Chief Technology Officer

Game Technology in Medical Education

2009-08-25T09:11:00.001-04:00

This book proposes four hypotheses concerning the impact and acceptance of virtual reality, simulation, and computer game technologies in medical education. It focuses on laparoscopic surgery because of the similarities between that form of surgery and virtual reality systems. The evidence indicates that the following four hypotheses are supported by the medical research literature.

· Hypothesis 1: Surgical training can be accomplished at a lower cost using virtual reality and game technology-based tools than through existing methods of training.

· Hypothesis 2: Virtual reality and game technology-based training environments provide better access to representative patient symptoms and allow more repetitive practice than existing forms of training.

· Hypothesis 3: Virtual reality and game technology-based training environments can reduce the training time required to achieve proficiency in specific procedures.

· Hypothesis 4: Virtual reality and game technology-based training can reduce the number of medical errors caused by residents and surgeons learning to perform new procedures.

The strong evidence collected in this study indicates that game-based systems are becoming much more accepted in medical education and that the technical limitations that existed when these devices were first introduced are being overcome.

Web Page: http://www.modelbenders.com/medsim.html

Cloud Computing Bootcamp

2009-03-31T14:17:00.000-04:00

Bootcamp is a day-long tutorial on the operating details of a lot of the leading cloud service providers (and a few nearly-cloud services).

Allen Williamson from AW2.0 does an excellent job of sharing the ins, outs, ups, and downs of CC providers.

Check his details at
http://www.aw20.ac.uk/

Rush Down Cinque Terra, Italy

2009-02-21T17:19:00.002-05:00

Technology in Free Tools

CTO for the USA

2008-09-19T21:44:00.004-04:00

Mitch Kapor talks with Technology Review about the need for a CTO for the entire country.

"TR: Why does the country need a CTO?

Kapor: The underlying premise is that tech is inextricably intertwined with virtually everything. You can't talk about homeland security or education or energy without it being in large part a conversation about technology. The president will be well served if policy making is done in a more technologically sophisticated way."

Link: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21247/page1/

Is Google making us stupid?

2008-07-29T16:59:00.000-04:00

Nicholas Carr created a firestorm around the value of IT in 2003 when he wrote the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” for the Harvard Business Review. He has a new article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Google and similar tools allow us access to a lot more information than any other generation has ever had. However, the style of the information and the mental behaviors that we use to access and absorb it are very different from the way previous generations absorbed books and detailed articles. Carr suggests that are becoming accustomed to all information being delivered as small bites that can be consumed in a few minutes. As a result we are losing the mental habit and facility to sit with a long treatise on a subject and work through it over many hours or many days. He reaches back to historical examples that have had similar effects on people’s behaviors. In summary he proposes that the tools that we use to create and deliver information shape the way our brains work and that the Web fails to create the mental muscles required to deeply investigate a subject.

Lead User Innovation

2008-05-23T09:31:00.000-04:00

In most industries, R&D is done by a specific in-house department. However, for many products there is a leading edge group of users who buy the product and immediately make modifications to meet their very unique needs. Eric von Hippel (2005) of the MIT Sloan School of Management has studied the impact of "lead users" on the development of new features for products. He describes this effect in windsurfing, mountain biking, and open source software. These customers are effectively an external R&D lab for the company’s products. von Hippel argues that they need to be enrolled by the company as partners in identifying and developing features for the next generation of products. Three criteria must exist for this to be effective: (1) the users must have an incentive to innovate, (2) they must have an incentive to reveal their innovations and share them, and (3) their work must be at a competitive level with innovations created internally and by competing companies.

von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation is available as a free download on his web site: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

MMOG on Cellphone - Resurecting Motorola RAZOR

2008-03-26T21:34:00.000-04:00

There are 10 million players of World of Warcraft and a few million more MMOG players spread among the other major titles. These people form a distinct customer group. Some portion of these are very dedicated and would take advantage of the opportunity to access and play their character when they are away from their desktop computer. Imagine that a cellphone company signed an exclusive deal with WOW to provide a miniature version of the game client for the cellphone. It could potentially capture several hundred thousand players and become the center for an entire sub-culture in society that is growing. The cell client may not allow the player to do all of the functions of the full 3D desktop version. But by giving them the ability to manage their assets, plans raids, stay connected to other players, and exchange dialog these players would spend even more hours with the game. This service might have the power to rescue a struggling cellphone provider like Motorola from oblivion. WOW exclusively on the RAZOR could reignite interest in that platform and drive sales for generations of new and better devices. At least one company may be saved from competing in commodity hell by offering such a unique product – that also makes phone calls on the side.

Annual Computer Server Sales

2008-03-06T17:24:00.002-05:00

At a recent presentation, Scott McNealy, the Chairman of the Board at Sun Microsystems, stated that estimates for 2007 were that worldwide sales of server computers were 8 million units. They believe that 1.5 million of these servers were purchased by Google. If you estimate the numbers purchased by Yahoo, MSN, Amazon.com, and Salesforce.com, it paints a picture in which server side computing is being dominated by a few big service providers. This seems to align with a statement that Sun’s CTO made in 2006 that “the world only needs 5 computers”. Most of these companies are creating a server-side infrastructure that can handle a huge load of the world’s computing needs as a subscription service, with few applications residing on the client-side (a.k.a. desktop or thin-client machines).

- Scott McNealy's Talk on the subject (somewhere on this page - they keep changing the URL)

- Greg Papadopolous' Five Computers:

Social Browser

2008-02-28T15:53:00.004-05:00

When the Internet looks like an endlessly linked set of HTML web pages, you need a browser to navigate the links - like the app you are using right now. But when the Internet is a set of social networks that link to you to friends and content that you have associated together, what should the browser look like then? Perhaps it should look like the Flock browser (www.flock.com).

I think millions of us hove been wondering what the next step in our web tools was going to be. We have been offered Firefox and IE 7.0, both nice tools, but both pretty much the same thing we have been using for a decade or so. The creators of Flock begin to see the web differently. They begin to appeal to the next generation of web users who are social, those people who "Surf Facebook" rather than "Surf the Web".

FREE ... what does that mean?

2007-12-27T21:16:00.001-05:00

Chris Anderson is the Editor of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail. His newest idea and next book is centered on the idea that computer and communications costs are dropping to zero. What does it mean when these resources are so cheap that they are essentially free?

A video of a presentation that he did on the subject for Nokia is posted on the web HERE

Free Computers for your Datacenter

2007-12-21T11:07:00.000-05:00

With the price of electricity getting so high, many data centers are paying in the high six and low seven figures for power every year. Given the switch in costs of computers and electricity, electric companies may be able to offer customers free computer hardware if they will just sign a contract to buy electricity from them. It is the cellphone model of selling services and giving hardware. Another example, NetZero got its start in the 1990’s offering a free PC to customers who would sign a contract for Internet services.

Death of the GPU

2007-12-06T09:22:00.000-05:00

What is the primary and overridding difference between the CPU and the GPU is a nice consumer computer? It is NOT the speeds at which vectors can be processed, it is NOT the ability or lack of ability to processes double precision numbers.

The most important factor is who makes the most money from that PC you bought. Under the current configuration a nice graphics card can account for 50% of the cost of a computer and the GPU often costs more than the CPU.

This situation does not set well with Intel and AMD. The latter has made a move to change this by purchasing ATI and working on a new computer design that combines the capabilities of the CPU and the GPU and brings more computer revenues to the compined company (AMD+ATI).

Intel, on the other hand, is changing the paradigm from inside the company and inside the CPU. Their Larrabee project is looking to perovide a multi-core chip that includes cores that can handle the graphics that have traditionally been owned by the GPU.

So what is Nvidia doing to defend their very profitable turf? It appears that they are pursuing high-applications with their Tesla product that uses multiple GPUs to handle high-compute problems. Given that the consumer desktop is where all of the money is, you would expect them to be doing their own innovation in the consumer space. That may include multi-core GPU, multi-chip cards, combined CPU/GPU architectures ... Or something entirely different.

THe situation where the GPU pulls in a significant share or the PC price is equivalent to a serious threat to Microsoft's ownership of the O/S and Office productivity tools. The power of Intel HAS to rise up to reclaim these revenues. There will be a new architecture for consumer grade computers in CPU/GPU specifically because of the current revenue share ... Intel will make it happen. The real question is why has it taken so long?

Innovation in America

2007-11-20T06:48:00.000-05:00

[Extracted from Strategy+Business.]

S+B: How is the United States losing its innovation edge?
KAO: There are two complementary narratives at work here: what’s happening in the rest of the world and what’s happening inside the U.S. After World War II, the U.S. was the big mountain peak on the landscape of innovation. Our productive capability was unmatched. Our consumer products marched around the world. We invented the platforms for innovation, linking public and private resources in university settings. We innovated financing, inventing the concept of venture capital. We had demonstrated our prowess in top-down, large-scale efforts like the Manhattan Project, but had also excelled with emergent bottom-up, large-scale innovation models like the Lockheed Skunk Works.

But then we had our Sputnik moment in 1957 and we realized that we weren’t so smart after all. The Soviets had surpassed us not only with the first satellite but with the first animal in space, the first man and first woman in space, the first space walk, et cetera. This was a big wake-up call for America.

I think we’re at a Sputnik moment today, except that it’s a silent Sputnik. There is no obvious inciting incident such as an adversary putting up an object in space that is taunting us for not being first. Look at where we stand in comparison to the rest of the world. Look at our approach to human capital, which boils down to education, and to our ability to attract and keep talent. Look at our idea-generating capability and our approach to research and development. Look at our financial capital. We have real deficits in each of these areas, while other countries are gaining strength.

Book Review: Dealing with Darwin

2007-10-22T20:17:00.000-04:00

Dealing with Darwin: How great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution. Geoffrey A. Moore. Portfolio Press, 2005. List $25.95, 288 pages.

Geoffrey Moore is well known from his two previous books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. Those presented models of innovation that explained the challenges of moving from a new idea to a new product in the market. In his new book, Dealing with Darwin, Moore moves beyond the challenges of getting into the market and discusses the types of innovation that are used by companies throughout the lifecycle of a product or service. The book is targeted at established companies, with established products, in established markets. Like Clayton Christensen and other innovation authors, he explores solutions that help established companies remain in their market dominating positions.

Globalization is moving many businesses and jobs to emerging countries like China and India. Moore claims that this is a major migration in the economy similar to others that have occurred over the centuries. Economic power has moved its focus from Italy to The Netherlands. From The Netherlands to France, Germany, and England and finally across the Atlantic to the United States. He claims that it is now jumping the Pacific to reach China, India, and other parts of Asia. Corporate innovation is one key activity that is required to retain business in America in the face of this global shift.

