Keith Instone

Check out the July 22nd BusinessWeek: Innovation of the Week podcast:

• R&D: The D Is for Design. "How research and development must change. Monty Montague, a principal at innovation consultancy Bolt, discusses how incorporating design into traditional R and D departments has led to major innovations at companies ranging from IBM to Herman Miller."

The basic question: "What is the relationship between research and innovation?" A few overall notes:

• Innovation defined as "invention that gets out in the world" (debatable: "and provides value")
• Do demand-driven research, not supply-driven (e.g., "outside-in" not "inside-out" which is the more traditional way)
• Colt 45s and individualized blender examples
• Key is "making connections" with the outside (customers, users, other industries)
• The "D" is becoming more than just "development", including "design" (and design thinking)
• Product, service and process innovation (not just products)

At about 6 and a half minutes into the interview. Monty starts talking about IBM. I may have transcribed some of the words wrong, but here is the basic quote:

Total user experience is how IBM has, not only through research and through revamping of their business model, developed innovative products, but they are innovating the user experience. And that is part of what R&D needs to do today. It needs to not consider itself a "product R&D group," but an "experience R&D group." And look at not only the development of the product, but the development of the user guide for the product, the service center for the product, the call center, the people calling to get information about the product, the selling environment in which the product is sold. All of those are touchpoints for the consumer that are as important as the product and the R&D team can be the facilitator of the innovation around all of those. And IBM has done that.

He does not mention specific examples or sources, but it is a very nice thing to say about IBM.

Since Monty seems like such a smart guy, I did a little searching for other things he has written. I only found a few:

• Integrating the Product + Brand Experience, Design Management Journal / Review, 1999
• Recognize innovative possibilities, Charlotte Business Journal, July 25, 2008

The ibm.com US home page has a feature on Service Science this week.

(In the past, I have written about service innovation, frontiers in service and service science in politics.)

The main angle for this IBM feature on Service Science, Management and Engineering seems to be "it is the next computer science" (not unlike web science).

A few quotes:

• IBM helped create "computer science" as a field of study... IBM is again at the forefront of the next major trend in college and professional education...
• We already live in a world full of service systems, with access to more and more every day. Computer science was studying something that was very rare in the world—digital computers... (Jim Spohrer)
• Traditional courses do not integrate across discipline boundaries...It will be very important that graduates understand that an SSME focus will lead to good jobs and careers... (Lynne Rosansky)
• It provides for an integrated framework to explore all disciplines, especially computer science and information technology... (Mohammed Ghriga)
• ...a group of full professors starts to teach and research SSME, then they get from their faculty a recognition of their discipline, then the ministry of universities recognizes the discipline and then it is possible to get new full professors... (Guido M. Rey)
• ...the emerging model for software engineering is to offer an ongoing service as opposed to a tangible product acquired through a one-time sale. (Aaron Quirk)

One of the items of additional reading is the Succeeding through Service Innovation white paper, which I had the pleasure of giving feedback on. I commented on various aspects of user experience that seemed to be missing. They did use one of my quotes about the relevance to business.

I think we still have a long way to go to get the next generation ready to fix all of the messes we are going to leave them, but inter-disciplinary approaches like SSME are a step in the right direction.

I am lucky. I am off to visit the Almaden Research Center next week for the Almaden Institute 2008 conference.

I did a little research about some of the (non-IBM) speakers to help me get the most out of the program. Here are a few links in case you want to learn more, too.

• Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, UC Berkeley ischool prof.
• Kristofer Pister, also UC Berkeley EECS prof.
• Christopher Meyer, Monitor Networks, FutureMonitor blog. I enjoyed the video from his recap of Day 2 of the 2007 Institute of Design Strategy Conference.
• Greg Niemeyer.
• Andreas Weigend.
• Robert Merges, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.
• Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Research.

I managed to also plan 1 day of "extra time" to hang out with area IBMers that I do not get to see often enough, like Fred Sampson, Andrea Ames and Thyra Rauch. And do "real ibm.com work" with Rob Johnson. Finally, it will be nice to see EWHCI colleague Allen Cypher while I am there.

IBM's involvement with a local economic development organization continues. First, IBM did a consulting engagement with the Regional Growth Partnership (see my previous blog postings from August 2006 and January 2007).

Next week, RGP is hosting an event on March 6th where IBM Americas General Manager Marc Lautenbach will be talking. The information about the entire morning:

Innovation capturing global opportunity and building regional growth
Thursday, March 6, 2008
9:00 a.m. to Noon
The Pinnacle, 1772 Indian Wood Circle (Arrowhead Park), Maumee

Featuring: Marc Lautenbach, General Manager IBM Americas
"Globalization & competitiveness"

Panel discussion: Business, academia & government working together toward a knowledge-based economy
Including: Dr. Lloyd Jacobs, President, University of Toledo
Mark Wagoner, Ohio Senate (2nd district)

Every few years, an important IBMer comes to town. Bob Sutor came to talk in 2005, for example. I am looking forward to meeting Marc: I am not part of his organization, but I work with several IBM Americas people on a regular basis on ibm.com matters.

