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The Syllabus
MBA 624 - Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation - Summer 2006
other course pages
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This is a good page to bookmark.
The links on this syllabus and the readings on the case page will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.
| June 21 | Introduction to the Future |
| Visions of the Future | |
| June 28 | The Past: How We Got Here Organizations of the Future |
Tech review: web construction, chartjunk, image editing |
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| July 5 | The Evernet; science; public policy |
| VC and Start-up Resources | |
| July 12 | web portals; training modules |
| July 19 | Frontiers of Technology I |
| July 26 | Public Policy Debates - Position Statements |
| August 2 | Frontiers of Technology II |
| August 7 Monday | Public Policy Debates - Rebuttals and Discussion |
| August 9 | Frontiers of Technology III |
Liberation
Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties
by Tom Peters
Bold times call for bold leaders. Bold times call for bold experiments. The time for incrementalism has passed. It's true, to be sure, that the march into the future will take place one step at a time. But those steps had better be in pursuit of a zany, bold future. Period.
your expectations of the course -- first roundtable
Nine Wednesday evenings: 6 - 8, break with food, 8:30 - 10:30
Saturdays? 9 - 11, break with food, 11:30 - 1:30
We have eight more evenings/Saturdays and almost sixteen of you. Sign up in pairs for taking care of the food. We have a refrigerator, microwave, grill, etc.
three deliverables: web portal, training module, debate position
Long Bets' Predictions
Panasonic's video wall
Sony's weird technology
IO2 Technology's Heliodisplay
coe.mpg on my desktop - Visual Genomics
Philips' e-Paper
Accenture's Real World Showroom
CNN's Welcome to the Future video archive
Intel's Digital Home
How will individuals and organizations make money in the future? What products and services will find markets?
In the videos, you see dramatizations of the near future. What products and services do you see that we don't have now? About how much would you expect to pay for that product or service?
Dinner by Doug
case -- choose research topics
How to think about the future: tools, basic concepts, and mental models
The Internet is enabling a self-organizing, adaptive society to
evolve its form and substance without any central planning. By analogy, it is
organized like the human brain is organized with individual brain cells replaced
by individual brains.
Knowledge and information are no longer slaves to serial or linear systems of
categorization and storage. Think of letters of alphabets or the classification
of books by the Dewey Decimal System. Instead, information is defined by its
links to other information.
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science |
democratic justice |
markets |
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theories |
policies/laws |
products/services |
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lab |
party |
company |
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journal |
legislature/court |
store |
atoms vs bits; scarcity vs abundance; zero-sum vs non-zero-sum world
numeracy from giga to nano -- large and small numbers
the arrow of time (top half of page)
Does the future affect the past? How can you tell the difference between reversible and irreversible processes?
algorithms: game of life
applications of algorithms - Abstract Algorithms
The Internet: what's driving it?
The Internet: what's restraining it? PEST
The Internet is an open-source self-organizing adaptive many-to-many peer-to-peer international file-sharing public collaborative agreement based on human goodwill, which means it's teetering on anarchy. In the last forty thousand years of human culture, this commons has been the fertile ground of cultural innovation. In corporate terms, an agreement to share is a threat to hierarchical control structures, like record labels.
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driver |
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small, fast, cheap |
Moore's Law |
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visual |
broadband multimedia; streaming media; two-way
streaming media; interactive two-way video |
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networked |
They all talk and listen to each other, peer to peer |
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converged |
"phones" with music, video camera, and internet connection |
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embedded |
You can't see them. |
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universal |
Everyone will have them. |
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ubiquitous |
They're always on, everywhere, as pervasive as electricity. |
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distributed |
They can share unused capacity. |
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intelligent |
They can mimic human intelligence to a limited
extent. |
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trusted |
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standardized |
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packetized |
The classic arc from "You're completely bonkers" to "Congratulations, you've won the Nobel Prize."
I heard a story on the radio about the guy from Rochester who invented the copier and how he went from one high-tech company to another in the 1940's. No one would buy it. Why would anyone want a copier? They had carbon paper!! Who would want a copy of something that had already been typed up? Besides, PhD's in physics impatiently explained to him, his invention was theoretically impossible. They all laughed.
Go to Amazon and check out the book:
They All Laughed... From Light Bulbs to Lasers: The Fascinating Stories Behind
the Great Inventions That Have Changed Our Lives
by Ira Flatow
The speakers, and the congregants, knew that
open source, an open Internet and open spectrum are the proper models for 21st
century economic success. Yet, as former FCC chair Reed Hundt told them, these
simple, basic concepts are now apostasy in Bush's Washington.
