Interview with Jimmy Wales.

“I don’t think of my work as technological innovation, I think of it as being social innovation.” (Jimmy Wales)

Tuesday, February 24, 2009. Marco Dettweiler and Roberto V. Zicari have interviewed Jimmy Wales.

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966), President of Wikia, Inc.; Board member and Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation.
His work developing Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people.

Q. Mr. Wales, one of your new project is called Wikia? What is it?

We are building the rest of the Library. We are taking the Wiki model beyond just non profit educational and research community into things like humor, political activism, all kinds of different things.

Q. How does it compare Wikia with Wikipedia?

I would say, it`s the rest of the Library, it is everything that does not belong to an Encyclopedia. For example, Uncyclopedia is a humor site, it is a parody of Wikipedia, it is not a serious site, it is all a joke.
Another example, we have a site about Wikia Green , which is all about sustainable living, it is not a neutral site, it is specifically advocating for specific prospective in the world.
Another example we have, is Wikianswers , where people post questions and get quick short answers to various questions as rather than Encyclopedia Oracle that has a question answer format. There are many things that are different from an Encyclopedia.

Q. Another service offered by Wikia is Wikia Search. What is the difference with respect to other existing search engines (e.g. Google)?

The primary difference what I am trying to do is to put the editorial control into the hands of the community. Every search engine has an editorial component to it, where you type in a search term, and they tell you the things that you should be looking for related to that search term, and all of that is controlled very secretively in most search engines. My view is let`s try and open it up to public dialog and discussion and debate, so that the community can determine it.

Q. Does Wikia Search relate to Wikipedia?

Well, it is a completely independent search project. It is searching the entire Web and not anyone particular site, and so really it does not have anything to do with Wikipedia.

Q. Wikianswers: What is the difference with other services such as Yahoo! Answers?

I see two main differences. First it is a Wiki, meaning everyone works together to edit the same entries, rather then each person giving a separate different answer. So you work to improve answers that have been given by the community.
The other major difference is that all of the things we are doing are under Free License (open source license), as opposed to all the other answer sites where all of the work is kept under proprietary license; so the community doesn’t really have the ability to take that work and reuse it and move it to another site if they want to.

Q. How do you ensure you get some quality answers?

Well, then you see that on a lot of answer site you see a lot of very questionable answers, and people giving contradictory answers. The idea here is to have the community that oversight of what is going on. If somebody gives a bad answer, the community can delete it.

Q. Would you consider the work you do similar to what the Open Source movement does in the software industry?

Yes, it is a very strong parallel. Everything I am doing is based on the idea of free licensing and free licensing is really what it powers open source software, free software. All of the work we do is put under GNU free documentation license. The reason for this is that this overcomes certain very complicated problems that people face regarding whether or not they are going to spend a lot of time working on something, and so it is very, very similar. For all of the free software you have the right to copy, to modify, to redistribute and to redistribute modified versions, commercially and non-commercially and we follow the same philosophy. We want people to be able to take their work, any work that they have done using one of our services and reuse it as they see fit.

Q. Is Copyright of information a problem?

Not really, we don’t really see a huge problem with that. Of course sometimes you have people who have inadvertently or not understanding copyright law copied things inappropriately. But that is a pretty minor part of the overall situation. It is really not much different from software.

Q. Does your work relate to the Semantic Web?

Very little to do with that. I am a bit of a skeptical about the notion of semantic web, although we are finally beginning to see things move a little bit in the direction of semantic web. But I think, it is still a long way to go before a lot of the dreams that people have about a semantic web begin to become true.

Q. Wikia is a profit company, how do you generate revenues out of free information?

We are advertising support edit, so we have some Google-ads on the site, we have some display ads on the site – that is basically it. It is a very simple, very standard kind of model for a website.

Q. When do people use Wikia and when Wikipedia?

It is completely different, so the two reasons you might use something would be very, very different from each other. They are really not comparable in that sense. It is very similar to a library and I like to go back again and again to that metaphor. If you go to a library sometimes you are looking for an encyclopedia, sometimes you are looking for political activism, sometimes you are looking for humor, the next time you are using an almanac.
The reasons why people come across it are very different.

For example, if you go to Uncyclopedia, you will find something very different from Wikipedia. Your are going to laugh and have fun reading it. But if you need basic information you obviously want to go to Wikipedia.

Q. What kind of reaction did you have from the Community to the services of Wikia?

So the response has been very good. A lot of people find that Wikia is a fun place for them to spend some time building something and some people find that they are still more interested in Wikipedia. It just depends on the person and what they are interested in.

Q. You are thinking of introducing “Flagged Revisions” in Wikipedia. To what extent it will change Wikepedia?

Right now Flagged revision is being used extensively in German language Wikipedia and very successfully. We are watching very carefully the statistics around U search and how long it takes to approve things and all of this. We are in a learning process.
It seems to me a useful tool, I think we will be introducing some formal Flagged revisions into English Wikipedia within the next month or two. We are just discussing right now about how we should be doing it and what should be the right approach.

Q. Recently Wikipedia had problems with some individuals (for example in Germany), who sued Wikipedia because of supposedly “wrong facts” about them. What is your opinion on that? Will this be a typical issue Wikipedia will have to face in the future?

I don’t think we will see a lot of that. In this particular case the politician was very embarrassed by his actions and ended up to apologize. It seems unlikely to be a really major factor for Wikipedia going forward.

Q. Wikipedia is currently being used by students (both at High Schools and Universities), but quotes from Wikipedia are not accepted by most of the Professors. Do you think this will change in the future? And if yes, how?

I think that it is important to think about what is the proper role of an encyclopedia in the research process over all. In general we don’t think of any encyclopedia as being something that you would cite as a source in an academic paper.
That is not what it has been designed to be about. You want it to be a very high quality, but even if it is a very high quality, it is always an introduction to material. It is always to provide you with the background context. It isn’t original research, it isn’t an academic journal.
When we are thinking about how should university students be using Wikipedia, I think we have to be realistic: They are using it all the time, all of them. So what we need to think about is a couple of questions: First: How do we make sure that they are educated on the right way on how to use an encyclopedia, and second how do we make Wikipedia as good as it possibly can be, because it is important for a lot of people.

Q. Some countries, such as China for example, impose a strict censorship on the Internet. Does a free of expression content repository such as Wikipedia has any chance there?

Wikipedia was completely banned in China for about three years. We are currently available in China. We have a policy that accurate information is a fundamental human right, and we won’t compromise with censors. What I see overall if I look at the overall trend, I see a trend for more openness on the Internet in China, but also in many other places around the world. I think that censoring the Internet is essentially impossible. You can have some impact and scare people. Really stopping the flow of information is becoming more and more difficult. I think that many countries around the world are realizing that it is not a very useful tool for a public policy to try to control the flow of information in the way it used to be controlled. So, I am reasonably optimistic, but there are so many problems around the world and I don’t think we are going to see very quickly the end of censorship, but I think we are generally moving in the right direction.

Q. What kind of innovation do you use?

Clearly, we are in an era where many new things are being created. I don’t think of my work as technological innovation, I think of it as being social innovation. The technology involved in almost everything that I am doing is pretty much off-the-shelf existing technology. We are not really trying to innovate on that level, although we are in some ways. Primarily what we are doing is social innovation, finding ways for people to work together in social communities online and figuring out what social rules and norms are helpful for people to create healthy and productive communities.