Moore’s innovation mantra for the book is, “extract resources from context and repurpose for core.” He differentiates the core value of a product or service from the context in which it exists. A company must invest its resources in the core, not in the context. Too many companies invest widely and at cross purposes, negating the effects of many of their investments. The result is less productivity and less leverage in the global market. He offers the golfing business of Tiger Woods as an example. Woods derives 90% of his income from licensing agreements with sponsors and only 10% from winning golf tournaments. Based on this distribution of income, some would argue that Tiger Woods should spend 90% of his time and efforts managing his licensing deals and 10% perfecting his golf game. However, Moore points out that Woods’ proficiency at playing golf is the core of the revenue machine. It is the quality of his game that makes it possible to earn the other 90% of his income. Therefore, he should focus his energy and time on his core, the game of golf, and allow others to worry about the licensing deals, which represent context revenue.

Applying this example to companies, Moore suggests that each company must identify its core. Once that is done, they can determine which type of innovation is appropriate to maximize their effectiveness in the market. Moore suggests that companies fall into four major “Innovation Zones” and that there are fifteen different flavors of innovation, each of which plays a different role based on the placement of the company within the major innovation zones. The zones are labeled: Product Leadership, Customer Intimacy, Operational Excellence, and Category Renewal. In the Product Leadership zone, new products and services are being created and face the challenges presented in Moore’s two previous books. In this zone, innovation should focus on making better products and identifying the sweet spot of the customers’ needs. In the Customer Intimacy zone, products and services are established and the competition is focused on customization that will draw market-share from competitors. The Operational Excellence zone also deals with established products, but focuses on the supply side of producing and delivering the product. It calls for innovation in processes, integration, and cost reduction. Finally, in the Category Renewal zone, companies must gracefully exit from products that are at the end of their life. Companies should look for ways to loop back into the Product Leadership zone with replacements for mature and declining products.

Moore provides fifteen flavors of innovation, each aligned with one of the four innovation zones and illustrated with short vignettes from companies that have successfully implemented it. In Moore’s opinion, there is a flavor of innovation that is appropriate and effective for any product in any phase of its lifecycle. The book brings together a number of management strategies and re-labels them as innovations. It does a good job of demonstrating that opportunities for innovation exist in all markets and for all products.

Dealing with Darwin is a natural extension of Moore’s two previous books and provides an interesting model of innovation opportunities for products and services at all phases of their lifecycle.

Book Review: Dragons at Your Door

2007-10-22T20:15:00.000-04:00

Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation is Disrupting Global Competition.
Ming Zeng and Peter Williamson. Harvard Business School Press. 2007. List $29.95. 204 pages.

Ming and Williamson explore the power of the cost advantage that China has in manufactured goods, and the way they are leveraging this to become global competitors in the 21st century. We are accustomed to the fact that American and European companies are off-shoring much of their production to companies in Asia. This has allowed electronic, textile, plastic, and a host of other goods to be offered to consumers at significantly lower prices in recent years. It has also created a very large trade imbalance with Asia. All of this is foundation material which Ming and Williamson use to explore the position of China in future international business in Dragons at Your Door.

The authors suggest that this cost advantage is a disruptive innovation of the type introduced by Clayton Christensen in Innovator’s Dilemma. Chinese companies are outgrowing their role as the world’s manufacturing facilities and are extending their reach to the distribution, retailing, services, R&D, and branding of products. These moves have already begun in a number of global industries, but have just begun to extend into the American retail sector where they are evident to the average consumer. Companies like China International Marine Container Group (CIMC) and Haier are becoming true international companies, supplying both their native country and the rest of the world. To do this they have begun exercising strategy, financing, partnerships, and acquisitions “in the Western style”. These companies are aiming to be international competitors, not simply Chinese suppliers to western international companies. This move will redirect significant profits from the western integrators, branders, and distributors into the hands of the Chinese manufacturers turned full-service competitors.

At the root of this expansion is the cost advantage of labor in China, as well as government support of the expansion. The authors cast this as a disruptive innovation in the Christensen style. But it appears to be more of a competitive advantage ala Michael Porter. In his works, Porter argues that a company can either compete on cost or on unique capabilities. The Chinese companies profiled are currently basing their strategy on lower costs, which has a limited duration. But, they argue that this is just the beginning of a more full-featured advance that includes R&D, branding, and unique product features based on Chinese intellectual property. Their prime example of this is Dawning Computer who offers low-cost, high performance computers (HPCs) based on the intellectual property of China’s Institute for Computing Technology (ICT).

Ming and Williamson point out that Chinese companies are not well prepared to compete in all industries or product classes. Their cost strategy works best when an industry is well established and has a dominant product design. Given this situation, Chinese companies are in a position to imitate that design at a lower cost as the basis for their competition. In industries based on the complex integration of intangible assets like IP and branding, the Chinese competitors are not prepared to mount an effective opposition.

The authors’ prescription for western companies who want to defend against this attack is three fold: (1) begin your own internal cost innovation program, (2) give a global mandate to your Chinese subsidiaries to beat their Chinese competitors at this game, and (3) build alliances with the Chinese dragons to strengthen your global competitiveness.

The story of the emergence and growth of China is not new. It follows a pattern that has we have seen from Japan and that will probably be repeated by Eastern Europe in the near future. Once an international firm gains access to the markets of a rich country it continually expands its ability to win business there. Just as Japanese electronics and automobiles are known for their high quality, Chinese industries will probably achieve a similar reputation over the next decade.

Book Review: The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel

2007-10-22T20:12:00.000-04:00

The Future of Management. Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Harvard Business School Press. 2007. List $26.95. 269 pages.

Hamel opens by explaining that we are running 21st century companies using management ideas and principles that are often 100 years old and were created by “long dead theorists”. These ideas began with Taylor’s principles of scientific management and largely focus on creating static structures that can improve productivity and quality of products that change only gradually over time. At this point in history, however, these ideas are too static, too regimented, and too myopic to be effective among the very dynamic, disruptive, and shifting opportunities that present themselves.

Hamel’s historical analysis of management points to the following list of practices which have evolved over the last century: setting and programming objectives, motivating and aligning effort, coordinating and controlling activities, developing and assigning talent, accumulating and applying knowledge, amassing and allocating resources, building and nurturing relationships, and balancing and meeting stakeholder demands. All of these are sensible, logical, and seemingly effective. But inherent in this list is the assumption that the external environment is largely static and can be operated on in the same manner repetitively and with cumulative effect.

Although the word does not appear in the title, Hamel has written another innovation book. He insists that productivity and quality cannot be the basis of advantage in the 21st century. Companies that hew to these old measurements will become more effective at operations and with products that are increasingly obsolete. Hamel insists that companies must adopt management practices that are centered on innovation and adaptability. He presents a number of different management principles for adaptability. First, life is about creating variety, not enforcing standardization. Second, market forces within a company enable flexibility. A market environment allows innovators to be creative and attracts the types of people that companies need in the present and future. Third, leaders are accountable to those being governed and everyone has a right to dissent about the direction of the organization. Leadership is actually distributed throughout the organization, not resident at the top. Fourth, the mission or the organization really does matter. Modern organizations must be in pursuit of goals that are meaningful to the employees and for which stakeholders are willing to adapt their behavior toward the achievement of those goals. Fifth, diversity of skills and perspectives begets creativity. Organizations must structure themselves so that information and ideas can flow everywhere and come together in unexpected patterns. Serendipity in idea combination will create opportunity, value, and advantage.

In building these ideas, Hamel draws on case studies of Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, and Google. He also turns to lessons learned by IBM in its most recent business transformation. This is an innovation book, but Hamel uses it to challenge the management practices that have evolved over a century and then proposes replacements that may be more effective in the present and future. Those of us who have spent decades in traditional organizations resonate with the established practices that Hamel has distilled. But we are also aware of the limitations that those impose and wonder about ways to incorporate new practices within the old. Hamel suggests that an entirely new set of practices is needed and that they will be more effective at running a business in the future than those put forward by dead theorists. As practitioners we can choose to experiment with Hamel’s new practices or we can choose to ignore them and carry on with our existing practices. Given the extreme changes in the global business world, it appears that sticking with the past will put your company in competition with low-cost providers around the globe. On the other hand, Hamel’s practices will put your company in competition with global innovators who create products with much higher margins. The best choice seems to stem from the business strategy of the company and its plans for its own future.

Simulation as the Preferred Form of Communication

2007-10-17T00:07:00.000-04:00

[Cross-posted from ModelBlog]
Anthony Townsend at the Institute for the Future believes that "simulation will be an innate vocabulary for tomorrow's consumer, worker, soldier, and educator. They will see the world and describe it in terms of simulations in the same way that my parents used written essays and I use PowerPoint. It may well become their preferred mode of visualizing and interacting with data."

To make this possible the simulation and gaming community have to create simulation construction tools that are as readily accessible as PowerPoint is today. It has to have a similar ease of use, ubiquity of access, and accessible price point.

These tools also require/drive a data standard, which could be community generated as was XML, or commercially generated as is the MS Office Document format.

Innovation Books

2007-10-01T07:29:00.000-04:00

There is no shortage of books on innovation - they grow like weeds in the business section. Every business professor or management consultant knows that the word "innovation" in the title is good for a 10,000 item boost in sales right out of the gate. You and I have both read a number of the really flat stinkers that just say "do things differently", or "defy the status quo", or "invest in R&D", or "create cross-functional teams" ...

I have compiled a short list of some of the books that really have something valuable to say. This list will have to grow because there is an occasional flower among the weeds every year.

Amazon Listmania on Innovation

Cost as a Disruptive Innovation

2007-09-12T20:34:00.000-04:00

Dragons at Your Door is an outstanding description of the future plans of Chinese companies to use their cost advantages to move on global markets. It is a mistake to see them as an outsourcer from American companies. With their advantages they are in a position to take customers away from American and European companies that operate globally, and then to move into local American and European markets.

Watch the Digg Stream

2007-09-09T14:31:00.000-04:00

Digg allows people to tag stories they find interesting on the Internet. Those "diggs" go to a database where you can find out what people are really interested in and perhaps who else is interested in the same things that interest you.

Digg (the company) has a created several tools that are the stock ticker tape of its population of Internet taggers. You can a real-time stream of digg topics. The stream is offered in 4 different formats - the stack, the swarm, the arc, and the "bigspy". The first three are the most clever, but the last one is really the most useful.

Imagine yourself sitting and watching what people are reading on the Internet. What could you do with this information?

Digg Labs Real-time Streaming

The Grill at ComputerWorld

2007-08-30T22:14:00.000-04:00

Everyone in the technology fields has the opportunity to be buried under a deluge of free magazines. We have all been seduced into accepting just one more free subscription. Many of us receive enough of these to build an entire house or to fuel a stove through a long, hard winter. As you would expect of free publications, most of what they contain is shallow drivel that is just good enough to attract advertisers.

In this blizzard of worthless words there are a few pubs that are actually good. Every week I am pleased to receive ComputerWorld. I immediately head to the center of the magazine where "The Grill" column is hidden. They always have a quick interview with someone that I am genuinely interested in hearing from. Honestly, I do not look at anything else in the magazine. It is that one golden nugget that makes it worth getting the magazine.

