Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Creativity, Innovation and Design

I spent last week in London at Imperial College where earlier this year I was appointed adjunct professor in the Innovation Group of the Tanaka Business School.  As you can imagine, in such a world-class institution there are quite a number of exciting projects going on.  But one in particular caught my attention.

In early June, Imperial College and the Royal College of Art announced the creation of a new center - Design-London - to bring together the disciplines of design, engineering, technology and business to address jointly the challenges of innovation in an increasingly global, competitive economy.  Design-London aims to "create an innovation triangle between design (represented by the Royal College of Art), engineering and technology (represented by the Imperial College Faculty of Engineering), and business and management (represented by Imperial's Tanaka Business School)."

Two sides of this triangle are familiar territory.  For the last few years I have been immersed in IBM's efforts to bring technology and engineering practices to the world of business and complex organizations in general.  As part of this initiative, we have been working with universities to help create a new discipline - Services Sciences is the name we have been using in IBM - to conduct research and develop educational programs to better address these problems.  Such a new discipline must invariably bring together technology and engineering with business and management, which is why I chose to become affiliated with two such interdisciplinary departments - MIT's Engineering Systems Division and Imperial College's Innovation Group. 

The third leg of this triangle is very intriguing - namely the inclusion of Design and the Royal College of Arts as a full partner in Design-London.  What are creative disciplines - and a college of arts, for heaven's sake - doing side-by-side with the hard, analytical disciplines that are charged with pushing the economy into the future - engineering and management, technology and business?  You are mixing the people who run companies and build things with the creative types? 

But the more I thought about it, the more I started appreciating the sheer brilliance of this move.  After all, we are talking about innovation.

Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and Organization

Last month I attended Supernova 2007 in San Francisco.  Along with Sun's CTO Greg Papadapolous and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, I participated in a panel on What will drive future growth and innovation in the technology sector?

In my opening remarks I focused on the opportunities to leverage the huge advances in technologies, standards and communications to enable us to look at a whole organization - an enterprise, an industry eco-system or an economy - as a holistic, integrated system, linking together processes, information and people.  Needless to say, these are incredibly complex systems. The tools we are using to design, build and manage them today are quite primitive, and they thus require considerable labor-based services.

We need breakthrough innovations to enable us to better deal with these increasingly complex organizational systems.  Engineering has done a very good job developing advanced tools and methodologies - e.g., CAD/CAM, simulations, models, etc - to help us deal with very complex physical systems, like airplanes, skyscrapers and microprocessors.  This has enabled very high quality and productivity in the production of physical objects. 

Our challenge and opportunity now is to develop similarly sophisticated tools and methodologies to deal with complex organizational systems like those found across industries and economies.  Compared to what we’ve done so far, this is hard, - very, very hard.

Why is that so?  To begin with, organizational systems must continuously evolve to keep up with the requirements of a fast-changing marketplace.  Moreover, people play a prominent role in such systems.  People-based processes and activities are particularly unpredictable, a point I glibly expressed in my Supernova remarks by saying that "processes involving people are a lot more complicated because people are a pain in the ass. They are not deterministic."

Nihilism vs Optimism

I have been thinking a lot about the culture battles that are raging around the world.  The recent failed car bomb attacks in the UK are but the latest reminder that we are truly in a global conflict with a variety of enemies spread around the world, who are organized into small groups and integrated into the civilian populations of their countries.  It is hard to comprehend why anyone would use tactics designed to inflict as much damage as possible to innocent civilians, whether in London, Baghdad or Tel-Aviv, unless one appreciates that what these terrorists - criminals - truly want is to destroy the way of life of those they are attacking in order to impose their own.

Not long ago I read a New York Times op-ed by Tom Friedman, - "œThe Quiet Americans," - which I found personally useful in thinking about these culture wars.  Having just recently participated in three different college graduation commencements, including that of his own daughter, Tom was reflecting on the young people who were now going out into the world, and how "quietly determined [they are] not to let this age of terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America they are about to inherit." 

Tom very nicely captured what might be the essence of these culture battles when he said: "If the dominant clash of my generation was between communism and capitalism, the dominant clash of this generation is between nihilism - as” represented by suicide bombers who try to blow up hope from New York to Baghdad -” and optimism that a better social and political order can be created."

Trust, Responsibility and the Globally Integrated Enterprise

There is general agreement that the corporation is going through dramatic changes in the 21st century, driven by a combination of advances in information technologies - especially the Internet - and the heightened competitive pressures brought about by globalization.  For example, consider one of the major findings of IBM's Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) 2.0:

"The nature of competition — increasingly intense, global and unpredictable — requires strength across the board.  So the objective is to decompose the enterprise into its component parts, understand with great precision what is truly differentiating — where the enterprise has strengths and weaknesses — and then make decisions about how to build, buy or partner for world-class capability.  In this model, companies can focus their energies on their true point of differentiation, instead of trying to master many domains and ultimately squander competitive advantage by dispersing focus and investment. Rather than existing as static and fixed organizations, more enterprises could essentially become an aggregation of specialized entities with complementary interests — expanding, contracting and reconfiguring themselves in a way that best adapts to or even anticipates market dynamics."

Business strategist and author Don Tapscott has focused on the changing nature of companies in his research at New Paradigm and has written extensively about what he calls Enterprise 2.0 or the Open Networked Enterprise.  For example, in this article he says:

"We came to the conclusion that the corporation is arguably going through the biggest architectural change in a century. Throughout the 20th century we created wealth through vertically integrated companies that did everything from soup to nuts. . . . But the rise of the Internet means that boundaries are far more porous. A new model is emerging, enabled by IT and networks. Vertically integrated companies are unbundling into business Webs, or what I call the open networked enterprise. These are companies that think and act differently, that take a new approach to doing business in a highly networked world."

Dealing with the (Virtual) World in our Minds

One of my favorite films is the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet.  Loosely inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest, the film had a considerable influence on science fiction movies and TV programs over the next few decades, including Star Trek and Star Wars.  But what I really like about Forbidden Planet is its very clever story line.

In the 23rd century, a spaceship is dispatched to a faraway planet to find out what happened to the crew of a previous expedition to the planet twenty years earlier that has not been heard from since.  They discover only two survivors - a grumpy scientist; his young, beautiful daughter; and a friendly, super-intelligent robot named Robby. 

Eventually, we discover the secret of this mysterious planet.  Many years before, the planet was inhabited by a very advanced civilization - the Krell.  Their final project was to build a huge machine designed to let them physically materialize anything they wanted with a mere thought.  They finally finished the machine, turned it on, and were promptly wiped out.

The Krell forgot one crucial thing - the Monsters of the Id.  Even though they were highly civilized, their subconscious minds, with all their fears and hatreds, were unleashed by their powerful machine, and the monsters thus created from their darkest urges killed them all in one single night.

Somehow, Forbidden Planet really touched a nerve in me.  I am not sure if it was the concepts of being able to build a machine that materializes whatever is in our minds, or the really clever plot twist of the Monsters of the Id that the Krell did not take into account in the architecture of their machine. That was quite a design bug.   

Maybe the reason I am so excited about the whole subject of Virtual Worlds is that in our own way we are beginning to have tools that let us make real the fruits of our imagination.  We are not quite able to physically materialize them as the Krell did - a good thing until we learn how to keep in check those pesky monsters of the Id buried deep down in our subconscious - but we are certainly now able to render more concrete the contents of our mind through powerful simulation and visualization tools.