Carl Olofson on Innovation

Here is another interview on Innovation. This time with Carl Olofson, IDC.

Carl Olofson performs research and analysis for IDC’s Information Management and Data Integration Software service within the Application Development and Deployment research group. Mr. Olofson’s research involves following sales and technical developments in the information and data management (IDM) markets, database management systems (DBMS) markets, data movement and replication software, data management software, metadata management software, and the vendors of related tools and software systems. Mr. Olofson also contributes overview and data integration research content to Integration and Deployment Software, which covers developments in software technologies that manage the overall integrated deployment of applications developed and maintained using application development and deployment software. Mr. Olofson also advises clients on market and technology directions as well as performing supply and demand-side primary research to size, forecast, and segment the database market.

Mr. Olofson has 30 years of experience in IT, including two years of application development consulting, 10 years of database and tools software development, four years of product consulting, and three years as a senior product manager.
In 2000, Mr. Olofson received IDC's highest award, the James Peacock Memorial Award for professional excellence in market research. Prior to joining IDC, Mr. Olofson worked at Cayenne and Cadre, where he was involved with directing the management for ObjectTeam products, including an object-oriented CASE tool and a component construction and assembly tool. He was also responsible for product packaging, pricing, requirements analysis, sales force preparation, and product roll-out. Prior to that, Mr. Olofson managed customer relations and performed sales support for MSP in promoting its mainframe repository, METHODMANAGER. He also worked at LBMS, where he led a team of eight engineers working on a repository technology research program; and at Cullinet where he was responsible for the Cullinet CASE strategy. In addition, Mr. Olofson worked for eight years in project teams developing the IDMS, IDD, ADS/Online, and Online Mapping products.


1. What is "Innovation" for you?
Innovation is the development of new approaches to solving problems. These can include actual inventions, but also new processes, new ways of thinking, and improvements on existing machines, processes, and ways of thinking that result in their being used in new ways.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?
It's tempting to list inventors, since they are obviously high profile innovators, but I find that most inventors don't really know how their inventions are going to be used. Thomas Edison, for instance, expected the phonograph to be used mainly for taking and playing back dictation (the Dictaphone was a spin-off), and that motion pictures would mainly be used for industrial training. He was a very serious, work-oriented person who could not imagine spending hard-earned money on a machine that had, as its sole purpose, entertainment.

My favorite innovators are people who read a need, and come up with a new way to meet that need. Sam Walton, for instance, rethought the concept of discount retailing, and realized that the key differentiator was efficiency. Using IT strategically, he created the Wal-Mart empire. Sir Richard Branson understood that a key to success, whether in retail (audio, specifically) or services (such as air transportation) was an excellent customer experience, and from that built the Virgin companies. Along similar lines, in terms of IT strictly, Steve Jobs drove his engineers at Apple to concentrate on creating not only a pleasing, but distinctively signature user experience in all their products, which has enabled the Macintosh to survive the Windows onslaught and also ensured the success of the iPod, iPhone, et al.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
Most innovations that reach public awareness are things that have existed, or at least been under development, for at least 10 years. Thus, a major technical innovation of the past three years is the latest demonstration of miniaturized technical integration that I call the integrated mobile information device, but which is more commonly called, for legacy reasons, the "cell phone". It is a telephone, of course, but it's also a text messaging device, e-mail client, Internet browser and, in some cases, a music player, a camera, a networked PDA, and a push-to-talk audio transformer (a.k.a., "walky-talky"). In the near future, I expect it to also be a GPS navigator and mobile television set (with DVR capability). Lots of people also use it as a pocket watch. It has replaced the land line telephone for a whole generation of users (who don't live where I do, which is to say, they must live where they get fairly reliable signal service). It replaces the older "brick" style cell phone, as well as the pager, the PDA, pocket camera, watch, and even the MP3 player. The key innovation was daring to see a single device as capable of filling a wide variety of purposes, many of which were regarded previously as unrelated.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
A successful innovation is not just a new idea, it is a practical one that solves real problems. Successful innovators are usually commercially successful because they meet a market need. That doesn't always include the original inventor of the underlying technology, unfortunately, and engineers are often poor promoters of their technology, or attempt to introduce their technology at the wrong time, before the market is ready. A successful innovator has the right idea at the right time, and knows how to sell it.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
The big mistake that most innovators make is that they fall in love with their innovation, and expect that it will always prevail in its market. Such individuals typically fail to adjust when competitors arise who offer "almost as good" for less, or otherwise exploit the general idea, diluting the business opportunity, and leaving original innovator as a relic. The IT industry is full of innovators each of whom successfully exploited one great idea, then tried to milk it beyond its expiration date and came up with nothing original again. Any innovator should, as soon as the innovation proves successful, move on to the next new idea, and not look back. Repeat innovators always do that.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
There are both financial rewards and the ability to point to something that is his/her own idea.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
1) It must address a practical need.
2) It must represent a new idea, or a new take on a classic idea.
3) It must actually work, and be embraced and adopted by a significant constituency.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Firstly, have a good understanding of what you know and do well, then find ways that your knowledge, insights, and abilities can address an unmet need of a large number of people. Then, figure out how your solution can be explained to, adopted, and used by those people, and finally, be prepared to work long and hard to make your solution a reality.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
We need to encourage inquisitiveness, curiosity, imagination, and independent thinking. Our society has a depressingly large degree of "herd mentality" thinking, and I fear the highly programmed nature of many kids' upbringing these days tends to depress independence in thought and action. Promoting science and technology, including technical competition, is important as well.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Excessive caution, conformity, lack of imagination and initiative. Also, the current climate of popular culture, which seems to denigrate science in particular and intellectual excellence in general.

10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
No, but the qualities I outlined above can be encouraged in the way courses are taught and kids are raised, and those qualities in turn lead to innovation.

10+2. What is in your opinion the influence that a "location" (country/region) plays with respect to the possibility to be a
successful innovator?

10+3. What would you recommend to make a "location" attractive for innovation?
If by "location" you mean physical location, then I guess the presence of educational institutions, a highly competitive environment, and venture capital would be pretty key. Innovation can happen anywhere, though.

Ted Selker On Innovation.

This time I had the pleasure to interview Ted Selker.

Dr. Ted Selker develops and tests new user experiences. He spent ten years as an associate professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he ran the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed the Counter Design Intelligence: product design of the future project. His work is noted for creating demonstrations of a world in which human intentions are recognized and respected in complex domains, such as kitchens, cars, on phones, and in email. Ted's work takes the form of prototyping concept products supported by cognitive science research.

Prior to joining the MIT faculty in November 1999, his work at IBM gained him the title of IBM Fellow where Ted directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research Lab. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs, and taught at Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Brown University.

Ted's research has contributed to products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device and many of his other inventions are used in notebook computers, his visualizations have been responsible for performance and usability improvements in products, and his adaptive help system has been part of many IT products as well. Ted's work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. He was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006 and the Telluride Tech fest award in 2008.

