ACUMEN_Spring2021_FINAL_singlePP

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 25 Stoltz says. “The first can be a valid type of critique, but for this work I’m drawing on supporting literature about innovation that goes back to classical sources in the field. In the second case, I’ve read a third of the articles I analyzed computationally, and inter- viewed 50 management consultants at these firms, so I feel confident concluding that these organiza- tions do value innovation in the way I measure it.” Stoltz’s research raises a conundrum: If creative thinking should yield a competitive advantage in upper echelons of the consulting field, why don’t the top firms work harder to cast their net more broadly? Further, Stoltz asks, what do these recruiting practices mean for the ideas that are circulating within the field? “If organizations are really looking for outside- the-box thinking, it’s valuable to have people in the room with drastically different social origins and back- grounds,” says Stoltz. “It’s a lot harder to jump through the hoops that get those credentials for a lot of people. It may not be the only thing that matters but social class is certainly very important in this regard.” ● “My argument is, if a paper is, for example, bringing together two disconnected silos of concepts in a way that differ from the corpus of the articles, it’s doing something unique.” Stoltz found, after assessing the originality scores on the papers and looking at the profiles of the authors, that the work of consultants who attended Ivy+ schools as undergraduates was the least original. “These authors had statistically significant lower innovation scores, despite being most likely to talk about things like disruption or creative destruc- tion,” Stoltz says. By contrast, this was not the case for authors who instead attended top MBA programs, nor for those who earned their degrees abroad. A New Schema Content analysis has its critics, some of whom say it misses nuance, but Stoltz feels he is on solid ground in this case. “One critique is whether my measure of innovation is a proper measure of it, and another is the question of whether innovation is truly valued here,” “ If organizations are really looking for outside-the-box thinking, it’s valuable to have people in the room with drastically different social origins and backgrounds.”