Sustaining the technical edge

January 27th, 2012 | No Comments | Tags: , , |

In the global knowledge economy of the 21st century we are witnessing an ever increasing pace of knowledge creation, mostly in the sciences and engineering. The developed and developing world economies alike are seeking out new ways to increase and sustain technical competencies and preparedness of their workforce. Dr Charles Vest, President of the US National Academy of Engineering, in a recent 2007 speech put it simply: prospering in the knowledge age requires people with (updated) knowledge.

The rapid growth of knowledge in science and engineering is reducing the “half-life” of Bachelors and advanced degrees. Half-life refers to the time it takes for the degree to lose half its value. Moreover, new fields are constantly emerging (e.g. nanotechnology, biotechnology, and informatics).

In the 1960s, a typical engineer with an advanced degree would have no more than 2-3 jobs during his or her lifetime. In contrast, today’s engineers are changing jobs every 2-3 years because corporations are downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring at a similar pace. By some estimates, today’s engineers will have changed jobs at least 10 times before they turn 40 years of age.

Private engineering firms are well aware of the importance of a high-quality and competent workforce. As remarked by Bill Gates, global corporations make decisions about where to locate a new plant or an R&D facility based not on labor cost but on the availability of technically savvy workforce.

The Lifelong Learning Imperative project was initiated by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to assess current practices in lifelong learning for engineering professionals, reexamine the underlying assumptions behind those practices, and outline strategies for addressing unmet needs. The project Steering Committee consisted of corporate executives and university leaders.

Following a 2009 framing workshop, the project team led by Deba Dutta, NAE Scholar in Resident and Dean of the Graduate College at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, conducted a survey of engineering professionals and interviewed several engineering executives.

Findings of the study indicate that the current infrastructure in the US for lifelong learning for engineers is ad-hoc and inadequate for the demands of the 21st century.

The survey results point to career growth as the major motivation for lifelong learning amongst engineers. Many feel that lack of time and finances are the primary obstacles that prevent them from engaging in lifelong learning.

An overwhelming majority of surveyed engineers expect businesses (industries) to play the leading role and in collaboration with universities and professional societies should develop a national framework. But, small to medium enterprises (SMEs) face significant challenges since they do not have the necessary resources and often focus on how to survive in the fiercely competitive global marketplace.

The surveyed engineers also believe that lifelong learning programs in the U.S. must be directed at learning business practices in other countries.

A final workshop in the October 2011 convened academic, government and corporate experts to discuss next steps. A key recommendation to industry, academia, professional societies, and policymakers is to work together to develop a national framework for lifelong learning for engineers.

The LLI project final report is to be published soon.

Debasish Dutta, Professor, University of Illinois

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We can live without love, but not without water

January 12th, 2012 | No Comments | Tags: , , , |

Richard Smalley, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996, identified energy, water, food, the environment and poverty as the most urgent problems facing humanity in the next 50 years. If we reflect on these factors for a while, it can safely be concluded that they are highly interconnected.

In fact, water is emerging as a key issue that may determine if our world is heading towards competition or collaboration. Water scientists worldwide have been ringing the alarm bells for an impending water crisis, but with limited success.

This issue is particularly pronounced in Asia, where more than half of the world population lives, but is also highly relevant in other areas, such as Southern Europe, parts of the USA, Africa and the Middle East. To give just one example, South Asia accounts for more than 21% of the world’s population, but has access to less than 10% of global water resources. This unbalance is expected to grow worse due to the increasing population, industrialization and climate change. In the coming years, water scarcity is expected to create obstacles to growth in several emerging countries that are still currently enjoying rapid economic growth, even in the midst of the present debt crisis. When we add to this the simultaneous deterioration in water quality, we can see the enormity of the challenge that we as mankind are facing.

Freshwater, which accounts for less than 3% of global water resources, is like the bloodstream for the entire biosphere (and surprisingly only 0.006% of it flows in rivers!). Due to its scarcity, increasing demand and worsening quality, various efforts have been made to produce potable water from seawater.

