Stanford CSP BUS 74 [Principles of Invention and Innovation], Session 4 Quiz 1

On July 19, 2016, Bloomberg Technology News reported that Google used its DeepMind AI technology to reduce power consumption in the company's data centers:

In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York.

The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, "which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment," he said.

The savings translate into a 15 percent improvement in power usage efficiency, or PUE, Google said in a statement. PUE measures how much electricity Google uses for its computers, versus the supporting infrastructure like cooling systems.

Question 1. Using the system model, name the functional element that DeepMind technology helps to improve directly.
Question 2. Based on what you know about the improved element, describe other functional elements within the same system.

Finally, I have my magic formula for analyzing problems and inventing new stuff!

Actor(s) {A}
in Context(s) {E},
using Stuff {S} and incurring Cost(s) {C},
perform Action(s) {P}
produce Result(s) {R},
which counts as Outcome(s) {O}

Several immediate thoughts:
- Dilemma resolution techniques apply to Actor(s) and/or Context(s).
- 10X analysis applies to Cost(s) and/or Result(s).
- The Three Magicians, esp. the second one, move us between Results and Outcomes and provide different levels of Contexts.
- Elements quantize!

There's a lot more but I have to think about how to describe this 6-dimensional innovation space in detail.

Also, we live in a world abundant with high-tech startups, while Christinsen's "Innovator's Dilemma" was formulated for a world with sparse startups. Today's successful high-tech companies — Google, FB, Apple, etc — feast on this abundance.

tags: invention, innovation, system, model, dilemma, 10x

Solving Detection problems with the System Model

Since the publication of Scalable Innovation, I've had many discussions about the System Model with readers and students. Intuitively, they think that the left-to-right dimension corresponds to Space-Time. That is, the Packaged Payload moves from the Source to the Tool via the Distribution.
Although this intuition is correct, it's not the only one we can use in the system model. Importantly, we can think about the second Time axis — the vertical one — that applies to a particular system element. In this case, the element becomes dynamic, e.g. changes over the time or moves in space.

In other words, the system model covers processes that involve repeated transactions and/or evolution of a particular physical element over time. For example, the Sources in the picture above represent the same physical Source at different points of time. This approach works really well for solving Detection problems because it allows us to identify an element based on its behavior. That is, we can extract Aboutness by controlling and/or interacting with the element.

Since this is not intuitively clear, I probably need to develop examples that explain this use of the System Model.

tags: model, system, detection, book

Facebook anticipates user engagement - a new US patent

On January 6, 2015 US PTO awarded Facebook patent 8,929,615 "Feature-extraction-based image scoring" (inventors David Harry Garcia and Justin Mitchell).

The new patent covers a technology that extracts features from a photo and makes clever decisions how to use it on a social networking; the decisions are based on predicted user engagement. For example, if you like drinking women  smiling babies the system will be able to include more baby pictures (and ads) into your news feed.

To put the matter in perspective: few months ago a lot of media hoopla was generated about Amazon being able to anticipate where to ship user packages.  The new Facebook technology is much more interesting than that of Amazon because
a) it addresses the growing world of digital social media;
b) it enables anticipatory content distribution;
c) while Amazon can anticipate shipping to the right zipcode within a certain time interval, Facebook can "ship" the right content to the right user at the right time.

In short, Facebook anticipates more and with a greater precision.

Also relevant to this discussions are recent Facebook patents US 8,930,837 "Graphical user interface for map search" (inventors Brandon Marshall Walkin and  Zhen Fang) and US 8,930,243 "System, process and software arrangement for providing multidimensional recommendations/suggestions" (inventors Alexander Tuzhilin and Gediminas Adomavicius). The latter patent goes back to a 2001 invention!

From our system model perspective, the patents describe novel Control systems that take advantage of the Aboutness, extracted from the Packaged Payload.

tags: control, aboutness, detection, model, 

Facebook patents secure upgrade of a wireless mobile device.

Facebook got a nice patent (US 8,631,239) that covers a secure software upgrade of a wireless mobile device. According to the specification, the system uses a public key to authenticate the software delivered over the air (OTA).

