Stanford CSP, BUS 152 - Innovation Timing. Session 2, Quiz 1

In a recent article, MIT Technology Review described exciting new developments in AI-enabled robotics:

This robot, controlled by software from a San Francisco–based company called Osaro, is smarter than any you’ve seen before. The software has taught it to pick and place chicken in about five seconds. Within the year, Osaro expects its robots to find work in a Japanese food factory.

Industrial robots have been largely untouched by the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Over the last five or so years, AI software has become adept at identifying images, winning board games, and responding to a person’s voice with virtually no human intervention. It can even teach itself new abilities, given enough time to practice. All this while AI’s hardware cousins, robots, struggle to open a door or pick up an apple.

That is about to change. The AI software that controls Osaro’s robot lets it identify the objects in front of it, study how they behave when poked, pushed, and grasped, and then decide how to handle them. Like other AI algorithms, it learns from experience. Using an off-the-shelf camera combined with machine-learning software on a powerful computer nearby, it figures out how to grasp things effectively. With enough trial and error, the arm can learn how to grasp just about anything it might come across.

Moreover, investors show strong interest in the field as well. For example, this week's Bloomberg article noted creation of new ETFs dedicated to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

Quiz:
1. In your opinion, does the field of new AI-enabled robots follow the process generally described as Hype Cycle? Explain briefly.
1a. If yes, what is the current stage of the technology relative to the cycle?
1b. If no, how do you explain major disadvantages of using the technology relative to more traditional robots?
1c. How many years would it take for AI-enabled robots to become mainstream?

2. Where would you place the technology on the S-curve and Adopter Distribution chart as of today? Explain briefly.

Stanford CSP, BUS 152 - Innovation Timing. Session 4, Quiz 1

Background:

Recently, a number of technology companies introduced Augmented Reality headsets that enable users to overlay images from the real world with information generated by a computer, including text, video, graphics, etc. Microsoft HoloLens  is one of the most advanced projects in the field, backed by a major industry player. For example, in a 2016 TED Talk, Alex Kipman demonstrated a head-mounted 3D hologram computer that lets users interact with "magical objects" directly, which eliminates, among other things, the need for displays, keyboards, joysticks, and other typical computer accessories.

Please read the wikipedia article referenced above, watch the TED video, and answer the following questions:

1. Is HoloLens a new technology? Explain.

2. Imagine that it is year 2040. Do you see HoloLens-like devices dominating specific fields of human-computer interaction, e.g.

a) Education (certainly, highly likely, maybe, absolutely not). Explain.
b) Gaming (certainly, highly likely, maybe, absolutely not). Explain.
c) Construction and Industrial Services (certainly, highly likely, maybe, absolutely not). Explain.
d) Healthcare (certainly, highly likely, maybe, absolutely not). Explain.

3. (Optional) In your opinion, what are the top three bottlenecks that may prevent Augmented Reality devices, like HoloLens, from becoming widely popular among consumers during the next 3-5 years? Explain.

Stanford CSP. Business 152. Innovation Timing. Session 1, Quiz 2.

On November 14, 2016, the New York Times wrote a story about a Spark Capital, a 11-year old technology venture firm.

The article opened with a description of one of Spark's recent deals:

Betting on an automated driving start-up in 2015 may not have been the most intuitive gamble at a time when Google and Uber had already declared that self-driving vehicles were among their top research priorities. 

But in the fall of 2015, Spark Capital was one of a few established venture capital firms to wade into the industry, helping lead a $12.5 million investment in Cruise Automation, a start-up based in San Francisco whose software helps cars pilot themselves. One of Spark’s partners became the only outside board member of the firm. 

It was a bet that paid off quickly: Within six months, Cruise sold itself to General Motors for about $1 billion.

Questions:
1. In your opinion, why the timing of the deal turned out to be so good? Was it pure luck? If you were the analyst who "discovered" Cruise Automation back in 2015, how would you justify the $12.5M investment to your VC partners?
2. (optional) Consider the generic innovation diffusion S-curve, as described in Everett Rogers' "Diffusion of Innovations." What stage of the curve the self-driving car technology is now? Why?

tags: course, stanford, innovation, s-curve

Stanford CSP. Business 152. Innovation Timing. Session 1, Quiz 1.