The technological challenges are mainly related to providing sanitation and water that is safe for drinking, and water that is clean enough for various industrial purposes. It is well-known that every year millions of children die from preventable water-borne diseases. The technology and resources exist and are available, but the issue is rather to what extent all stakeholders have access to them and in particular whether the treatment technologies are sufficiently cost-efficient for the different practical applications.

Here in Finland we have numerous SMEs and major companies operating in highly relevant sectors, such as Kemira, Metso and Outotec, to name just a few, for which the above considerations offer huge business opportunities. Looked at from another angle, as the title of this blog suggests, water is everybody’s business!

I challenge Professor Markku Leskelä from the University of Helsinki to write the next blog.

Mika Sillanpää, Professor, Lappeenranta University of Technology

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Revealing the secrets of the brain

December 5th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , , |

In 1983 the personal computer revolution was just getting underway. A small British company, Acorn Computer Ltd, had established its position in this revolution by working with the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) to produce the BBC Microcomputer, a machine that formed the foundations of UK computing education for a decade. Ambitious to move forward, Acorn embarked upon the development of its own microprocessor, motivated by a frustration with the capabilities of existing designs and the exciting opportunities offered by a new movement towards architectural elegance promulgated by US academics at Stanford and UC Berkeley. This movement was the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), and the microprocessor was the Acorn RISC Machine (later shortened to ARM).

From little Acorns mighty oaks do grow or, in this case, mighty ARMs. Today ARM Ltd (the expansion of the acronym was dropped 20 years ago!) supplies the microprocessor technology for most of the world’s mobile electronics, including iconic products such as Apple’s iPod, iPhone and iPad, mobile phone handsets from Nokia, Samsung, HTC and others, and a whole range of less visible computer systems embedded into cars, telecoms, and many other familiar consumer products. To date well over 20 billion ARM processors have been shipped by ARMs host of semiconductor partners, which amounts to around 3 ARMs for every person on planet earth. Although the distribution is far from even between rich and poor, there can be hardly a person on earth who has not at some time used an ARM to make a phone call, such is the pervasive nature of the electronic fabric of modern life.

The ARM isn’t just useful for everyday life, either. It can contribute at the leading-edge of scientific research, as in my current SpiNNaker (say “Spiking Neural Network Architecture quickly!) project. SpiNNaker will ultimately deploy a million ARM processors in a single connected machine built to run real-time models of how the brain works. Although a million processors is a formidable computing resource, it is sufficient only to support network models of about 1% of the complexity of the human brain. Still, these are much richer models than can currently be run in real time even on large supercomputers, so we hope and expect that the ARM will play a role in advancing our understanding of the principles of operation of the brain, which still remains as one of the great mysteries at the frontiers of science.

The fundamental problem in building real-time brain models is the very high connectivity of the biological system. Each neuron (brain cell) connects to thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of other neurons. The physical connectivity of the biology cannot be replicated inside a computer, but it can be replicated by logical connectivity because electrical wires are very much faster than biological wires. In SpiNNaker biological spikes (which are the predominant means of conveying real-time information in the brain) are represented by electronic packets of information that can be conveyed very rapidly through a packet-switched network across the machine. The precise details of the simulated network are translated into the routing paths that the packets take within the machine, travelling from a neuron modeled on one processor to many targets on other processors. It is SpiNNaker’s ability to carry very large numbers of very small multicast packets that makes it uniquely-suited to the brain-modelling task.

With SpiNNaker we hope to create a computing platform that can be used by neuroscientists and psychologists to test their hypotheses of neural information processing, the result of which will be increased understanding of the principles of information processing in the brain. This could lead to applications in areas such as robotics, security, medicine, automotive crash avoidance and other forms of driver assistance, computer vision and speech understanding.

The benefits of knowing exactly how our own brains work are really hard to foresee, and as yet we have no idea just how difficult reaching this level of understanding will ultimately prove to be. Our hope is that SpiNNaker will represent a useful step towards achieving this Grand Challenge goal.

Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering, the University of Manchester,
2010 Millennium Technology Prize Laureate

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“This place is too safe”

November 18th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , , |

A few months ago, a friend and colleague of mine wrote in her blog about an innovation that she and a few friends had achieved. After six months research into the topic, patent applications, establishing startup companies etc., this group of five academically-educated, highly-talented people came to the conclusion that it was too much trouble, that there was too much at stake, and that nobody in the country was willing to fund their idea. Just a few weeks ago, I heard essentially the same story in a discussion about the future of material science in Finland – even though the research conducted in our universities is world-class, there is no potential in existing companies to utilize the innovations that result, and almost no way of funding startups.

Also, the research world is divided into small kingdoms ruled over by professors and funded by multiple streams of small grants sufficient only to employ one post-doc and a graduate student. To keep a research group going and growing, grant applications have to be written continuously, an occupation that in many cases takes close to 20% of one’s working time. To guarantee a reasonable success rate, project proposals follow current research trends, do not represent overly-large risk, and do not offend the potential evaluators in any way. Research supposed to be ‘boldly going where no-one has gone before’ has become risk-averse business as usual in which one research group looks much like any other.

On the business side, I recently talked to someone who did establish a startup company and made it a success. After expansion to a medium-size enterprise with about a hundred employees, he noted a drastic change in the way the company operated – the group of friends who used to discuss the big picture of what to do over coffee and then got down to doing what was needed had been replaced by accountants, lawyers and a variety of managers. His honest question was: “How did we turn overnight from reasonable people with high morale and a strong work ethic into either mindless children or egoistic crooks whose actions need to be monitored and controlled at all times?” To me this spells a more general observation – small enterprises are much better equipped to exploit the potential offered by new ideas, larger companies tend to walk well-trodden paths avoiding errors at all costs.

“This place is too safe” is a quote by the chair of a panel evaluating the quality of teaching and education  at Aalto University. His point was that teachers and students in our universities enjoy very little accountability for their actions: If the teaching you provide is bad you’ll see fewer students in class – but the class will anyway be repeated next year. Don’t show up in class / fail all exams – and you’ll be given endless opportunities to try again. This type of atmosphere simply doesn’t foster excellence amongst either teachers or students, nor does it encourage the time-consuming but highly-rewarding interaction between the competent and the ingenious. Almost everyone in the innovation chain – students, researchers, business managers – operate in comfort zones where the status quo is maintained with a very high degree of certainty and where big gains are difficult to achieve.

All this comes back to the question of how to develop an academic environment that provides greater stimulus for innovation, and a society willing and capable to act on the opportunities which emerge. Yes, increasing research funding will help, as will altering funding structures to improve the recognition of innovative ideas amongst the mass of ‘more of the same’ research. (And if we believe that innovations will save the economy, please do not cut university funding!). We can also help by creating effective funding mechanisms for startup companies. (And let’s think of ways other than SHOKs – the biggest consensus machines I’ve seen for a long time…) But fundamentally I think we need to do something much more difficult: We academics need to change the way we think about our role in society.

The five years spent at university shape the course of our young students’ lives in many different ways. This is the time to encourage each generation to become active members of the community, to be responsible for their actions (and non-actions), to be international and culturally open-minded, and – first and foremost – take their futures into their own hands. At one and the same time, we have to educate them to both generate new knowledge and discover novel solutions to difficult problems. Having such individuals in both academia and business life and encouraging them to interact will foster the development of research ideas into business models much more effectively than any type of organizational reform I can think of. But we need to do this quickly – seven billion people are out there waiting for food, water, energy, care and cure.

I challenge Dr. Asta Kärkkäinen from Nokia to write the next blog.

Tuija Pulkkinen, Dean, Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering

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Management principles for lifting innovation to the next level (openness 2.0)

November 11th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , |

Innovation, I have often claimed, is a distraction until it pays off. Indeed, that is the nature of ‘innovation-as-usual’ inside companies where people are focused on getting their “Job #1” done. Ideas from left field or even ideas that could be useful but for the lack of time to think about and develop them, are easily discarded. Also, if you tell your boss about the innovative idea you are working on, the unnerving response in these uncertain times, all too often, is along these lines: “Don’t you have a job to do?” No wonder Innovation 0.1 did not and does not work very well. Even if an idea survives and becomes a small business, it often fails to impress management.