What will you get in the "The Grill"?
Here is a Google list of Recent Interviews

Amazon.com CTO

2007-08-12T22:41:00.000-04:00

It seems that all CTO's are asking a similar question: How do you define what CTO's do? Who is doing it well? A recent posting by Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com, followed this same line of inquiry (see link below).

It seems that everyone wants to define the CEO, CIO, and CFO. But the CTO can just run his own show and perhaps someone will let him or her know when they have made a mess of things - or perhaps not.

Role of the CTO

The Unreasonable Man

2007-07-12T21:23:00.000-04:00

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Man and Superman, 1903, George Bernard Shaw

Smart Documents - Help us Xerox and Adobe!

2007-07-07T21:10:00.000-04:00

Like me, all of you have hard drives full of documents that are organized into folders. But that barely helps keep track of all of the docs that you have and are interested in retrieving some day. I have innocuous folder names like "Other Organizations" and "Media Relations" into which I drop all sorts of documents. I even have one entitled "Ocean of Info" for all of the stuff that I want to keep but have no idea how to organize it.

Why are all of these docs still as dumb as a piece of paper? When are they going to organize and file themselves and come a running when I need them? A document needs to be a lot smarter than they have been in the past. Such smarts would be a huge step forward in managing the deluge of information in the world and the small fraction of that which lands on my hard drive.

Yes, I know that we are in the Age of Search, which means that Google has a solution for everything. I have tried Google Desktop on a couple of my machines. What I immediately noticed was that he machine was less responsive to simple tasks like opening documents and applications. It turns out that the CPU was busy searching, sorting, and indexing my documents while I was trying to work. It was so disruptive that I soon uninstalled the applications and returned to my old, and pitiful methods of organizing documents. [Note: I know that as soon as I write this criticism of a piece of software that another person who loves it will tell me that it has improved and I should try it again. No thanks, I am a fly fisherman of software. You get one chance to impress me, then I am off to something else.]

So I think that Xerox and Adobe might be just the right companies to look at making all of my documents smarter. Make them organize themselves and come running when I call - like a tiny ming-reading, fairy is attached to each one. Please thrill us with this simple but essential capability. My "Ocean of Info" folder is waiting to be sorted out.

Fortune Article: Xerox Inventor in Chief

Robert Ballard on Ocean Exploration

2007-07-05T07:32:00.000-04:00

Robert Ballard, located the Titanic and discovered geothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. He pointed out that we spend more money exploring space in one day than we spend exploring the oceans in an entire year. His work has been supported by NOAA and the Office of Naval Research and has bridged exploration and military missions.

Newly declassified fact – the search for the Titanic was a cover story for a classified mission. His team was really searching for the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine with nuclear weapons that was lost in 1968. The Navy was not exactly thrilled when he actually found the Titanic and brought in media attention from around the world.
The hydrothermal vents explain the chemical composition of the ocean (why it is different from fresh water) and show that life can exist without photosynthesis. They may also point to the origins of life on Earth.
Using unmanned robot submersibles he is now surveying the 50% of the U.S. land mass that is under the ocean, primarily the areas around the Hawaiian and Marshall islands. He also uncovered nearly perfectly preserved ships in the Black Sea and next year will return to try to locate and extract the preserved bodies of its crew members.

Robert Metcalfe on Future Networks

2007-07-05T07:30:00.000-04:00

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, presented some interesting ideas at a Navy conference. He described his perspective on where the Internet is going and provided advice on how to build military networks:

The Internet is growing into Video, Mobile connection, and Embedded networks in devices. Video and Mobile connections are stressing the foundations of the Internet right now and he thinks it will take 5-10 years to build out the net so that it can properly handle all of this content. However, the growth of devices with embedded networks is more important. Last year 10 billion devices were sold with embedded computer chips, most of them do not have network connection. He believes that in the future all of these devices will be on the Internet. The current net is not ready to support this volume of traffic and TCP/IP is not an appropriate protocol for that last mile to the device. He is pushing Zigby as the protocol that will bring embedded devices to the Internet.
The Internet was created by graduate students with no interest in security. He believes that the Internet is most vulnerable because it has no authentication of users at its lowest level. Routers do not verify the origin of messages, which allows spam and viruses to spread with little record of their originators.
We do not currently monitor the status of the oceans, rather we sample it with a few missions that take data at one location at a given point in time. If we really want to understand the oceans by monitoring them, then we need an underwater Internet to make it possible for sensors to reside and report from there permanently.

Management of Technology Conference (IAMOT'07)

2007-06-02T14:32:00.000-04:00

I am just back from the annual conference of the International Association of Management of Technology (http://www.iamot.org/) where I spoke on the changing role of the CTO in a growing corporation. I began by introducing the 5 Patterns of the CTO (see previous blog posts) and then applying those five patterns to the different growth phases of a company. The paper describes how the "Genius" CTO who was one of the founders of the company (think Steve Wozniak at Apple or Larry Page at Google) must change his pattern of behavior as the company grows. Larger companies require a CTO that is focused on the customer experience (the Advocate); managing technology vendors (the Administrator); running an R&D organization (the Director); or participating in the strategic plans for the organization (the Executive).

As always, the entire paper is posted online - see http://www.ctonet.org/documents/CTO_ChangingRole.pdf.

Google's Eric Schmidt - Growing Google and Google Culture

2007-04-21T21:35:00.000-04:00

Google's revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

It's a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model is still small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. Attempting to provide too much order dries out the creativity. What's needed in a properly functioning corporation is a balance between creativity and order.

But we've reined in certain things. For example, we don't tolerate the kind of "Hey, I want to have my own database and have a good time" behavior that was effective for us in the past.

-- Wired, May 2007.

Dean Kamen on Innovation

2007-04-21T08:34:00.000-04:00

"Innovation and creativity will be the only serious metrics to sustain us as a world-class country." - Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, President of DEKA Research.

Challenges = Tenure

2007-04-07T20:35:00.000-04:00

Why do people change jobs? There are entire books and research studies on this and an entire Blog site could live on the subject ... hmm, there is an idea of a lively and oft visited blog.

But one reason that a company has control of is that people just get bored doing the same thing in the same place with the same people for the same amount of money. There are just no challenges or thrills left at the old job any more, so they start looking around for a greener pasture.

Robert Wayman was the CFO of Hewlett-Packard for 23 years and a 37 year veteran of the company. He was ready to retire when things got a little dicey and the company needed help cleaning up the mess associated with board-directed detectives. Why did he postpone his retirement? New challenges. "How long you stay with a company depends on how many learning opportunities are available," he said (CFO magazine, April 2007, http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/8885490?f=search).

If you have ever just stuck it out at a company where you were totally bored, but just could not quite leave, then you know what a living hell that can be. Eventually you even become ashamed of yourself for not having the initiative or courage to walk out.

Pursue the challenges and let the rest take care of itself.

Sun's Chief Gaming Officer - Chris Melissinos

2007-04-04T07:28:00.000-04:00

The military needs a mechanism to deliver training applications to any desktop client at any facility in the world. Accomplishing this by installing the right training app on the right computer is totally impractical, and practically impossible. This has to be a pull system that allows the trainee to open or install the necessary applications on the computer that he is sitting at. Web pages are a great model for this, though training applications are more like 3D games is their size and complexity.

Java games delivered via Web Start is one solution to this. It allows the application to be larger and more complex than a typical web page or Flash application. But it also avoids requiring the user to install applications from CD-ROM.

Of course Chris Melissinos, the Chief Gaming Officer for Sun Microsystems, thinks this is a great solution because it uses Sun's Java environment as its foundation. After playing with a number of Java games for entertainment, I tend to agree with him for medium-sized applications (i.e. 1MB to 10MB).

One entertaining example is Tribal Trouble.

Discussion with Greg Papadopoulos

2007-04-04T07:16:00.000-04:00

During the Game Developers Conference, I had a great meeting with Greg Papadopoulos, the CTO of Sun Microsystems. We were able to explore a number of ideas for computing to support ubiquitous training applications for the military. Specifically,

Servers - What kind of back-end servers/services do you need to provide a source from which to deliver training applications?
Learning Metrics - How do you measure the impact that the training applications are having on the soldiers who are going through it?
Identity Management - How do you verify the identity of the person who is being trained somewhere in the world?
Long-haul Networking - What are the conduits that can deliver instantaneous training applications to soldiers?
Training Client - What software technology can effectively carry training to 500,000 people spread all over the globe?

CTO and Technology Leader Study

2007-03-11T10:56:00.000-04:00

Researchers at McMasters University are conducting a study of CTOs and similar technology leaders. In their own words:

"This questionnaire is part of a research program investigating technology leadership in organizations. The highest ranking manager/executive in the organization charged with the oversight of technology is usually called the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), although some organizations use other titles such as Vice-President of Technology. For convenience we use the title CTO to refer generically to all such positions. Not much research has been done on CTO’s and the important leadership roles that they play. Neither is there much reliable information about best practices for the position. This questionnaire is being used to gather information about these issues in a sample of American, European, and Japanese companies.

This questionnaire is intended to be answered by CTO’s or those in equivalent positions and includes three short sections:
In the first part are questions about your career history. These will help us build a profile of the kinds of experiences which lead people to the CTO position. The second section asks about the tasks, responsibilities and authorities associated with your position and what you perceive to be the important trends and issues in the management of technology. The third section asks questions about the important upward and outward aspects of CTO leadership."

If you would like to participate in this study, please download the questionaire at:
http://www.ctonet.org/documents/CTO%20EITIM%20survey%202007%2003%2001.doc

Evolving Executives

2007-02-18T17:02:00.000-05:00

Jim Collins points out that entrepreneurs often mature into excellent executives:
"It's simply a myth that entrepreneurs can't evolve into company builders. Our research shows quite the opposite: In great companies the entrepreneurs generally grow as the company grows.

Here is a short list of those who evolved into company builders: Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Hewlett and Packard, J.W. Marriott, Sony's Akio Morita, Walt Disney, Intel's Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher, and of course Gates and Phil Knight. They made the shift from time telling to clock building - to seeing their primary creation as the company itself: what it stands for, its culture and how it operates." [Fortune, Feb 19, 2007]

The same should be true for evolving technology executives. As companies mature, so must the CTOs. One path of positional evolution is described in the paper "CTOs in Transition".

Pick up the phone

2007-02-10T20:47:00.000-05:00

CTOs can become totally consumed with meeting the executives and interacting with partner companies, and meeting customers. It is easy to forget to delve into the personal, technical, and organizational side of your own business. If you do not know what is going on inside the company, you cannot know when you find something valuable on the outside.

Pick up the phone and call your business leaders, engineers, and scientists. Make an appointment for lunch or to drop by their office or lab. Going to where they are is important - (1) it shows that you are interested in their environment, (2) it proves that you know where they live, and (3) you will run into a number of other people that are interested in seeing you.

