BIF-3: Session 5 (Wladawsky-Berger, Christensen, Lane, Levy)
Today I attended BIF-3: The Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence. Today is the second day, but the first for me. The conference has some big names like Warwick, RI native Walt Mossberg, dancing Maverick Mark Cuban, and Jason Fried of 37signals. Below are my notes from the first session of the second day.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger (interviewed by Walt Mossberg)
Wladawsky-Berger is vice president of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments that are critical to the future of the IT industry. He has led a number of companywide initiatives like Linux, Grid Computing and, in October 2002, IBM’s On Demand Business initiative. He is visiting professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and adjunct professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School. Wladawsky-Berger was born in Cuba and came to the US at the age of 15, in 2001 he was named Hispanic Engineer of the Year.
- With IBM for 37 years (1970-2007)
- Your expertise could be your undoing
- If the environment shifts, the leader needs to adapt
- Can a company reinvent itself if it doesn’t have a near death experience?
- Apple is a great example of a near death experience
- What helped IBM was becoming a more outward-facing company, less private
- Microsoft’s problem: How can you be against Linux and against open document formats, yet claim to be so innovative?
- Microsoft has plenty of researchers, but “The game is played in the field, not in the dugout.”
- The innovation needs to be more public
- Virtual worlds
- IBM employees found meetings in Second Life were more human than conference calls (not more human than face-to-face meetings, though)
- “The killer apps are meetings, and learning & training”
- Costs of virtual meetings are the cost of the PC
- Conference call technologies do not scale. Can have a conference like BIF-3 in a virtual world.
- IBM built classrooms in Second Life.
- You can’t currently express much emotion in Second Life
- For example, in a Rolling Stones Second Life concert, you can’t see the strut and facial expressions of Mick Jagger
- But films like Happy Feet show us what is possible in the future.
Also see: Brian Jepson’s summary or Erica Driver’s summary.
Clay Christensen (interviewed by Walt Mossberg)
Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. His research and teaching interests center on managing innovation and creating new growth markets. A seasoned entrepreneur, Christensen founded three successful companies: CPS Corporation, Innosign, and Innosign Capital. Christensen is also author or co-author of five books and is presently completing two books concerning the problems of our health care and public education systems.
- The business unit was designed not to evolve
- The corporation evolves as the individual business units die
- You can’t catch up by just offering better features and better prices
- You need to disrupt the current model
- You can’t out-Google Google. You need a better idea.
- Is it possible for Google to be disrupted?
- “I can’t think of it now. But it will happen.”
- iPhone is a sustaining innovation, rather than a disrupting one
- The platform will be disrupting, Clay predicts Nokia will be better positioned to disrupt than Apple (Walt disagrees, becuase Nokia’s products suck and they don’t “get” software)
- Writing 2 books:
- Disrupting education
- Disrupting health care
- 2 steps to disruption
- Easier technology needs to be the enabler
- The change needs to be associated with a concrete business model
Also see: Brian Jepson’s notes.
Stephen Lane
Lane co-founded Item Group and over two decades has built up a dynamic and entrepreneurial design and development firm. Steve focuses on defining and executing new initiatives, both corporate and long-range planning, capitalization and strategic partnerships. Lane thrives as an active leader in the design, entrepreneurial and venture communities, and is an adjunct faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the department of industrial design.
- Showed film of trauma bay following a motor vehicle accident
- Chock full of chances for design improvement
- Medical device companies are competitive to a fault, won’t work together
- More wires in trauma bay than you can even see
- Trip hazards, entanglements
- Item is working to design the trauma bay of the future
Ellen Levy
Levy is currently the founding Managing Director at Silicon Valley Connect. She also serves as the Deputy Chair for the Global Health track within the Clinton Global Initiative; she is the Network Advisor to venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson; she is a consultant to the Kauffman Foundation; and she is an Industry Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology in the School of Engineering.
- “Living the Network Effect”
- Forget Jack of All Trades, Master of None
- How about Master Jack of All Trades?
- MediaX at Stanford
- Innovation: A New Model for University-Industry Collaboration
- Universities are split up into disciplines. Real world industry problems are not.
- Must find out how to come up with a single point to cross the unieversity-industry barrier
- You can virtually organize the structure without actually changing it.
- Tech transfer does not equal idea transfer
- “It’s all about the ROI”
- Research of interest
- Results of importance
- Return on investment
- Innovation: 3 guiding principles
- Start with good questions
- Relationships over transactions
- Sufficient metrics don’t exist yet
- Network Effect: Key Challenges
- How do you capture the Value you create?
- How do you scale?
- How do you answer “What do you do?”
Also see: Josh Calone’s summary.
Update: Yeah, sorry about that. I opted to kinda sit back and listen instead of blogging the last couple sessions. Glad I did, too. They were excellent, right up to the final interview of Mark Cuban by Walt Mossberg (Brian’s summary). All in all it was a different kind of conference with amazingly varying stories—but all of inspirational innovation. ‘Twas a great job putting it together by the BIF folks.