Enter Open Innovation, or Innovation 1.0. Management acknowledges that “not all good ideas reside inside our organization” and creates innovation goals – goals such as Procter & Gamble’s requirement that more than half of the ideas the company explores should be externally sourced. Unquestionably this adds to the tolerance for idea generation inside organizations.

Whirlpool went even further when it decided that each business unit head should, on pain of losing 10% of their budget, find at least three radical and innovative ideas to fund. Shell’s pioneering “GameChanger” program offers an opening for employees, academics and entrepreneurs to come and tell about their energy-related ideas with the potential reward of securing Shell as an angel investor and organizational mentor. But as any game-changer will tell you, that’s now old news.

It’s high time to move forward to Innovation 2.0. I will be introducing new innovation principles that begin to crack open our collective capacity for innovation. Of course, some of these principles are still maturing but they are well worth noting as signals of change. Times are such that new innovation capabilities are sorely needed! So, here we go.

The first principle of Innovation 2.0 is resource morphing. This is the ability of an organization or a person to free a particular resource from its common or previous use and repurpose it on the go. While Google may be using an old paper mill as a server farm, Biocurious in Silicon Valley seeks to “build a community biology lab for amateurs, inventors, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to experiment with friends”. Erin Gentry and her co-founders at Biocurious have overcome the high cost of laboratory space and equipment by starting their venture in a garage and buying used equipment from eBay. In the process they have repurposed an activity once carried out only in science and corporate labs into an activity to do with friends!

The second principle of Innovation 2.0 is “gameful engagement”. Jane McGonigal uses this term to describe how games can be harnessed to bring the ideas and energy of many thousands of people to address a real-life issue and enable them to feel the thrill of a personal epic win, something reality is supposedly short of. For example, “World Without Oil” was a “massively collaborative imagining” of how to cope with an energy shortage. Nineteen hundred players, motivated by the slogan “Play it – before you live it”, thus narrated alternative realities.

Collective hacking is the third principle of Innovation 2.0. Hacking entered the public consciousness when, at the end of the last century, Eric Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar. No longer the exclusive domain of software coders, hacking has spread into different walks of life. For example, as described by the Institute for the Future, Ariel Waldman, an open source scientist, has organized Science Hack Days, “a 48-hour, all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and people with good ideas in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’.” The nature of a “hack” is to provide a quick solution to a problem. As such, it may not be the most elegant solution but is often the cleverest. It is also a “mashup”: A hack mixes data from different sources in novel ways.

It is now up to you, Dear Reader, to hack up the fourth and fifth principle of Innovation 2.0.

Liisa Välikangas, Aalto University and the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, California, USA

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Thinking Fiberglass Web

November 3rd, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , |

While the Greek root « EXA », is not familiar to everyone, it is the new reference measure for our communications society. We are all too familiar with MEGA, and now GIGA, from our flash-memory keys that never seem to contain enough bytes as time goes on and our information glut increases. An EXA is a billion billion, or a billion GIGA of something. Like, for instance, the number of grains (one cubic-millimeter size) in a sand heap of one cubic-kilometer volume. It is also very nearly the number of square-centimeters on the surface of the Earth.

And so what of it? We better comprehend scale in the world where we live if we consider first that one exabyte could capture the contents of 50,000 Libraries of Congress. Not impressed yet? Consider then that our internet carries fifty exabytes annually, corresponding to an everyday traffic of the equivalent of 150 billion books. There you go!

Contrary to widespread public belief, this internet capacity has very little to do with satellites, and even less with cellular phones. The overwhelming majority of the internet traffic is carried by a fiberglass web. The WWW is first and foremost an optical fiber network, completed at the edges, true enough, with space, cellular, and last-mile access networks. What length of fiber optics is needed for all this? Answer: too long, and never ever enough! Today, the existing fiberglass web represents a 1.5 billion kilometers infrastructure: enough to circle the Earth 37,000 times, or to reach the planet Saturn. Five years from now, this length will have doubled. Currently, optical fibers are deployed worldwide at a global rate of five kilometers per second, or fifteen times the speed of sound. Even so, there are huge gaps in the geographical distribution (we will come back to this below).

