Professor Neil Kay, who holds a professorial position at the Edinburgh Business School, recently delivered a seminar at the prestigious Stanford University in California.
Professor Kay gave the opening seminar of the Spring quarter series, given by specially invited external speakers, to the SCANCOR Institute of Stanford University.
The seminar was entitled 'When QWERTY travelled to Europe: path dependence versus path creation in the evolution of a standard', in which Professor Kay looked at the internationalisation of the QWERTY keyboard standard. The main national variants of QWERTY represent highly efficient adaptations to their specific environments, which adds further weight to earlier research that found QWERTY was designed using efficient design principles.
The seminar was attended by members of the SCANCOR Institute and other members of the Stanford community.
Professor Kay is currently visiting the Institute for Business Innovation at the University of California Berkeley for several months at the invitation of Professor David Teece, Director of the Institute with whom he is co-editing a two-volume series on 'Recent Developments on the Theory of the Firm'. He is also contributing to the Palgrave-Macmillan 'Encyclopaedia of Strategic Management' edited by Professor Teece and Mie Augier of Stanford. Publication in both cases is expected late-2015.