Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to Health Care

Clayton Christensen is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.  He is one of the world's foremost thinkers in strategy and innovation. In particular, Clay – since I know him personally, I feel I can call him by his first name - is an expert in dealing with disruptive innovations, developing organizational capabilities and finding new markets for new technologies.  In addition, he has a major quality that distinguishes him from most experts.  Not only does he repeatedly come up with great ideas, but he also comes up with innovative ways of communicating his ideas so that they are accessible to lots of people in the business world and the general population. 

Clay is also an accomplished writer.  His first book, The Innovator's Dilemma is a classic.  His second book, The Innovator's Solution - co-written with Michael Raynor – is a comprehensive guide to innovation in all aspects of a business.  I use it extensively in my MIT graduate seminar.

His new book, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to Health Care - co-authored with Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, - is scheduled to come out on September 19 of this year.  When I learned that he is co-author of a new book on health care, I quickly invited him to MIT to give a public lecture on the subject.  Clay came to MIT last month, and not only was his seminar - which can be seen here - excellent because of its fascinating content, but it could also serve as a master class on how to discuss a very complex subject in an accessible, interesting and elegant way.

A Dialogue on Sexism

In the last few weeks there have been lots of articles in the press about the alleged sexist media coverage of Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Many have suggested that, just like the historical candidacy of Barack Obama has presented us with the opportunity to have a serious dialogue on race, the equally historical candidacy of Senator Clinton should lead to an equally serious dialogue on sexism in US society.

I could not agree more.  As the father of a young woman, and as someone who has worked closely with female colleagues throughout my long professional career, I strongly believe that we will become a much better society if we take stock of where we are in our battle against sexism, and what we need to do to keep making progress into the future. 

Over the last thirty years, women have made huge advances in the US - and in the world in general.  But, one would have to be very naive or ideologically driven not to agree that sexism continues to be a serious negative force in our country.  The facts speak for themselves. 

In 2006, women earned on average 77 cents for every dollar men earned, - up from 60 cents in 1960.  In the US Congress, 74 out of 435 members in the House of Representatives are female, as are 16 out of 100 in the Senate - the highest numbers of women in the history of Congress, but still under 20 per cent.  In business, 12 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women, as are 24 in the Fortune 1000.

Most statistics show a similar picture.  The glass is most definitely getting fuller - but, there is a ways to go.

Breaking the Petaflops Barrier

Last week, the US Department of Energy announced the first supercomputer to achieve a petaflop of sustained performance.  It will be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.  The machine designed and built by IBM, is named Roadrunner, after New Mexico's state bird. 

A petaflop is a million billion calculations per second, that is, a 1 followed by fifteen zeros.  That is how many calculations per second Roadrunner can perform.  When talking about petaflops, the numbers are so large that it is hard to comprehend what they mean.  We are almost into numbers of astronomical dimensions. 

The IBM press release used a few analogies to describe the power of Roadrunner, such as "The combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers";  and, "It would take the entire population of the earth, - about six billion - each of us working a handheld calculator at the rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day."

The previous major milestone for supercomputers was the teraflop - which is a 1 followed by twelve zeros.  Crossing the teraflops barrier was a huge deal for the supercomputing community when we did it in the late 90s.  And here we are - only ten years later - with a machine which is 1000 times more powerful than a teraflop machine.

Trip to Portugal

I spent the past week in Portugal at the invitation of the MIT Portugal Program.  I gave a talk on Complex Engineering Systems in the Knowledge Economy, and had meetings with faculty members and government officials involved in the program.   I also spent some time with colleagues from IBM Portugal.

The MIT Portugal Program was started in 2006 as a collaboration between MIT and government, academia, and industry in Portugal.  The program aims to foster education, research and economic development in areas related to engineering systems.  It has targeted bio-engineering, sustainable energy, transportation, and engineering design and advanced manufacturing as its key focus areas.

The MIT side of the program is being coordinated by the Engineering Systems Division (ESD).  For ESD, the program is an invaluable learning experience as it explores, together with Portuguese universities, government and the private sector how to best leverage engineering systems for the benefit of society and business.   

For Portugal, the program represents a strategic commitment to science, technology and higher education.  Similar programs have been established by the Portuguese government with UT Austin - which has a focus on digital media, advanced computing and math; with CMU - whose focus is on IT, critical infrastructures, innovation and applied math; and with Harvard focusing on biomedical sciences.  These international programs are an investment in human capital, designed to make Portugal a relevant partner for future joint ventures in the emerging knowledge-based, global economy.

The Systems Challenge in Education

Growing up, I really enjoyed math, so when I started college in 1962 at the University of Chicago I was a math major.  I loved calculus and related subjects, but as the math courses I was taking got more and more abstract - e.g., algebra, projective geometry, topology, - I realized that pure math was not for me.  What I enjoyed most about math was its more applied side, the side that you used to help you solve problems in a variety of disciplines.  So, I switched my major to physics, and eventually left the U of C with a Ph D in physics in 1970.

But a career in physics was not for me either.  I did my graduate work under the supervision of Professor Clemens Roothaan, one of the pioneers in scientific computing, back in the early days of computers, when they were viewed as suspect by many established scientists.  Toward the end of my graduate studies, when it was time to look for a job, I realized that I enjoyed the computing side of my work more than the physics, and thus I switched fields once more and became a computer scientist.  Professor Roothaan was a consultant to IBM at the time, and through him I met a number of computer scientists from IBM who encouraged me to interview for a job at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.  I did, and ended up joining the computer sciences department of IBM Research in June of 1970.

During my first several years at IBM I continued to do fairly academic work, now in computer sciences.  It was OK, but not great.  It was not until the late 1970s when I became involved in more applied systems projects, that I discovered my true passions.  I loved complex systems, both their design and analysis in the lab, and the challenges of bringing them to market.  In particular, I loved working on disruptive, new system ideas like parallel supercomputing, the Internet, and cloud computing - the more complex and innovative, the better.