Who is in charge of energy costs?

2007-01-18T21:25:00.000-05:00

Teaching IT to Energy Managers is so 1999. The 2009 problem is teaching Energy Management to IT Managers. The price of energy is going through the roof (e.g. gasoline projected at $4.00/gallon by 2010) and the rate of consumption of electricity on a constant upward spiral in support of all of the computer infrastructure. In this environment, electricity costs are no longer going to be part of the facilities budget, they are going to be allocated to the departments that are consuming the power. Each of those will find their operating budgets taxed to pay for electricity and their internal or external profits slashed when they take electricity on as an expense.

Electricity is supposed to become more and more of a commodity, not turn itself into an item of competitive differentiation. Google saw the writing on the wall several years ago and moved their computers to where the cheapest power could be generated. Just as production, service, and technologies jobs have moved overseas to lower costs, energy consuming equipment is going to pack up and move to where the cheap energy is. We tend to imagine that it is not worth the cost of moving the equipment, some personnel, and installing the infrastructure to manage it remotely. But that is 1990's thinking. If the price of power keeps going up, it is going to become one of the major issues on the executive plate. Corporate guidance is going to be to find a way to lower energy consumption or lower energy prices. Who in the IT department knowns how to tackle that problem?

Related Stories:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/article.php/3625421
http://cio.com/archive/011507/ceo.html

CTO for Nuclear Power

2007-01-15T11:26:00.000-05:00

What does the CTO of nuclear power giant Westinghouse do for a living?
#1. Design nuclear power plants.
#2. Try to sell them to countries around the world.

Until recently #2 was a lot harder than #1. Countries were just not buying nuclear power -- too dangerous, too much regulation. But now that oil is expensive, suddenly nuclear power looks cleaner and cheaper.

Here is a quick description of the challenges that faced Howard Bruschi, the former CTO of Westinghouse, when he was peddling nulcear power plants around the world.

"One great challenge in designing nuclear power plants is that making something safer and making something cheaper are often conflicting priorities: the less you spend, the less safe it is, and vice versa. This was what Westinghouse engineers began to wrestle with as they explored designs that could be built more efficiently. For any new project, the same basic technology would still be used to produce electricity: uranium pellets, encased in fuel rods, would undergo a controlled chain reaction in the core, release energy to heat pressurized water and generate steam, and the steam would turn giant, magnetized turbines to generate electricity. But they theorized that if the plant was physically smaller and it used less in the way of materials, it would help reduce costs and construction time. Also, a cheaper plant could be built off site from poured concrete modules and assembled on location, rather than through a huge works project on the scale of the Great Pyramids, as at Vogtle. Most important, perhaps, the engineers began to ponder what's known as ''passive'' safety features. Years before, the U.S. military had asked Westinghouse to design a small, underground nuclear reactor to power missile silos. The reactor was never built, according to Howard Bruschi, the company's former chief technology officer, but the lessons were not forgotten. Passive safety measures included backup systems that would kick in automatically in the event of accidents or mechanical problems. Hundreds or thousands of working pipes and valves might be replaced by, say, a tank of cooling water mounted high so it could be emptied by gravity rather than by an electric pump. Complexity reduced, money saved. And at least in theory, there was an improvement in safety, too. The company's project was given a name: the AP600. It stood for Advanced Passive reactor; the 600 represented the output in megawatts.
Westinghouse financed part of the AP600 effort through its research budget, and the company also received a generous grant in the early 1990's from the U.S. Department of Energy. But even those sources of money weren't enough to supply the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to create the large working models to test the efficacy of the safety systems. ''So we basically went to other countries that had nuclear programs and invited them to help with their test facilities and engineers,'' Bruschi says. Within Westinghouse, I heard it said that Bruschi went around the world, hat in hand, looking for help. I asked him how many countries he visited. ''Italy, France, Japan, England, Scotland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Latvia and Poland,'' he told me. Eventually he went to China and Indonesia, too. It paid off when the N.R.C. approved the design for the AP600 in 1999.

But there were no buyers. Not one. Ed Cummins, the Westinghouse engineer, says that one major utility executive set him straight on why. Any utility could build a gas plant for far cheaper, he was told, and sell the electricity at a lower rate. So why build this? The AP600 was too small. It generated too little electricity to justify its construction costs. ''He was right,'' Cummins says, and in response, he and his staff spent several years expanding the AP600 into the 1,100-megawatt AP1000. It cost more, but its larger electric output made it more competitive. When I visited Westinghouse in late May, the company was just putting the finishing touches on a simulated control room for the new plant, a sleek space near Cummins's office to demonstrate for buyers and regulators how operators will monitor the plant on just a few computer terminals and one large, central screen. Unlike the control rooms I visited at Vogtle and Grand Gulf, where operators are in charge of literally thousands of buttons, switches and meters, the technology at the AP1000 simulator, like the aesthetic, is modernized, simplified and streamlined."

Drawn from a longer article written for the New York Times Magazine: Original Draft Here

5 CTO Patterns vs. 4 CIO Archetypes

2007-01-07T10:26:00.000-05:00

In several journal articles and blog entries I have presented 5 major patterns of the CTO position (see paper: http://www.ctonet.org/documents/5PatternsofCTO.pdf).

The 2007 survey of CIOs by CIO Magazine created a similar set of classifications for that position. In many ways, their results line up very well with the 5 Patterns of the CTO.

4 Archetypes of the CIO

Business Leader. Priorities are aligning IT and business goals.
Operational Expert. Primary mission is to cut costs.
Innovator. Focus on ITs ability to drive new business initiatives.
Turnaround Specialist. Risk-taking agent of change.

Read the CIO archetype profiles at: http://www.cio.com/state/

How can the CTO impact the organization?

2007-01-07T10:14:00.000-05:00

As a CTO, what can you do to improve the organization you are a part of? How do you demonstrate that the CTO adds significant value? Here's a quick list of 10 areas where you can really impact the organization.

Enable Business Innovation
Reduce Business Costs
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Create Competitive Advantage
Improve Risk Management
Enable New Revenue Streams
Grow Existing Revenue Streams
Enable Global Expansion
Enable Regulatory Compliance
Automate the Supply Chain

How you accomplish these is unique for each business and CTO.

_{List derived from CIO Magazine: http://www.cio.com/state/survey_slideshow/p16.html.}

National Medal of Technology

2007-01-02T14:41:00.000-05:00

President Bush made several awards of the National Medal of Technology in February. It is interesting that two of these went to women - Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Motorola, and Chrissie England, President of Industrial Light & Magic.

White House Article

Open Business Models - Henry Chesbrough

2007-01-02T14:32:00.000-05:00

Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape.
Henry Chesbrough. Harvard Business School Press. 2006. List $35.00. 215 pages.

Henry Chesbrough follows up his first book, Open Innovation, with a second which provides more details on how to build an open business model to take advantage of the innovation or intellectual property from other companies and to monetize unused IP within your own company.

As the author pointed out in his first book, modern products and the technologies that support them are far too complex to be completely developed by a single company. Therefore, companies must learn to cooperate with each other to leverage the expertise that each has. Chesbrough points to the importance of licensing IP as an important part of this practice. Most companies possess IP which they are not using and which they will never use. However, it is a mistake to assume that the IP is not valuable to others with different capabilities and a different market focus. Companies like Qualcomm have recognized that their real capabilities are in developing new technologies for the cellular communications market, but not in making products for sale to the consumer. Therefore, Qualcomm focuses on making chips and licensing its technologies for others to incorporate into cell phones. IBM, on the other hand, has significant manufacturing capabilities and has begun to supplement its core business by licensing its extensive portfolio of IP. That company has increased its IP licensing revenues from a few million dollars per year to $1.2 billion.

Traditionally, companies have relied on their own internal R&D for new technologies to drive future products. These companies have also worked hard to hide or protect these technologies from competitors – a closed business model. Chesbrough’s open business model calls for companies to rely upon both internal and external R&D for new technologies. This is coupled with a modified revenue model in which the company makes money from selling products, licensing IP, creating spin-offs, and selling IP outright. The success of IBM, Qualcomm, and others in creating significant business revenues from previously unused IP suggests that a number of companies, usually large companies, possess untapped riches in their patent vaults.

As companies create partnerships and practice an open business model, they must be careful to avoid giving away the farm. Chesbrough contrasts the approach of two companies in working with partners. GO approached Microsoft to convince them to develop applications for its pen operating system. However, they forgot that Microsoft’s primary business was operating systems, not applications. Therefore, following partnering discussions that exposed the details of GO’s product, Microsoft used this information to create the PenWindows operating system and pressured GO out of business. Collabra, on the other hand successfully developed a product and released it before competitors like Microsoft could respond. Their partnering discussions limited access to their IP and they worked with people far from the strategic headquarters of Microsoft.

Chesbrough’s open business model focuses on leveraging all of the IP owned by a company by licensing it, and encourages taking advantage of the IP of others. He advises for companies to change their perception and practice regarding their IP portfolio, viewing it as valuable resources for revenue generation rather than simply as a means of protecting existing products.

CTO is Not Equal to IT

2006-12-29T13:37:00.000-05:00

I received an anonymous comment that InfoWorld is a good resource for CTO's and a publication that focuses on the CTO. I have subscribed to InfoWorld for several years and initially discovered it in my search for guidance on the CTO position. However, I quickly discovered that InfoWorld is focused primarily on IT products and services. Therefore, the CTO's that they serve are usually those whose product focus is IT.

But companies that provide IT and computers are just a small fraction of those that employ the CTO position. A CTO provides executive level focus on and contribution from technologies that contribute to a company's profitability. For example, a company that mines copper would have a CTO focused on mining engineering and chemical processes for extracting copper. That CTO may not spend any time or energy on the IT products and services that the mining company consumes.

Many IT companies, CTOs, and CIOs mistakenly assume that the CTO of all companies is concerned with IT and works in conjunction with the CIO and an IT staff. I often receive sales calls from sales reps who cannot imagine that my position is very interested in new types of lasers, electronic textiles, supercomputing, and computer graphics ... but has no interest in IT products.

I certainly respect the IT industry and even have a couple of projects that are looking to extract new and powerful ideas from that field to use in other fields.

Merry Christmas Humor

2006-12-22T20:05:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas for CTOnet and Calvin

Fantastic Four Path Through Innovation Lifecycle

2006-12-20T21:16:00.000-05:00

Product and service innovation does not come in the same form at all stages of a product's life. Utterback and Abernathy presented a model in which innovation begins in the functionality of the product, then shifts to its user features and manufacture, then shifts to a cost competition - as shown in this graph.

As these shifts occur, a company may respond in a number of different ways. Four of these are fantastically popular.

