Case: MBA 624: Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation: Summer 2006

Rather than structure the course around a textbook, I'm structuring the course around a project. I've found it works better if everyone writes on the same general theme. Information retrieval, analysis, evaluation, and presentation skills are used throughout organizations. They are transferable skills; you can take them from the marketing department, to production, to finance, to personnel and use the same skills and software.

Parkside Partners

You are part of the management team at a venture capital firm, Parkside Partners. The principal partners realize that their long-term success depends on their ability to buy into business models at the right time. If the partners could predict the future, they would make much better decisions. Because they can't predict the future, they are asking each member of the management team to develop a partial vision of the future. In other words, you will provide the depth and a framework for ongoing analysis. The partners will add your visions together -- giving breadth to your depth -- to create a comprehensive vision of the future that will be more accurate than any of us can do individually.

The partners see the firm continuing to seek investment in new products and services that affect:

work and daily life

health and health care

global business trends

changing consumer society

PEBBLES, a new assistive technology, is revolutionizing the educational and emotional experiences of hospitalized and/or homebound children. PEBBLES unites medically fragile children, hospitalized for protracted periods, with their regular school site. It utilizes a unique video-conferencing system known as telepresence.

Telepresence differs from traditional video-conferencing in both theory and practice. By definition, telepresence technology establishes a true sense of shared space among geographically remote persons by duplicating the three-dimensional human experience via actual face-to face encounters. Indeed, telepresence is a stunningly different way to telecommunicate.

Future technology

Note | Your choice of technology to research is crucial. If the technology doesn't excite you, then your reading will be boring, your training module will be confusing, and your portal will be weakly developed. If the technology does excite you, then your reading will be fascinating, your training module will be stimulating, and your portal will be useful.

In order to understand and predict trends in these product and service areas, the partners want the firm to develop expertise and reputation in:

This Elon University/Pew Internet Project site is a multi-section resource containing thousands of pages. It exposes future possibilities while simultaneously providing a peek back at the past. In it, you will find the words of thousands of people from every corner of the world, from today and from yesterday, making thousands of predictive pronouncements about the future of humankind.

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human
by Joel Garreau

Technological advances often bury quaint vestiges of simpler times. The latest victim may be the old expression, "dumb as a brick." Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a "smart brick" filled with electronic sensors to continuously monitor the structural health of buildings for both routine maintenance and safety in emergencies.

Smart things are going to communicate with the user via hypertags. These images show a phone for people on the go, but in the office where eWalls puts "paper" on the walls and in the home where vBooks puts the "book" on the tables, the user's device can be any object in the room, including you or your clothes. For that matter, vBook could talk to eWall and both could be connected to a company's web site.

In addition to the movie theater ad campaign in London, the company is targeting visitor attractions, health clubs, shopping centers, railway stations and even airports. It doesn't stop there, though.

"Looking even further ahead, Hypertag will use visual recognition, so phone users can point their phone at a magazine or newspaper article and be linked to a Web page, and even sound," said Morgan. "Using sound would allow TV viewers to access related Web pages by pointing and clicking their phone at the television.

"It's all about linking wireless devices to content," he added.

Brain cells can be enticed into forming uniform functioning patterns using a nano-engineering trick.

The technique could allow the development of sophisticated biological sensors that use functioning brain cells, the researchers say. This type of device would identify a compound - a deadly nerve agent or poison, for example - by measuring its effect on a functioning network of neurons.

explore the strengths and limits of virtual reality (sensory immersion, 3-D representation) as a medium for science education.

the leading resource and advocate promoting access to medical care for consumers and health professionals via telecommunications technology

up-to-date and relevant information and resources on (tele-)presence, i.e. the subjective experience of 'being there' in mediated environments such as virtual reality, simulators, cinema, television, etc.

Since August of 2001, Harris & Harris Group has made all of its initial investments in tiny technology. Tiny technology includes nanotechnology, microsystems and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).

the most realistic, advanced, and �most wildly dazzling holographic images� in the world

a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using the downloadable Croquet SDK, software developers can benefit from a flexible enough framework that virtually any user interface concept could quickly and easily be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations.

the seventh in the series of ITU Internet Reports originally launched in 1997 under the title �Challenges to the Network�. This edition has been specially prepared for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), to be held in Tunis, 16-18, November 2005.

