Lawrence is originally from Galway, Ireland. He is married, has two children, and enjoys getting out on his bicycle in the picturesque, yet often wet and windy, Irish countryside.
Lawrence is an Associate Editor of R&D Management journal, a peer-reviewed jounral covering the full range of development and innovation, while also co-director of the BComm programme at Cork University Business School (CUBS) at University College Cork (UCC).
“Like a lot of kids of the 1980's, when there was high unemployment in Ireland, I stayed longer in college than I probably should have…because it was better to be a full-time student than an unemployed graduate!”
He studied business as an undergraduate, then got interested in quality management, lean thinking.
He started his PhD around the same time when John Bessant, Joe Tidd and Keith Pavitt first published their book “Managing Innovation” – by then he was interested in how innovation happens ��
As a PhD student in the late '90s, he attended the R&D Management Conference and got to know people [in the community]
“R&D Management, that's my network” he adds. At the R&D conference in Grenoble, Lawrence met Ellen Enkel and Oliver Gassmann. He then started reviewing more for the journal and, in 2014 he was invited to be part of the Editorial Board. “It was a very tight family”, Lawrence adds.
“We've done some very interesting work since then [2014], we've advanced about 10-12 special issues. One, which I was particularly proud of, was the entrepreneurial ecosystems issue that came out late last year.”
Reflecting on his role as AE:
“I'm privileged to receive in papers from the community, some of which are better than I could ever write.”
“Reviewers are the silent heroes of the process (…) 10-12 years ago, we'd have to invite 6-8 reviewers to secure two. Now it can be it can be 15-20.
Sometimes we fail. Everybody is busy, but we would really appreciate your support.”
Lawrence’s thoughts about high-quality research: “Once you've clearly defined what your research question is, and explained how you're going to go about answering it in terms of being methodologically sound, then it’s a case of grounding your findings in the relevant literature to make explicit the novelty and ‘so what’ of your research”.
About his own research, Lawrence says: “In the early days, I was looking at flexible manufacturing systems, automated systems. Now, my unit of analysis is the human being and their role in the collaborative process of driving innovation.”
Lawrence is Director of the largest undergraduate programme, BComm at CUBS at University College Cork. One of his favourite class exercises builds on a learning assignment of Stanford professor Tina Seelig, where 5 EUR cash is given to each student group and they have two weeks to turn it into as much money as they can, while in compliance with ethics and regulations. Funds generated are donated to charities like UNICEF ”a real win-win for everyone”, Lawrence adds.
Read more of Lawrence’s research here.