Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Evolution of Collaborative Innovation

For over a dozen years now the concept of collaborative innovation has been at the center of much of my work.  It is a common theme in my talks and seminars, as well as in my blog.  This is not surprising given the nature of the initiatives I have been associated with during this time. 

Foremost among them is the Internet, which I have been closely involved with ever since becoming general manager of IBM’s Internet Division in December of 1995.  The Internet, and all the social media platforms and applications in its wake have been one of the major enablers of collaborative innovation the world has ever known.

Then there is my work with Linux, which started around this time ten years ago when we finalized the decision to launch a company-wide Linux initiative.  In January of 2000 we then announced that IBM was going to support Linux in all its products and services, and that I was responsible for forming a new organization to coordinate our Linux efforts across the company.

In those pre-Web 2.0 days, the community concept behind Linux and open source in general was mystifying to many.  They were surprised that IBM had so strongly embraced Linux and were wondering what its relevance would be to the world of business.  We spent a lot of time explaining that we were supporting Linux because it was an excellent operating system that ran on every single hardware platforms regardless of vendor or architecture, and would thus facilitate the integration of systems, applications and information over the Internet.

Julia Child, Innovation, and the Open Mind

I just saw Julie and Julia on DVD.  The film intertwines two stories.  The main story starts in 1948 when Julia Child and her diplomat husband Paul arrived in Paris, and traces her transformation from recently married housewife looking for something to do, to the legend she became after the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961.

The second story focuses on Julie Powell, who in 2002, spent a year cooking her way through all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art, chronicled her saga in a blog that quickly gained a large following, and later wrote a book about her experience: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.

I enjoyed the movie, especially the sections on Julia and Paul Child, masterfully portrayed by Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.  It reminded me why Julia Child has been one of my personal heroes ever since my student days at the University of Chicago in the 1960s.

Cloud Computing and the Evolution Toward the "Outside-In," Virtual Enterprise

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a very stimulating meeting in Madrid sponsored by the Bankinter Innovation Foundation.  The Foundation was started in 2003 by Bankinter, - one of the largest commercial banks in Spain, - in order to foster entrepreneurial innovation in the country.

One of the the Bankinter Foundation’s main initiatives is its Future Trends Forum (FTF), a multi-disciplinary international think tank of over 300 experts that together aim to anticipate the major social, economic, scientific and technological trends driving innovation around the world.  The Foundation holds two meetings a year in Madrid, each focused on a major trend previously chosen by the FTF members.  In addition to a subset of the members, subject matter experts are invited to attend and speak at the meetings.

After the meeting is over, all relevant information and discussions are analyzed, and the results are published in a document that is made publicly available on the Foundation’s web site.  Twelve such documents have so far been developed, on topics ranging from mobile technologies to reinventing sustainable developments.

The 13th FTF meeting took place the first week of December.  The topic was “The Crowd in the Cloud.”  Given my interests in cloud computing, I was invited to participate.

Reflections on Surviving Disruptive Innovations

Last week I wrote a post on the impact that digital technologies are having on the newspaper, entertainment and media industry in general.  It was based on the “Social Media Implications for Business” panel I moderated during my recent week as Innovator in Residence at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism.

The panelists pretty much agreed that many legacy media companies are going through a kind of near death experience as the industry transitions from analog to digital technologies.  Two forces, in particular, are wreaking havoc on the industry: cannibalization - inexpensive new products that are cutting into their existing revenues; and fragmentation - audiences being shared across the many new kinds of content and experiences now available to them.

Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC Universal, has succinctly captured what is going on in the media industry, with his widely quoted comment that the new digital business models are turning media revenues from analog dollars into digital dimes.  The key problem for legacy media companies is thus to come up with new, innovative business models that will enable them to make money and survive as their industry continues to transition from a business model based mostly on analog dollars into one based mostly on digital dimes.