Background:

Timing is critical for innovation success. Sometimes, companies introduce new products and services when it’s too late. For example, neither Google+ nor Microsoft smartphone succeeded, despite their respective companies putting major resources behind them, both in money and development efforts.

On the other extreme, some innovations fail because they seem to appear too early. Social networks Friendster and Livejournal started gaining traction in the early 2000s, but never got to the scale of Facebook. Similarly, WebTV started in 1995, with the intent to provide users with a broad range of content over the Internet. In almost two decades that followed, the company burned through hundreds of millions of dollars, went through a major acquisition, but failed in the very same marketplace where NetFlix and other video streaming services managed to succeed a few years later.

Finally, certain products and services had perfect timing. For example, Gmail and Youtube spread like a California wildfire. The Apple iPhone succeeded where Apple Newton failed.

In preparation for the course, please answer the following questions:

1. List 2-3 novel products or services in each of the timing categories:
a) too late;
b) too early;
c) just perfect.

2. (Optional). Pick one example from the list and explain your reasoning with regard to innovation timing. Mention at least 3 factors that played a role in the success or failure of the innovation.

Stanford CSP. Scalable Innovation (BUS 134) Session 2 Quiz 1

Go is a board game invented 2,500 years ago in China. According to a recent MIT Technology Review (MTR) article, "Mastering Go ... requires endless practice, as well as a finely tuned knack of recognizing subtle patterns in the arrangement of the pieces spread across the board."

Experts have long considered Go as one of the most complex and intuitive human games ever created, much more complex than, e.g. chess or poker. Nevertheless, Google AI researchers have developed a software that "beat the European Go champion, Fan Hui, five games to zero. And this March it will take on one of the world’s best players, Lee Sedol, in a tournament to be held in Seoul, South Korea."

Read the MTR article mentioned above and consider/answer the following questions:

1. Does Alpha Go represent a major technology innovation? Explain your reasoning.

2. If combining two or more deep learning networks, as described in the article, is the wave of the future, what industries, new or existing, would benefit from the technology the most? Why?

3. Using the System Model (Scalable Innovation, Part I), hypothesize what system elements and interfaces still need to be invented to complement or take advantage of Alpha Go-like software.

tags: innovation, course, stanford, quiz

Pragmatic creativity among Chimps, Orangutans, and Bonobos

Unlike us humans, who are still confused about what "healthy" food is, many primates know that "healthy" means developing a habit that separates nutritious food from harmful food. For example, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos, know how to turn dirty apples into clean ones, while gorilla's don't.

Chimps, Orangutans, and Bonobos are pragmatically creative because they've developed a consistent process for dramatically improving health outcomes of a recurring situation.

Source: Matthias Allritz, Claudio Tennie, Josep Call. Food washing and placer mining in captive great apes, 2012. DOI 10.1007/s10329-013-0355-5.

Scalable Innovation - Quiz (Session 3-3)

According to the PC Magazine (January 22, 2015),

BMW and Volkswagen on Thursday announced they are teaming up to create nearly 100 electric vehicle charging stations along heavily traveled roads on the East and West Coasts.
The companies are working with ChargePoint, the largest electric vehicle charging network, on the effort. The publicly available stations will be added to ChargePoint's existing network of more than 20,000 charging spots in North America, and can be accessed by anyone with a ChargePoint or ChargeNow Card, or with the ChargePoint mobile app.

Each station is expected to include up to two 50 kW direct current Fast chargers, or 24 kW direct current Combo Fast chargers compatible with BMW and Volkswagen electric vehicles, as well as many other models. When charging at a 50 kW station, the BMW i3 and the Volkswagen e-Golf can charge up to 80 percent in 20 minutes; at a 25 kW station it'll take 30 minutes.

Question 1: Does the data presented in the article imply the beginning of exponential growth of electric vehicle deployment in the US within the next 2-3 years? Why?

Question 2: Does the addition of 100 charging stations remove a key constraint to growth?

Scalable Innovation (BUS 134) - Quiz, Session 3-2

Gordon Moore, of the Moore's Law fame, writes about his experience of creating a breakthrough technology at Intel,

...at the time the first microprocessors were shipped, the total annual market for computers in the world was something like 10,000 units. The microprocessor would have been a commercial disaster if all we did was to replace those 10,000 units with cheaper processors.

