This was the last remark from my supervisor at our meeting today, and I have to say I have failed him again

A month ago I was asked to write a literature review paper in the area of open innovation and open source, and to make it more fun I had to aim for publishing it (yeah there are journals for literature reviews as well). Without much prior experience, I basically went with my own guts on how to do this. I did not have a systematic way of collecting articles to review, just hit a few keywords to the search engine and downloaded the ones I could. And of course I did not document this “research process” at all. Then when I started to review those articles, I was more on the mission to identify new theories, new concepts, unexplored areas etc and was too excited doing that, instead of the old fashion reviewing.

Result? My supervisor basically said all I had done was just making some potential conclusions, for a body of research that I had not yet clearly identified, nor reviewed properly. He added that this process should be non-creative, non-exciting and very restrictive… so if I did not feel any of that probably I was not doing it right

Actually I was not that upset, because from this little incident I sort of understand myself a bit better. I have a tendency to skip all the rules of a game and try to define new ones, like as I have some sort of authority to do that autonomously. That’s how I behave as a lecturer I guess (at least most students would agree that I challenge the status quo quite often, I mean in terms of student workloads, hehe), I have the total freedom to come up with a set of conclusions for things that I think I know (or even think I know better than others), and preach those “me-idea” to the students. Research is the other way round, especially at this early stage, I have to exclude “me-idea” from my paper. I cannot read a few articles and then feel that I have the same level of understanding of the field as those people who have spent years to research there. For that, my idea does not count, and I have to do a self-filter in my mind when I write.

As my supervisor said, it was like sudoku – you have 9 numbers in the game to play with, and all I am learning now is the rules to play this game and be familiar with the 9 numbers… but not try to think about changing the games with even more numbers and how exciting that would be etc. I know in some way it does sound anti-creative, but I guess I can be creative once I go thru this stage, building a solid foundation of knowledge that I borrow from others and so I do not have to spend all the time to justify them.

I’ll try again!