Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Embracing Disruptive Innovations: Organizational Challenges

In early August I participated in a strategic planning meeting in the Boston area.  I was there in my role as a board member of the Institute for Data Driven Design (ID3), a research and educational nonprofit established to help define the principles, contracts and rules needed to empower individuals to assert greater control over their personal data and digital identities.  To implement and enforce these principles, ID3 is developing an open software trust framework platform along with a variety of software tools and algorithms. 

ID3 was co-founded by MIT Media Lab Professor Sandy Pentland and by Media Lab Research Scientist John Clippinger.  They both participated in the planning meeting, along with senior executives from one of ID3’s industrial partners.  The objective of the meeting was to explore potential collaborations between the industrial partner and ID3. 

At the beginning of the meeting a few of us made brief introductory remarks.  I was asked to talk about the organizational challenges that companies generally face when embracing disruptive innovations like those being developed by ID3.  This is a topic I am quite familiar with having lived through it at different times in my career as well as being a subject I often discuss in seminars.  Given that I had 15 minutes for my introductory remarks, I distilled them into three key points:  the need for a clear, compelling strategy that the whole organization can rally around; the management of disruptive innovation initiatives; and the importance of top-down leadership and support.  Let me elaborate on each of these points.

The Collaborative, Sharing Economy

A few weeks ago I wrote about my recent participation in the 2013 Roundtable on Institutional Innovation, an Aspen Institute event that took a close look at the impact of digital technologies on the evolution of companies and other organizations.  At the Roundtable, I heard a number of interesting presentations.  One of the most intriguing was The Collaborative Economy, by Jeremiah Owyang, a partner and analyst at Altimeter Group, whose research focuses on the changing relationships between companies and their customers. 

Since the advent of the steam engine in the late 18th century, technology advances have been radically improving the productivity of business, enabling companies to significantly lower their prices while providing higher quality products and services.  Throughout the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries, a stream of disruptive technologies, - steam engines, railroads, electricity, cars, airplanes, phones, radio, TV and so on, - have transformed the economy and just about every single industry, as well as re-shaping the institutions of society. 

Is our present digital revolution qualitatively different from those of the past two centuries, which were primarily driven by machines and other industrial-age physical technologies?  Could it be that our continuing advances in digital technologies are now leading us to a new kind of information society and knowledge-based economy, which could, over time, be as transformative as the 18th century transition from pre-industrial agrarian societies to technology-based industrial societies? 

The industrial economy has been primarily based on production, with GDP as the key measure of economic activity.  The collaborative economy feels very different.  There is a lot I find appealing about it, in particular, its potential impact on the really critical issue of jobs in the digital economy.  Given that large public and private sector institutions are not expected to create enough new jobs, the collaborative economy might be one of the most important ways for individuals to come up with all kinds of innovative ways of making a living.

Innovation as a Journey into the Future

I recently read an excellent innovation report, - Surfing toward the Future: Chile in the 2025 Horizon.  The document was developed by Chile’s National Innovation Council for Competitiveness (CNIC), a public-private organization charged with providing advice to the President of the Republic on policies that will strengthen innovation and competitiveness in the country.  The report was officially presented to Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera on August 6.   

CNIC has been led by Fernando Flores since April of 2010.  Flores has had a remarkably multifaceted career in both Chile and the US.  He has a Ph D from UC Berkeley and has worked extensively as an entrepreneur and consultant in computer science, human cognition and organizational leadership.  He has written a number of books, including Understanding Computers and Cognition: a New Foundation for Designand Building Trust: in Business, Politics, Relationships and Life. 

I first met Flores during a trip to Chile in August of 2006 to attend a conference.  He was a Senator then, a position he held from March of 2002 until his appointment to president of the Innovation Council.  We discovered that we had a number of common interests, - in addition to our common language, - and have since become friends and met a number of times in Chile and the US. 

A couple of months ago, Flores sent me a draft of the Surfing toward the Future report.  This was like no innovation document I’ve read.  The language is more literary than is typical for technical or business documents, not surprisingly since Flores is an accomplished writer in both English and Spanish.  While the report focuses on Chile, I believe that its findings and recommendations are generally applicable to the US and most other advanced and emerging economies.

Parallel Supercomputing: Past, Present and Future

From the early days of the industry, supercomputers have been pushing the boundaries of IT, identifying the key barriers to overcome and experimenting with technologies and architectures that are then incorporated into the overall IT market a few years later.  While we generally focus on their computational capabilities as measured in FLOPS, - Floating-point Operations Per Second, -  supercomputers have been at the leading edge in a number of additional dimensions, including the storage and analysis of massive amounts of data; very high bandwidth networks; and highly realistic visualizations.

Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the fastest supercomputers were based on highly specialized, powerful technologies.  But, by the late 1980s, these complex and expensive technologies ran out of gas and parallel computing became the only realistic alternative to scaling up performance.  

Instead of building machines with a small number of very fast and expensive processors, the early parallel supercomputers ganged together 10s, 100s, and over time 1000s of much less powerful and inexpensive CMOS microprocessors, similar to the micros used in the rapidly growing personal computer and workstation industry.  A similar evolution to microprocessor components and parallel architectures took place a few years later in the mainframes used in commercial applications.

The transition to parallel supercomputing was seismic in nature.  Everything changed, from the underlying computer architecture, to the operating systems, programming tools, mathematical methods and applications.  It took considerable research and experimentation to learn to effectively use these new kinds of machines.  Moreover, there were widely different parallel architecture designs, some coming from universities and others from industry.  It wasn’t clear at all which designs worked well for different kinds of applications and would thus be commercially viable.

The Department of Energy (DOE) national labs have long been among the world’s leading users of advanced supercomputers and played a leading role in the transition to parallel architectures.  In 1983, the DOE’s Argonne National Lab established the Advanced Computing Research Facility (ACRF), an experimental parallel computing lab which brought together computer scientists, applied mathematicians and supercomputer users and vendors to learn how to best use this new generation of parallel machines. 

This past May, Argonne convened a Symposium to mark the 30th anniversary of the ACRF.  The Symposium looked both at the progress made in parallel computing over the past 30 years and the major trends for the future.  I attended the Symposium and led a panel on The Impact of Parallel Computing on the World.