Strictly, the Internet was the invention of TCP/IP that in turn enabled HTML websites, e-mail and ecommerce, among others. Before it could revolutionize our society, it had to be implemented over some physical network in order to become what we experience today, with further promise for expansion in the future. In this respect, we should not forget two great inventions of the previous halfcentury: the Laser (including semiconductor chips and photo-receivers), and the optical fiber.

However, even with the best lasers and fibers the most powerful signals will fade after 100 km: too short for global dimensions, and subject to a desperate electronic bottleneck if conventional amplifiers are used. The optical amplifier, the so-called EDFA, a piece of fiber lightly doped with the rare-earth erbium, came to the rescue and now optical fiber trunks span from several hundred kilometers to over 10,000 kilometers, on land and undersea, with internet signals reaching the far end of the fiber at 2/3 the speed of light. Most importantly, the internet light signals are now packed into hundreds of multicolored (wavelength) channels, each one running at its own speed between GIGA and 1,000 GIGA bytes per second.

So far, between the Internet and the fiberglass webs, this has been a happy “He and She” marriage (“She” poetically to recall Mother Earth, or course…). So far? Is there a rumor of discontent? Well, yes, the household may soon run short of bandwidth, the bread-winner.

In the 2005 European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC’05), the Chairman, Prof. David Payne, asked me to do the impossible: deliver a keynote paper that would help stimulate a depressed community, still recovering and unconsoled from the “telecom bubble”. He suggested the title “Optical Communications in 2025”. Safe enough to allow the luxury of a dream? After some precise searching on Internet growth statistics, and carefully analyzing optical fiber capacity using the best tangential approach to the immutable limits of Claude Shannon, I quickly realized that available bandwidth might rapidly fall short of any “Optical Moore’s Law” projections, and that we were well advanced in the paradigm. My talk concluded that, on Dec.31th, 2025, at midnight, the Internet will turn into the World Wide Wait. Just kidding here, but this is to convey the “smell the coffee” moment.

“A foreseeable end of the Optical Moore’s Law?” It took a few years for the message to really sink in. Since then, papers about the subject have flourished. Last month, at ECOC’11, David Payne, while addressing the “capacity crunch” issue, advanced the ticking clock to 2020. Eight years is not much to fix the looming problem, unless we start thinking of limiting the internet growth, from initially exponential to steady linear, at the new pace of technology. Any thoughts on its impact on society, any volunteers on how to do that ?

Emmanuel Desurvire, 2008 Millennium Technology Prize Laureate

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The rigor of relevance

October 27th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , |

An interesting dimension in management science is that the science component mostly plays only a marginal role as a source of management ideas. By way of comparison, think of medical doctors using TV series as a source of knowledge, or engineers consulting science fiction when designing a bridge… Doesn’t sound good? In business management, all opinions are legitimate as long as they are viewed as refreshing and innovative. Anyone can be a management guru – new management fashions emerge on a regular basis and respectable organizations built their visions on knowledge that has no empirical support. In quite many ways, the management of large organizations relies on faith as much as knowledge. As we have a considerable amount of scientific knowledge relating to both management and organizations, a question well worth asking is: Why is that knowledge only selectively used in daily managerial practice?

First of all, the science and practice of management are two separate systems that function using distinct and separate logic. On the science side, the aim is to generate general theoretical models that explain organizational phenomena. In management practice, the focus is on solving specific problems embedded in unique contexts. As a consequence, scientific rigor can never be relevant – and is very rarely seen as such. Secondly, practice has more need of faith than knowledge does. Most of the ‘scientific truths’ in the field of management are fairly discouraging when you are faced with the need to put things right in real organizations. Quite the contrary, but even though the most popular management fashions (such as ‘dynamic capabilities’,‘re-engineering’ etc.) cannot withstand any empirical test, they still offer modern organizations hope. The low levels of scientific quality that prevail when employing these knowledge packages do not matter. In actual fact, the whole idea within popular management knowledge and management fashions is for the answers provided to be ambiguous, over-simplified, clearly articulated, and persuasive in their newness.