Wireless connections are notoriously unsafe and prone to hacker interception. The Facebook solution enables a service provider to perform a reliable upgrade over an unreliable channel. It's highly likely that in the future most software upgrades, especially in the enterprise environment, will be done using this approach - simple and powerful!

Unfortunately,  the patent itself has an important flaw: it does not define the term "endpoint", which figures prominently in claim 1. Moreover, in Fig 1B it uses a different term "System Front End (120)."

As I noted several times before, the company's quality control over their patenting process seems to be spotty, at best. A simple document search would allow them to spot and fix the definition problem.

1. A method comprising, by one or more computing systems: executing software from a first partition of system memory; requesting an over-the-air (OTA) software update from an endpoint; receiving a manifest for the OTA update; downloading a payload pursuant to the manifest; installing the payload into a second partition of system memory; and rebooting, pursuant to the manifest, to the second partition of system memory, wherein rebooting to the second partition of system memory comprises authenticating a bootloader signature with a bootloader public key.

Brief system analysis: the manifest represents the "Aboutness"; encrypted software update - Packaged Payload; device  - Tool; a process that runs on the device to verify authenticity - Control; endpoint - Source; over-the-air channel - Distribution. Overall, it's a textbook example of system composition (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 2). To solve the problem, the inventors use Separation in Space - one of the key TRIZ principles.

Model-wise, it is quite similar to my patent US 7,529,806. They have a different payload, but the aboutness is managed and created for the same purpose. I should use the Facebook patent as a system analysis homework assignment in BUS 74 this summer.

In view of the Nortel patent and invention principles listed above, the Facebook patent can be attacked as "obvious."

tags: patent, invention, innovation, security, mobile, enterprise, system, model, aboutness

Lab Notebook: NSA, Google, cookies

In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 5. System Control Points: Where to Aim the Silver Bullets), we introduce the concept of aboutness and use the example of web cookies to explain how it helps solve detection problems. In the second edition of the book, we should illustrate the concept with the recent revelation that NSA uses Google cookies to identify targets for hacking. This is exactly the use our system model predicts.

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations. (Source: Washington Post, December 10, 2013).

tags: detection, control, system, model, example

Nobel Prize in Economics: Using models to make sense of models.

Lars Peter Hansen shared 2013 "Nobel Prize" in Economics for his work on models. Below are several slides from his Nobel Prize Lecture. Since I study innovation-related hype, the second slide, which shows how to model distorted beliefs, is quite interesting. Maybe we can use this approach to understand why Gartner Hype Cycle keeps showing up in innovation processes.

tags: science, economics, hype, model

Lunch Talk: Modeling and Economics (Financial Theory @Yale University ECON 251)

Financial Theory (ECON 251)

This lecture explains what an economic model is, and why it allows for counterfactual reasoning and often yields paradoxical conclusions. Typically, equilibrium is defined as the solution to a system of simultaneous equations. The most important economic model is that of supply and demand in one market, which was understood to some extent by the Ancient Greeks and even by Shakespeare. That model accurately fits the experiment from the last class, as well as many other markets, such as the Paris Bourse, online trading, the commodities pit, and a host of others. The modern theory of general economic equilibrium described in this lecture extends that model to continuous quantities and multiple commodities. It is the bedrock on which we will build the model of financial equilibrium in subsequent lectures. 

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction
07:04 - Chapter 2. Why Model?
13:30 - Chapter 3. History of Markets
24:41 - Chapter 4. Supply and Demand and General Equilibrium
37:59 - Chapter 5. Marginal Utility
45:20 - Chapter 6. Endowments and Equilibrium


tags: lunchtalk, model, innovation, economics, control

Invention of the Day: Relevant Advertisement.

