Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Resilient Enterprise

Recently, JetBlue Airways experienced major operational disruptions as a result of a severe winter ice storm in the Northeast.  The company and its CEO David Neeleman are doing everything possible to recover from the problems that plagued their customers for several days and to make sure that such problems do not re-occur in the future.  Mr. Neeleman wrote in an online message to JetBlue customers:  "We have begun putting a comprehensive plan in place to provide better and more timely information to you, more tools and resources for our crewmembers and improved procedures for handling operational difficulties.  Most importantly, we have published the JetBlue Airways Customer Bill of Rights – our official commitment to you of how we will handle operational interruptions going forward – including details of compensation."

JetBlue’s travails remind me once more of the increased fragility of complex systems, and in particular, of the need to apply to 21st century businesses the kind of systems thinking that has long been used in more mature disciplines like civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.  My MIT colleague, Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, recently published a book, The Resilient Enterprise, in which he addresses these issues head on.

How Many Words is a Picture Really Worth?

Over the last six months I have been thinking a lot about virtual worlds and visual, intuitive, human oriented interfaces in general.  I am frankly fascinated by our increasing ability to deal with all kinds of applications in a highly visual, interactive way.  After all, that is how we generally deal with the world around us.  And I suspect that is how we usually think about subjects of all kinds, including those involving people. 

For a while now, we have been able to deal visually with IT applications that have a physical representation, be they in science - research into molecules, pharmaceuticals and galaxies; in engineering - the design of airplanes, bridges and microprocessors; or in personal productivity - interacting with web pages, documents and e-mails; and so on.  But now, because of advances in our ability to simulate and visualize just about anything, we are able to bring these capabilities to a whole new range of applications, from video games to learning; from business process designs to meetings, commerce and many other people-oriented activities.    

This raises many intriguing questions in my mind.  Are we better able to deal with large amounts of information visually than in text or verbal form?  Is there a kind of "broadband" visual channel into our brain, vs. the perhaps more "narrowband" text and verbal channels?  How many words is a picture really worth?  And, most important, what are the implications of the answers to these questions for human endeavors like learning, working and shopping?  Let me offer some speculations on these questions.

A Dialogue on Virtual Worlds

Last week I moderated a panel on Transforming Healthcare, Education and Business through Virtual Worlds at the Westport (CT) Public Library.  There is a lot of interest in virtual worlds - and Second Life in particular, as evidenced by the number of recent newspaper and magazine articles by top technology reporters like Kevin Maney of USA Today and David Kirkpatrick of Fortune. 

Many are trying to figure out whether these are serious subjects that go beyond games and entertainment.  Some of us believe that this is the natural evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web, and therefore worthy of the considerable attention being increasingly devoted to it by the technical and business communities, as well as by the media.  Others, however, feel that this is all the marketing hype of a hungry IT industry looking for its Next Big Thing.  Perhaps the biggest skeptic about the future of virtual worlds and Second Life is Clay Shirky, a consultant, writer and teacher who is Adjunct Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

He, Beth Coleman and Henry Jenkins have started a very interesting dialogue on virtual worlds and Second Life through their respective blogs.  Henry Jenkins is Professor of Literature at MIT, where Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media.  They are both also on the faculty of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.  Here are Henry's, Beth's and Clay's blog entries to kick off their discussion.  I would like to contribute to this civilized exchange by explaining my own point of view on the subject, which I come to from a somewhat different angle than Clay, Beth and Henry. 

Senate Science and Technology Caucus

On January 24, I participated in a panel on The Impact of R&D on US Economic Competitiveness sponsored by the Senate Sciences and Technology Caucus.  The bipartisan Senate S&T Caucus was created to better inform members of congress and their staffs about the importance of science and technology issues, and in particular, about the relationship between science and technology and continued American competitiveness in an increasingly global marketplace.  It is co-chaired by senators Jeff Bingaman and Lamar Alexander.

The panel was moderated by Steve Merrill who is Executive Director of the National Academies' Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy.  The panel included Sumiye Okubo, who is Associate Director for Industry Accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce;  Dale Jorgenson, Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and me. 

My remarks focused on the emerging opportunities in marketplace innovation.  Most statistics used to measure R&D focus on classic or laboratory-based innovation.  However, the nature of R&D is evolving and today more and more R&D and innovation take place outside the laboratory, in particular in those activities that are market-facing and involve people, either as providers or consumers of services.  The reason is that innovation increasingly is occurring not just in the technologies and products themselves - which are developed in laboratories, - but in their application to problems in the marketplace and society at large, in industry after industry, from healthcare to finance to distribution to government.  The opportunities for such marketplace innovation are clearly very large, and they are heavily dependent on innovation in services.