1. What is "Innovation" for you?
Innovation is presenting and solving problems in a novel way to changing the way things are done.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?
There are so many innovators and many in my life that I enjoy: Marvin Minsky who invented the confocal microscope, etc., John Mccarthy who invented time sharing and many elements of modern programming, Victor Scheinman who made some of the most successful industrial robots, Toshiuki Ikeda who made the Thinkpad happen, Larry Page and Sergay Brin who created the modern best company, Rob Barrett who invented the way that Atomic Force Microscop`s know where they are, etc., Will Wright who shows with every new game he makes such as Spore shows how vast exploring environments can be at least as compelling as the typical brutality video games of the past.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
The theories that show that quantum dots could greatly reduce the bandgap problem in photovoltaics potentially bringing their efficiency over 80%. The new breed of Lithium phosphate batteries that can be recharged thousands of times. The LEDs that are among the most efficient lights ever made. The Flash memories that are large and cheep enough to replace disks and be faster and more efficient. Ubiquitous mobile devices with useful applications and capabilities. The WII game.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
If you Fill your mind with problems, fill your mind with parts to solve problems, appreciate solutions, appreciate contributions from wherever they come, and need to make solutions happen you can become an innovator.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
An innovator is often uncomfortable and making others uncomfortable.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
Helping the world around you.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
A problem worth solving. A problem that can be solved. A problem that will have enough resources and authorization to allow itself to be solved by the people trying to innovate.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Enjoy improving your ideas of how to solve problems with others. Enjoy getting people to allow you to solve problems.
Practice really following through solving problems.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
I have a dream I call Excubate which supports early stage technology business development. I plan to support innovation while delaying commitment to specific parts of the solutions.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Confusing your self esteem and ego with peoples acceptance of any specific innovative proposal.

10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
Absolutely. I love to teach workshops on invention and innovation. Get people to have a habit of defining questions as part of problems they see. Get them to have habits of appreciating others ideas and improve on them. Get people to try out more than one idea, in their head, and in every other way the can: design on paper, build moch ups, build prototypes, get authorization to disementate.

10+2. What is in your opinion the influence that a "location" (country/region) plays with respect to the possibility to be a
successful innovator?
We are surrounded by the problems of where we are: the physical (my water is more expensive than my electric bill in California) the people (the people I know talk about other things than a leak in their plumbing) the tools (I have a milling machine in my shop, I have an osciliscope on my desk, I have a programming environment in my computer), the encouragement of others (my partner asks me to go down and sit at my desk)

10+3. What would you recommend to make a "location" attractive for innovation?
To make a location attractive, make it easy to come to, full of tools and people and other things that can make the ideas turn into working and used solutions.

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10+ Questions On Innovation to Dennis Tsichritzis

I am interested to learn how innovaton can be supported and if possible created. Large research centers do (sometimes) innovate and/or facilitate individual innovation. Read what Dennis Tsichritzis has to say on this. Dennis was previously President of GMD and later senior vice president at Fraunhofer, after Fraunhofer and GMD merged to form one of the largest research center in Germany.

Dennis Tsichritzis got his PhD from Princeton 1968 in Computer Engineering and he spent 40 years in different positions in North America (US and Canada) and Europe (Switzerland, Germany and Greece) doing Research and Research Management. His main Research work was in Data Bases at the University of Toronto and in Object Oriented Systems at the University of Geneva. His main Research Management positions were in Germany first at GMD (as a President) and then at Fraunhofer (as senior vice president). He published extensively and was a University Professor and a business consultant throughout his career.

1. What is "Innovation" for you?

Dennis Tsichritzis: It is the process of creating value by combining ideas, old and new, to improve products, processes and overall environments in economic activities. The emphasis should not be in the novelty of the ideas but at their application to
solve real problems. In Research it is the new idea that is important. In innovation it is the new application.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?

Dennis Tsichritzis: I prefer to talk about favorite innovations rather than favorite innovators. It is sometimes hard to pin point the advancement to one person and only Historians can attribute the credit appropriately.
Just to name a few.
1) The combination of the keel (used for boat stabilization) and the sail (used for boat propulsion) to invent the sailing boat capable of sailing against the wind. Attributed to the unknown sailors who first noticed and then perfected the sailing ship transporting people and goods around the World.
2) Harnessing energy to produce motion. All sorts of engines from the steam (Watt) to the modern combustion engines powering autos, planes, etc. which leverage human muscular strength and allowed widespread transportation.
3) Bringing together Computers and Communications which produced Internet, the Web and made information readily available throughout the World. Only half a century ago the study of Computers and Communications were separate with even a different mathematical basis, Computers used Discrete Mathematics and Communications used Continuous Mathematics.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?

Dennis Tsichritzis:
1) The smart phone combining Telephone, Media device and Computer to bring mobility, power, versatility and ease of use in a small affordable package.
2) Sensors of all kinds which identify objects and communicate their properties. This allows an unprecedented and open ended host of applications connecting real world objects between themselves and with Human beings.
3) Revisiting the whole energy scene with new ways of producing, storing and transmitting energy. Most of the alternatives may prove unrealistic but the whole activity will modify the patterns of energy production and consumption.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?

Dennis Tsichritzis: To understand the world and its real problems and have a wide palette of interesting technologies which may be applicable is a necessary precondition. You also need focus and persistence over a long time frame and appropriate economic conditions to light the fire.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?

Dennis Tsichritzis: Once you are obsessed with an idea you neglect everybody and everything including your own private life. You have to live through many dissapointments without giving up.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?

Dennis Tsichritzis: Nothing material, few innovators become rich. They seldom have the right entrepreneurial characteristics. Fame, if it ever comes, is late and is a small consolation. Most innovators do it for the pleasure and self satisfaction. Other people around them reap the real benefits and sometimes the fame too.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?

Dennis Tsichritzis:
1) To be economically relevant.
2) To be widely applicable.
3) To provide a better quality of life.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?

Dennis Tsichritzis: Observe the World and listen to other people. Most of the ideas are around if only you take the time to discover them. Do not get easily get sidetracked or discouraged. Do not follow any fads and directions where everybody is going.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?

Dennis Tsichritzis: By admiring the new and the chances that it brings as opposed to thinking of the risks and the shortcomings. By rewarding lavishly everybody who tries to innovate as opposed to the successful ones. By encouraging young persons to think differently as opposed to learn what is widely accepted.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?

Dennis Tsichritzis: Backward mentality, vested interests and fear of the unknown.

10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?

Dennis Tsichritzis: No I do not think that becoming inovator can be widely taught, the same way as painting or poetry writing. What can be taught is the appreciation and the support for innovation.

10+2. What is in your opinion the influence that a "location" (country/region) plays with respect to the possibility to be a
successful innovator?

Dennis Tsichritzis:
1) The right general culture
2) The acceptance of the need for innovation (otherwise we will not make it)
3) The right economic conditions so an innovation can be promoted at a global scale

10+3. What would you recommend to make a "location" attractive for innovation?

Dennis Tsichritzis:
1) Attract top talent around the World by giving them the best working conditions and living environment.
2) Revamp the education system to promote free thinking instead of recipes
3) Support financially innovations and promote them world wide

Thank you!
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Grady Booch on Innovation.

Happy New Year!

One of the main driving force which influenced the introduction of new generation database systems, such as ODBMS, was Object Oriented Programming (OOP). For OOP a number of OO methodologies have been introduced. I had the pleasure to interview Grady Booch.
Grady Booch is IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist, Rational Software, IBM.

Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work on software architecture and software engineering. A renowned visionary, he has devoted his life's work to improving the effectiveness of software developers worldwide. Booch is one of the original authors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and has served as architect and architectural mentor for numerous complex software-intensive systems around the world in just about every domain imaginable.
Grady received his bachelor of science from the United States Air Force Academy in 1977 and his master of science in electrical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1979.

1. What is "Innovation" for you?
Innovation means creating something new, making a connection that has never been made before, discovering some underlying truth that has remained hidden. Innovation is all about thinking out of the box and destroying rigid assumptions. Innovation involves finding the simple beauty in that which is complex.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?
Edison and Feynman are at the top of my list.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
In hardware, I'd say it's the emergence of commercially viable multicore processors; in software, the growing standards for the semantic web; in society, the rise of social networking and blogging. for me personally, my exposure to NVC and the work of Marshall Rosenberg and Gail Taylor.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
Three things: a manical, passionate focus, a lack of fear of failure, and a willingness to press on even when the structures and dynamics around you resist you.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
A true innovator is often a stranger in a strange land. But then again, that's a price only a non-innovator would care about.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
The privilege of being able to create, to discover, to participate in that journey: these are the rewards that for me are sufficient unto themselves.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
I have no idea how to answer that question. There are as many paths to innovation as there are innovations themselves..

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
The innovators I admire the most are whole people, not just sages in their own domain. So, my advice is to enjoy life, live fully - and the innovation will find you.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
A culture that celebrates play is one that can support and sustain innovation.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Rule-based organizations and people who view the world as in terms of absolute right and wrong are the worst inhibitors to innovation.

10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
Yes, again by encouraging a sense of play in learning.

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Thank you for your questions...they are among the more interesting I've had thrown at me in a while ;-)
GB.

2 More Questions to Bjarne Stroustrup: Locations, People and Innovaton

I received several very positive comments about the interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. People really like it.

I re-read the interview, and I wanted to ask Bjarne two more questions which are interesting to me addressing how Locations and People relate to Innovaton

Here is his reply...

2 More Questions to Bjarne Stroustrup

In your professional career you left Denmark and studied in UK and then immigrated to the USA to do research. What is in your opinion the influence that a "location" (country/region) plays with respect to the possibility to be a successful innovator?

I left Denmark to meet people doing more interesting work and having more interesting "toys" (i.e. advanced computers and software) than I could find at home. After a while, I found that it was not easy to return. The kind of work I was doing wasn’t done in Denmark and both industry and academia seemed closed to the kind of outsider I had become, working in Cambridge and at Bell Labs. I believe that Denmark (and Europe in general) is now far more open to ideas of practical research, but then there were few places for the kind of work I like to do.

For me as a young researcher, the quality of my colleagues dominated my choices. Denmark is one of the very best places in the world to live, but it did not have people like Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Roger Needham with an establish organization complete with great students. Cambridge is a town that – as a social environment – is second to none, even compared to my native Aarhus, so I didn’t feel serious social dislocation. However, the suburbs of Northern New Jersey are not a match for either, so I felt a loss. On the other hand, the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Center was – at the height of its powers – a uniquely stimulating environment. The people there, such as Doug McIlroy, Al Aho, Brian Kernighan, Bob Morris, Sandy Fraser, Dennis Ritchie, and many others, just made the Labs the greatest “playground” for a young computer scientist. Importantly, all the people I listed and the many more that I couldn’t mention without becoming tedious, are not just great technical people, but also real three-dimensional people with a wide variety of non-technical interests.

I’ll get back to “location” in the answer to your next question, but for me “people” trumped “location”.


What would you recommend to make a "location" attractive for innovation?

What you say “location”, I immediately think of places with a stunning physical presence, such as California (remember PARC, Stanford, CalTech, etc.), Provence (INRIA in Sophia Antipolis). Next I think of places, such as Cambridge (England) and Cambridge (Mass.) where great universities have created their own environment with little help from the surrounding countryside. A great university is essential – that’s where you find the talent and inspiration.

Families are crucial. No great place can stay great unless it can both attract young people and also sustain them as they build their families and bring up children. Recruiters talk about “the two-body problem” and usually miss the point that you don’t just have to attract talent; you have to make whole families grow in a community. Just about anyone worth employing can get another job elsewhere.

Every great place I have visited had – at least during the early years – a nucleus of really exceptional people. You need someone completely off the scale to get started. Later, merely good people can sustain an institution until the next great people come along. Organizations that foster innovation seem to have people who inspire and to leave ample time and space for younger talent to thrive and explore unexpected areas.

Building an environment for innovation isn’t done overnight – it takes decades. It follows that an organization that is stable over decades – such as a government or a university – must be involved. Commercial enterprises have – for good reasons – trouble looking that far ahead, but they thrive best in a location with at least one great university and a variety of other (competing and collaborating) commercial enterprises (hence the “research parks” that seem to spring up everywhere).

##

10+1 Questions on Innovation to Bjarne Stroustrup

One of the main driving force which influenced the introduction of new generation database systems, such as ODBMS, was Object Oriented Programming (OOP). C++ is notably one of the most important. I had the pleasure to interview Bjarne Stroustrup who invented C++.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of "The C++ Programming Language" and “The Design and Evolution of C++”. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.
Dr. Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He retains a link with AT&T Labs – Research as an AT&T Fellow. Member of the National Academy of Engineering. ACM fellow. IEEE Fellow. Bjarne Personal Page

1. What is "Innovation" for you?

I basically agree with Edison: “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. There are few great ideas, and many good ones. Even the great ones require much work to validate them and to make them into useful tools for someone. I think he called it “invention”, though, but the main point is that you need a good idea (or several) carefully refined and embodied in some form of gadget, tool, or system to make a real innovation. An idea by itself isn’t much. Think how far the idea of “atoms” have come since the early Greeks. Think how far computing has come since Turing’s paper. And those were two of the most revolutionary ideas in history – the 99% perspiration is probably an underestimate.

Obviously, I associate “innovation” with technology, rather than pure science or art, though I have no doubt that the notion of an idea needing serious thought, development, and experimentation to become more than “just a good idea” applies universally.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?

OK, let’s get back to earth and look at ideas and innovations of a more manageable magnitude. Consider the relatively few and simple ideas that became Unix, such as “have each program do one thing well and combine them using streams of characters”. The Unix pioneers, McIlroy, Thompson, Ritchie, Aho, Kernighan, Feldman, Morris, and many more created a system and a set of related ideas and tools that live on today inside most of our software based systems.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?

That’s hard to say. As a rule of thumb, a major success exists in embryonic form 15 years before it becomes a major success. The one with the most ramifications to programming and software systems is multi-cores. We now have to get serious about quite fine grained concurrency, and we have never been very good at that.

I have a camera, a cell phone, an MP3 player, and a laptop. It is obvious that some synthesis of these three will happen. We see it happening: last week someone in Amsterdam showed me a talk I gave in Canada in August on his iPod. I want such a gadget that is good at each of the tasks, rather than just a compromise that is mediocre at each and relatively large. For example, as long as a camera phone features 3Mpixels and a lousy lens, it’s unacceptable as a camera.