Most management fashions are pretty harmless: more entertainment than serious business. But things get more complex when public authorities begin to take this unscientific entertainment or these ideologically-produced “isms” seriously. (Remember that a large proportion of the international business schools are religious in origin).) Things get complex because even the silliest ideas rapidly become widespread when they are sponsored by powerful civil servants and politicians. One recent and influential ‘megatrend’ is entrepreneurship.

Most economists acknowledge that the amount of entrepreneurship in all societies is fixed. The only thing that varies is how all the entrepreneurial activity is channelled. If a society’s institutional environment is functional, entrepreneurs can operate in business and industrial production and generate economic wealth for the whole society. Likewise, poor institutional systems encourage criminality and other wealth-destroying activities. This we know. And we also have the former Soviet Union and other failed communist economic systems to demonstrate the importance of individuals being able to act as entrepreneurs. But when entrepreneurship is promoted to become an important part of education in schools, vocational colleges and universities, we have an ideological programme – not something that relies on scientific facts supporting the causal link between entrepreneurship and economic growth. What we then end up with is a gigantic educational experiment. Generations are educated to improve their entrepreneurial skills without any knowledge of how this could affect overall societal development. This is just as dangerous as any other ideological programme and a good example of what happens when political elites believe they have knowledge when in reality they have nothing but beliefs.

I guess it would be naïve to expect management (or even our public administration) to be based on scientific knowledge. Actually, this is almost impossible as management scholars are generally more interested in explaining management phenomena than offering normative statements. What would be beneficial, however, would be to safeguard universities and schools from ideological programmes being imposed by political elites – in the 1970s they were too anti-entrepreneurial, nowadays they are too pro-entrepreneurial. Strong academic autonomy, education based on scientific facts, and the open-minded development of educational goals are the right tools for building healthy and prosperous societies.

I challenge Professor Pekka Aula from the University of Helsinki to write the next blog.

Juha-Antti Lamberg, Professor, PhD, Strategy and Economic History, University of Jyväskylä

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Democracy, development

October 18th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , , , |

The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 marks a significant socio-political change in our recent times. Although the details of what exactly happened during the process of renegotiating power in the Mediterranean countries remains largely unknown, the sequence of events has triggered happy reactions in Europe. It seems that what took place in the Arab world reminds the West of their own baby-steps towards democracy. Such events are easily labelled as ‘democratisation’ or ‘liberation’, followed by a content, Universalist sigh.

In the meantime, commenting on the recent London riots in his essay, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek asks the relevant question: “What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?” By referring to Hegelian ‘abstract negativity’, he points to the destructive force at the outskirts of society, people deprived of the fruits of development.

Despite the glimmers of hope, a dash of scepticism should be taken onboard: that there is the risk of embracing a dangerous romance; of assuming that as long as things go further in a ‘democratic’ way, everything will be ‘ok’. Effectively, this romance functions like a fog – a screen preventing us from seeing and understanding what is actually taking place either in countries undergoing radical reform or in the democratically-established West.

In fact, a parallel similar to the political ‘free/unfree’ dialectic can be detected in the field of technology and innovation. It is that of ‘progress/no-progress’. Technology and scientific advancement are often viewed as the motors of development, virtually independent of context: “Progress equals happiness and the economy needs to grow.” Right. In this kind of talk there is an inherent risk of taking happiness for granted; human experience of meaningful life is projected through the satisfaction of formerly non-existent material needs.

In our time, the rise of the BRIC countries provides us with a prime example of how the adoption of technology can boost economies and bring welfare to populations. Without the burden of obsolete industrial infrastructure, the BRICs even have the potential to leapfrog traditional industrialised countries; they are in fact doing so. At the same time, one should be aware of the risk of becoming overly confident in the good intentions of either emerging economies or companies involved in the process. In the worst case, we may become witnesses to unforeseen environmental and socio-economic devastation during coming decades.