I remember going to a conference and speaking before a group that was more involved in applications than devices and explaining to them that we had to ask big questions, like, ‘ How are we going to develop markets that can use 100,000 of these a month?’ (While one hundred thousand a month doesn’t seem like many now when compared to the tens of millions shipped currently, it sure did then.) Ted’s insight and the Fairchild experience with ICs helped us understand that this product had countless uses, but we also understood our efforts alone would build volume markets.

Question 1: Did Moore's questions imply linear, exponential, or logarithmic growth?
Question 2 (bonus): Name one or two Silicon Valley companies that use the Moore's approach to innovation.

tags: innovation, course, stanford

In praise of procrastination

Nassim N. Taleb writes:

[T]he Romans revered someone who, at the least, resisted and delayed intervention. One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, “the Procrastinator.” He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement.

There is a Latin expression festina lente, “make haste slowly.” The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei,“passive achievement.”

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad. - Antifragility, 2012.

I've been thinking about discussing or — better! — solving the procrastination dilemma with the students during the Summer '13 Principles of Invention course at Stanford. On the one hand, procrastination is bad because it makes us miss important deadlines or waste time on unimportant rather than important tasks. On the other hand, as Taleb notices, procrastination helps us save the effort of reacting to events that might blow by harmlessly without any intervention.

My earlier posts on procrastination: 1, 2, 3

tags: dilemma, problem, solution, course

The Transistor: a Cinderella Story.

Transistor is arguably one of the greatest inventions of all time. Today, all computers, including mobile phones, use electronic chips that comprise billions of transistors. Nevertheless, when the transistor was invented it received very little attention from the general public. On July 1, 1948, The New York Times published a short note about the invention at the bottom of The News of Radio section, p.46. (see below).

I find it remarkable that this announcement of a great invention sits side by side with trivialities (on the left above). It makes you think that really important technology news never appear on page 1.


tags: invention, innovation, course, media, technology

Innovation: Silicon Valley vs Wall Street

In preparation for The Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley (BUS 117), I read a lot of papers about innovation and growth. Here's a good sentence from Bresnahan and Trajtenberg NBER/Journal of Econometrics (1995) paper "General Purpose Technology: 'Engines of Growth?'"

Economists have known for a long time that technical change is the single most important force driving the secular process of growth (Abramovitz, 1956; Solow, 1957).

From a purely financial (risk) perspective, Silicon Valley is an engine of growth because it is really good at developing uncorrelated assets using new technologies. That is, while everybody is happy with proven technologies, the creative crowd in the valley is willing to bet on something totally new. As the result — and in accordance with both the financial and economic growth theories — Silicon Valley innovations stimulate growth and at the same time reduces overall financial risks.

By contrast, Wall Street innovations create a trade-off between growth and risks. Therefore, when the Wall Street creates a lot of innovation the financial system becomes prone to disasters (or as Nassim Taleb calls them "Black Swans").

tags: innovation, theory, technology, silicon valley, course, stanford

The Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley, BUS 117.

This fall, beginning on September 27th and ending on December 6th, John Kelley and I will be teaching our new course at Stanford University Continuing Studies Program - The Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley, BUS 117.
Here's a preview of the syllabus.

Course Objectives
- To understand what makes an innovation great
- To identify Silicon Valley’s greatest innovations
- To understand why these innovations constituted both technological and
economic breakthroughs
- To address several fundamental questions concerning them:

• How do they work?
• Who invented them?
• What inspired their inventors?
• How did these innovations differ from earlier efforts?
• Why did they succeed?

- To present diverse perspectives concerning these issues through guest speakers
- To enhance your abilities to innovate, to invest, and to contribute back to Silicon Valley wisely

Course Outline
- Session 1, Introduction to the Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley. Theme: The Valley’s Uniqueness.

- Session 2, The Cold War, Silicon, and Money. Theme: Defense contractors, semiconductor manufacturers, and venture firms.

- Session 3, Personal Computing Leads to the PC. Theme: Computers bring a new wave of innovation to the Valley.

- Session 4, Having Fun Can Be Serious Business. Theme: Entertainment driving innovation.

- Session 5, The Biomedical, Biotech, and Bioinformatics Revolutions. Theme: Advances in biology, medicine, and related fields of innovation.