These two examples are huge. They are not individual innovations but sums of many and drivers of further innovation. Design – aesthetic concerns – will be important. I’m very keen on solid, functional, and beautiful designs. A beautiful and functional system contains innumerable small innovations and refinements. These are easy to overlook because they so quickly become taken for granted. For example, for decades, shower-curtain rods were straight, running parallel with the rim of the shower area to ensure than water didn’t splash out. This led to most people – literally – having too little elbow room until some genius though of having the rod curve outwards. Brilliant! Water that splashes out is caught be the curtain and runs back into the tub – and life is just a little bit better for a few hundred million people.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?

A solid technical education, a sense what is practical, persistence, impatience with dogma, a willingness to take (calculated) risks. In many cases, an aesthetic sense that deems existing solutions inadequate and guides innovation. You can’t innovate in the abstract, every innovation is a response to problems.

I think idealism often plays a part. Individuals who are just out for themselves are too easily diverted in short-term money-making schemes or corporate climbing.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?

To be an innovator in a technological field, you have to have a serious technical education and work hard at developing your ideas. You become a “geek”. That’s great and often involves desirable personal traits, such as trustworthiness, stamina, and a skeptical attitude towards unproven ideas in general. Unfortunately, those are not universally appreciated traits – especially among technophobes – so it can carry a social cost. You must also devote serious time and effort to “technical details” that are often not appreciated by managers or people in general – even if their lives or livelihood depend on them. On the other hand, survey after survey have shown engineers to be among the most stable and satisfied groups in society, so maybe the negative aspects are overrated.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?

Satisfaction of having made a positive contribution to the world, and sometimes status and wealth. Most of the successful innovators I have met also built up a network of friends and colleagues that can sustain them for life. I think that the “lone wolf” image of an innovator is misleading. Many of the most successful innovators are at the center of a network of exceptional people.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?

Curiosity, persistence, and – of course – luck.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?

Get a good degree in a technical subject – science or engineering – and then get a bit of practical experience trying to put ideas into working products. Also exposure to an aesthetic field, such as literature, architecture, furniture design, image composition.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?

That’s harder than it appears. Most cultures highly value and encourage regularity, predictability, providing the right answer to conventional questions, respect of authority, not wasting time on “extraneous matters”, etc. This is especially true in educational settings. Major innovation more often arise from asking unconventional questions and working hard to find elegant answers.

We need to tolerate and encourage people to “take a walk in the forest” (as A.G. Bell expressed it) repeatedly in their education and career. We are too keen on giving people well-specified tasks and having them set definite short-to-medium-term goals. Sometimes, there has to room to do a task, a project, a course “just for fun”, etc., and there must be rewards for coming up with something unusual. A culture goes stale fast if the greatest awards typically go to people who never take a chance and never look up from assigned tasks.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?

Lots of specific tasks; tight deadlines. Lack of general direction; lack of deadlines. Lack of rewards, trivial rewards. Emphasis on huge, life altering, monetary awards for the very few. Emphasis on individuals moving from technical work into management.

10+1. Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?

I think I have seen it done. In Bell Labs technical managers and senior researcher often spend serious time Mentoring a new researcher. I think “innovation” is more suited to one-to-one discussions than to courses; also, what is required successful innovation in one field and in one company isn’t necessarily the same as is required elsewhere in industry or in academia. The selection of a mix of topics to work on – such as, short-term, long-term, risky, and low-hanging fruit – can be crucial. I doubt that the more personal aspects of innovation, such as calculated risk taking, perseverance, and curiosity can be taught, at least not to adults.

10+1 Questions On Innovation to: Hector Garcia-Molina

This time I asked the 10+1 questions to a distinguished database colleague, Hector Garcia-Molina.

Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was the chairman of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). From August 1994 to December 1997 he was the Director of the Computer Systems
Laboratory at Stanford. From 1979 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford University, Stanford, California, he received in 1975 a MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer
science in 1979. Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is on the Technical Advisory Board of DoCoMo Labs USA, Yahoo Search & Marketplace; is a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle and Kintera.


1. What is "Innovation" for you?

Finding a way to do things better, where "things" can be anything and "better" may means faster, more pleasantly, more accurately, more effectively.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?

Jim Gray is my favorite innovator. He may not be widely known outside the computer science research community, but his work made possible today's data management systems. He has also been a great mentor to many young scientists.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?

It takes more than 3 years to know if something really has an impact, so I am struggling to single out three recent innovations.

4. What helps to become a successful innovator?

You have to be a bit of a rebel and quite self confident. Do things differently and pursue your dreams even if people think you are wasting your time.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?

Not when you are finally successful and recognized. But before you reach that point, you can become poor or ostracized or frustrated.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?

Financial in some cases, prestige in others, self-satisfaction in other cases, perhaps all three!

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?

Solve a problem or fill a need.
Solve a problem or fill a need.
Solve a problem or fill a need.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?

Get a good education, and if possible spend time at places where innovation is a tradition, so you can see how it is done.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?

Shine the spotlight less on movie stars, athletes, criminals, and more on people who contribute to society.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?

Not giving people enough freedom to explore things; burdening them with mindless tasks.

10+1. Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?

I do not know how to teach innovation by lecturing or by answering questions like these. The desire to innovate seems to be something one is born with, but it can be enhanced "by example", that is, by living in an environment that nurtures and incentivizes creativity and innovation.

##

10+1 Questions on Innovation to Hermann-Josef Lamberti

I asked 10+1 Questions on Innovation to Hermann-Josef Lamberti, member of the Management Board of Deutsche Bank AG.

See his reply below.

10 +1 Questions On Innovation to: Hermann-Josef Lamberti, Chief Operating Officer, Deutsche Bank AG.

Hermann-Josef Lamberti was appointed a member of the Management Board of Deutsche Bank AG in October 1999.
He is also a member of Deutsche Bank™ Group Executive Committee.
As Chief Operating Officer he has global responsibility for Human Resources, Information Technology, Operations (excluding Securities Settlement according to MaRisk), Cost and Infrastructure Management, Building and Facilities Management as well as Purchasing. He joined Deutsche Bank in 1998 as an Executive Vice President, based in Frankfurt.
Hermann-Josef Lamberti began his professional career in 1982 with Touche Ross in Toronto and subsequently joined Chemical Bank in Frankfurt. From 1985 to 1998 he worked for IBM, initially in Germany in the areas Controlling, Internal Application Development and Sales Banks/Insurance Companies. In 1993, he was appointed General Manager of the Personal Software Division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at IBM Europe in Paris. In 1995, he moved to IBM in the U.S., where he was Vice President for Marketing and Brand Management. He returned to Germany in 1997 to take up the position of Chairman of the Management of IBM Germany in Stuttgart.
Hermann-Josef Lamberti studied Business Administration in Cologne and Dublin and graduated in 1982 with a master's degree in Business Administration.

1. What is "Innovation" for you?

Innovation is implemented creativity which adds value. Value could be many things, from tangible or intangible business value for the owners or employees of a company, through to innovations which protect our planet.
In an organisational context, innovation is the lifeblood of an organisation. Successful companies are the ones who can remain agile and reinvent themselves not only to remain top of their game, but also to survive.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?

My favorite innovators are the staff at Deutsche Bank who constantly impress me with their level of creativity.
Innovation is one of five core values at Deutsche Bank, it is something we attach a great deal of importance to, whether it's product, people, process or management innovation.

