2006/10/07 12:45 Stu Feldman, "Summary and Closing"

2006/10/07 12:45 Stu Feldman, "Summary and Closing", SSME - Education for the 21st Century Conference, IBM Palisades, New York

Services Science, Engineering and Management Conference, at IBM Palisades, October 6-7

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

Stu Feldman, vp of exploratory research

Excitement:  it's a new area, a new way of thinking

This is the time for snowballing

Lead to socio-economic value

The way you tell pioneers is by the arrows in their back

At least four clusters of intellectual impetus:

  • Math/OR
  • Industry engineering / systems engineering
  • Computer science / information management
  • Physics, complexity

Already recognize success will come from crossing individuals

  • T-shaped individual, but reality we need for pi-shaped people, deep in two directions and broad across everything else

Not just intellectual output: experience factor, not just cognitive, you won't understand why it's hard

  • Describing contexts (invisible relationships) is hard

Services are, at base, about people

  • The most we talk about: humans as actors, operands.
  • They also provide purpose, goals, impetus
  • Humans are at the core of a small enterprise
  • But want to maximize value, e.g. Moore's law

What are service activities?

  • Designing / building / operating
  • Monitoring
  • Managing
  • Understanding, looking at long-term questions, e.g. societal

Sat on an agenda-building model in Europe, for people to focus on 10 years

Book: Academic charisma -- basically, everything came from German academics in 1870s.

  • What did it take to make a radical change in the world, and what does it take?
  • Changes will be evolutionary

Tenure the usual block, only mentioned twice here:

  • Mostly likely to do new is the young, and they shouldn't do things that will hurt them from getting tenure.

Respectability: computer science only got this after 25 years, still some questions as to whether it's a real field.

Who is going to support this?

  • Have spoken to Brussels and Washington
  • Think that they should do something, but they're reactive, not proactive.
  • Feedback loop, that no one starts
  • Cross-disciplinary

Need to build constituents in governments, also foundations.

Curriculum: the master's degree is the soft spot, where can sneak in new courses and experiment

  • At an early stage, want diversity

How do we create graduate programs?

  • What perterbations should happen in the undergraduate programs?

IBM will help, fund a little (although not a government)