Today, Google makes billions of dollars a year, by serving ads relevant to user searches. Bill Gross, of IdeaLab, is generally credited with inventing the business model. We use this example in class (Principles of Invention. BUS 74) and Scalable Innovation to illustrate a couple of points:

1. The difference between Invention and Innovation (for more detail see Scalable Innovation, Prologue. Soft Barrier 2: Invention vs Innovation. page xxxi).
2. Breaking, rather than accepting a broadly accepted trade-off, often leads to a major innovation breakthrough. That is, in 2000 when Yahoo dominated the web and used Google search engine to serve user requests, it made money by serving annoying banner ads. In short, Yahoo was locked in a trade-off between making more money and making user experience unbearable (very similar to today's Facebook situation). Google took Bill Gross' original idea and broke the trade-off, by making ads useful (see Scalable Innovation, 2013. Prologue, Internet Advertisement. page xxxvii). As the result, the constraint on revenue and user experience disappeared, making Google the dominant force on the Internet.

New developments in the world of patent litigation show that the concept of relevant ads was invented not by Bill Gross, but by Richard Skillen and Fred Livermore, of Nortel. US Patent 6,098,065 describes a search system that "correlates the received search argument to a particular advertisement." Derived US patents claim multiple aspects of their original idea.

In 2011, Apple, Microsoft, and others bought thousands of patents from bankrupted Nortel for $4.5B. Now, they are suing Google, Samsung, and the rest of the Android universe for patent infringement. The Skillen and Livermore patents are an element of the lawsuit. Of course, the suit will not stop Google from dominating search on the web and mobile. Rather, it is likely to result in a monetary settlement or damages awarded by the courts. The best part of it is that we now know the original inventors of a new powerful business mode. And they are Canadians!

Why Toronto, Canada is not Silicon Valley is another story.

tags: invention, patent, internet, business, model

Lunch Talk: (@MIT) Goedel, Echer, Bach

During the summer of 2007, Gödel, Escher, Bach was recorded for OpenCourseWare at MIT

Original Content Location: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/Vide...

tags: lunchtalk, psychology, model

Trade-off of the Day: Revenue vs User Experience

Yahoo reported 2012 Q4 results that show a company stuck in a 15-year old trade-off between selling more annoying banner ads and improving user experience:

Display ad revenue excluding commissions to other websites in Q4 fell 5%, even though the amount advertisers were willing to pay for ads rose 7%, the company said in an earnings statement.

...the fall in Q4 was also at least partly an effect of Mayer's mission to improve the user experience on some Yahoo properties, including its home page, wrote Cowen and Co. analyst John Blackledge, who rates Yahoo as neutral. Fewer ad impressions in Q4 were "partially a result of an attempt to rein in site clutter and improve user experience," he said.

Yahoo's business model is bound by the Revenue vs Quality trade-off. In contrast, Google provides relevant text ads that improve user experience AND generate more revenue. The difference in business models creates a huge performance gap.

 

tags: tradeoff, business, internet, model, constraint, 

Lunch Talk: (@Google) How NASA builds maps of Earh, Moon, Mars..

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8wZalVOqVRI?list=UUbmNph6atAoGfqLoCL_duAg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Description:
High-quality planetary maps and 3D terrain models have become essential for NASA to plan exploration missions and conduct science. This is particularly true for robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, where maps are used for site selection, traverse planning, and planetary science. This is also important for studies of climate change on Earth, where maps are used to track environmental change (such as polar ice movement).

In this talk, we will describe how the Intelligent Robotics Group
(http://irg.arc.nasa.gov) at NASA Ames builds highly accurate, large-scale planetary maps and 3D terrain models from orbital imagery using novel statistical stereographic and photometric techniques. Orbital imagery includes data captured by the Apollo missions, on-going NASA and international missions, and commercial providers (such as Digital Globe). The mapmaking software that we have developed (Vision Workbench, Ames Stereo Pipeline, Neo-Geography Toolkit) is available as open-source and is widely used by scientists and mission planners.

tags: lunchtalk, space, model, technology

Online tracking: social networking vs analytics

Hi-tech websites seem to use a lot more social networking tracking than business sites (figs below). For example, wired, VBeat, Cnet and other tech-oriented content services are more geared toward generating "buzz", while biz sites use good old spying techniques to sell ads.

