Dr. Jim Spohrer: Service Science is BizTech Innovation

 

Rule-changers are often characterized by wild maverick behavior.  We see them driving a new idea hard, crashing through crowds of people, bodies flying in their wake.  Dr. Jim Spohrer, Director of Service Research at IBM’s Alamaden Research Center, is a different kind of rule-changer.  He is famous for caring as much about people as new ideas, so not surprisingly his latest work is about converging people stuff and technology stuff.  He wants nothing less than a whole new educational regime that combines a half-dozen separate technical, business and social science disciplines into a coherent curriculum taught at the undergraduate and graduate level: Service Science.

A person who studies Service Science will learn as much about organizational behavior, human systems, and economics as she will learn about engineering, logistics, and information technology.  And if you are thinking that this sounds about as easy as throwing a successful party between Math majors and Drama majors, I would agree.  But now is the time for it.  Services – activities where suppliers and buyers must work together to produce value – now employ 70% of the workforce in countries like the US and Japan.  If that many peoples’ jobs depend on understanding services, seems smart to have a major in it – and not just a boutique major like Ancient Yoruba Basketweaving but a big robust major, and hopefully a major that can – this time finally – attract roughly equal numbers from both genders. 

Just as Computer Science was a necessary convergence of Math, Electrical Engineering, and – yeah – Philosophy, Spohrer and a growing army of academics and industry folks believe that Service Science is a necessary convergence of Management Sciences, Computer Science, Economics, Logistics, Game Theory….and let’s throw Law in just for seasoning.

What I really like about this is that it means we will have to start treating business as a science, and science as an inherent part of human systems:  BizTech. 

If you’ve read other thethreepercent.com posts, you might be seeing a pattern about now.  Real innovators are BizTech, and BizTech innovators are about to get their very own major.  About time.

There are heaps of universities – including UC Berkeley, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Penn State, and North Carolina State – starting Service Science programs.  And we are likely to start seeing IBM and others posting “Service Science Certificate Preferred” on job postings.

If your university is running a Service Science program, take a second and put a link to it in comments.

Krisztina Holly: A Plea to Save Innovation from “Innovation”

My friend Ellen sent me this article in the San Jose Mercury News from vice provost and executive director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, Krisztina Holly.  The article was such a breath of fresh air I couldn’t sleep without posting it.

For the hyperlink-averse, here’s the gist:  The word ‘Innovation’ is being way overused.  She suggests a more rigorous understanding of the word – “true innovation is the process of translating new ideas into tangible societal impact.”  This fits so well with what thethreepercent is all about that I’m half tempted to replace our standing definition:  “Innovation occurs when someone uses an invention – or uses existing tools in a new way – to change how the world works, how people organize themselves, and how they conduct their lives.”

Same idea – fewer words.

The Meat of the Problem

The New Scientist reported today that a study by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan shows that producing one kilogram of beef generates more greenhouse gas emissions than running a car for three hours.

I assume that the cow isn’t entirely to blame here, though a cow pie sure kicks up a lot of something gaseous.  The heavy emissions must mainly be in the form of the business systems around the cow today…the machines and vats and transport systems that process several tons of animal into plastic-wrapped slabs of juicy goodness.

Typically, we talk about technologies that solve business problems.  Here is a technical problem which, I’m going to assert, will have to be solved through business model innovations (with some enabling technical inventions to be sure). 

Maybe what made me think about this is the fact that the study came out of Japan.  This is the birthplace of modern quality process and supply chain logistics – one of the most tangible areas for business concept research.

Another Pure-Technical Innovation Program Needlessly Dies

If I had a nickel for every technology-oriented innovation program I have seen cut when times got tough.  NASA has shut down the famous NIAC, Nasa Institute for Advanced Concepts. 

I’m not going to ponder the reasons for this cut.  The reasons are always the same.  What I will say is that it was both inevitable and avoidable – inevitable because truly innovative thinking along purely technical lines is difficult to find even with a wide net, and when you do find it, the innovations are typically divorced from strong business concept innovation.  It is avoidable, because ‘biztech’ programs know how to stand strong in tough times.

The few programs I have seen which merge business innovation thinking with inventive technical ideas tend not only to survive but to be virtually ‘unkillable.’

Now here’s where a lot of people will miss the point.  I am not saying that technical innovations must be submitted with a business plan and “sell out” to crass money-making schemes.  What I am saying is that if the inventor of a technology has also truly explored how to apply that technology to change the patterns of how people organize themselves, then the proposal to develop the project is closer to money, and the program that supports such submissions is better able to articulate why it can generate more value than is spent on it.

Technical invention is about playing with patterns – combining different tools in novel ways.  Business concept invention does the same thing.  It would be natural to create a team of scientists from different fields like optics, microelectronics, and genomics (that’s what gave us the gene sequencer after all), but to many poor scientists whose funding gets cut by the bad-ole-CEO, the notion of adding a business modeler (a person who practices the science of business concepts) is not only odd – it is often considered heresy.  Sigh.

Leroy Hood – Systems Biology, Systems Business

Scientific American’s podcast this week interviews Dr. Leroy Hood, one of the creators of the DNA gene sequencer, for which everyone who watches CSI should be thankful.  Dr. Hood is currently the Chairman and founder of the University of Washington’s cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biology and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

His notion is that we have to look at living organisms as a whole, not just look at the bits, like the DNA or a protein, or even ‘big’ structures like blood cells.  Scientists need to understand the body as an information system, a network.  Now that would be cool enough, because like all threepercenters, it means Dr. Hood is an advocate of crossing boundaries – in this case life science and areas like computer science.  A cross-disciplinary biology department?  Yeah, Dr. Hood is cool.

But that’s not why he shows up here.  What struck me about the podcast was that Dr. Hood spent a good bit of time crossing a different boundary – science and business.  As a systems thinker, Dr. Hood refreshingly does not distinguish between business and science.  Clearly to him, there really isn’t much of a difference – they are both complex systems, networks. 

He was credited as much for creating the Systems Biology Institute as for creating a number of new business concepts based on gene sequencing and other technologies.  So what does Dr. Hood ask at the end of the interview?  Not how we are going to find new technology for understanding the body – this will happen of course – but rather how we will use these tools to change how the web of operators, including hospitals, doctors, pharmaceuticals, medical device makers, insurers…patients, organize themselves and interact.  If we can tailor-make drugs that only work effectively for a single person, who in the pharma business loses their job?  And who gets a whole new job?  One thing seems likely – the distinction between companies like Pfizer and companies like IBM is going to get a lot fuzzier.

Business and science – not really all that different from a systems point of view.  We’re all just playing with patterns.