The Thing = Immovable. Stay the course, refuse to change, insist that the market will come back to you. This is the most likely path to oblivion.
Human Torch = Specialize. Focus on being the very best at one specific part of the product or service chain. There is always room for the best.
Mr. Fantastic = Flexible. Shift your focus to meet the new dynamics of the market. Transform the company or the product. Behave like a start-up.
Invisible Girl = Hide. Find a crack in the market shimmy down into it and contract to fit the niche. Hope competitors do not come looking in that crack.

Utterback and the Fantastic Four are included in this conference presentation

Game Technology Disruption in the Rear View Mirror

2006-12-20T20:53:00.000-05:00

The interactive simulation industry, particularly that serving the military, is being disrupted Clayton-Christensen-style right now. We have created a foundation of technologies that largely rely on government investment or defense-specific companies for their creation. While we have grown very well over the last 10 years, we have seen the game industry and the IT community coming up fast in our rear view mirror. Game graphics engines, network methods, persistent worlds, artificial intelligence, and physics modeling have grown so quickly that they are now at a quality level that they can perform many of the operations that were previously reserved for military contractors.

What does a defense company do when disrupted in this way? As I said in a recent conference presentation, there are 3 choices:

Adopt the technologies and mix the best of the current tech with the best of the new game tech. There are a number of companies bringing the two together and there are companies emerging specifically to create and deliver game technologies to simulation customers.
Move Up Market by selling the simulation technologies to more demanding customers. Rather than targeting the military, use high-power tech to go after weather, population, and cultural simulation. Of course, there is much less money available from those customers.
Move Down Market by selling the old technologies to much smaller customers, shift to lower price and higher volume.

Game technologies are so close in the mirror that there is no doubt that they are in the simulation space and will grow there. IT service technologies like SOA are further back. But possibly headed in the same direction, right up the simulation tailpipe.

Google Earth CTO -- To Build or to Sell

2006-12-19T14:21:00.000-05:00

A CTO often sees the job as injecting technology into a product or service to get a company launched or positioned in a market. Some technologists are so wrapped around the technology that they can only see a path for building to a company's future. But as a company moves forward, the CTO has to have bigger eyes than this. The person must be able to transition from being a genius to an executive (see "5 Patterns of the CTO" and "The CTO in Transition")

Michael Jones is the CTO of Google Earth and got to that position by building a small start-up called Keyhole. He helped them to create a great product, but as a small company they had trouble reaching customers and getting access to all of the geo data they needed to populate the world in their tool. The solution - sell the company to Google and use the brand name to achieve global recognition, and the money to buy access to all of the data you can imagine. Mary Jo Wagner brings this out in the following fragment of an interview with Jones:

"MW: As Keyhole already had the technology and product line, why couldn't it achieve what Google Earth has in record time?

MJ: I think what we built at Keyhole was good, but it was known by a smaller part of the world. And one thing small companies have a really tough time doing, and I know from experience, is reaching out to the world. To actually be able to reach everybody's brother is really hard. Google was attracted to what we were doing - Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] were personal customers - and wanted to find a way to make that available to more people. So when Google launched this service and offered the chance to check it out for free, the whole world noticed at once."
[From: Geospatial Solutions]

As a CTO can you see the world from the perspective of new technology + access to customers + brand recognition + financial support? This job has a "C" in the title for a good reason. It is much more than Chief Technologist/Scientist/Engineer.

Motorola CTO is Blogging Publicly

2006-12-13T21:02:00.000-05:00

I just received a message from Wendy White, Motorola's Director of Global Technology Marketing and Communication, informing me that the Blog of their CTO, Ms. Padmasree Warrior, is now posted publicly. At its grand opening the Blog has 7 postings stretching back to February.

Bits at the Edge: Padmasree Warrior

CTOs and technology leaders should take note of this. Ms. Warrior is one of the few CTOs who shows up in public fora side-by-side with the company CEO. Ed Zander has allowed, encouraged, or not-discouraged Warrior from becoming a noted public face of Motorola. In one news article the author even credited Ms. Warrior with coming up with the company tag line "seamless mobility" during a plane ride with Zander.

Motorola could be one of the first big companies to tap its CTO for a top leadership position like President or CEO.

I'll be reading the Blog.

CTOs Digging in the Dumpster

2006-12-13T06:53:00.000-05:00

Imagine your CTO in his best suit rummaging around in the dumpster behind the facility. He is looking for new product ideas among the rubbish of the past. At Big Pharma they have a number of "failed" drugs on the shelf - million dollar investments that did nto payoff as hoped. So they are sending their scientists into these piles of IP rubbish with new biotech tools. Their mission is to figure out whether any of those drugs are good for something else -- something profitable.

What a great idea. Every company has products and IP that they are not turning into profits. When new technology comes along you can use it to try to create yet more products, or you can use it to reevaluate your old products. The latter is much cheaper. Time to go dumpster diving.

Fortune: Technology in the Trash Bin

Best Buy's Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)

2006-12-09T10:24:00.000-05:00

"Best Buy is recognizing that sitting in a chair is no longer working." [from Business Week, Dec 11, 2006]

Best Buy has experienced a worker revolution. From within the ranks of the hard-charging company, the employees created a work-from-wherever-you-like practice called "Results-Only Work Environment" or ROWE. It grew silently for 2 years before the company's CEO even knew it was happening.

Flexible work hours are not new. But a silent revolution to implement such a practice gets my attention. Something like that had to come from people who were overworked - BUT who also loved their jobs enough to turn rebel in order to find a livable way to stay at the job.

Critics ask, "But what happens when sales go bad or people's productivity declines? Is this sustainable?" The obvious 21st century answer is -- Haven't you noticed that change is the new standard. Nothing remains the same for very long in this century. Policies and practices change to meet the needs of the current environment. When that environment changes, the practice will change again to match it. The days of business practices that are static for decades (long enough to publish in policy manuals, distribute to all locations, and inculcate into all employees) are gone. We are now being guided by principles and missions. Practices change every day.

Magazines for a CTO

2006-12-09T10:05:00.000-05:00

As a CTO, which magazines do I read and get the most good out of? Identifying #1 is easy - Business Week. Almost every issue contains something that I can quote in a blog, circle for future reference, tear out a page to show a friend, or pass the entire issue along. Though I am lothe to save old issues of any periodical because I can always look it up again online, there are a dozen old issues of BW under my desk just in case I want to get to them again. I also find single pages of the magazine stuffed into project folders relating to the articles. Also, the magazine always arrives on Friday and I try to finish reading it before Monday so I can move on an idea before other people.

Where does the list go from there?

Business Week
Fortune
Business 2.0
Forbes
Money
Inc.
Academy of Management Review
CIO
CFO

From there the list branches into titles that I am reading in specific industries to understand new trends.

Jay Allard on Creating the Future

2006-12-09T10:04:00.000-05:00

"The only way to change the world is to imagine it different that the way it is today. Apply too much of the wisdom and knowledge that got us here, and you end up right where you started. Take a fresh look from a new perspective, and get a new result." -- Jay Allard, Microsoft Entertainment Division [from Business Week, Dec 4, 2006]

5 Patterns of the CTO

2006-12-03T07:23:00.000-05:00

Research into company practices indicates that there are 5 different patterns of the CTO position.

I have been contacted a number of times by people trying to understand what it means to be a CTO at their company. The role that they are trying to define always seems to be different from the material they find on the web or in the bookstore on the CTO position. Welcome to the confusion! We all experience this when we come into the position. There is no real single defined responsibilities for the CTO. But at least 5 unique patterns are emerging.

Genius. This is often one of the founders of the company who is a wizard at the core technology that launched their product or service.

Director. For bigger companies, the CTO is not usually a "doer", but a director of what needs to be done. He/she may be very technical, but spends their time managing product development or research labs.

Executive. In large companies the CTO may be a member of the executive staff and spend their time on strategic directions for the company. The focus is not on creating technologies, but on creating strategy.

Advocate. This person is focused on the experience of the customer with the product or service. This is a hands-on, in the trenches person.

Administrator. This person is interested in scheduling the efficient deployment of the product and looking for the best licensing deals for vendor products.

Void. Many companies have a CTO void. This is when no one holds the title AND no other title is handling the strategic future of technology in the company's products. Given the current state of the world, this is a dangerous place to be, even if your company just makes T-shirts.

For a complete description of the 5 patterns: "5 Patterns of the CTO"

Computerworld wants to know what a CTO does

2006-11-26T17:51:00.000-05:00

A reporter from Computerworld called me recently to discuss the difference between the CTO and the CIO. It is common to confuse the two positions when discussing IT companies and a number of dot.com's. For those, the CTO often fills a position that is like an "Assistant to the CIO". The CTO discussed IT services, deploying capabilities to customers, etc. -- always tied to IT products and services.

However, when you are talking about the CTO of a cellular phone company, the person is more likely to deal with the strategy side of new technology and research related to cell phones.

The Computerworld reporter wanted to focus on the "Assistant to the CIO" role, while I wanted to talk about the non-CIO positions. In my own research on the subject I spent several months confused by the diversity of CTO's. Eventually I settled on "5 Patterns of the CTO", one of which is CIO-like.

It will be interesting to see how my comments on the subject come out in the article.

Sun Microsystems CTO - Greg Papadopoulos

2006-11-03T07:01:00.000-05:00

Greg Papadopoulos, the CTO of Sun Microsystems maintains an excellent blog on the latest technical moves at Sun.

Greg Matter

On Disruption - Michael Urlocker

2006-11-03T06:55:00.000-05:00

Michael Urlocker has created a very useful blog on the dissruptive impacts of new technologies and new business models on established industries. He has developed a tool to assist organizations in identifying where they stand in the shifting sands of their own industry.

On Disruption

Game Adoption Pattern

2006-08-06T15:16:00.000-04:00

At the center of the Game Impact Theory (see previous blog posting) is the adoption pattern of the technologies. The adoption of game technologies in many industries may follow a pattern that is similar to that experienced by the military. It will begin in a niche area that is closely aligned with at least one powerful game technology. If successful there, it will be adopted for applications and activities that are not regulated. These are spaces where local groups define their own processes and measures of success. From this position, support will grow for the technology in a number of organizations and geographic areas. This will lead to some form of certified status of game technologies as an acceptable solution to specific problems. Success at this level will lead to it becoming a recommended practice in which the recognized regulating bodies will include it among the proven and preferred approaches to solving a problem. Finally, game technology may become a mandatory standard method of solving problems across the industry.

The visual, auditory, and mental stimulation that come with games are often strong motivators for adopting and promoting the technology. Along with the flexibility that is built into the tools by core developers, these come together to create a very energetic lead-user community that contributes advances to the technology. von Hippel described this enthusiasm in the open source software development community in Democratizing Innovation, and these forces appear to be even stronger in the game communities.

Game Impact Theory: The Five Forces That are Driving the Adoption of Game Technologies within Multiple Established Industries

2006-08-06T14:52:00.000-04:00

The computer gaming industry has begun to export powerful products and technologies from its initial entertainment roots to a number of “serious” industries. Games are being adopted for defense, medicine, architecture, education, city planning, and government applications. Each of these industries is already served by an established family of companies that typically do not use games or the technologies that support them. The rapid growth in the power of game technologies and the growing social acceptance of these technologies has created an environment in which these are displacing other industry-specific computer hardware and software suites.

