Medium Academics Hour: why I write the way I write

On January 29th, I took part in the Medium Academics Hour, a video of which was posted yesterday with the full transcript and some selected quotes.

Moderated by Scott Lamb, Medium’s VP of Content, the other guests besides me as Professor of IE University were Carin-Isabel Knoop, Executive Director of Harvard Business School, and Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor at the University of London. Our conversation revolved around how academics can make the most of a platform like Medium.

I talked about my approach: using my articles as a way to keep up to date on a dynamic subject like technology and innovation, which, because I teach at a university, means I have to take a generalist approach. My daily articles are basically a way of forcing myself to keep up to speed, review the sector, and also to find good topics for discussion in my classes.

That is really the reason why I write the way I do, filling my texts with links much more than is generally the case: on the one hand, I want my students to get used to the idea that what I write isn’t necessarily important, since is simply an opinion — more or less informed — and rather than accepting my conclusions, they should instead click on the links and read the articles that I used to reach those conclusions, because they may well reach different ones…