journal of Sociology
June 16, 2012 Sent to Administrative Science Quarterly
October 19, 2012 Got an R&R
January 3, 2014 Submitted a revision
April 2, 2014 Got a conditional acceptance
May 1, 2014 Submitted a revision
June 2, 2014 Got an acceptance
September 18, 2014 Submitted final corrections
October 6, 2014 Paper posted online in advance
November 3, 2014 Paper published
May 25, 2013 Sent to Academy of Management Review
July 20, 2013 Got an R&R
March 31, 2014 Submitted a revision
June 10, 2014 Got another R&R
February 12, 2015 Submitted a revision
April 28, 2015 Got a conditional acceptance
June 25, 2015 Submitted a revision
Split into two papers
I The first draft of this paper (with Dan Hirschman) was
completed in April, 2010
I During the review process, on the advice of reviewers, we
split the paper into two
I The first paper appeared in late 2014, the second is just
finishing up now in 2015
I From start to finish, the process took 5 years, and that
excludes early drafting

6. Challenges

7. Challenge 1—Remembering what you’ve done
I When you’re deep into a project like your
dissertation, it’s easy to feel like you’ll never
forget important details
I You just spent 6 weeks cleaning a control
variable, how could you ever not recall your
process?
I But it happens!
I You want to guarantee you’ll be able to use
your data long into the future
Don’t be this guy when a
reviewer asks you to rerun
an analysis 3 years later!

8. Develop a habit of building good documentation
I The best system is whatever one you’ll use regularly
I Want to include all details necessary to replicate your process years
later—file names, locations, versions, urls, contact information
I Things that seem obvious now are easy to forget as time passes and
you start new projects
I Some possible tools: Excel, Word, any text editor, Google Docs,
Evernote, automatic generators for code (e.g., pydoc, roxygen2)

9. Here’s a more extended example: https://github.com/russellfunk/icos/tree/master/matching

10. Challenge 2—Staying e cient
I As you become involved in more projects (and other things) your time
starts to disappear
I Invest in learning software (e.g., qualitative data analysis, reference
managers, spreadsheets), programming, and/or other tools that can
extend your capabilities and make your workflow significantly more
e cient
I Finding the time can be hard, but it pays to go slow now so
you can go fast later!

11. My favorite tool. . .
Python
I a general purpose programming language; huge community
of users
I great for web scraping and pulling data from online sources
I also excellent for automating things like online data
collection
I resources for data analysis, visualization (geographic,
network, textual)

12. Challenge 3—Staying at the frontier
I It’s useful to think about yourself as an
entrepreneur and your research as your
“products”
I You want spend some time thinking not
only about your current pipeline, but also
devoting time to considering what’s next
I Similarly, what kinds of things can you do
to best prepare for changing environments
and to take advantage of future
opportunities?
I It’s easy to let demands of the present take
precedent over preparing for the future

13. My approach to staying at the frontier
I Attend lots of professional development workshops and similar
conference events
I Take advantage of great online courses and resources (e.g., Coursera,
Codecademy)
I Make it a rule to learn one new thing (however small) whenever you
work on a project (e.g., a new literature, method, software tool)
I Adjust the scope of what you want to learn to the scale of the project
. . . for example. . .

14. A concrete example
I As a goal for preparing my AoM
presentations this year, I wanted to learn
how to make a few plots in a new
visualization package
I It took a little longer to make some
slides and I could have made the plots
using tools I already know
I But now I have an option in the future
when I need to do something that
couldn’t be done with other tools

15. Challenge 4—Clogged pipelines
I Part of what makes research fun is that the more you do the more
you see opportunities to do more
I Given pressures to publish, it’s also very tempting to fill your pipeline
with many projects
I Make sure your pipeline doesn’t get clogged!

16. My suggestions for keeping the pipeline flowing
I Adhere to the “No Paper Left Behind” policy
I Focus on projects that are complementary
I Minimize switching costs
I Collaboration is great, but be mindful of the time and energy
investments necessary for successful collaborations
I Be careful not to spread yourself too thin
. . . and finally. . .

17. “People think focus means saying
yes to the thing you’ve got to focus
on. But that’s not what it means at
all. It means saying no to the
hundred other good ideas that
there are. You have to pick
carefully. I’m actually as proud of
the things we haven’t done as the
things I have done. Innovation is
saying no to 1,000 things.”

18. Thank you!