"This public space to which the public thoroughfare must take us is where
democracy will be defined," he concluded. To which the first response was,
you're a socialist.
American inventor Lee De Forest
Newscan, July 2, 2004 -- (my emphasis)
Lee De
Forest (1873-1961) went to work for the Western Electric Company in Chicago,
where he began designing devices for wireless telegraphy. In 1902 he received
sufficient funding to found the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company.
Unfortunately, by 1906 his company became insolvent (due to fraud by his
business partners), but in 1907 he obtained the patent for his Audion tube, the
triode device that he had developed by adding a third element to the electronic
diode patented by the Englishman Sir John Ambrose Fleming in 1905. Using his
radio tube, De Forest was able to broadcast experimentally both speech and music
in the New York City area.
De Forest again ventured into business, starting up the De Forest Radio
Telephone Company, which became another failed operation. However, this
time his poor choice of partners led to an indictment of De Forest for
fraudulent use of the mails to promote a worthless device. De Forest was
acquitted and then made the fateful decision to sell his rights to the Audion --
only to watch his "worthless" invention become the basis for the subsequent
success of AT&T.
De Forest later designed a movie-sound system and contributed to the development
of the phonograph, telephone, television, radar, and diathermy. Over time,
however, De Forest acknowledging his poor business acumen would sell many of his
patents at prices much less than their true worth.
Archer, L. History of Radio. New York, American Historical Society, 1938. p. 110.
The key device that makes long-distance radio broadcasting feasible is the
audion tube, invented by Lee de Forest in the early 1900’s. de Forest was an
entrepreneur as well as an inventor, and founded a company, the Radio Telephone
Company, intended to create and market long-distance radio technology. When he
tried to sell stock in the company, he was brought to trial for fraud. The DA,
in the course of the trial, declared that:
"De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be
possible to transmit human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on
these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public...has
been persuaded to purchase stock in his company..."
diffusion of innovations, incremental or exponential change: network effects
operational improvements or reinvention?
incremental change, disruptive technologies, creative destruction
innovation comes from repeated failure
Online Extra:
Q&A With MIT's Nicholas Negroponte
Business Week, June 21, 2004
Q: Which new products or services are likely to
make the biggest splash?
A: Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell
phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc. Furthermore, you
will see micro-wireless networks, where everyday devices become routers of
messages that have nothing to do with themselves.
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social
systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption
that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Q: One idea is that this jousting between industries will create
friction, fights, and startling innovation. Are there examples where the
blending of two industries really did spark some magic?
A: Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They
explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the
last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas
come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
Q: Some would have it that many of the great innovations are going to
come from outsiders who figure out how to harness new technology and then use it
to lay waste to the big companies' business plan in the process. One example
might be [peer-to-peer Net telephony startup] Skype. Is innovation more likely
to come from popular or subversive movements?
A: As I said above, innovation comes from those who stand to lose the
least from it. That said, let's separate what Skype is doing from innovation
itself. Skype is remarkable (I know them well) and will change the landscape
radically. However, they have done so not by innovating and inventing either
peer-to-peer or IP telephony, but by executing extremely well. The actual
innovations came long before.
Q: Where are we on the tech cycle?
A: Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically,
four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research
universities. Government labs are shrinking (in the U.S., at least). Big
companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies
spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst
bubble.
So this leaves universities somewhat alone.
government labs
TechnoScout's New Products, though I'd like you to think further out into the future.
Emerging
Technologies
Business Week, June 18, 2002
PC Magazine's Future of Technology
Economist's Technology Quarterly
Forbes' Future Tech
CNN's Welcome to the Future
Australian TV's Beyond Tomorrow
MIT's Technology Review
Eight
Technologies That Will Change the World
by Brad Wieners
Business 2.0, June 2002
The Computer You Wear
Biointeractive Materials
The big idea: High-tech sensors for living systems
Fossil Fuels Go Vegan
Biofuel Production Plants
The big idea: Replacing oil with fuels from genetically engineered crops
Upgrade to a Better Body
Bionics
The big idea: Artificial systems to replace lost or disabled body parts
The Brain Is the Interface
Cognitronics
The big idea: Computer-aided telekinesis
DNA Gets Personal
Genotyping
The big idea: Classifying people based on their genetics
Brute-Force R&D
Combinatorial Science
The big idea: Combining statistical analysis and massive computing power to cut
research time
Any Object, on Demand
Molecular Manufacturing
The big idea: Building complex structures, atom by atom
Port-a-Nukes
Quantum Nucleonics
The big idea: A portable, safe, nonpolluting source of nuclear power
After you start narrowing down your topics and for sure after you settle on one, learn how it has been covered in the press, both print and online.
information hubs and news sources
Check your directory info on the reports page. Is your email correct?