 

Tracking on wired.com

(all four major social networks present)

 Tracking on bloomberg.com

(no social tracking but extensive analytic  data collected)

tags: technology, media, control, detection, social, networking, business, model

Starbucks and McDonald's compete to deliver Diabetes 2

Recent medical research confirms my corollary that Starbucks is McDonald's for the affluent.

Researcher Marie-Soleil Beaudoin has discovered not only that a healthy person's blood sugar levels spike after eating a high-fat meal, but that the spike doubles after having both a fatty meal and caffeinated coffee – jumping to levels similar to those of people at risk for diabetes.

Since many Starbucks sell fatty sweets and lunches, adding coffee to the mix creates a recipe for sure-fire Diabetes 2: sugar (salt) + fat + caffeine. Similarly, when McDonald's sells coffee in addition to its traditional junk food they reproduce Starbucks' commercial success and the Diabetes 2 recipe.

tags: 10x, health, control, packaged payload, business, model

Quote of the Day: Model-Dependent Realism

 Stephen Hawking (and Leonard Mlodinow) write:

we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. (The Grand Design).

In Scalable Innovation, Max and I introduce a system model (my Stanford students know it as 5-element analysis) and multiple case studies that connect the model to observation. Part I of the book briefly introduces the model and shows how to make the connections. Part II discusses methods for navigating system levels and their connections to reality. Finally, Part III shows the system dynamics: how it evolves along the S-curve and its correspondence to observations.

tags: book, quote, model, five element analysis,

Quote of the Day: The Luck of Silicon Valley.

Gordon Moore:

I never fail to credit the element of luck.

My personal success stems in part from the fact that Fairchild’s timing and direction were extremely fortuitous. Semiconductor science and technology were evolving rapidly. Fairchild invented the planar technology that provided the basis for the integrated circuit. Intel made a lucky choice of a new version of the MOS technology using a silicon layer for the gate of the transistors.

The luck of this valley stems from the fact that it began with a fairly clean slate in a wide-open technology space.

Moore's insight about luck gives us an important attribute of a possible successful innovation: wide-open technology space. We should also realize that when Moore talks about technology he means the business of technology, not just the technical side of a specific implementation.
Similarly, when Steve Jobs introduced PC and, later, iPod he targeted a wide open business-technology spaces.

This aspect of luck can be captured by using my 4Q diagram approach (one of the topics of today's class at Stanford).

tags: 4q diagram, strategy, quote, innovation, business, model

Lunch Talk: (@Google) Chris Guillebeau "The $100 Startup"

In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose -- and earn a good living. Still in his early thirties, he's already visited more than 175 nations -- and yet he's never held a "real job" or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back. Chris talks about how you can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful. And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs. This remarkable talk will start you on your way.

It's all about finding the intersection between your "expertise" -- even if you don't consider it such -- and what other people will pay for. You don't need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.

link

tags: lunchtalk, business, model, startup

Zumable User Interfaces (ZUIs)

The Economist (Jun 2nd 2012. Technology Quarterly Q2, 2012): the prophets of zoom:

Zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs), as they are known, are arriving on the coat-tails of touch-screen gadgets such as the iPhone that have popularised zooming to magnify graphics. With ZUIs (pronounced zoo-ees), information need not be chopped up to fit on uniformly sized slides. Instead, text, images and even video sit on a single, limitless surface and can be viewed at whatever size makes most sense—up close for details, or zoomed out for the big picture.

The system-level transition I was predicting two years ago is beginning to happen.

tags: trend, payload, tool, system, model, example, interface, synthesis

Winner-takes-all market in tablets (so far)

CNet reports on web traffic data originating from tablets. Because Apple is such a dominant force, the chart they refer to looks like this:

Note that Apple's iPad is not in the picture at all. When you add the iPad the chart looks like this:

Data Source: Chitika.

tags: market, domination, tool, synthesis, 4q diagram, business, model

Lunch Talk: (@TED) 3D printing

Lisa Harouni is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Forming, a company that works on the software side of 3D printing -- the design tools needed to run the new generaion of 3D printing processes. She has a background in economics, and worked in the G7 Economics team at Deutsche Bank AG before moving over to the consumer products business.

tags: lunchtalk, business, model, technology