A sign hanging in Dr. Avimanyu “Avi” Datta’s corner office in the State Farm Hall of Business could serve as his motto: “Don’t grow up. It’s a trap.” Unlike many adults, Datta hasn’t abandoned his youthful passions or lost his curiosity about life. That’s not Datta’s style.
Datta is a professor and researcher of strategic management and entrepreneurship, the Gary R. Gemberling Faculty Scholar in Business, and director of the George R. and Martha Means Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the College of Business. However, he continues to pursue his childhood interests in painting and mechanical watches, loves to experiment with coffeemaking, and can now add award-winning science fiction writer to his LinkedIn profile.
Appears InSince 2022, Datta has published three sci-fi novels, all part of his “Time Corrector Series,” “employing nonlinear narratives that challenge the core assumption that causality and time are linear.” The second book, The Movement, is a fan favorite. It received 4.8 out of 5 stars on Amazon and won the Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal for the best Sci-Fi Novel in 2023. Earlier this year, he published his latest novel, The Reset, which garnered 100 reviews in less than two months.
Datta arrived at Illinois State in 2011 after finishing his Ph.D. from Washington State University. He was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2017 and became full professor in 2021. He began leading the Means Center in 2019. He collaborates with researchers in the U.S. and Japan, where he was a Visiting Fellow at Hitotsubashi University’s Institute of Innovation Research. He has over 75 scholarly contributions on the intersection of technology, strategy, and entrepreneurship. His research has been featured in top journals like Technovation, R&D Management, Information Systems Research, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Small Business Management, and Journal of International Management.
Datta’s varied interests mirror his conversation, which flowed fluidly over disparate subjects during an hourlong interview last spring. He touched on his childhood in India, quantum mechanics, Formula One racing, Chopin’s compositions, Marcus Licinius Crassus (the wealthiest man in Rome) in an aside about the rise of the middle class, the mechanics of the Spring Drive Movement in Grand Seiko watches, and most relevant to his job, the role of innovation in large companies. His intellect knows few bounds. He also talked about his books and research in the following interview, which has been edited for brevity.
Are you surprised by the success of your sci-fi books?
It took me by surprise, primarily since, on average, self-published authors sell 150 books in their lifetime, and I have crossed over 10,000. But I don’t make much money since the cost of promoting and everything else goes beyond what I make. I hope that once a fourth or fifth one comes out, I will get enough traction to bring in literary agents.
I love my job as an academic. I love my research, so there is no chance I will stop this. Being able to connect several things reasonably is necessary for a successful academic. And in my books, several stories are interconnected.
How has your entrepreneurship research informed your books?
In my story, the protagonist was a professor but then got bored with it and became an entrepreneur and an inventor. My graduate assistant once told me that my protagonist is Avi on steroids. So, there are some similarities, but I try to keep the walls separate for my sanity.
My first mechanical watch was from a small Indian company called Hindustan Metal Tools, which makes mechanical watches. When my father first opened it, I saw everything moving in circles. I said, “Why do we measure time as linear?” He said, “It’s not. It’s just the way we try to understand time.” Later on, I read, “There is no absolute past or present. Everything is happening at this moment, right now.” And maybe all the future has already happened, and the past is yet to happen. We just label things as past or future based on the order in which we experience them. That made me think, can I construct a novel in which somebody has the power to view time like this? And how would that impact their lives, the people they love?
So what I did was I tried to incorporate struggles, such as love relationships, racism, and all those things, into my story so that people can actually understand it in a better way without having to understand quantum mechanics. In a way, I believe my research is a sleeping pill for the insomniac. My stories create insomniacs.
How did you get involved in entrepreneurship-related research?
I started doing my research in information systems (IS). And during that time, the IS market was not very strong. So, it was combined with entrepreneurship, information systems, and management. I was looking into patterns in the IT (information technology) industry and investigated the entrepreneurial steps to create innovation.
Previously, I worked on large firms’ ability to create new ideas, but in the last few years, I’ve also been doing qualitative research because of my trips to Japan and other things. For instance, I’m looking into the luxury watch brand Grand Seiko. They created a movement, which is part quartz, part mechanical, but does not require a battery. It’s called the Spring Drive, where the mainspring is wound, and the unwinding power of the mainspring moves the hands in the same manner as the mechanical watch.
The Spring Drive is superior to mechanical watches in impact resistance because it adopts a crystal oscillator. For the Spring Drive, wear and damage occurs less than mechanical watches since the spinning speed of the glide wheel is adjusted by a “contact-free” electromagnetic brake.