A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and
B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

Context - PEST

The partners also recognize that a set of social policy issues and public debates have special bearing here:

patents

network neutrality

internet governance

spectrum

personal privacy

national security

economic globalization

accessibility, consumer rights

The partners want to participate in the public conversation, online and as event speakers. Thus, they need to listen to a variety of opposing viewpoints, after which they can sort out which ones to favor. It is your job to provide those opposing viewpoints.

Skills

Many companies can't afford to research far into the future. They need to focus on short-term ROI. Odds are good that most current companies won't be around to see much future. Thus, research firms -- such as Gartner, McKinsey, Forrester, and Accenture -- that specialize in future-thinking can sell their research products and services to corporations. They can sell them report by report for thousands of dollars. These firms hire MBAs as researchers and analysts and are looking for a skillset that I have tried to build into this case: research, oral presentations, reports.

... create visions of the future based on independent research and development. We explore the intersection of business and technology by building prototypes that combine new technologies in original ways, illustrating how emerging technologies will have a significant impact on our clients� business performance in the next three to five years.

These phrases keep appearing in "market research" and "research analyst" job ads for MBAs:

develop research agendas and scenarios.

develop complex and compelling futuristic scenarios.

analysis - seek out and piece together fragments of information, extrapolate, build and apply conceptual models, recognize patterns and draw conclusions from partial data.

develop thought-provoking research presentations.

take positions on key issues.

access the full spectrum of information sources (on-line databases, CD-ROM products, print sources, the Internet, trade associations, government agencies, etc.) to gather relevant facts.

organize, interpret and present these facts using summary memos, spreadsheets, tables, charts and analytical frameworks.

develop own area of expertise and publish insights.

prepare short thought pieces which highlight the salient points of an interview set and a topic.

Deliverables

You (no teams) are going to look a dozen years into the future, let's say around 2015 to 2020, and learn more about a future technology that is now in the lab but appears to have commercial potential.

Three deliverables: training module, position statement, web site

You will make two presentations during the last half of the course. One will be a training module that will explain a cutting-edge science / technology and analyze its commercial potential in the future. The other will be a position statement during a debate about a relevant public policy issue.

You will also design and begin to develop a web site to act as a portal or clearinghouse for others to keep track of your future technology.

Training module

You will be responsible for up to three-quarters of an hour of class time on the evening when we discuss the future technology that that you have researched and are developing a web site for. The format will be similar to a traditional graduate-school seminar where each student "reads" a "paper" and leads the following discussion. In this more up-to-date seminar, you will make an oral presentation about your future technology and related problems and issues. It can be straight lecture, hopefully energetic and entertaining. It would be good to include some video and demos. It would be even better if you used interactive or even project-based training techniques.

The audience is your colleagues at Parkside Partners, the partners themselves as well as the rest of the management team.

Assume that they have heard about your topic, but would have trouble even defining it on their own.

When you have finished, they should have enough information about your topic to carry on a conversation about it. In addition, they should have enough information that they can use appropriate search terms to learn more on their own.

First, you limit your audience's learning objectives to several clear statements. For example, on July 5, I spent an hour explaining about the future's enabling technologies. The learning objectives:

The students will better understand that:

in the future, businesses and consumers will have enough bandwidth to do what they want to online, even what seem to be bandwidth intensive applications like immersive reality

this bandwidth may come from a variety of vendors/utilities (wire, cable, fiber, radio waves)

the research (Internet2 and others) is advancing beyond the abilities of our laws and policies (and incumbent industries) to keep up

the people making the legal and economic policy decisions don't seem to have a very accurate understanding of the technology

Similarly concrete statements will help you structure your training module. Then ask yourself how you can best help us learn those things. I chose lecture, some pictures and diagrams with a smattering of video, some links for you to click on, and then an excruciatingly long audio of Senator Stevens of Alaska to drive home the final point.

