Once Desperate, Thrice Slow
Desperate people do desperate things. Early on in my academic journey, I was pretty desperate to produce an output. During such an instance, there was conference on innovation coming up at UNU-MERIT. I needed to be obedient and not to rest on my hoars as a young academic. I had an idea of a paper that could fly. If my memory serves me right, titled the paper, 'the employment effects of process and product innovation in Nigeria.' I strove and I strove and I wrote and wrote. There were some papers based on other climes that I could glean thoughts from too. I got as much useful material that I could get, did preliminary analysis and sent it off. Ultimately, the paper came back rejected for the conference. As I went further down the academic road, I realised that paper was not original in the least. If I know what I know now I should have done a plagiarism test before sending it out. But I was very grateful I was not accepted for that conference. In the spirit of transformation,