Thomas Edison is a good role model for how constant experimentation and failing fast and often allows one to succeed sooner. Edison innovated on innovation, being the first to build an Industrial Research Laboratory, a process for constant innovation. Edison holds 1093 US patents and his businesses live on today in the form of General Electric. A testiment to an innovative culture and business success, GE is one of the original 12 companies to be listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896 and it is the only one to still be listed on this index today.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?

There are so many to choose from, the pace of change is getting faster. Working in a knowledge industry, I'm interested in Social Networking and the value this can add to an organisation. There is a human need to communicate and interact and a business need to democratise knowledge, to allow it to flow as freely as possible within defined groups. On the internet we've all seen the fast growth of Facebook and YouTube, this is a largely untapped area within large organisations.

Another area of innovation which especially benefits those in the developing world is microfinance via mobile phones.
Microfinance is nothing new, as part of our long-standing and wide-ranging commitment to society, Deutsche Bank has been involved in structuring and managing microfinance funds for 10 years (for more information see here).
By combining existing tools, the microfinance loan and the mobile phone, this enables the local microfinance institutions to reach more of the world's poor to help them with the seed capital to build their own businesses.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?

As per Tom Kelley's book The Ten Faces of Innovation, there are many roles and characteristics required to realise an
innovation. In no particular order, I believe the following are some of the things required to become a successful innovator:
Funding, Supportive Environment (all ideas are good ideas initially, fail with impunity, experiment), Insight (get to the
customer's unarticulated needs), a good Network, Self-belief, Risk Taker, Persistence, Knowing when to call it a day, Celebrating Success!

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?

There should be some failure & learnings along the road to a successful innovation, then to the victor go the spoils.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?

The definition of reward is clearly unique to each person, within Deutsche Bank we have internal innovation award programs
to recognise and reward our innovators. In the broader context, I think it's similar to mountain climbing. It's hard work, it's
enjoyable, it's a challenge, there may be some slips which you get back up from, then the satisfaction and view from the
summit makes it all worthwhile. Some people are wired this way more than others.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?

Success is in the eye of the beholder, one person's success can be another person's loss.

1. Beneficiaries benefits from the innovation (even if not the originally intended value or beneficiary)
2. Stakeholders in the innovation (those who have provided resources) also realise value from the innovation and continue
to provide resources for future innovations
3. The benefits outweigh any negatives (the innovation should be morally and socially responsible)

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?

Go for it. Generate lots of ideas. Expect to fail many times before succeeding. Develop a deep insight into a given area and
experiment. As the bird starts to fly the nest, nuture it, feed it. If it lands on the ground, try again, if it flys, you're off! Innovating when young is a great time to start as orthodox thinking has not had as much chance to set in.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?

By setting the behavioural tone from the top.
By visibly recognising and rewarding the behaviour we want to see, encouraging this behaviour in others.
By proving resources and a safe environment.
By connecting the passionate.
Through diverse backgrounds within groups.
Through internal and external networks.
Through story telling and myths.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?

Not doing the above.

10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught?

Yes. Everyone is creative, even people who think they are not.
Everyone has a role to play in realising an innovation.

10+1 Questions on Innovation to Marten Mickos.

I asked 10 +1 Questions on Innovation to Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB.
See his reply below.

10 +1 Questions On Innovation to: Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB.

Mårten Mickos joined MySQL AB as CEO in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a start-up to the second-largest open source company and the fastest-growing database vendor in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.

1. What is "Innovation" for you?

Some new thing or way of doing things that brings economical
value to a customer.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?

I admire IKEA for innovating the production and distribution process, Apple for innovating usability (mostly from existing
components), and the free and open source software movement for having innovated a great new way to produce and distribute software.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?

I don't make such assessments! I'd rather spend time helping innovators than assessing them. I follow Wayne Gretzky's principle that "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
So I think we should try to get more innovations done, not try to find the top 3. The markets will pass their judgment on the innovations anyhow.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?

Curiosity. A meticulous ability to make observations. A desire to contribute. An ability to let go of old thoughts.
Perseverance.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?

Every passion has its price. Most innovators never hit a home run. But all innovators have to give up something else (mostly time).

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?

I am not an innovator myself, but I believe that the best reward an
innovator can get is to see his or her innovation in productive use.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?

Frugality, combination, meticulousness.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?

To start innovating in their everyday life, and to not give up even if it takes years to develop the ability to see new solutions and make them happen.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?

By making heroes of the innovators.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?

I believe that the propensity to innovate is fairly stable across the world and over time. But there also needs to be a full set of supporting functions (investors, sales channels, labour market, etc.) and those we can influence.
For instance, I am not sure Silicon Valley is any more innovative on a base level than any other place, but Silicon Valley has all the functions that you need to make an innovation come true.

10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?

I believe there is an amount of passion needed that you cannot teach.
But I think you can wake up a dormant passion for innovation by exposing young people to successful innovators.
This is the principle of "hanging out and drinking beer with Nobel laureates". It is extremely stimulating.

Also, I think you can teach the techniques of innovation, as well as the skills you will need to bring the innovation to commercial success.

Hope this is useful!

///mgm

10 Questions On Innovation

August 2007--
In my work as Editor of ODBMS.ORG
I started a Section on Innovation.
I believe this is important. In the IT industry innovation plays a key role.
But how does innovation occur? I thought the best way is to ask who did some mayor innovation..

So I asked:

Ivar Jacobson. creator of OO methodologies
Alan Kay, pioneer of OOP, PC, and GUI
Vinton G. Cerf, father of the Internet
Philippe Kahn, founder of Fullpower, LightSurf, Starfish, and Borland

You can read in this blog their answers to my 10 Questions On Innovation.

Learning from great innovators is one source of inspiration, but not a guarantee of course...

Enjoy. -- Roberto V. Zicari

10 Questions On Innovation to Ivar Jacobson.

August 2007--
Dr. Ivar Jacobson is one of the great thought-leaders in the
software world where he has made several seminal
contributions.
He is one of the fathers of components and component
architecture, use cases, modern business engineering, the
Unified Modeling Language and the Rational Unified Process.
He is the principal author of five influential and
best-selling books. He has written more than 50 papers and he
is a regular keynote speaker at large conferences around the
world.

1. Who are your favorite innovators?
[ivar] I am very impressed by some innovators that have made
the world a better world, but I really don't have any
favorites. My favorites are found in other spaces such as sport, music and art.

2. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
[ivar] I have not given this question any thoughts.

3. What helped you to become a successful innovator?
[ivar] I have never seen me as an innovator. I have tried to
solve problems we have with software, but I guess that could
be seen as innovations. I introduced components in 1967 as a
means to build software architectures that could change
gracefully over many years and that could be reused for many
different applications.
I introduced use cases to get more understandable
requirements at the same time as they worked as test cases.

4. Did you pay a price to be an innovator? Which one?
[ivar] Being a manager for a large project and at the same
time fighting for a better way of building software is
professional suicide. After having introduced components at
Ericsson it took ten years before the company knew it had
created history in the telecom space. In the mean time I was
demoted and recommended to leave the company. The
recommendation was given by my boss who later became the
president of Ericsson.

5. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
[ivar] I never came up with an idea to be rewarded.
Components made it possible to develop a product that could
be adapted to every customer with small costs and made it
possible for me to do what I had been asked to do.
Use cases streamlined the life cycle since use cases were test cases.
However, later I have been rewarded because people adopted
these ideas. I have been able to work with fantastic people
around the world and make a living out of it.

6. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
[ivar] This is a new question to me, but I will give it a try.
An innovation should 1) be practical, 2) stand on a good
theoretical foundation, and 3) be simple to understand.
I usually quote Kurt Lewin: There is nothing as practical as a good theory.
Even a rather complex idea must be presentable in a simple way.

7. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
[ivar] First of all, don't make it your goal to become an
innovator. If you have good ideas, you will have to fight
for them. Many people have good ideas, but most give up due
to the resistance that comes from the establishment. Success
requires perseverance. On the other hand don't become
greedy. Don't focus on making money, but be generous with
your ideas. You have more ideas that you can harvest from
later on. And have fun.

8. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
[ivar] There are many obvious answers to this question so I
will try something different: First, in Sweden there was a
time when we had no world class tennis players. Then we got
Bjorn Borg. After Bjorn Borg we got many world class tennis
players. We have similar effects in other areas. If someone
has great ideas, let her or him work with promising people
and they will all soon be more interested in coming up with
new ideas. In my companies I have had great people around me
that now are very alert for new ideas.
For example Gunnar Overgaard, Per Kroll, Agneta Jacobson,
Maria Ericsson, Dave West, Patrik Jonsson, Pan Wei Ng, Ian
Spence, Kurt Bittner, Magnus Christerson, Stefan Bylund.
Nothing is as effective in growing an innovative culture as
working with innovative people.

In big companies actively supporting alternative careers has
been very effective in growing an innovative culture.

9. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
[ivar] I can't think of anything more than the obvious answers.

10.Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught?
[ivar] Absolutely

10 Questions On Innovation to Alan Kay

April 2006 - Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. He invented or co-invented object-oriented programming; Smalltalk; the 1968 FLEX Machine, a desktop computer with graphical user interface and object-oriented operating system; the Dynabook, a laptop computer for children; Alto, the first networked PC; and participated in the design of the ARPAnet.

1. Who are your favorite innovators?
Hundreds if not thousands of important innovators have flourished over the 400 years that we've had real science, and antiquity shows that even though it was much harder to innovate in the deep past, there have been deep seminal thinkers operating in most generations. My interest in reading all sorts of things makes it difficult to set down a short list here. (Who doesn't love Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, etc.?)
In our own time and my own field, I was particularly struck by the ideas of Licklider (man-computer symbiosis), Ivan Sutherland (invention of interactive computer graphics and object oriented modeling), Dave Evans (the father of continuous tone 3D graphics), Nygaard and Dahl (Simula), Bob Barton (the B5000 computer), John McCarthy (Lisp), Seymour Papert (Logo and constructivist education), Marvin Minsky, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, etc.
In my own generation I've been tremendously impressed by the work of Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Nicholas Negroponte, Carl Hewitt, Paul MacCready, and many more from the 60s and 70s communities funded by ARPA and Xerox PARC.
In the generation(s) after me, I have been very impressed with Dave Reed's distributed object system, Bill Atkinson's Hypercard, Mitchel Resnick's starLOGO, Brewster Kahle's file systems, Doug Lenat's CYC research, Takeo Igarashi's UI work, etc.
The Draper Prize of the NAE is aimed not just at engineering feats but at those that really got out there and benefited humanity:
integrated circuit, jet engine, GPS, Internet, Personal Computing, etc.
One of my favorites from the early 19th century is the guy who invented the hydraulic ram pump, a truly elegant simple outstanding machine.

2. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
I can't think of any in computing (we are in a very incremental and almost moribund period in our field) but this could simply be "old-fogeyism" on my part. If the content of the $100 Laptop is done well and we can figure out how to help the helpers of the children who will get them, then this should qualify as a grand innovation (perhaps in 2008?).
But if we widen the scope, there are some very promising ideas that grapple with some of the largest human problems.
a. For example, about 70% of the world does not have drinking water of high enough quality. The conversion of low quality water to high quality water requires both new technologies (e.g. membranes for reverse osmosis) and energy (for forcing water backwards through the osmotic membranes, or distillation, etc.). Some very good things are now being done here, including a very inexpensive and efficient tidal-powered high quality water producer, etc.
b. I forget when the modifications to bacteria to produce fuel from garbage were done. The insulin modification was done longer ago, but I think I recall seeing that some good fuel production recombinant modifications were done more recently. I think we could claim that the progress in this general area are such to be a promising innovation.
c. Another innovation that has gotten particularly important over the last 3 years is the joining of a number of fields into a real brain science, that has led to a much better understanding of brain chemistry, process, psychology, and pharmacology.

3. What helped you to become a successful innovator?
No one has benefited more from their community than I have (see: "The Power of the Context" - PDF). Beyond that, my interest in helping children learn how to think (catalyzed by Papert and my dismay with adult behavior) and wide reading got me hooked into the deep implications of computing as the next 500 year "big deal" since the printing press. This made it much easier to not get sucked into the whirlpool of current technical problems and to focus on "what should the technology be doing regardless of what it is doing now?". Also, "artists" are people who have to do art regardless of all else, and fundamental research and engineering is an art form whose best practitioners are kind of compulsive about making things happen. Xerox PARC was a concentration of technological artists with enlightened funding and organization provided by Bob Taylor. It was the perfect atmosphere for people with artistic visions.

4. Did you pay a price to be an innovator? Which one?
Interesting question. Beyond some of the compulsive behaviors (which can get a little too total), I would say "no" with regard to the 60s and most of the 70s. In the last 25 years there have been far fewer funding sources that have the enlightened model of ARPA and Xerox PARC. I don't have any interest in "computing as a job" but only in trying to round off the first phase of the invention of personal computing, especially forchildren. This hasn't really happened yet, and it is disturbing to see the poor subset of personal computing that is vended and generally accepted today.
So the price today is much higher than when mainframe people were calling us crazy for trying to do personal computing. That was nothing. What's harder today is that people think they've got personal computing and they don't really. The analogy here is between the jump from non-literacy to the printing press (which might be fought but the chasm that is to be crossed is clear) vs. the much trickier one of trying to explain to a culture that has the printing press and universities that it is not very well educated and thinks pretty poorly (for example, the US is in this general state -- it has the trappings but not the perspective to see how poorly educated most "educated people" actually are).

5. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
I think this differs with the personalities of the innovators. I felt most rewarded when an idea really worked out as imagined (this is a biggie if you have to leave present realities to do the imagining), and also it is a big deal to me that I was funded by ARPA and Xerox PARC (in fact I got better funding as a post-doc in constant dollars and environments than I do today). That is quite a statement to make, but it's quite true.
A terrific byproduct is that I've been able to meet with many of my heros, and work with quite a few of them. That has been very exciting.
My main feeling about the much later awards and medals is that (in our case at least) they miss the actual community-synergistic process. I think this is generally true about work that has a lot of engineering and building of stuff as part of it. As many important things come out of the building as in the original visions, yet the awards tend to celebrate the visions more than the larger process.
So actually getting to do the work with others of like mind has been the big thrill and reward.

6. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
A lot depends on the time scale of requisite change. I've been more of an inventor than an innovator, in that I think innovation also has something with getting stuff into the larger world. Most of my ideas that have gone out into the world have been taken there by others.
Example of short time scale: the Google folks did not invent the Internet or search engines. They had a particular idea about what was important and concentrated on that, hung in there, and have been successful. I think most innovation is like that: limited invention and ability to couple to existing structures. The ideas that require a general learning curve are more difficult to innovate.
For example, if you look at the grand dreams of the ARPA community, most required large changes both with technology and society. At PARC we decided (rightly) that we would have to build all of our HW and all of our SW to avoid artificial blocks from current practice. The first order theory is: this is crazy! But the second order theory says: if you can do it, then you must do it! A few years before, when we were all in ARPA research (and one of the joint projects was to do the ARPAnet), the IMP "routers" were made to order in one of the projects because no vendor equipment would do.
One way to answer the question is to note that the personality types and motivations of the inventors and innovators I've known have been rather different. A lot of different types can be successful. However, the ability to compulsively focus on a goal (short or long term) seems to be quite common across types. The more artistic and grand the goals, the more deep self criticism (without degenerating into the immobilization of depression) is required. This is not easy, because it has to be combined with an almost boundless confidence (but one that is not stupid about current goodness of idea). Since most ideas (even by talented people who have lots of ideas)are mediocre down to bad, the combination of criticism and optimism is a tricky important dance.
You've got to have lots of ideas, you've got to get rid of most of them, you've got to think that the visions are doable.

7. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Again, the best strategies depend on personality and motivational types. My type is "lone wolf" but I realized in grad school that what I wanted to do could not be done by myself. This led to quite a bit of conflict before I was able to start to adjust to the idea that I would have to set up a research group of folks whose talents were complementary to mine and somehow try to guide it. I wasn't terribly good at this, but we managed to get some things done.
So the simple advice here is to
(a) try to understand both one's strengths and weaknesses. The best plans require strategies for both.
(b) It's pretty hard to get by without gaining a fair amount of knowledge. Some innovators concentrate in their field (or a sub-field), and others draw on many fields for inspirations and analogies. Many technologists today are quite ignorant of history (even in their own field), and this leads to some really horrible blind attempts to reinvent. Awareness of history and anthropology in the large can relate technologists to the larger human condition and the actual end-users of their ideas. The needs that can be gleaned from history, etc., can also be a great source for ideas.
(c) Avoid taking your identity from your "product" or "process" or "possessions" or "peers" -- instead try to identify with your "potential". I.e. don't become a "brand". This has always been a bit of a problem in computing, but seems to be much bigger today (and getting still bigger) for individuals, groups, companies, and countries. Potential allows looking ahead and changing in a way that the other "p's" don't.
(d) As Jim Watson likes to say: if you are the smartest person in the room then you are in the wrong room. The genius of Bob Taylor at PARC was to get very good people in a designed environment so that no one was the smartest person in the room. This was very powerful.
(e) Learn how to hang in there.

8. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
Well, we had one until a few decades ago (and if you put more weight on incrementalism, we still have one). Awareness, scope, and multiple perspectives are all things that real education is supposed to magnify. The lack of real education (and really educated people) especially in the US is a disaster on many fronts. Once a culture gets to the point where it can't tell whether it is educated or not, it is in real trouble. One of the main goals of education early on is to give a sense of what there is to be known, and the thresholds required. One way to look at the US is that a little over 1% of US adults are scientists, engineers, mathematicians and physicians. That plus the industrial revolution to magnify the results of this small group gives the US the illusion of being a modern civilization. But if you take the industrial revolution away, it starts to look more like a 3rd world country.
A simpler way of looking at this is that any culture that requires war and threat of war to spend on research is missing the self-awareness to climb into the next stage of civilization.

9. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
People who would rather be in control of mediocre to moribund processes rather than feel out of control with possibly great processes. This has been the big change in funding over the last 30 years.

10.Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught?
Well, with reference to my debts to my own community, I would say "yes, up to a certain extent". To return to my soapbox on education, real education requires the following to happen to a mind: to create "a new field/idea/technology/path (either radically or incrementally) which had a profound (positive) impact on a particular subject area/field" (which is pretty much your definition of innovation). In other words, we have to do invention/innovation in our own heads to get educated and to learn how to think, and this is not easy for anyone, and it is quite difficult for many, but doable.
Another way to look at these questions from a wider point of view is that the ultimate aim of education is really to learn how minds work, especially human minds, and most especially our mind.

10 Questions On Innovation to Vinton G. Cerf

February 2006 - Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his partner, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet.

1. Who are your favorite innovators?
There are inventions whose inventors I don't know so the latter question has some relevance. Dean Kamen is one of my favorite innovators because he's a fearless engineer. Similarly Burt Rutan and Paul McReady are equally able to think of solutions out of the ordinary. Tim Berners-Lee for the WWW. Fred Smith for inventing FEDEX. Steve Jobs for his stunning ability to gauge the market for new devices/services. There are many more.

2. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
Carbon Nanotubes that have such a variety of potential applications.
Broadband communication over power lines (experiencing a renewal of interest with new economics;
Netflix - re-inventing DVD rental business.

3. What helped you to become a successful innovator?
Long term support for research by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; widespread participation in the design, implementation, deployment and operation of the Internet by thousands of companies and individuals; a philosophy of openness; and not constraining the Internet's evolution by patenting its technology.

4. Did you pay a price to be an innovator? Which one?
My famiy paid a price - I wasn't around much and still travel a great deal.

5. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
When your ideas take root and benefit from the support of many people, when businesses are built around them and when the world's population appears to get benefit from them, how can you not feel very amply rewarded for your part it the creation?

6. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
A) don't be afraid to re-visit old ideas - times, technology, tastes, economics change and may make an unworkable idea into a winner.
B) Listen to experts but don't be constrained by them
C) Perseverence counts.

7. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Find something you are good at and stick with it. Successful innovators are not afraid of hard work and long hours and perseverance in the face of adversity and even ridicule.

8. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
Celebrate innovation; show our young children that innovators are not just those that make a lot of money - they are also the ones who bring fresh, new ideas to the table. Encourage exploration.

9. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Rigid training methods that stifle innovation; failure to recognize alternative paths to creativity; positive feedback for out of the box thinking.

10.Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught?
I think conditions can be created to allow innovators to flourish but I am not sure this is something that can be taught.

10 Questions On Innovation to Philippe Kahn

February 2006 - Philippe Kahn is an extremely successful serial entrepreneur who founded four leading companies: Fullpower Technologies, Inc., LightSurf, Starfish Technologies, Inc. and Borland.

1. Who are your favorite innovators?
Usually all the great minds of the past, people such as Galileo, Marconi, Einstein and Moses, Jesus Christ and Buddha

2. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
The convergence of Life Sciences and wireless technologies

3. What helped you to become a successful innovator?
When I came to Silicon Valley, I didn't have a work permit, so I had to create my own opportunities. Innovation was the simplest way!

4. Did you pay a price to be an innovator? Which one?
Usually innovators are like pioneers in the old Far West: You can tell by the arrows in their backs. However, the rewards are much greater than the inconveniences.

5. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
Immeasurable, Priceless: You get to do what no other has done, it's like being the first person to climb Everest, every time.

6. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
Vision, leadership, perseverance.

7. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Vision, leadership, perseverance.

8. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
Give a little bit of a spotlight to innovation, 1/100th of what pop-culture gets will be a huge boost!

9. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Consumerism. Innovation is creative.

10.Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught?
To a certain extent, via role models.