Coevolving Innovations

Coevolving Innovations

… in Business Organizations and Information Technologies

Easing over to open software platforms

September 27, 2008
2 Comments

I’m migrating over to a Thinkpad T61, having last moved to a T41 in March 2005. Since research is core to my personal development, I’ve been diligent about preserving my digital files. My laptop stores documents created on a personal computer as early as 1994, with an archive of documents converted from mainframe files back to 1991. Thus, to move over to a new computer, it’s taken three days (and nights) to transfer:

  • 12.5 GB of work-related e-mail and databases (i.e. Lotus Notes e-mail plus local document-sharing replicas);
  • 8.6 GB as 19,000 work-related flat files (i.e. documents and presentations, mostly created in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat);
  • 346 MB as 4900 work-related modeling files (i.e. created in Rational Software Modeler or Websphere Business Modeler, with a lot of XML);
  • 1.2 GB of personal productivity files (i.e. browser profiles and plugins for Firefox and Flock, personal e-mail in Thunderbird, personal diary in Sunbird, and blog feeds in FeedDemon);
  • 9.6 GB of streaming media (i.e. temporary storage for MP3 audio that I’ve recorded and haven’t published to a web site yet, and lectures/interviews to be downloaded for listening to my MP3 player);
  • 756 MB of digital photographs archived on other servers, but yet to be blogged (or not); and
  • 2.4 GB of working files to maintain my multiple web sites (to speed up recovery if an irreversible crash ever happens).

There must be thousands of IBM employees annually who upgrade from one computer to a replacement.… Read more (in a new tab)

Offerings as Commitments and Context: Service Systems from a Language Action Perspective

September 15, 2008
1 Comment

As I’ve been doing research into service systems, I’ve reached my own conclusions about two blind spots in the current literature.

  • 1. There continues to be a lot of debates about the distinctions (and non-distinctions) between services and products. From a systems perspective, I’m satisfied that the most important features are sufficiently covered by a definition of offerings initially conceived by Richard Normann, and further developed by Rafael Ramirez and Johan Wallin. Features are expressed in three dimensions of physical content, service and infrastructure content, and people (relationship) content.
  • 2. Descriptions of service systems often follow mechanistic frames for function, structure and process that are helpful for understanding physical aspects of a system, but are less helpful for understanding the social contexts of collaboration. Conversations for action — also known as the language action perspective initiated by Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd — are an alternative way to model some aspects of human-to-human interaction, coming from the field of computer science. Language action is well known to reserachers in computer-supported cooperative work — actually famous or infamous, depending on your point of view — but less well known in by business researchers. The social perspective is inescapable in this perspective, because only human beings can make commitments. (Try blaming a machine for an error, and see if it cares!)

Since a service system is a social system, combining the above models of offerings and conversations for action is helpful in recognizing the types of obligations made about products, services, and (people) relationships.… Read more (in a new tab)

Business Models and Evolving Economic Paradigms: A Systems Science Approach

September 7, 2008
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In summer 2006, I constructed a curriculum on International Service Business Management for a one-year master’s program in Finland. Appropriate to the Finnish style, this content was assembled in rapid development. With a profile of students admitted mostly with technical undergraduate degrees and 5-to-10 years of working experience, the curriculum leaned toward the style normally expected in a practical executive MBA program.

In contrast, at presentations in August 2007, and then again in March 2008, Jim Kijima proposed a more ambitious challenge — for the new program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology — looking at services science based on systems science. For full-time graduate students, he sees systems science as a “liberal art” where their perspectives are broadened beyond their disciplinary technical teaching. In Japan, it’s not enough to have T-shaped professionals, they expect pi-shaped people, i.e. two downward stems with at least a major and a minor, in addition to the crossbar.

I took the idea of services science and systems science as a challenge, and constructed an article and a presentation for the ISSS Madison 2008 meeting as an exercise. With a target of master’s level engineering and management students, developing this content was based on a few premises:

T-shaped professionals, T-shaped skills, hybrid managers

September 6, 2008
24 Comments

The science, management and engineering of service systems is associated with a call for T-shaped people. The most recent emphasis is on T-shaped professionals, which was preceded by T-shaped skills, with linkages back to a 1990 study on hybrid managers. Some insight can be gained by working backwards through the nuanced terms.