Public policy debate

Each of the technology frontiers involves risk that can be articulated as problems and issues. We will more formally debate two overriding and closely entwined issues that are being severely stressed by the Internet: property rights and the role of government. What's at stake is the contractual and regulatory environment that can make or break the best-laid business plans. Very risky. (Thanks to David Wiley for the Napster graphic.)

The following categories will focus our debates along the current public discussion about:

software patents

network neutrality

internet governance

spectrum

personal privacy

national security

economic globalization

accessibility, consumer rights

These categories are complex, long-term, fundamental, and totally without consensus at the moment. Even though you may have strong feelings one way or the other, as MBAs, you need to be able to take and defend a variety of contradictory positions. Whether it's your boss, the bosses' boss, a lawmaker, a judge, or a regulations-writing bureaucrat, they all have choices to make. These issues will lead us as a computer-mediated society into the next stage, struggling to define the framework within which we will exist as a digital content consuming society and within which we will provide products and services to make money.

Although these are issues with multiple viewpoints, I want to focus on control. For each debate topic, there will be a Blue Team and a Red Team, each with a coherent philosophy.

Definitions

change: new ideas, procedures, products, services; innovation; disruption of old. Everyone agrees that change will happen. The questions are who should do it, the incumbents or the new entrants? When should the changes happen? And, of course, which changes should happen? The when and which are so important that the answer to who makes all the difference.

tight: centralized, hierarchical, monitored, regulated, favoring Porter's established competitive rivalries, especially the monopolies, the regulated monopolies, and the oligopolies.

loose: decentralized, open, favoring Porter's new entrants and especially substitutes.

control: explicit laws, policies, and regulations; implicit social norms. Control is not a question of how many laws, policies, and regulations we have. Instead, ask what human behavior we allow, reward, ignore, and punish.

risk: personal risk, financial risk, corporate risk, political risk, et al. Short-term risk of the next paycheck, the next quarterly dividend, the next election. Long-term risk of your career, the environment, a nation's geopolitical alliances. The future of our economy and our society. Everyone wants to reduce risk, whether they favor loose control or tight control.

The implicit question: who decides? Should this decision-making be local, national, or trans-national? Whose legislatures? Whose courts?

For example, you really want to spend some money at work. You say to your boss, "Please authorize me to spend this money." Your boss says, "Make a case for spending this money." You need good evidence and clear thought behind your case to influence your boss's decision. It might be obvious to you, but it's your obligation to explain it, to tell your boss how to think about it.

If your boss then says, "Make a case for not spending this money," you owe it to him and to the organization to try hard and honestly to make that case, too.

debaters

I would like to structure this debate as two teams with clearly defined and opposing philosophies taking agree-to-disagree positions. The idea is to illuminate the issue, help us think clearly, rather than to "win" the debate. Passionate advocacy for a position is usually good.

If we have sixteen students and two class nights, or eight hours, then we have time for eight debates, an hour each.

Please have your position statement available online so that it can be thoroughly rebutted.

It would make sense to use examples that would affect your final project. For example, ...

This team is going to argue for tight government control of change and innovation. For example, the RIAA and the MPAA take this approach. Their members, the large music CD and movie distribution companies, want to continue to cash in and they don't know how to do it on the Internet. So they argue for rights, property rights, digital management rights, etc. They have a right to protection of their business model even at the expense of innovation. In the U.S. today, this is by far the dominant position so it's a defensive position.

This team is going to argue for loose government control of change and innovation. Even though history is on their side -- change happens no matter what we do -- they are fighting a losing battle in the short term. The regulatory barriers are so ingrained that most people think they're "natural". The burden is on the innovators to make the case for change so it's an offensive position.

Debate protocol

The blue team will sit together across from the red team. Then I would like to alternate between the two; first the red team (offensive), then the blue (defensive), then the red, then the blue. It is up to each team how to sub-divide and sequence the statements.

OK: read your position.

Better: write out your position and post it online but speak extemporaneously from a list of topics to "cover".

Best: speak extemporaneously with images / charts projected onto the wall to illustrate your position.

