Innovation
Innovation
Elementary, Dear Watson
Computers process enormous volumes of digital content. Much of this content is unstructured text that is created by we, the people. Computers have not been able to process our created content in the same way that humans do (or try to) - by parsing it for it's meaning. The pursuit of systems that can do this - interpret, process, and respond to unstructured, direct language requests, over a broad range of topics, has been a holy grail for artificial intelligence researchers, with considerable recent progress. In this pursuit, the classic test is called the Turing test, for Alan Turing's recognition that once it is not possible to distinguish whether a computer or a human is responding to input typed into a terminal, our place in the world will have changed.
Generating ideas to help people
Google, for their 10th anniversary, has launched an effort to generate and implement creative ideas to help people, saying 'May Those Who Help The Most Win". They believe in the simple wisdom that 'beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people'. They are collecting ideas during October, intend to downselect from a candidate list of 100 to 20 by January (using community voting), and will narrow their selection to 5 final ideas through an advisory board. They have committed to $10 million dollars to implement the ideas. Their categories are:
Passion and new knowledge beats old knowledge
Netflix has been running their own X-prize ('Netflix prize'), a crowdsourcing competition for a million dollars to come up with a better algorithm for predicting movie preferences than the algorithm Netflix is currently using. That approach, Cinematch, currently captures 2 million new ratings (between 1 and 5 stars) per day, and is used to predict preferences ('if you liked Braveheart, you will also like...') for the 65,000 movies they rent, about 1 billion times per day. They are looking for a 10% improvement in accuracy, which doesn't sound like much, but would mean 10M of ther customers would get better matches each day - which is quite a lot, if you're trying to differentiate yourself to apture the off-line (and soon, online) rental market!.
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Management innovation
In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel challenges traditional thinking on the practice of management. He argues that management innovation is needed since more traditional approaches - centered on control and efficiency - no longer work in a world where adaptability and creativity are increasingly crucial to business success. He argues that current management challenges most frequently are focused around how to accelerate change, get everyone involved in innovation, and engaged to give their best - and none of these goals can be achieved very effectively (or sustainably) in a command and control-oriented environment. I couldn't agree more.
Hamel offers a somewhat traditionalist job description for a manager, which is to:
- Set and program objectives
- Motivate and align effort
- Coordinate and control activities
- Develop and assign talent
- Accumulate and apply knowledge
- Amass and allocate resources
- Build and nurture relationships
- Balance and meet stakeholder demands
He then explains how these goals are in fact most likely to be achieved when everyone in the organization is engaged in their pursuit; it's not just the manager's job, but everyone's job. The manager can only be the catalyst. Read more »
Spacing out
I had a chance to tour the Kennedy Space Center just before Thanksgiving, and was able to provide input and ideas in pursuit of an updated CAPPS contract for NASA's new Constellation program. The completion of the $130B International Space Station's construction is in sight, and is expected by 2010. Unfortunately, the originally planned life of the station only envisioned operational support through 2016, so the ISS's long-term role and cost-effectiveness for scientific research is uncertain, and has been significantly reduced from original plans.
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