Weather Report for June 21, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
This syllabus page was getting too long, even for me. So I made a separate page just for next Wednesday night! Read it first. If you want to learn more, here are longer excerpts from the originals.
Heilbroner (.zip file)
Chandler (.zip file)
Taylorism and Scientific Management
Creative
Destruction
Disruptive Technologies
Blown
to Bits (.zip file)
Things
That Think (.zip file)
If you read this stuff and more or less remember it, you'll be wiser (that is, you'll tend to make better decisions) than almost everyone you work with because you'll have a more accurate historical perspective.
Closer to Truth: Will
the Internet Change Humanity? |
transcript
Experts in public policy, technology and media gather to discuss the full and real impact of the Internet and the information age on humans and humanity. Find out how access to information, instant gratification and the personal, institutional and growing global impact of computer use and Internet access are changing the way we think, the way we do things, our communities and our civilization.
from 2000; the video is temp. unavailable
your
expectations of the course
describe
your future
on the
Edge, past inventions
First, we have some housekeeping to do. If we're going to lop of the last scheduled Wednesday, our best bet to replace it is Monday, August 7. Thus, the final two class nights would be August 7 and 9 instead of the scheduled August 9 and 16.
This syllabus page was getting too long, even for me. So I made a separate page just for tonight!
spirit.wmv on my desktop
The most important thing we didn't do last week because I ran out of energy was to talk about the public policy debates. We need to have topics and positions chosen in the next week.
dinner by Colleen and Rick
Bookmarks or favorites
Homebrew folder system - Save as ..
Clipmarks - note the demo
Clipmarks is not a bookmarking solution!
Clipmarks is about breaking down the web into pieces instead of
pages. When you find something in a web page that interests you, clip it. By
adding tags to clipmarks, you're able to create your own searchable
collection of things you've clipped from the web. Clipmarks is also about
seeing and discussing things that other people are clipping.
index pages and other pages
using templates to make new subfolders, new index pages for each of them, and other pages.
crop, resize, rename, save to images folder
profile, userID, and password
Weather Report for June 28, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
choose debate topic - email me. I'll try to get everyone their first choice, but I know ahead of time that won't be possible. Also, I may want to move some of your around to get some good match-ups.
readings and roundtables from last week
reminder: our final 4 class sessions:
August 2 Wednesday
August 7 Monday
August 9 Wednesday
August 16 no class
frontiers topics - more specific and grouped. Note schedule on reports page - some of you are going to be doing your training modules in two weeks, on July 19.
How the interstates changed America
by T.R. Reid
The Washington Post, June 30, 2006
There were no Wal-Marts in 1956, no Ramada Inns or Best
Westerns. Cross-country travel most often meant the railroad and only about
two-thirds of adult Americans had a driver's license.
But that America began to change on June 29, 1956, when President Dwight D.
Eisenhower signed the law launching a massive new federal project that had been
his dream for decades: the Interstate Highway System.
Check it out! Chipotle.com
GE Sees the Light
by Erick Schonfeld
Business 2.0, July 2004
By learning to manage innovation, Jeffrey Immelt is remaking America's flagship industrial corporation into a technology and marketing powerhouse.
How flat is our world?
In Afghanistan, the government is by far the largest employer. But that's public money. Who is the largest private employer in Afghanistan? The second largest?
Review of last week: intangibles
Lessig talks about three layers for the
locations of
control: the physical layer, the code layer, and the applications layer.
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physical layer alternatives |
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copper, fiber |
telephone company |
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cable company |
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power line - BPL --> |
electrical power utility |
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?? company, municipality (radio, satellite) |
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Frameworks: Internet2 | Wireless
How is all this going to work?
First, let's review the workings of the current Internet:
Distributed Networks | The Internet
The entire Internet is a gigantic, sprawling agreement between companies to intercommunicate freely.
