Seattle Innovation Symposium Overview

Background and Goals

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“People say the Internet happened quickly. They’re crazy. It took forever”.

-       Bob Taylor, Internet and Xerox PARC pioneer

It’s common for business people to point to the 1990s—specifically, to the 1995 Netscape IPO—as the “beginning of the Internet.” This claim is unsupported by fact. The Internet was “born” in 1968, more than 25 years earlier. Internet pioneers, such as Bob Taylor, in interviews express frustration at how slowly business came to realize the importance of a collection of technologies that we now consider extremely valuable. Internet pioneers worked hard to prove the value of the new technologies, but business took a very long time to “get it.”

During the past three years, Professor Rob Austin (Harvard Business School) and Richard Nolan (University of Washington Business School) have studied the evolution of the Internet interviewing Internet pioneers and innovators in a research effort aimed at answering the question:

• Why did it take nearly three decades for the Internet computing paradigm, based on collaborative networks of interconnected computers, to emerge prominently into the business world?

Important corollary questions that motivate the research include:

• Could this happen again?
• Is it happening again?

(See Austin/Nolan HBS Working Paper, On Identifying and Tracking the Next “Killer App: Reflections on an Effort in Progress”, June 2004).

The Symposium topic builds on the exploratory work of Austin/Nolan and other efforts to understand and accelerate the entry and transfer of new computing paradigms into the global business community. Multi-disciplinary researchers at the University of Washington in the areas of Computer Science, Information Sciences, Business, and Law have been informally discussing the issues and puzzles of productive IT assimilation into the economy for some time. These researchers have extended the dialogues with many of the companies in the Seattle area like Microsoft, amazon.com, Starbucks, drugstore.com, and Real Networks that have performed well in capturing the value of new technologies.

In addition, we note that there has been a great deal of work in building IT architectures focused on the individual versus the technology. This work includes single secure sign on to the web, identity-based computing, web services, and other similar initiatives, all of which are undoubtedly important. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies are allowing small computers with telecommunications to be embedded into various things like products, cases, pallets, and parts of cars and airplanes so that information on the thing can be acted upon through other computers. RFID technology is also used to secure children and pets, allowing parents and owners to know where their child or dog is at all times. However, it is a preliminary conclusion that the most important future applications will not arise from a focus on advantages to individuals that we can foresee and design. Instead, it will arise from advantages to many entities (individuals, organizations, markets) that are not currently foreseen, but which will emerge when information about contexts is made available to people as they do their work.

Awareness of context has potentially profound implications. When employees or customers “always knowing where they are” in a complex environment, they will use technology in unexpected ways, possibly to great business benefit. Leading companies in the retail industry (e.g., Wal-Mart) are already aggressively pushing the potential of technology to make an order of magnitude improvement in their vast global logistic systems for procuring and getting products to their retail outlets. Other retailers (Sears, for example) are using technology to understand the way that customers shop their stores. We anticipate that second generation uses that emerge from awareness of context might form a qualitative leap even over the significant advantages currently being proposed.

In the manufacturing industry, companies like Boeing, which have to keep track of the performance of the millions of parts that go into an airplane for the life of the airplane, are working with customers to use information technology to accomplish this formidable task.  In the process, they are betting the commercial success of the new Boeing 787 jet liner on the effective exploitation and application of the leading technologies associated with IT-enabled extended awareness of context.  The all-composite fuselage and wings will directly incorporate the senor technologies and neural network architectures in order to monitor fatigue points, and act upon them.  The senor information will enable Boeing to considerably reduce the risks of material failure, and reduce the time it takes to more fully understand the characteristics of the material as used in major aircraft construction.  This is an example of the implementation of an important new business practice of real-time “sensing and responding.”[1]

Like so many other sea change technologies, computer-based awareness of context will probably take years and several technical generations to fully understand and exploit. Its initial impact can be thought of as analogous to the experience of many people when they first put on a hearing aid. They hear all the sounds, which are, at first, more confusing than helpful. Our brains sort out what we hear or see in a way that is relevant to us; the other sounds and sights are sorted out as “noise” and ignored. The brain learns to do this over time. We think a similar process is likely as we learn about our new IT-enabled awareness of our extended context.

The creation of ideas stemming from new technologies needs to be nurtured, and facilitated with a better understanding of serendipity characteristic of innovation, and the potholed road of innovation whereby the ideas are transferred into significant economic impact. We believe that with better understanding of the IT idea generation and innovation process, companies will be able to take action earlier to prepare for the assimilation of the technologies in a manner to realize real productive gains earlier. This is the intent of the Seattle Innovation Conference.

Simple to Complex Innovation Processes

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The video case development methodology will be based on Professor Austin and his research team’s patterned interview approach where video taping of actual processes carried out by “expert innovators”. Case studies will be created for study in three arenas:

• Simple single innovator processes
• Complex factory multi-innovator team processes
• Complex organizational innovator processes at the enterprise level in e-Retailing

Multi-disciplinary researchers at the University of Washington in the areas of Computer Science, Information Sciences, Business, and Law have been focused on better understanding the issues and puzzles of productive IT assimilation into the economy for some time. These researchers have extended the dialogues with many of the companies in the Seattle area like Microsoft, amazon.com, Starbucks, drugstore.com, and Real Networks that have performed well in capturing the value of new technologies. Nevertheless, while the Seattle region has more than their share of successful software companies, the overall survival of innovative start-up companies is still far less than it should be. A better understanding of the issue of “sustainable innovation” is important to improving survivability of start-ups, and building the businesses to levels that make a significant impact on the economy.

The creation of ideas stemming from new technologies needs to be nurtured, and facilitated with a better understanding of serendipity characteristic of innovation, and the potholed road of innovation whereby the ideas are transferred into significant economic impact. We believe that with better understanding of the IT idea generation and innovation process, companies will be able to take action earlier to prepare for the assimilation of the technologies in a manner to realize real productive gains earlier. This is the intent of the Seattle Innovation Symposium Series.