The panel is also very interesting to me. The role of information technology is becoming an important element in the local discussions about regional economic development. For example, recent meta-plan meetings have started the face-to-face sharing of information among the various groups, but now people are asking how to use Internet technologies, social networking, Web 2.0 and the like to continue the collaboration. If I get a chance to ask questions of the panel, I suspect it will be something like this:

If we want our region to be a key player in the knowledge-based economy, then I think the first step would be to have the local economic development leaders use the tools of the knowledge-based economy. How are business, academia and government leveraging the latest web technologies to help them achieve their collaboration goals? What obstacles are in the way of utilizing technology to help us succeed in our regional economic development?

I also found it interesting that Mark Wagoner will be speaking on the panel two days after the Republican primary, where he is running against Mark Hollenbaugh. (Disclaimer: Mark Hollenbaugh is a friend of mine and I have donated to his campaign.)

Should be a fun and informative morning!

IBM Press has another good book out (on the heels of Do It Wrong Quickly).

• Outside-in Software Development: A Practical Approach to Building Successful Stakeholder-based Products by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer.

My copy is still being shipped, so I have not looked at the book in detail. From what I have heard / read, the "outside-in / stakeholder" theme merges Agile methods (stakeholder = "Agile customer") and user experience methods (stakeholder = "end user"). "Consumability" and "Outside-in design" are key parts of the IBM Software strategy. (Consumability: making products easier to install, configure, deploy and maintain.)

To learn more about the book, you can see previews on Safari and read Carl's blog Outside-in Thinking [URL update on Nov-16-2007]. And of course, Amazon.com's entry for the book (where I managed to buy a "used" copy that is new but very inexpensive, not sure how that works).

I remember reading this back in May, but I guess I never blogged it back then. Better late than never: IBM Joins User Experience Race. Quotes from Mike Rhodin, Lotus, and their commitment to user experience. Too bad there were not quotes from the many other parts of IBM that are also racing for the UX checkered flag.

I usually do not pay attention to real politics, instead only dealing with corporate politics in my day-to-day job. Two things are slightly changing that.

First, a friend is running for Congress so I am reading Ohio political blogs now and observing how the Ohio 5th district candidates are using the Internet.

Second, Hillary Clinton's Innovation Agenda came up at work. Notice this section on "services science" and some of the wording used (italics added by me for emphasis):

Create the Services Science Initiative. The services sector now accounts for approximately 80% of the U.S. economy. Nevertheless, innovation is rarely associated with the generation and delivery of services. Companies are increasingly carrying out service R&D, but there is no discipline that promotes innovation and productivity in the services sector in the same way that electrical engineering, for example, has led to technological advances in the development of the computer chip. Accordingly, Hillary will create a Services Science Initiative. Modeled on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the federal government will help support R&D in services; support and encourage cross-disciplinary research that draws on fields such as computer science, management, operations, and organizational behavior; and also facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. The Services Science Initiative will help improve the competitiveness of American business, and in the process, create jobs.

Now compare this to some of the phrases IBM uses to describe Service Science, Management, and Engineering and its academic initiative, like "multi-disciplinary research and academic effort that integrates aspects of established fields such as computer science, operations research, engineering, management sciences, ...". And IBM has helped form the Service Research & Innovation Initiative with similar goals to Hillary's.

I have no idea what is going on here, just noticing common themes. It is not every day that a candidate talks about something I am dealing with at work.

The last time I think I paid this much to government policy was during the first Conference on Universal Usability in 2000 when I heard about the economic policy for digital opportunity.

A bunch of IBMers are at the Frontiers in Service conference in San Francisco this weekend. (Not too surprising, since IBM Research/SSME is a sponsor.) The eBrochure has an overview; the full program is a PDF. The topics being presented (and co-presented) by IBMers:

• Measuring Information Relevance in Services
• Meeting the Challenges of Service Science Management and Education in the New York City Area: An Inter-disciplinary Initiative
• Information-Driven Service Systems
• Comparative Analysis of the Russian IT Services Market. Scenarios, Tendencies and Recommendations
• Bringing Services Theory and Methods to Online Service Applications
• Lessons from a Service Innovation in the Consulting Industry
• Component Business Modeling for Effective Enterprise Risk Management,
• Virtual Service Delivery Centers
• Service Excellence in Government: A Constituent-Centered Model
• Servicing for the Future
• ProACT: A solution for Automatic Customer Satisfaction Analysis and Business Intelligence in Contact Centers
• Model-based Business Transformation for Engineering Services
• Challenges and Models of Workforce Scheduling for Delivery Center Based IT Support Services
• Increasing Efficiency of Call Handling Service using Cross-Border Knowledge Search
• Estimating Value in Value Networks: A Case Study from Pharmaceutical Industry
• Using Organizational Simulation to Support Service Business Transformation
• Understanding Service Innovation Ecosystems
• Designing and Building Technology Enabled Service Systems: Challenges and a Solution Framework -- Two Case Studies
• Modeling Productivity and Performance Growth in Labor-based, Custom Services Firms
• Towards Services Innovation in Japan
• Leveraging your IT Investment using Business Intelligence (Panel)
• Service Innovation and Company Profit (Panel)

Jim Spohrer invited people to attend, but I do not see anyone live-blogging from the event. I will keep my eyes open for summaries that get posted. If you spot any news from the conference, please leave a comment and a link to what you found.

A book arrived on my doorstep today, unexpectedly. I had not ordered anything lately.

It was Do it wrong quickly: How the web changes the old marketing rules by Mike Moran, a former manager of mine at IBM. I helped review early versions of the book and had specific feedback on the information architecture parts.

In the spirit of the book, I am blogging it wrong quickly and will do a better job later (after I have read the final version).