Leave some time for audience questions and discussion. Better yet, invite the audience to participate, especially with discussion about how property rights, especially intellectual property rights, affect risk for the frontier technologies that they are researching.

As you can see from the schedule on the reports page, the debates will take two of the final four class nights. Prepared position statements and rebuttals will take about half of the time. Discussion will take the other half.

Dividing the time evenly, each of you will be responsible for half an hour of talking spread over both nights. Do your share, please.

Debate positions

When you make your position statement on the first night of the debate, how will you use your time? It will pass quickly if you try to do the following, which isn't much.

How and why will more/less government regulation of hardware and software promote innovation for [US economy/world economy/your topic]. I'll use intellectual property (IP) as an example.

Present your evidence, preferably using the sites and types of sites you have encountered in this course. This section will probably take the longest.

IP maximization bring four major benefits to our economy, as amply illustrated by history and demonstrated by abundant economic statistics. Most of all, super-strict, perpetual protection for intellectual property speaks to the deepest human needs and emotions.

The first benefit ...

It might help to structure this evidence, that is, to put it into meaningful groups. For example, here's one group: physical, financial, cognitive, security/privacy, administrative and operational.

Explain how your evidence supports your position. Tell us how to think about it. You should do this while you are presenting your evidence and then do it again at the end.

Look at the following implications of super-strict, perpetual protection for the quality of our lives. ...

For our economy, it is too risky for the government to not promote these changes because ....

Debate rebuttals

When you do your rebuttal, you will rebut specific positions taken earlier. This does not mean re-stating your position. It means explaining what's wrong (foolish, shortsighted, illegal, unethical, unnecessary, unprofitable, etc etc) with the other side's position. Your rebuttal may have nothing to do with your position. You are arguing against the other side's position. (Note that you are arguing against the position, not against the person who made it.) You may well not repeat anything you said on July 26.

You won't be able to prepare your rebuttal until you read / hear the position statements on Wednesday, July 26.

Web site about a frontier of technology

To help you understand what I'm looking for here, think of what this course would have been like ten years ago. In the pre-Web world, this course project would be a paper, a linear set of pages using black ink on stapled and numbered white 8 1/2" x 11" sheets. The site map would be the paper's outline or table of contents. The outline could be a bare-bones list of topics (the finished paper's headings and subheadings). It could flesh out that list with a short paragraph for each list item, thus getting closer to a rough draft.

For this course, you're going to do that writing, but you'll chunk it up into web "pages" that are linked to each other and to off-site webs. Instead of citations, you'll have links to the online sources.

The old paper report would be a finished product. This web, by contrast, will provide other researchers with a scalable, extensible information structure that can grow organically.

what system?

I rejected two options, wikis and blogs. A wiki (the Wikipedia is the most famous) is a templated, data-base driven content management system, so it's ideal for corporate collaboration. But this project doesn't need page-level collaboration.

A blog is another templated content management system, but it organizes information chronologically. This project needs information organized analytically.

Which leaves us with the old standby, static web pages. While in MBA 504, MBA 600, and MBA 604, I encourage you to be creative and to design your own web pages and structure the information as you see fit on your Plaza web, in MBA 624, we're going to do it a little differently.

the corporate web

At Parkside Partners, you are being given a section of the corporate web. You will be its steward. You will tend it and feed it and provide the content for it to grow. The company, however, will provide the web space and the page templates for a consistent look and feel. Your valuable time is better spent researching, writing, thinking, and discussing instead of designing web pages. However, part of the thinking and writing involves information design, that is:

when to start a new page

what to name the file and title the page

where to put it in relation to the other pages

how to link it for maximum usability

the text, the off-site links

a project logo and other graphical unifiers

lots of visual tools: images, charts, tables, etc.

Your project will have server space in Ricci Street's Port 60 Charthouse section. Each project will have a folder in that main folder.

In the future folder are sixteen folders with a two-letter name. These two letters are your personal initials. For example, Amr Abbas and Jon Gill each have one. Can you guess which is which?

software you will need

top-level navigation

The navigation bar provided with the template will have the top-level navigation for your web. These are the must-have sections of your web. How those sections further sub-divide and which sections get the most attention is up to you. Note how this nav bar functions much as a report's table of contents would in the linear paper world.