This paper puts forward a game impact theory that identifies five specific forces that compel industries to adopt game technologies for their core products and services. These five forces are computer hardware costs, game software power, social acceptance, other industry successes, and native industry experimentation. Together these influence the degree and rapidity at which game technologies are adopted in a number of industries. This theory is meant to be useful to managers who must make decisions about adopting, investigating, or ignoring these new technologies.

Complete Paper: Game Impact Theory

Entrepreneurial Technology Tranfer with George Washington University

2006-07-29T10:35:00.000-04:00

CTOnet has entered into a strategic partnership with the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science. We are investigating entrepreneurial technology transfer and ROI for R&D. The first results of this collaboration will be presented at the University Start-ups Conference 2006 to be held at GWU in October (http://www.ncet2.org/).

Innovation: Super-human or Super-team?

2005-08-08T09:43:00.000-04:00

Innovation Inside-Out

Jim,
There has been some very interesting research on the impacts of intellectual capital on innovation. Specifically, Subramaniam & Youndt (2005) studied the impacts of three forms of IC on two forms of innovation. IC can exist as human capital (brilliant individuals), social capital (groups that exchange ideas), and organizational capital (patents and databases of knowledge). Innovation is typically characterized as incremental (improving existing products or services) or radical (creating entirely new products).

Subramaniam & Youndt found that incremental innovation was primarily driven by organizational capital - the historical knowledge-base of the firm building itself up one brick at a time. However, radical innovation was NOT primarily driven by human capital - the brilliant individual was insufficient for creating radical innovations. Instead, the primary driver for radical innovations was social capital - groups of people sharing their ideas, insight, and experiments was more effective that the application of brilliant individuals alone.

They took a very scientific approach to this problem and worked hard to gate out external influences.

Conclusion -- If you want to develop radical innovations you had better invest in social interactions and collaboration first. You can spend the money you have left over hiring Giant Brains.

Roger

Reference:
Subramaniam, M. & Youndt, M. (June 2005). The Influence of intellectual capital on the types of innovative capabilities. Academy of Management Journal, 48(3), 450-463.

Hacking Wikipedia

2005-06-15T09:23:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting way to play with Wikipedia. Since anyone can edit the encyclopedia at any time, it lures "hackers" to edit the page that is the "Main Page of the Day" on the encyclopedia's home page.

Today's entry on the Cat's Eye Nebula has two short sentences inserted in the "General Information" section that are clearly not part of the definition of the nebula. It says:

"F*****g and s*****g is a very well studied planetary phenomena. It is relatively enjoyable by people of all ages at magnitude 8.1" (no stars in the original posting)

Since the web page can be edited instantly by anyone, this sentence will probably be erased almost immediately. But, it does provide a little notoriety to the hacker-of-the-Wiki-day.

Wiki programmers might address this problem by making the main page entries non-editable while they are on the feature page. Or they might do nothing. It will be interesting to see how much they are willing to tolerate.

Screenshot of the Hacked Article (grainy)
The Hacked Article on Wiki: Cat's Eye Nebula - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Western Electric History

2005-04-26T18:16:00.000-04:00

Western Electric History

Longhorn O/S vs. Security Software

2005-04-26T18:01:00.000-04:00

The market for security software like McAfee and Norton packages is created because the operating system is vulnerable to attacks by viruses, trojan horses, worms, etc. What happens to these products and their host companies when the O/S becomes bullet-proof?

If Longhorn and future releases close the security holes in Windows XP, then what becomes of 3rd party security products?

It seems unlikely that any international court could decide that closing the security holes in Windows is anti-competitive and should be prevented. Even though it may put some companies out of business, there is no way to argue that Microsoft should be forces to leave flaws in their products just to retain the marketspace for McAfee.

If this is true, then what is the future business case for security software providers? They must remain nimble enough to conquer security threats faster than Microsoft can, making them a valuable partner on customer desktops.

This fight will probably mimic the impact of Windows Media Player on RealMedia products -- but without the benefit for legal protection.

Web Reference: Gates unveils Longhorn�s features, security enhancement

Blockbusted by New Technology

2005-04-26T12:23:00.000-04:00

Blockbuster has consolidated a huge portion of the video, DVD, and gam rental business. They have taken control of most of the neighborhood business in the country. Who could compete with them?

... Technology competes with them every day. Why should a customer drive to the Blockbuster store and search the shelves for a specific movie, only to discover that the 10 copies owned by the store are rented out and the customer has to take the "The Land Before Time XXXI"?

A movie is a piece of information just like a document, photo, or music file. Broadband Internet into the home will do to movie sales and rentals what Napster and MP3's have done to the music industry.

Defending Blockbuster's business required mastering new technology and escaping from the old mindset that the movie is the DVD.

Broadband + Encryption + Digital Rights + Set-to-device = access to every movie ever made.

Who is a great competitor in this space? Tivo.

There is no reason the Tivo device and service have to be limited to programmed television. Imagine a library of encrypted digital movies that Tivo can stream into your home when you want them - not when Blockbuster decides that they will let you have one of their rare DVD's.

Web Reference: The Turning Point for Blockbuster - CFO Magazine - April Issue 2005 - CFO.com

CTO Network 2004 Book of the Year - Does IT Matter?

2005-03-17T11:19:00.000-05:00

We have selected Does IT Matter? (Nicholas Carr) as the CTOnet Book of the Year for 2004. It describes the declining power of IT to provide competitive advantage to a company that adopts it. One of the greatest values of this book was the controversy and discussion that it triggered. Open discussion on the business power of IT systems was becoming long over due and this book (and the related Harvard Business Review article) broke the dam and got the world talking about it.

Lowest Price: Does IT Matter? at Overstock.com

Innovation with a Bounce - Spalding Infusion

2005-03-14T10:05:00.000-05:00

Innovation can come to any product or industry. How much change can go into a basketball? New sticky grips, new patterns, logo licensing ... How about putting the air pump inside the basketball? Now there is a good idea. How many times have you had to hunt up that tiny needle in order to put air into your ball? How many balls are tossed aside simply because they are flat and it is too hard to find the needle.

At my house the pump needle is a well guarded item. I keep it in my car ashtray and do not let anyone else use it or lose it. My daughter and I have been using the Infusion football. We throw a few pumps into the ball every time we use it.

Technology Review Article: Spalding: An Idea with Bounce

Outsourcing Innovation (Business Week, March 21, 2005)

2005-03-13T22:41:00.000-05:00

Question: What makes America's Motorola different from India's Wipro?

Answer: (Choose all that apply)

American vs. Indian-based
High vs. Low-cost of Labor
In-house Innovation

The last one will not be a differentiator much longer. Ever since outsourcing began, it has been clear that the complexity of work shipped to India, China, and Eastern Europe would continue to increase. It was clear that one day the most demanding R&D would be done oversees just as manufacturing is now. This week, Business Week magazine profiled this trend in their cover story on Outsourcing Innovation.

Accenture says, "R&D is the biggest single remaining controllable expense to work on."
Motorola says, when outsourcing "you have to draw a line, core intellectual property is above it, and commodity technology is below."
Flextronics says, "Western tech conglomerates are on the cusp of a sweeping overhaul of R&D that will rival the offshore shift from manufacturing."
Nokia says, "Nobody can master it all. You have to figure out what is core and what is context."
Lucent says, R&D outsourcing "frees up talent to work on new product lines. Outsourcing isn't about moving jobs. It's about the flexibility to put resources in the right places at the right time."

Summing all of this up and dividing by the ever advancing trend to outsource, you arrive at a logical conclusion that R&D is a cost to be minimized. Anything labeled R&D is no longer going to be held in-house. Instead, much of this work will be outsourced to foreign companies that are better at it than the US-based conglomerates.

What will remain in-house is anything that creates new intellectual property (IP). This is the cream from the top of the R&D milk bucket. Companies want to retain only the IP and the resources required to create it. Once the IP is created and patented, they are happy to have all of the rest of the work done by anyone anyplace. Companies want to become IP holding companies more than manufacturers or researchers.

Where is this headed? Look at consumer electronics and automobiles. Flextronics, Wipro, and Quanta are the Toyota, Honda, Sony, and Sanyo of tomorrow. American customers will soon be able to choose between two identical phones, one labeled Motorola and the other labeled Compal. Motorola's will cost $199, Compal's will cost $49. Which do you think the customer will choose?

Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, humbly and slyly states that, "To be a successful product company requires intimacy with the customer", implying that only an American company can achieve that with American customers. So how did Toyota, Honda, Sony, Samsung, and LG build such strong positions in the American product market?

Clayton Christensen described the unstoppable advance of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma. Taking over R&D is the next step along Christensen's famous graph.

Debating whether this is good or bad is largely a political activity. In business, it is part of the economic evolution of the global marketplace. It is going to happen - see "Technology Impacts on Business: Disruption, Globalization, and Innovation Management".

The Business Week article is fantastic, but be sure to read Christensen's book as well.

Industrial Research Institute & Research Technology Management

2005-03-06T23:39:00.000-05:00

There are very few good sources for information about the CTO position and responsibilities. The Industrial Research Institute brings together Directors & VP's of R&D. These people often serve as the CTO as well. The associated publication Research Technology Management publishes papers on the practices and responsibilities of CTO's and research directors.

IRI Web Site

Utterback's Innovation Curve

2005-03-06T21:25:00.000-05:00

Utterback proposes a three-phase model of product innovation and evolution. The figure illustrates these phases and the activities that occur in each. This is a modified version of the figure given by Utterback (1996).

Innovation in business begins with an explosion of new product ideas. This forms the fluid phase in which there are many alternatives designs for a product and a number of different implementations. Companies compete with each other based on their own unique formulation of the technology and are willing to experiment with new ideas rapidly in order to discover a dominant product.

This is followed by a transitional phase in which one dominant design begins to emerge. Standardization begins to crystallize around that one standard, as when the movie industry began to release more material in VHS format than in Betamax. The preferred design will incorporate the needs of a number of different classes of customers and create a basis from which future incremental changes will be applied. Once this occurs, there is a noted drop in product innovation as firms rush to improve on the accepted or standardized products. At this point, the competition for product designs is over and the competition for the best processes for innovation and production begin. Companies that are able to manufacture or deliver products at low cost, on short schedules, with acceptable quality will win in this phase.

The transitional phase is followed by the specific phase in which many competitors drop out and a few remain. Those that remain share the market and each tries to focus on a unique adaptation of the dominant design.

This model predicts that radical product innovation can only occur at the beginning of the product lifecycle. It is only at that point that there is sufficient latitude in research, market demand, and emerging new features that a number of different designs can exist. Following the transitional phase, a standard emerges and defines the boundaries around the product. Those that do not fit within this boundary are no longer acceptable. Therefore, this becomes a period of incremental product innovation.