- Session 6, Bigger Systems for Bigger Customers: Databases, Workstations, and Networks. Theme: Innovation for the enterprise.

- Session 7, With the Internet, It’s a Whole New Ballgame. Theme: Infrastructure changes and world-wide impact of networking.

- Session 8, Where the Ether Meets the Road. Theme: Cloud Computing, Communications, Smartphones, and Apps.

- Session 9, Generating Content and Promoting Sustainability. Theme: Social Networking and CleanTech.

- Session 10, “Just Keep Truckin On.” Theme: The future of innovation in Silicon Valley
Is the Valley Itself Its greatest innovation?

Why patents don't protect.

Some rough notes on why patents don't protect and why the "pickets and fence" approach doesn't work ( in prep for the Patent Paradox, BUS 111.)

- Breach of a civil obligation is called a "tort", which is a French word meaning "wrong."

- Breach of a property right is called "trespass."

- Property rights focus on a static condition or status. The primary question is whether the complaining party owns land, a copyright, a patent etc.

- Once the property owner has proved the status of ownership, he or she has a nearly automatic remedy for even trivial interferences with the right. The property owner can win a case without having to prove fault or negligence on the part of the defendant. (Idea Rights, by H. Anawalt.)

Since patent is a property right, it is easy to think that it provides protection similar to rights on physical property, e.g. real estate. In reality, the same technology is covered by many patents and, as a result, nobody has the exclusive right to the property. Further, in most patent cases, it is unknown how many patents apply to the technology in question. Therefore, you never know who is going to show up and claim the "territory."

In Consumer Electronics and W3C the issue is resolved through a slow process of standardization, where multiple parties have sufficient time to discover, submit, and arbitrate their claims.

In IT capturing market share as soon as possible seems to be more important. Companies rush their solutions to the market without going through the slow and relatively expensive process of discovering patent rights. It's a good strategy, because if the product doesn't "stick," it doesn't make sense to make an upfront investment in legal resources. If the product is successful, its producer gets "surprised" with patent claims from others, which is a direct result of the initial business strategy.

tags: patents, course, control, theory

The Patent Paradox (BUS 111) syllabus

is now available online (pdf format).

Enabling vs Disabling constraints.

An excellent cartoon showing the difference between enabling and disabling constraints.

 

(c) The Economist

Often, constraints are perceived as limitations, i.e. "strings attached." But most of the time, constraints work as infrastructure elements supporting a myriad of routine processes of everyday life. For example, a traffic light limits our freedom to drive through a crowded intersection, but at the same time it enables us to move safely in traffic.

tags: constraint, example, course

The web is dead. Implications for e-commerce.

The low quality of recommendations was one of the problems we looked into during my Summer '11 BUS 74 Principles of Invention class. The class did not select it for the problem-solving session, but I felt the topic was important to the next generation of e-commerce. My intuition was that the traditional web-page + links + search approach was not going to work in the social networking space (the web is a dying media). Here's more evidence for that.

Gallup published a study that, in their opinion, debunks what they call Social Media Myths. One such myth is that consumers can be moved to purchasing decisions by brand-sponsored campaigns.

 

I can see that young unmarried people, i.e. the most desired target demographic, is mostly influenced by parents, friends, and experts. In the social world it boils down to just friends. Therefore, any effective ad campaign should target "circles", getting one or two members of the circle evaluate the promoted stuff. Having a campaign page or twitter account is a waste of effort.

In contrast, I think a product page [or reference application] on Amazon is a great promotional tool because it captures practically everybody in top influencer categories.  Getting people to cross-post their reviews ("Like", +1, etc) to Facebook or Google+ would be an excellent way to influence purchasing decisions. You may even want to create a dedicated "Shopping" circle so that your friends don't get mad at your spamming. Thinking along similar lines, Google's purchase of Zagat also makes sense.

Conclusion: web page promotions, created either through the traditional web, Facebook, twitter, or Google+ are ineffective. Consumers prefer accounts of immediate experience to product descriptions developed by an interested party.

For the philosophical logic behind this thinking, you can further read Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, published in 1912. Chapter 5 talks about the difference between what he calls acquaintance and description.

tags: social, networking, commerce, internet, control, facebook, course, detection

Amazon: making long-term innovation bets.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, talks about his company's approach to invention and innovation:

we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago….  There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work.