Seiko took about 20 years to develop this movement. The underlying objective was not to make money but to mix quartz’s accuracy with the beauty of a mechanical movement. This is as significant as Bugatti’s W16 engine or Bösendorfer’s 97 key piano.
After becoming a full professor, I decided not to treat innovation as a data point but to spend time understanding its philosophy. For instance, I am fascinated with something that interests me in Formula One racing.
What’s that?
I love speed and time and have liked Formula One racing since I was a little kid. So, I was thinking about how making your own engine impacts performance. Ferrari makes their own engine. Mercedes, too. Red Bull does not. McLaren does not. So, does this impact performance? In the past, yes, but now, not so much.
So, I looked into the entire idea of core products, such as building your own engine to be more successful. That does not work in the case of Formula One. So, what exactly drives success? Is it the driver? Is it the team all together? Should we look deeper into the research of core competencies? This is what’s driving that particular research.
What research are you proud of?
One I’m very proud of was published in Technological Forecasting & Social Change. There is so much confusion about innovation research. The confusion has been created by academics, who believe that radical innovation is breakthrough innovation. Breakthrough, if you look at the dictionary, is when you cross an obstacle. And you can create a breakthrough without incurring a radical innovation. A radical innovation occurs when a firm does something different than before. But you can create breakthroughs with incremental innovation, such as when the first car could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in under 3 seconds. That was all created through incremental innovation by adding more and more cylinders to an engine. But the thing is, it’s not radical. A radical innovation would be the electric vehicle.
So, we looked at the whole literature on innovation and devised a framework for looking at breakthrough innovation. This is one of the last papers I published, and I’m pretty proud of it because it synthesizes what we know and tells what we should know.
When you started at the Means Center, you said you wanted to reorient it into more of a research center. Have you been able to do that?
It’s a process, but we have measurable output regarding that. I created a means by which faculty can access software for entrepreneurship, like Stata and EndNote. We fund conference presentations if a faculty’s paper gets accepted into top conferences like the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, or the Babson Entrepreneurship Conference. We also offer faculty support to those who need help editing a paper.
Previously, the Accelerator Program for student entrepreneurs was mainly done through the director, but now we have included professors from other departments, one of the associate deans, and faculty from entrepreneurship to listen to the students’ ideas so that we can give them better guidance for improvement.
You did not start writing fiction until 2020. Did the COVID pandemic have something to do with this
No, I was on my sabbatical. I thought I would collect much data for my sabbatical, but it was done quickly. I had this dream. Let’s write a story. And so I wrote a story. First, it was not science fiction. That actually changed after I rewrote the whole thing over and over.
What inspired you to write the series?
The ending of the first one was a cliffhanger. My editor asked me if I planned to write another one because people liked the cliffhanger. I said, “OK, let’s call it the ‘Time Connector Series.’” And so I started writing my second book, which is much better written. I wrote my first book while learning how to write. I was more at ease with writing in the second and the third book.
People actually like the second book way more than the first one, and the third one is almost as good as the second one, if not better, but the third one is a little cognitively challenging because not only is it nonlinear, but there are two realities. They are interconnecting, and one particular character can dwell in both realities. But people have said it’s been rewarding enough to have that cognitive strain on their brains. One reviewer, I was told, lost his mind while reading the book, and I take it as a compliment.
How did you learn how to create these complex plots?
It mainly comes from how I look at cubism painting and how the pieces are put together. I write the story like that. And honestly, if I could paint the story, I would paint it on a canvas, but it is way too complicated to depict that in a particular painting. Other times, I shut my eyes and listen to some of my favorite pieces of music—Chopin’s Ballade no 4, Raindrop Prelude, and Liszt’s Consolation No. 3. The plot emerges through the notes.
I have also seen a lot of nonlinear storytelling. The famous Japanese animator Satoshi Kon’s work, especially Paprika, has scenes that even Christopher Nolan adopted. They’re very nonlinear. For example, he cuts midway into a scene, gets back to the scene with a different point of view, and continues from there. In my work, sometimes there’s a dream, then it gets to reality, but from a different person’s point of view. This is fascinating.
My third and second books open in a way where people would say, “OK, I don’t see how it is going based on how the previous book ended.” But slowly, the story converges. Many reviewers and editors told me to write a simpler plot, saying readers won’t understand it. They underestimate the readers’ ability. If they don’t like it, that’s fine. It’s my story. I’ll tell it the way I want to tell it.