Then we can look at what it is becoming:
The Evernet - universal, ubiquitous, distributed, standardized, visual, networked, converged
Your web template asks you to write future scenarios. It's not so easy. It's one thing to describe a video of what virtual reality in an immersive environment might look like. Or to imagine a smart device standing alone. But what about the context? What about the rest of that world? What will it be like? To get you started:
Premise | You will have enough cheap bandwidth, enough interoperability standards, and enough market penetration and social acceptance to do what you want.
How to decide? Do you go for what's best, what's most popular? Don't make a choice and do it all?
The emerging digital world will have always-on everywhere embedded networked computers, trillions of them. Humanity's brain. Is it just like the offline world, only parallel? Customs? We know that the emerging digital world has different customs, accompanied by a different vocabulary. Email etiquette is not the same as typed-and-snailmailed letter etiquette.
But what about laws? Does the emerging digital world need laws and regulations and policies different from those in the old analog world? Regardless of whether you answer yes or no, who will decide?
Will it be a current government? Which one?
Will it be a corporation? Which one?
Will it be a group of well-meaning, disinterested experts? If you could find any, who would appoint or elect them?
After the decisions are made, will it make any difference? If the decisions can't be enforced in computer code, that is, to the extent that we're talking about human behavior, who will monitor and enforce that behavior?
Online, who's in control?
Who runs the Internet? ICANN pro and con
Customhouse's Standards -- definitions
Shoreline's Standards -- issues and problems
A Series of Tubes - audio on my desktop | text
I just the other
day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday
and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet
commercially...
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again,
the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled,
when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by
anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts
of material.
dinner by Hugo and Tara
Taheerh's biometrics primer
vc slide show on desktop
DigiSmart - video of pitch at Demo -
GPal - video of pitch at Demo
Gee-wiz tech toy: Hyperwords - video
despair videos on desktop
myvu - video on desktop | user experience
implications of RFID chips - AirClick
Wikipedia Machinima | Machinima.com | Machinima.org
Why you should never put your picture on the Internet
debate previews
Several of you have expressed interest in developing the public policy issues that you are going to debate in a couple of weeks. During a debate, it's always good to know as much about your audience as possible.
During this final hour tonight, I'd like to spend 15 minutes looking at each debate topic. We'll have that topic's four debaters sit together and listen only while I lead the others in a discussion about the topic. For the debaters, their task is to learn what their audience brings to the debate. From your red (loose) or blue (tight) side, are you preaching to the choir? If so, give them lots of valid evidence to support their preconceived ideas. If the audience is largely one color and you are representing the other, then you have a harder persuasive task.
I'm hoping that the debaters, two on the red side, two on the blue, will be better able to develop their complementary positions after listening to their classmates grapple with the issues tonight.
Note | Everyone will be both getting (when you're the debater listening) and giving (when you're the audience discussing). The more you give, the more you get.
Weather Report for July 5, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
continue working on your debate position statements and on your frontier web
venture capital - new ventures
review of your web portals's content - Charthouse's Future
review of your training modules
An innovation has to make sense in the world in which it is finishes, not the world in which it starts. Strategic plans are too often written for the world that's rapidly ending, instead of the world that's coming.
dinner by ??
using the web template
work flow
words | source: copy --> NoteTab: paste, reformat, copy --> Front Page: style
images | source: save image as .. --> Paint Shop Pro: paste, crop, resize --> Front page: insert, right-click picture properties
Weather Report for July 12, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
schedule on reports page
Dot's A Lot
by Quentin Hardy
Forbes, July 17, 2006
Hewlett-Packard has invented a wireless data chip (right) that can store 100 pages of text or 15 seconds of video on a dot about half the size of a rice grain, with potentially dramatic applications in everything from health care to photography and marketing.
Weather Report for July 19, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
post your debate position statement at the Bistro
debate deliverable on case page
debate notes and readings on debate page
schedule for presenting position statements on reports page
forum for posting position statements at the Bistro
Weather Report for July 26, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
schedule on reports page
dinner by Keith
P
Weather Report for August 2, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
rebuttals and discussion schedule on reports page
dinner by ??
Weather Report for August 7, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
schedule on reports page
dinner by ??
W?
Finally, we'll talk about what we learned.
Weather Report for August 9, 2006
How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?
Don't forget your self-assessment. I expect each of you to send me a long email discussing what you learned in MBA 624 and how you learned it.
Deadline: this Sunday night, August 13.
This self-assessment is the single most-important thing you can do to benefit your learning.
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