Most of our customers shop with us from desktop or laptop computers, but people have a different posture with tablets,” he said. They “lean back on their sofa. People leaning back on their sofa, buying things from Amazon, is another tailwind for our business, so I’m very excited about that.

via venturbeat.com

Tablet is going to be a huge boost to e-commerce and many other ways of content creation/consumption. The sooner the Internet sheds shackles of the browser,  the better.

tags: 4q diagram, bus75, course, bet, innovation, strategy 

The oldest (and the dimmest) lightbulb in the world

Recently, the city of Livermore celebrated the 110th year of continuing service of a ligh bulb:

For more than a century, the 4-watt "Centennial Light" -- believed to be the world's longest-burning bulb -- has hung from the modest rafters of Fire Station No. 6 in Livermore.

4 watts! By design, this old bulb produces at least 10 times less light than an average modern one. The key reason for that is the limitation imposed by the low-current DC electricity distribution system invented by Edison. His main business constraint was the cost of copper wires: the higher the current, the thicker and more expensive the wires would have to be to feed the bulbs. But expensive wires would not allow Edison's system to cover a large city area, making it a poor competitor for gas lighting installations popular at the time.

Therefore, Edison settled on a low-current system, which required high-resistance light bulb filaments. Unfortunately, a carbon-based filament found by Edison, the famous bamboo one prominently shown in books and movies, would heat up during operation and burn out fairly quickly. Furthermore, the carbon filament would eventually blacken the inside surface of the bulb, turning it even dimmer. To make his system more reliable, Edison had to limit the brightness of bulbs used, the bulbs bright enough to beat competition from candles, kerosene and gas lamps. Only with the invention of high-resistance tungsten filaments by Hungarian engineers in the beginning of the 20th century and, later, the process of filling the bulb with an inert gas, light bulbs began approaching levels of brightness comparable to today's standards.

Eventually, the world created highly resistant bright light bulbs that consumed more and more electricity, the electricity coming over long transmission lines from distant power plants burning fossil fuels, losing lots of power on the way and in the bulb itself because most of the power went into heat. Paradoxically, with low-power LEDs and local solar panels producing low-current DC we don't need the heat and the transmission lines, but we still lack efficient power storage systems. When these are deployed at scale, we'll go back to Edison's good old idea of a 4-watt bulb, which, implemented with new technologies, will shine brighter and greener(!) than ever before.

tags: system, evolution, power, distribution, tool, constraint, trade-off, payload, course

Freedom to the cows!

Architect Carolyn Steel gives a TED talk on how city transportation infrastructure defines the food we eat. She shows evolution of London food supply routes: from river, hoof, and foot, to railroad, cars, and airplanes. A part of the evolution is a drastic change in food packaging, production scale, and consumption patterns.
Several points I'd like to note:
- meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand;
- feeding animals to feed them to humans takes 10 times more food;
- takes 10 calories [of fuel] to produce 1 calorie of food in the West;
- half the food grown in the US is thrown away;
- a billion of us is obese.

She proposes food localization as a solution the all these problems, but I don't believe it will work, unless people are willing to pay much higher prices for their food. And we've already seen revolutions in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt, when a spike in food prices occurred.

Here's the video, but if you don't have 20 minutes you can read a full transcript of the talk (on the right of the video on the site).



tags: distribution, payload, health, system, evolution, problem

The greatest inventions of all time (a candidate list)

 A couple of years ago I taught The Greatest Innovations of All Time course at Stanford University CSP. At the time, I focused on five areas of human experience: 1) Energy, 2) Communications, 3)Health Care, 4) Money, and 5) Transportation. Implicitly, I also included 6)Agriculture, as part of the discussion on Energy and Health. It was a great experience and I got good reviews from my students, but I felt that a better list of inventions was needed to understand the invented world we live in. Here's my updated attempt at this list in a semi-chronological order.


Writing
Philosophy/Mathematics
Money
University
Double-entry accounting
Contract
Factory
Smallpox vaccination
Scientific Method
Steam Engine
Road
Rocket
Telegraph/Morse Code
Software and Universal Computer(The Turing Machine)
Transistor
Social Networking

* I just noticed that the majority of words on this list start with S. Maybe this is a coincidence, or maybe it's a psychological bias, due to the fact that my last name starts with S :)

tags: invention, technology, history, business, model, system,  course