Welcome	index.html
Introduction Overall assessment of commercial potential Summary of current and potential products and services Site map and web guide	This page is the introduction to your web. It needs eye-catching, startling, intriguing images, factoids, and Big Ideas to hook the reader. What is this innovation? What are the promises and opportunities? This page also needs your bottom-line summary for the venture capitalists at Parkside Partners about the commercial potential of your technology. While this page (and all pages) will have the same top-level navigation, this page should also introduce each of these other pages or sections of the web, much as I do at the bottom of the index.html page for this MBA 624 course web.
Technology Primer	primer.htm or primer/index.html
What is it? How does it work? History Future Scenarios	Define all the basic terms related to this technology/tool. If the definitions include pictures, that would be great. Get into the eye-glazing technical details where pictures are especially valuable. Describe the (external) systems this technology is a part of. Describe the (internal) processes that make this technology work. Established facts: What does everyone agree on? What technical problems still have to be solved? The background or history. How did we get here? What did we do before we had this tool? What's the promise of this technology? Look as far out into the future as you can. What do the dreamers and visionaries have to say? How big and important can this technology be? How is money going to be made with this technology? What products and services will be offered? What will be their value proposition? How much will people pay for them? What will they pay -- money? attention?
Community	community.htm or community/index.html
Corporations Organizations - trade associations, advocacy groups, think tanks, local development agencies Media - popular press, TV/movies, and academic journals Personalities Conferences Online resources	Who are the current corporate players? What is still in R&D? Tech transfer? Production? What academic and corporate think tanks are working on it? What professional organizations hold meetings or publish journals? What about online discussions, newsgroups, mailing lists, blogs, rss feeds? How is this technology being portrayed in the MSM (mainstream media)? Accuracy? Fears? Is it even on their radar? Where can we learn more? A few essential readings and a longer list of recommended reading would be best. What web sites should we visit regularly to keep up with this technology?
Research	research.htm or research/index.html
Academic Corporate Funding sources	What's going on in the labs, offices, and studios worldwide? Who is funding what? Who could fund what? Who should fund what? Who makes the funding decisions? foundations? agencies? elected reps? bureaucrats?
Technology Adoption Analysis	analysis.htm or analysis/index.html
Challenges Drivers Restraints Market Factors Technology Roadmap Application Analysis and Trends Standards	What lies ahead? Between here and there, your future scenarios, what hurdles and problems to be overcome? Who and what is pushing this technology? Who and what is pushing against it? How is this technology affected by the driving and restraining forces of the Internet? influential demographic and other market forces such as complementary products and services How dependent is this technology on standards ensuring interoperability? What is the status of those standards? Who's in charge? Net neutrality? Hardware / software neutrality? Analysis - visualizing overlapping clusters of common ideas, identifying subtle relationships among ideas and clusters, developing ontologies and taxonomies for large databases so that logical relationships can be seen. enhance the ability of analysts to develop prescient and deep understandings of major potential and emerging events.
IP: patents and copyrights	ip.htm or ip/index.html
Current Patents Future Patents Copyright	In what ways is IP relevant to your technology? In what ways is it relevant to commercialization? What is already protected? Who owns it? For how long? How protected, enforced, licensed?
Policy Issues and Questions	policy.htm or policy/index.html
Political Economic Social Technological	What will it change? Who will resist it? On what grounds will change be debated? What are the prominent issue statements? Any issues as far-reaching, in-depth, and important as these are made up of sub-issues and underlying issues and larger issues. For example, the ?? issue includes the underlying issue of encryption and the broader issue of national security. When national security gets extended to domestic security and law-enforcement, then the security issue blends into the privacy issue. Help us untangle this complex situation by clearly stating the three or four prominent issues in debatable terms. What are the prominent positions? Excerpt, summarize, and link to the partisan advocacy positions on security taken by the players.
Data/Misc

Evaluation

I try to engage each of you in an ongoing discussion of your learning. If you aren't getting enough feedback from me, ask for more. As you probably know, I favor formative feedback and Socratic questioning.