Reference:

Utterback, J. (1996). Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation. Harvard Business Press.

Radical vs. Incremental Innovation

2005-03-06T21:15:00.000-05:00

“It is not by improving on the candle that the electric light bulb was invented."

That is the real difference between incremental and disruptive innovation. Inventors who searched for new forms of wax, better wicks, scents and colors for the wax, and complementary lantern designs were engaging in incremental innovation. Disruptive innovators worked to turn electrical power into a reliable and ubiquitous source of lighting.

Betz defines Radical Innovation as “a basic technological innovation that establishes a new functionality.” He also defines Incremental Innovation as “a change in an existing technology system that does not alter functionality but improves performance, features, safety, or quality incrementally or lowers cost.” (Betz, 2003)

Moving from candles to kerosene lamps is disruptive to the candle trade and its associated suppliers for wax, wicks, scents, colors, molds, and production equipment. However, these provide very similar capabilities to the customer and it would not be considered radical because the use of the lamps is fundamentally the same as for candles.

Creating electric lighting allows the customer to place lighting in places that a lamp lighter could not reach. It allows the distribution of light on city streets, without the limitations associated with humans to light and clean the lanterns. Benjamin Franklin was a champion of public services like the lighting of the streets. However, he noticed the problems associated with the traditional glass balls that enclosed the lamps. They blackened quickly, requiring frequent cleaning, and when broken were difficult to replace (Franklin, 1778). Electric lights change this entire dynamic.

Additional examples of incremental and radical innovations are provided in the table below. The area of military systems and large government projects is filled with examples of radical innovation.

Domain	Incremental Innovation	Radical Innovation
Air-delivered Bombs	Growth from the 500 lb. To the 2000 lb. bomb	Fat Man (Hiroshima) and Little Boy (Nagasaki) Nuclear Bombs
Spacecraft	Transition from a Mercury capsule on top of a Pershing missile to an Apollo capsule on a Saturn rocket	Space Shuttle for reusable launch, reentry, and human/cargo combinations.
Theater Missile Defense	Longer-range ground-based missiles	Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to disable threat missiles from space-based platforms
Global Communication	PBX-based telephone service expansions like voice mail, call transfers, and software-based number assignment	Voice Over IP systems that place all telephone services in computer software and eliminate the need for traditional services. This foundation can integrate voice, video, data, and business applications into one medium.

LG Electronics is using R&D to Leap Ahead

2005-01-10T14:07:00.000-05:00

LG Electronics has moved into a very strong position with cellphones in America in the last coule of years. The CTO of LG explains how the company is partnering with R&D firms in Korea to make its competitive products.

Web Source: http://us.lge.com/www/aboutus/message_cto.jsp

Management & Leadership of Scientists

2005-01-10T13:57:00.000-05:00

Thomas Clarke of Stargate Consultants presented a very useful paper to the Analytical Laboratory Managers Association on managing scientists.

Web Source: http://www.stargate-consultants.ca/artalma.htm

TI is Revived by a Marketing Guy Chasing Technology

2004-08-21T17:01:00.000-04:00

Every recent business article on Texas Instruments talks about the revival of the company thanks to its vision for the future of digital signal processing (DSP) chips for the cellphone. They realized that DSP chips could put amazing capabilities into a cellphone, partnered with Nokia to begin the transformation of the product, and launched themselves into the most powerful position in these chips.

Surely there was a technological brain behind this realization, someone who could see the power of a core product within TI and convince the CEO to pursue it. Surely? or Surely not? Articles in Business Week, Business 2.0, and the TI web site all credit a guy from Marketing and Sales with this revelation and the salvation of the company.

Richard Templeton entered the company through the sales department (though he did have a BS degree in EE). He rose to lead the semiconductor side of the business and leveraged the move into cellphone chips.

Where was the CTO, Chief Scientist, or Technical Director to inspire him, back him up, or put the vision in front of customers like Nokia? According to published history, there wasn't one. There seems to be no reference to such a person. Does this mean that a company does not need a CTO? Can you get a two-for by hiring a President/COO who has a technical background?

"Things that make you go hmmmm..."

Business 2.0 Article: What Works: Don't Mess With Texas Instruments

Business Week Article: A Talk with TI's Richard Templeton

TI Web Bio: Richard Templeton

Emerging Technology Conference at MIT

2004-08-17T11:12:00.000-04:00

Executives talk about how to get technology out of the lab and into the market. Others discuss the importance of keeping the invention pipeline filled with technologies that can be harvestd on a regular basis.

The Emerging Technology Conference at MIT

Hurricane Charley

2004-08-15T18:45:00.000-04:00

I have been off the net for a few days because Hurricane Charley visited my neighborhood. It tore down most of the oak trees around here - but luckily did little damage to houses and roofs. We got our power pack after 1 day and telephone/internet after 2. Other parts of Florida and Orlando were not so lucky.

S Curve vs. Z Curve: The Battle for Competitive Advantage

2004-08-03T15:14:00.000-04:00

R&D is all about discovering technology (through research) that can be applied to a new product profitably (through development). Ivory Tower projects aside, most companies rely upon being the first with a new idea to give them a competitive advantage. That advantage can be maintained through trade secrets, patents, and complexity of application. But eventually the competition is going to find a way to match that advantage, and if possible, surpass it. Therefore, everything that R&D and the CTO do will eventually be commoditized.

This fact is why Ford Motor Company continues to invest in R&D. If Henry Ford's ideas for a modern production line had not been copied by every other car company, Ford could still rely on them for its profit margins.

Nicholas Carr draws the Z curve to illustrate the declining advantage provided by IT. It illustrates the fate of all new technologies in providing an advantage. Nothing is new and unique forever.

Web Source: Digital Renderings: The Z Curve and IT Investment

Does T Matter?

2004-08-02T14:09:00.000-04:00

Nicholas Carr's new book, Does IT Matter? is a great exploration into the cost/benefit of new computer and software technology. The book and the earlier Harvard Business Review article have raised a hue and cry from the IT community. The fact that open discussion on this topic is so painful to many IT vendors indicates that they fear that Carr might be onto something.

In this blog we are more interested in the universal "T" (technology) than in the specific "IT". If you read Carr's book with an eye toward its meaning for the CTO, you will see that he clearly believes that technology innovation is a much more powerful and long-term method for competitive advantage than IT. IT can eliminate a lot of friction inside of a company and between the company and its suppliers or customers - like a new engine lubricant in a race car. But, like a new super-lubricant, eventually everyone will adopt it and your company will have to look elsewhere for ways to win the competitive race. That is where you must turn to proprietary technology to create a lasting and defensible competitive advantage.

There is No "I" in "CTO"

2004-08-02T13:50:00.000-04:00

Within the IT community the title CTO is often synonymous with CIO, or perhaps subordinate to it. On the wider stage of companies that use technology to enhance their profits and competitive position, the title CTO has a unique meaning that has little to do with the CIO.

Where the CIO deals with IT services to support the company's internal operations, and sometimes external interfaces with customers, the CTO is more often focused on the development of technologies that have a direct impact on future company products. For example, Pat Gelsinger, CTO of Intel, does not handle anything to do with Intel's IT systems - internal or external. Gelsinger is directing the research, partnerships, and PR of Intel such that they are positioned for the future intersection of computing and communications. Intel sees that in the future the line between these two domains will blur and disappear. They do not intend to allow their products to be limited to the computing side of that integration. This is even more important because their competitors (e.g. AMD and Transmeta) could move squarely into the center of the computing/communicating space and displace Intel as the primary player. Gelsinger's #1 mission is top position the company so that that does not happen.

The "T" in CTO is generic. It is not limited to information, IT, computers, networks, or the Internet. It refer to the exploration of new drug development at Novartis, the creation of new construction techniques at ABB, the invention of new power sources at GE, and the incorporation of lighter airplane composites at Boeing.

CTO = Strategic technology positioning for future competitiveness - specifically applied to new products and services.

CIO = Strategic application of IT to improve internal performance - including the information interface to the customer.

The CTO role is not what it used to be

2004-07-28T20:28:00.000-04:00

"'CTO used to be the glamour job,' said Peter Woolford, manager of IT and engineering for the Boston staffing firm Kforce Inc. 'Generally, one of the company founders or principals stepped into the role, and it meant less involvement in day-to-day management and a focus on playing with new toys.'"

Web Source: The CTO role is not what it used to be, Tech Republic.

MIT 15.351 Managing the Innovation Process

2004-07-27T15:25:00.000-04:00

MIT has committed to placing the learning materials for ALL of its courses online so that they can serve as resources for students of the world. This is the MIT Open Courseware project that has been covered heavily by the press.

Among the courses available from MIT's Sloan School of Management is one on Managing the Innovation Process. "This course approaches 'managing the innovation process' through five levels of analysis: individual, team, network, organizational, and industrial. At each level of analysis, particular attention is given to the conditions under which innovation processes succeed and fail."

MIT SLOAN 15.351 Managing the Innovation Process, MIT OpenCourseWare, Sloan School of Management.

Multi-University/Research Lab (MURL) Seminar Series

2004-07-26T21:40:00.000-04:00

Are you interested in seminars on social computing, artificial intelligence, computing parallelism, miniature robotic aircraft, search engines, and a hundred other topics all presenting by some of the smartest people in the country? The Multi-University/Research Laboratory Seminar Series is the place to find all of this. It is hosted by Microsoft Research, but includes five major members and visiting seminars from people everywhere.

MURL partners are:

Carnegie-Mellon University
MIT
Microsoft Research
Stanford University
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

Multi-University/Research Lab (MURL) Seminar Series

Xerox PARC makes big leap to innovation in medicine

2004-07-26T21:33:00.000-04:00

MercuryNews.com - Xerox PARC makes big leap to innovation in medicine: "Xerox PARC, best known as the home of some of the great innovations in computer science, is turning its prowess in a new direction -- medical devices."

Technology Impacts on Business

2004-07-25T11:48:00.000-04:00

"Management literature is filled with examples of the changes wrought on business by the addition of technology and the creation of entirely new businesses whose primary product or service is technology. These changes have become of vital interest to companies who see technology as a means to improving their operations. They are also important to the inventors and vendors of this technology, encouraging them to identify the next product or service that customers will flock to. The term “killer app” is often used to describe the most wildly successful technologies or products. In the past, such killer apps have been the personal computer, laptop computer, personal digital assistant, Windows Operating System, word processor, Internet, electronic mail, World Wide Web, web browser, information portal, cellular telephone, and wireless messaging. Each of these has been so widely adopted that the leading providers have risen to the pinnacle of commercial success. Companies like Microsoft, Dell Computers, Palm, Research in Motion, Yahoo, Google, and Nokia have all ridden from obscurity to international prominence on the back of a killer app."

This article explores the importance of three major impacts that technology has on a business:

Disruption of the current status quo.
Globalization of opportunity, skill-base, and wealth.
Innovation Management as an essential tool for attaining or retaining a leadership position.

