• November–December 2022
• Article

Space is becoming a potential source of value for businesses across a range of sectors, including agriculture, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and tourism. To understand what the opportunities are for your company, the authors advise you to consider the four ways in which using space could create value: data, capabilities, resources, and markets. For most companies thinking about their space strategy over the next five to 10 years, data will be the dominant focus. For instance, many companies are turning to remote-sensing satellites for data that will inform business decisions. Whether it’s tracking the number of cars parked in retail locations, detecting costly and environmentally damaging methane leaks from natural-gas wells, or assessing soil type and moisture content to maximize crop yields, creative uses for data gathered from space abound. Companies looking further ahead will want to explore the value to be gained from conducting activities in space, utilizing space assets, and meeting demand from the new space age. Businesses engaging with commercial space should be willing to experiment and should look for partners.

• December 2022
• Case

Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500 companies-including Microsoft, Samsung, and General Electric-embraced digital labor solutions, enterprise adoption lagged far behind smaller businesses and startups. Despite the promising potential benefits, concerns persisted about navigating labor regulations, ensuring appropriate vetting, and guaranteeing the quality of work. Sarah Tang, the newly appointed Vice President of Enterprise at Freelancer, Ltd., took on the challenge of crafting the growth strategy, operations, and sales of Freelancer's services to Fortune 500 companies. What it would take to convince more enterprises of the potential of on-demand freelance labor that could help them hire skilled freelancers in volume or in multiple countries simultaneously? What did the future hold for open work practices between enterprises and digital labor markets?

• November 22, 2022
• Article

There are long-standing concerns that peer review, which is foundational to scientific institutions like journals and funding agencies, favors conservative ideas over novel ones. We investigate the association between novelty and the acceptance of manuscripts submitted to a large sample of scientific journals. The data cover 20,538 manuscripts submitted between 2013 and 2018 to the journals Cell and Cell Reports and 6,785 manuscripts submitted in 2018 to 47 journals published by the Institute of Physics Publishing. Following previous work that found that a balance of novel and conventional ideas predicts citation impact, we measure the novelty and conventionality of manuscripts by the atypicality of combinations of journals in their reference lists, taking the 90th percentile most atypical combination as “novelty” and the 50th percentile as “conventionality.” We find that higher novelty is consistently associated with higher acceptance; submissions in the top novelty quintile are 6.5 percentage points more likely than bottom quintile ones to get accepted. Higher conventionality is also associated with acceptance (+16.3% top–bottom quintile difference). Disagreement among peer reviewers was not systematically related to submission novelty or conventionality, and editors select strongly for novelty even conditional on reviewers' recommendations (+7.0% top–bottom quintile difference). Manuscripts exhibiting higher novelty were more highly cited. Overall, the findings suggest that journal peer review favors novel research that is well situated in the existing literature, incentivizing exploration in science and challenging the view that peer review is inherently antinovelty.