No form of technology or science is detached from the context of its application. Falling in love with technology without understanding its many potential uses is risky. In this respect, innovation systems which embrace the space of new possibilities should be geared to a holistic understanding of things. Corporations, having earlier articulated their sole interest as lying in maximising profits for their shareholders, have nowadays refined their statements by using a more holistic, socially-agreeable tone. Similarly, political rhetoric has crept towards pleasing ‘mindful’ voters.

If it’s about incentives, who has the power to craft them? The modernist dream of endless development cannot be the only answer.

To write the next blog, I challenge Senior Researcher, Mikko Jääskeläinen, Institute of Strategy, Aalto University School of Science.

Tuomas Kuronen, PhD candidate, Institute of Strategy, Aalto University School of Science

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Thinking about intuitive innovation

October 7th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , |

Personal, corporate and national success stories are intrinsically connected to innovation. The realm of the new is the one that propels us the most effectively to new heights of achievement. People who are able to acquire new skills and make courageous strides into the unknown have a better chance at striking inventive gold than those who stay comfortably on the sidelines of ingenuity. Companies that create dynamic processes and embrace a culture that fosters invention create the most value for their shareholders. Countries that invest the most into opening the minds of their citizens by investing in education and supporting R&D are the ones who usually end up at the top the world’s competitive indexes.

Invention is at the heart of success. Lack of imagination and imitation are often the root causes of mediocrity. Because of this, people, companies and entire countries furiously hunt innovation. However, a common observation about creativity in general and innovation in particular is that is simply happens. Like an accident or an act of God, innovation sometimes seems to materialize itself by a modern variety of Immaculate Conception. It often escapes complex processes and the power of large and resourceful corporations. It can be dormant in the minds of two or three employees of a small start-up before blossoming into a massive new value proposition that will entice millions around the world.

Why can’t innovation be like an oil field that we can simply find and drain at our leisure? The main reason for this is that the raw materials for innovation are people and ideas. The bringing together of the right people with the right ideas at the right time and place is a continuous concern of innovation-hungry corporations. In addition, these people and their ideas need to bask in the right kind of environment with the appropriate attitude and resources to come up with a novelty that will genuinely add value to others. These factors form a long and challenging set of fluctuating variables that appear, on their face, to inordinately depend on randomness.

Innovation inevitably comes from processes of trial and error. There is in my opinion a certain hierarchy in the type of trial and error processes that are needed to instigate innovation. In my experience, trial and error processes can be divided into three types. These are random, cognitive or intuitive trial and error processes. We can imagine their relative place in the form of a pyramidal hierarchy with randomness at the bottom, cognition in the middle and intuition at the top. These levels can be seen as different methods of discovery with their associated various level of effectiveness in producing innovation.

At the bottom of this hierarchy is random trial and error. At this level of our quest for innovation the main driver is chance. The right people and the right ideas just happen to find each other to produce a piece of valuable novelty. This is somewhat like buying a lottery ticket or rolling a dice. Though it may seem crazy to rely simply on this type of trial and error to generate critically needed innovations, it is a fact of life and business that many success stories hinge around good timing and luck. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs acknowledge and accept this to be a part of their work in creating new services and products.

There are, however, two other important ways to increase our odds in producing innovations. The first is the use of analytical intelligence and the second is intuition. The second level of the trial and error hierarchy mentioned earlier is cognitive trial and error. The main driver of this level of innovation discovery is analytical or investigative intelligence. By this I refer to things like scientific testing, process experimentation and market research and commercial trials. These are among the ways we are able to use human cognition to narrow the scope of what is technically possible and commercially desirable. This level of trial and error is driven by the facts and data currently available.

The challenge with basing innovative processes solely on cognition is that it tends to focus too much on the past and the present. It incrementally improves what already exists. The bigger opportunities, however, reside in the unique exercise of lateral thinking that comes from intuitive trial and error. This is the highest level of the trial and error hierarchy and it is based on intuition. It is also the most powerful form of trial and error because it focuses almost exclusively on the future. It combines the workings of luck and investigative intelligence with the added driver of intuition. Intuition is our unique blend of personal insight and experience. It is the faculty that allowed us to see that a typewriter could be transformed into a personal computer or that a traditional phone could indeed become mobile.