Web Source: "Technology Impacts on Business: Disruption, Globalization, and Innovation Management",
posted at CTOnet.org

CTO People: Padmasree Warrior, Motorola

2004-07-24T17:32:00.000-04:00

What lessons have you learned that would be valuable to women beginning their careers in technology?

"Be an expert in your field, know your stuff! Develop a clear, concise and distinctive communication style. Surround yourself with giants - don't be intimidated by brilliance from others, leverage it. Lead with femininity and grace - you don't have to be "one of the boys" to be recognized as a strong leader. Be professional and always treat people with respect. Be well organized in how you deliver and be thorough in what you do. Take charge of your career. Don't wait for the perfect opportunity to land in your lap--search for it with passion and daring. A lesson I learned from Bob Galvin is "Leadership is the ability to take people elsewhere. Lead with humility. Humility does not mean that one thinks less of oneself, it means that one thinks of oneself less". This is a nugget I will always carry with me."

Interesting Bio at Women in Technology International: WITI Biography
Very Official Bio at Motorola: Motorola Biography
Very Quick Intro at Chicago Business: Chicago Business

Innovation Begins with an Eye

2004-07-24T17:23:00.000-04:00

In The Art of Innovation, IDEO founder Tom Kelley talks about how their company creates so many innovative product designs. They boil their method down into 5 steps - in their words, an embarassingly simple 5 steps:

Understand the market, client, technology, constraints.
Observe real people in real-life situations.
Visualize new concepts and customers who will use them.
Evaluate and Refine prototypes in a series of quick iterations.
Implement the concept for commercialization.

All of this begins by looking at the world with a different eye. It requires seeing what is right there in front of everyone, but no one can see because they are busy seeing the world their own way - not the way the customer sees it.

Book Web Site: The Art Of Innovation

The IDEAL Model for Technology Change

2004-07-23T16:49:00.000-04:00

Faced with an organization that needs to be refocused on pursuing new technology, leveraging existing technology, or outsourcing technology strategically - how does one go about making this transformation?

One approach that has been quite successful and that has been formalized by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon university is IDEAL.

IDEAL spells out the phases of the change process for the organization. These are:

I - Initiating. Laying the groundwork for a successful improvement effort.
D - Diagnosing. Determining where you are relative to where you want to be.
E - Establishing. Planning the specifics of how you will reach your destination.
A - Acting. Doing the work according to the plan.
L - Learning. Learning from the experience and improving your ability to adopt new technologies in the future.

The SEI has generously placed a great deal of information on IDEAL and its application on their web site. So you have free access to this powerful tool and to a large library of documents to assist you in implementing it.

Web Source: The IDEAL Model

Innovation in Bug Hunting

2004-07-23T07:24:00.000-04:00

"Klocwork, a startup in Ottawa, Canada, is helping to solve a multibillion dollar problem: finding and fixing bugs buried deep in lines of computer code – or exterminating at the source before they strike.

It is a worthy battle. Software defects cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion a year, or about 0.6 percent of its gross domestic product, according to a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Developers already spend about 80 percent of software development costs on identifying and correcting defects."

CTO and Co-founder, Djenana Campara, "moved from Sarajevo to Toronto with her infant daughter in 1998, escaping the war in Bosnia. She had a degree in science, electrical engineering, and computer science from the University of Sarajevo, but didn’t speak a word of English. She sent out handwritten resumes on lined paper and landed a job Toronto technology company Amdahl; later she moved to Nortel Networks. There she developed software to clean code and free up memory, allowing programmers to add new features without the fallout.

The software was so successful at finding and repairing software code that Nortel decided to spin it out as a separate company – Klocwork – in February 2001, after a five-year incubation period."

Web Source: Red Herring, May 25, 2004 (requires free registration)

Klocwork Web Site

Return on Innovation - A New ROI

2004-07-20T15:59:00.000-04:00

What is the payoff for investing in innovation? Is it a linear relationship? Is it logarithmic? Authors at Strategy+Business explain their concepts and research into the Return on Innovation.

"The law of diminishing returns in innovation effectiveness explains the numerous cases in which increases in R&D spending do not produce significant lifts in sales or growth. These companies are not raising but rather “riding the curve” — increasing their spending on idea generation and new product development, without altering the processes, systems, structures, or capabilities that determine their ROI."

Sttrategy+Business article (requires creating an account): The Innovator's Prescription: Raising Your Return on Innovation Investment

GE Investor Meeting on Technology 2004

2004-07-20T15:16:00.000-04:00

General Electric spends billions of dollars each year on R&D and the application f new technologies. This is such an important part of their corporate strategy that they schedule meeting with their shareholders to explain their strategies - to win investor support for their technology exploration.

R&D and Technology are a significant part of the future of GE.

View GE Briefings: General Electric Investor Meeting on Technology

Innovation Management at Siemens AG

2004-07-20T11:15:00.000-04:00

Siemens has determined to be a trendsetter in developing solutions to life in the 21st century. The key, says Claus Weyrich, Siemens' Head of Technology, lies in developing “comprehensive visions, pictures of the future.” The company attempts to maintain technological leadership, aggressive patenting, synergy among work groups and a vast network of 50,000 skilled R&D workers worldwide.

Video by Weyrich: MIT World : Innovation Management at Siemens AG

Chief Executive is the Head Innovator at Novartis

2004-07-17T18:09:00.000-04:00

Chief Executive - Innovation: July 2004 Issue 200: "Many experts agree that in an industry where the work is as technical as pharmaceuticals, it helps if the CEO is a scientist or doctor."

The article above describes the technical prowess, technical management, and technical interests of the CEO of Novartis ... almost as if he were the CTO. He seems to set R&D budgets based on his own understanding of the potential of each new drug. Novartis does not have a CTO, but Jorg Reinhardt is the Head of Development, which includes R&D. What input does he have on setting R&D budgets?

Chief Scientist's are not always in favor of more technology investment

2004-07-17T18:01:00.000-04:00

Chief Scientists, standing in for the CTO in this case, must consider the financial situation of the company. More technology investment is not always what the company needs right now.

"McNealy was bucking not just the counsel of outsiders but also that of his own lieutenants. After the tech industry went into its long slide in late 2000, virtually his entire management team, including Chief Scientist Bill Joy and President Edward J. Zander, pleaded with McNealy to scale back his vision and adjust to meaner times."

Web Source: BW Online | July 26, 2004 | Sun: A CEO's Last Stand

Sun Stock Performance

Intel CTO Extracts Value from Acquisitions

2004-07-11T14:48:00.000-04:00

A Red Herring article in 2002 implied that Intel needed a CTO because they had made a mess of their business situation through multiple acquisitions and had to call on someone to turn those acquisitions into a profitable and integrated business.

"Mr. Gelsinger will help manage a $4 billion research-and-development budget as Intel tries to navigate the complex and increasingly unstable terrain of computing, networking, and communications. He has to extract viable businesses from Intel's mess of acquisitions."

However, it is more important to recognize that the benefit of a CTO is in extracting value from technology, regardless of whether it was acquired or invented in-house.

Red Herring is on target when they point out that growth, acquisition, and research in all directions as fast as possible is a luxury that cannot be sustained indefinitely. Eventually you will have to bet on products that you can market and retreat from technology that is not leading anywhere.

Web Source: Red Herring, January 21, 2002

Scott Donnelly � : Technology for the 21st Century

2004-07-11T11:40:00.000-04:00

Scott Donnelly, VP for Global Technology at GE, speaks to MIT about the future of technology.

Video: MIT World � : Technology for the 21st Century

GE Focuses Their Investors on Technology

2004-07-11T11:02:00.000-04:00

General Electric spends over $2 billion on research and technology every year. Scott Donnelly, Senior VP for Global Research, spans all of the company's business areas. His goals are:

Delivering Breakthrough Technology

Leveraging Core Technologies in Multiple Businesses

Driving Technology Across the Businesses

Infusing New Technology Value in Acquisition

Developing and Protecting Intellectual Property

GE considers this investment so important that they schedule meetings with their investors to explain what they are doing in technology and why. The briefings at the link below explain the meaning of the five goals above.

GE Investor Meeting Focused on Technology

Technology Administration at the Department of Commerce

2004-07-11T09:28:00.000-04:00

Question: What does the Department of Commerce's Office of Technology Administration do?

Answer: "The Technology Administration seeks to maximize technology’s contribution to economic growth, high-wage job creation, and the social well being of the United States."

How:
Advocating for technological innovation in the government policy arena, and other key national and international organizations.

Analyzing factors that affect U.S. technological innovation and competitiveness, including R&D investment, business climate, technology infrastructure, and workforce technical skills.

Developing and promoting measurements, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, trade, and the quality of life. This includes conducting research to advance the U.S. technology infrastructure, promoting excellence and quality achievement in U.S. business and other organizations, providing technical and business assistance to the nation’s smaller manufacturers, and supporting the development of technologies for broad national benefit.

Providing access to information that stimulates innovation and discovery. This includes serving as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information.

Technology Administration

The Council on Competitiveness

2004-07-01T10:15:00.001-04:00

"The Council on Competitiveness is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that sets an action agenda to drive economic growth and raise the standard of living for all Americans."

It has responsibilities similar to the Technology Administration in the Department of Commerce. Also the sponsors of the Technology Forum.

Forum on Technology & Innovation

2004-07-01T10:15:00.000-04:00

Follow discussions on technology policy in Washington D.C.

Forum on Technology & Innovation

Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos - Speaks His Mind

2004-07-01T09:52:00.000-04:00

One of the jobs of a CTO in Silicon Valley is to make outrageous predictions that are worthy of being carried in the media and that will garner a place on the front page. In the case of Sun, it also requires maintaining the duel between Sun and Microsoft - the Grand Rivalry. (Yes, recent new is that the rivalry has been settled and Microsoft won in exchange for a $1.8 billion licensing payment to Sun for Java tech.)

Greg Papadopoulos, CTO at Sun, has several good articles on his Sun web site. Particularly look at the one on the innovative legacy of Thomas Edison. He maintains that Edison made similar outrageous claims to get the press' attention.

Papadopoulos Speaks

Information ... Knowledge ... Innovation ... Effectiveness

2004-07-01T09:34:00.000-04:00

Storytelling Series - Larry Prusak, IBM Global Services.

IT Competitive Advantage - the Shrinking Timeline

2004-07-01T09:09:00.000-04:00

Strategy+Business, Does Nick Carr Matter?: "Dawn Lepore, vice chairman in charge of technology at Charles Schwab, estimates that a lead in new IT-based financial products lasts from one to 18 months. 'You still get competitive advantage from IT, but there is no silver bullet,' she observes."

This use of the term "technology" is more limited than what we consider here. It is nearly synonymous with "IT" or "MIS". However, since IT has been the primary source of technology innovation over the last decade, it is important to notice when the power of that innovation begins to wane.