The 2008 Cambridge (IfM and IBM) report issues a challenge to universities for developing skills, and then seeks to enlist support from business and government.

Developing T-shaped professionals
Discipline-based education remains a vital role of modern universities. In order to close the skill gap, however, universities should also offer students the opportunity to gain qualifications in the interdisciplinary requirements of SSME. Such qualifications would equip graduates with the concepts and vocabulary to discuss the design and improvement of service systems with peers from other disciplines. Industry refers to these people as T-shaped professionals, who are deep problem solvers in their home discipline but also capable of interacting with and understanding specialists from a wide range of disciplines and functional areas.

Widely recognised SSME programmes would help ensure the availability of a large population of T-shaped professionals (from many home disciplines) with the ability to collaborate to create service innovations. SSME qualifications would indicate that these graduates could communicate with scientists, engineers, managers, designers, and many others involved in service systems. Graduates with SSME qualifications would be well prepared to ‘hit the ground running’, able to become immediately productive and make significant contributions when joining a service innovation project.

… Read more (in a new tab)

Innovation as open, collaborative, multidisciplinary, global

June 13, 2008
3 Comments

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard IBM executives assert:

The nature of innovation has changed. In the 21st century, innovation is open, collaborative, multidisciplinary and global.

The ideas of open, collaborative, multidisciplinary and global appeared in the Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 report that was published in mid-2006. These words appeared on IBM-internal slides presented by Nick Donofrio at an Consulting Leadership Exchange in September 2005, and at the external-facing conference on Education for the 21st Century in October 2006 … with lots of other occasions in between. But what do these four words mean?

To make some sense for myself, I’ve extended these words into phrases and contrasted their contexts in a table .

  Industrial age nature of innovation   21st century nature of innovation
Strategy Private methods and development enabling autonomous control over designs + Open standards and interfaces leveraging expedient platforms for advancing designs
Relationship Transactional production chains linked by inter-organizational contracting + Collaborative alliances coproducing accelerated learning
Method Analytical problem-solving + Multidisciplinary conversations
Economics Colonial trade + Global talent

I’ve been listening to audio recordings of Donofrio in conversation, as well as following Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s blog. While I believe that my reasoning is consistent with theirs, this is not something they’ve endorsed. When I present the right column to audiences, I generally see nods in agreement. At the same time, the implications of a contrasting left column on current business practices provokes some deeper reflections.… Read more (in a new tab)

World diet is concentrated on a few cereal grains

May 21, 2008
2 Comments

I normally focus on industrial and service businesses, but recently headlines on rising food prices have me looking into agricultural businesses. Here some statistics to ponder: the world’s top 4 crops — wheat, corn, rice and barley — weigh more than the next 26 crops combined.

1999_WorldRevNutrDiet_Cordain_Table1.jpg The world’s top 30 food crops (estimated edible dry matter) [following Cordain (1999) Table 1]

Our diet really is quite limited in scope, according to Cordain (1999):

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      Ames and Hall (2003) provide some tips for those studyng the DaoDeJing.
    • Diachronic, diachrony
      Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2”, edited by F. E. Emery (1981)
      The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]
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      In reviewing the original introduction for Systems Thinking: Selected Readings in the 1969 Penguin paperback, there’s a few threads that I only recognize, many years later. The tables of contents (disambiguating various editions) were previously listed as 1969, 1981 Emery, System Thinking: Selected Readings. — begin paste — Introduction In the selection of papers for this […]
    • Concerns with the way systems thinking is used in evaluation | Michael C. Jackson, OBE | 2023-02-27
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    • 2024/03 Moments March 2024
      More work than play for first part of month, in anticipation of trip to Vancouver to visit family.
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      Chinese New Year celebrations, both public and family, extended over two weekends, due to busy social schedules.
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      Hibernated with work for most of January, with more activity towards the end of month with warmer termperatures.
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      A month of birthdays and family holiday events, with seasonal events at attractuions around town.
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      Dayliight hours getting shorter encouraged more indoor events, unanticipated cracked furnace block led to replacement of air conditioner with heat pump, too.
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      Left Seoul for 8 days in Ho Chi Minh City, and then 7 days in Taipei. Extended family time with sightseeing, almost completely offline from work.

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