Market research and technical processes do not deliver these kinds of powerful insights. The challenge with most innovation processes that I have seen is that they are stuck in the area of cognitive trial and error. This produces useful and important innovative work but it falls short of the quantum leap than can come from making more use of our intuition. In the future, we should spend more time in finding the ways of encouraging and tapping our collective intuition. The best stimulants for this are an open mind, a community based on trust, and the courage of directing our inventive resources towards a unique future rather than a better copy of the past.

I challenge Petri Kokko, Sales Director at Google, to write the next blog.

André Noël Chaker, Author of The Finnish Miracle, Senior Advisor at Veikkaus Oy., the Finnish National Lottery

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Creating Big Change through Small Steps

September 8th, 2011 | No Comments | Tags: , , , |

Recent weeks have brought a continuing stream of disconcerting news about the state of the global economy. Worries concerning the ability of the heavily-indebted eurozone countries to shoulder their burdens have not been dissipated; and some have accused policy makers of taking decisions in reactive mode, resulting in piecemeal fixes to pressing problems that beg for solution. Against this backdrop, Finland and its research and innovation system could be headed for stormy weather. It is therefore pertinent to ask how innovation processes can be best managed in increasingly turbulent conditions that are permeated by uncertainties.

Many recent developments in the Finnish innovation system have been premised on the assumption that there is a need for stronger strategic guidance, implemented, for instance, by granting resources primarily to those programmes and projects which represent selected research areas or fulfil other predefined selection criteria. In many contexts, this assumption is legitimate and contributes to a better alignment of interests among researchers and industrialists; but there are caveats. For example, if giving shape to these strategies and implementing them is excessively laborious and time-consuming, there is a risk that undue effort will be spent on administrative work rather than the production and exploitation of new knowledge. Furthermore – to the extent that estimates about future potential are uncertain – there is a risk that resources will be consumed sub-optimally by tying up resources with unpromising topics even if the use of the most recent information would call for a timely change of direction. Even well-meaning preconditions may be counterproductive: for example, even though highly networked, large, and interdisciplinary projects tend to hold more potential than smaller ones, unfounded efforts to increase the size of projects may result in higher coordination costs, thus undermining the sought-after improvements in efficiency.

Innovation, by definition, involves novelty and uncertainty. Indeed, cursory analyses of past attempts at innovation show that even the most meticulously prepared market forecasts can turn out to be embarrassingly incorrect, if only because the vacillating tastes and whimsical behaviour of consumers are notoriously difficult to predict. Often such challenges are compounded by technological difficulties which may thwart chances of success, making it difficult but all the more important to establish a rational basis for allocating resources.

Pharmaceutical companies, perhaps more than their counterparts in other industries, have long had to grapple with uncertainties. Indeed, when a new medical compound is discovered, it is only after a lengthy, costly and laborious process that the true potential of that compound can be fully demonstrated. It is therefore imperative that pharmaceutical R&D activities be well structured, starting with smaller early phase projects and moving on to more extensive tests of safety and efficacy at a later stage. Such an approach serves to mitigate the risks of binding resources too early – or picking presumed ‘winners’ that do not in fact win. But even here there are important parallels with innovative activity in other areas: committing resources to a few ‘big’ projects at the outset does not necessarily mean that such resources are optimally allocated. So-called ‘big science’ does have a well-defined and legitimate niche in areas where major research infrastructures are essential; but the space for ‘big innovation’ should be much more encompassing, including a large diversity of projects – even ones modest in size – that are most likely to thrive in an environment characterised by a firm commitment to achievement, a relentless passion for creativity, and an openness to fortuitous encounters.

I challenge Professor Juha-Antti Lamberg, Strategy & Economic History, University of Jyväskylä, to write the next blog.

Professor Ahti Salo, Systems Analysis Laboratory, Aalto University School of Science

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