I am a long standing fan of the Ig Nobel awards. The Ig Nobel awards are an initiative by the magazine Air (Annals of Improbable Research) and are handed out on a yearly basis � often by real Nobel Prize winners � to people whose research �makes people laugh and then think� (although its motto used to be to �honor people whose achievements cannot or should not be reproduced" � but I guess the organisers had to first experience the �then think� bit themselves).
With a few exceptions they are handed out for real research, done by academics, and published in scientific journals. Here are some of my old time favourites:
� BIOLOGY 2002, Bubier, Pexton, Bowers, and Deeming.�Courtship behaviour of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain� British Poultry Science 39(4)
� INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH 2002. Karl Kruszelnicki (University of Sydney). �for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint � who gets it, when, what color, and how much�
� MATHEMATICS 2002. Sreekumar and Nirmalan (Kerala Agricultural University). �Estimation of the total surface area in Indian Elephants� Veterinary Research Communications 14(1)
� TECHNOLOGY 2001, Jointly to Keogh (Hawthorn), for patenting the wheel (in 2001), and the Australian Patent Office for granting him the patent.
� PEACE 2000, the British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout �Bang!�
� LITERATURE 1998, Dr. Mara Sidoli (Washington) for the report �farting as a defence against unspeakable dread�. Journal of analytical psychology 41(2)
To the best of my knowledge, there is (only) one individual who has not only won an Ig Nobel Award, but also a Nobel Prize. That person is Andre Geim. Geim � who is now at the University of Manchester � for long held the habit of dedicating a fairly substantial proportion of his time to just mucking about in his lab, trying to do �cool stuff�. In one of such sessions, together with his doctoral student Konstantin Novoselov, he used a piece of ordinary sticky tape (which allegedly they found in a bin) to peel off a very thin layer of graphite, taken from a pencil. They managed to make the layer of carbon one atom thick, inventing the material �graphene�.
In another session, together with Michael Berry from the University of Bristol, he experimented with the force of magnetism. Using a magnetized metal slab and a coil of wire in which a current is flowing as an electromagnet, they tried to make a magnetic force that exactly balanced gravity, to try and make various objects �float�. Eventually, they settled on a frog � which, like humans, mostly consists of water � and indeed managed to make it levitate.
The one project got Geim the Ig Nobel; the other one got him the Nobel Prize.
�Mucking about� was the foundation of these achievements. The vast majority of these experiments doesn�t go anywhere; some of them lead to an Ig Nobel and makes people laugh; others result in a Nobel Prize. Many of man�s great discoveries � in technology, medicine or art � have been achieved by mucking about. And many great companies were founded by mucking about, in a garage (Apple), a dorm room (Facebook), or a kitchen and a room above a bar (Xerox).
Unfortunately, in strategy research we don�t muck about much. In fact, people are actively discouraged from doing so. During pretty much any doctoral consortium, junior faculty meeting, or annual faculty review, a young academic in the field of Strategic Management is told � with ample insistence � to focus, figure out in what subfield he or she wants to be known, �who the five people are that are going to read your paper� (heard this one in a doctoral consortium myself), and �who your letter writers are going to be for tenure� (heard this one in countless meetings). The field of Strategy � or any other field within a business school for that matter � has no time and tolerance for mucking about. Disdain and a weary shaking of the head are the fates of those who try, and step off the proven path in an attempt to do something original with uncertain outcome: �he is never going to make tenure, that�s for sure�.
And perhaps that is also why we don�t have any Nobel Prizes.