Getting a PhD changed my life fundamentally. I was working on applied projects with the World Bank and IMF, travelling to about 20 countries to collect data for my economic development and innovation research. Once I published that information, I realised there were so many people other than development economics who were interested in what I was working on. I invested a lot of my time looking at areas far afield from my original research.
I ended up looking at: the effects of human physiology on economic development; the interaction of the hypothalamus on human consumption patterns; and how to leverage the theories of Montesquieu from 350 years ago to forecast markets in 100 different countries simultaneously!
As time went on, I realised that my PhD afforded me complete liberty to work on problems that were unsolvable in other domains. When you’re a professor, you can work on projects that might take 5, 10 or 15 years. That time horizon is far too long for a typical business.
There are no boundaries in business
One of the things I’ve been working on is machine learning – and creating artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically author text materials, including books. In particular, my research into computational linguistics allowed me to collaborate with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a mobile-telephone platform for use in Africa. We were able to deliver weather forecasts and farming tips in local dialects for the very first time. Right now our platform is used in 68 countries around the world in over 120 dialects.
All of that doesn’t sound very business oriented, but if you look at the core of my original thesis, it was about creating algorithms to solve business problems… and in business there are no boundaries!