I expect you to participate in both our physical classroom and our digital classroom. At a minimum, you should:

follow all the links on the syllabus, especially those on the To Do (homework) lists

contact me a dozen times via email and instant message

post the Roundtable messages listed on the reports page

Your course grade will come from doing the minimum above and from three deliverables:

frontier of technology web at Port 80's Charthouse

frontier of technology training module

public policy debate

Except for private email, all the work you do for this course will be publicly available.

This is graduate school and this is a learn-by-doing course. There is no final exam or convergent skill set for you to master. Everyone is researching something different. If I were using a rule-by-fear grading method, you could not afford to make "mistakes" because you'd have a lower grade as a result. I try to reward mistakes and my biggest enemy is your fear of being hit by a low grade. Putting it off and doing it all at the end in a mad rush will not produce the learning you will need for other courses. Thus:

If you do the minimum above in a timely manner and make the presentations in class, you'll get an A- for the course. That's what I expect most of you to get. Note that I don't mention how well you do them. Because your work is public, I expect that your personal pride will motivate you more than a grade. Nevertheless, I'll get email after the course wondering why you got "only" an A-. I will reply to the email by directing you back to this web page.

If you do the work with flair and enthusiasm, you'll get an A, but that's exceptional. (I did not give any last year.) Your boss could show the web pages or presentation to a client or to the big boss as is. Your boss would remember them when discussing a promotion. It does not matter that you deserve an A+ because you worked hard and are an all-around wonderful person. I don't doubt that for a moment, but it has nothing to do with this course grade.

If you don't do the minimum above in a timely manner or don't do one of the presentations, you'll get no better than a B+ for the course.

If you are missing more than that, you should expect a B. We will need to talk about whether you have time for the course.

Please note that a "lousy" presentation will get the same A- as one I personally "like". However, that doesn't mean I don't have standards and you don't have pride. Note the criteria below as well as my philosophy of learning and grading. In my experience teaching adults, the public display of all your work does more than fear of low grades to motivate you.

Policy | Because of the progression of the work, the groups, and the tight syllabus, I don't know how and where to fit in a realistic make-up of your oral presentations. Your web pages and Roundtable messages, however, can get revised as often as you want.

In addition to these presentations, please note that you have one other very important requirement. You must email a self-assessment after you have done all the other work for the course. I will not turn in a grade for you until I get that email.

Criteria

While grades are useless at best and statistically bogus, I'm a big fan of feedback, assessment, evaluation: better now in class than later on the job and better from many sources than from one. I expect you to seek feedback from your team and your classmates as well as from me. My evaluation of written and oral work asks four questions.

content

Is it logical, insightful, and visually interesting?
structure

Is it easy to follow and learn from?
language

Is it designed, written, illustrated, and presented in an appropriate business tone?
mechanics

Is it free of error and attractive to look at?

In short, does your work exhibit a command of business communications and its conventions, especially digital?

It comes down to this: If I were your boss, I would want to see documents, webs, and presentations that are attractive and accessible. Having your work available when I need it affects the quality component of my assessment. The quality of your work can be important at raise and promotion time.

These criteria are loaded with ambiguous and subjective terms: easy, appropriate, attractive, flair, enthusiasm. Such holistic characterizations come from observations colored by assumptions and prejudices. However, there are some generally agreed upon professional standards.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
- Virginia Woolf

	Team Red (loose)	Team Blue (tight)
Technology should be neutral / indifferent to current laws and business models.	Colleen, Tera	Taheerh, Rick	Technology should enforce current laws and extend current business models.
IP (patents, copyrights) protection should be minimized.	Jon, Sean,	Anne, Amr	IP (patents, copyrights) protection should be maximized.
Spectrum should be treated as an abundant resource and a public good.	Kevina, Katherine	Tim, Hugo,	Spectrum should be treated as a scarce resource and a private good.
The public Internet should be stupid.	Gary, Lemar	Tara, Keith	The public Internet should be smart.

The Case

MBA 624 - Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation - Summer 2006