Markets, Products and US talk
Having problems connecting to Blogger, so I’m making notes instead of putting it on the blog.
Dr. Dennis Tsichritzis
Fraunhofer Institute
Abstract
The commercial world is witnessing many shifts. While this situation does
not affect Universities immediately, eventually it forces some rethinking
of plans, programs and student career possibilities. We will outline the
new trends and try to point out some necessary changes. The legacy issues
and the cultural aspects who may be an obstacle to such changes will be
openly discussed.
Brief Biography
Dennis Tsichritzis obtained his PhD at Princeton (1968) in Computational
complexity. He then joined as a faculty member the CS department at
University of Toronto (1968-1985) where he worked in different areas,
eventually concentrating in the area of Database Systems. During that
period he helped set up the CS department and the Research Institute on
Informatics at the University of Crete, Greece. He returned to Europe as
professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1985-2001) where he
mainly worked on Object oriented Systems. He then became the president and
chief scientist of GMD the German National Research Center on IT
(1991-2001) where he undertook a major restructuring. In 2001 GMD was
merged with Fraunhofer, a major European Research Center, where until
recently he was senior VP and member of the Executive Board.
Talk
Dennis was a professor at University of Toronto and was hired by Kelly Gotlieb, and now he’s back at U of T, so he's coming full circle. His talk is on Markets, Products and US, nobody understands the consumer market and how it relates to corporations. Graduate students come out of university with all this knowledge, but they don’t know how to apply them in the corporate world. If we look at what the big companies are doing, they are hiring in Asia and Europe. We now see a transition in companies from building boxes to building systems. There is an emphasis from technology to business solutions, and business models are changing from selling products to selling services. This is where IBM is going where IBM has initiated a services business and IBM Research is involved with services research.
OK, Blogger is working now, so I'll continue blogging on Blogger.
OK, here's the interesting part of the talk. What happens to the research value chain? How does research fit into the company, and how can grad students get jobs in corporations with the research that they have. Hmm, something that definitely I need to know, as I will graduate hopefully within a year and a half from now. Dennis is now addressing this through curiosity-based research. Humbolt's model is based that high-quality education is based on research. You're doing your own research, you're in this balloon and you pump papers based on the research. What is the pool of the results? The pull effect is zero, nobody is knocking on your door to find out what you are doing (marketing plug: if you're reading this and reading my research, and would like to discuss about my research and want to know more about what I'm doing, contact me). The pull effect is minimal. The basic innovation model is research to applied to research to R&D in corporations. Now, we are going to a fast innovation model where research goes to prototype to start up then to a new product. The pull effect is considerable and the pump effect is strong. The financial pull model is different, it is research to patents to start up to trade sale, the pull effect is extreme and the pump effect is drastic. The next model he is showing is a financial turbo model where you have research to startup to IPO, the pull effect is unbearable and the pump effect is strategic.
Things are changing now. IPOs are getting difficult to get, trade sales are under financial scrutiny (witness all the scandals like HP, Enron, Nortel), venture capitalists are keeping companies to stay afloat longer, venture and private capital is chasing other opportunities, and there is a global economy effect. Therefore, there is no pull and no pump.
So how does this affect us? We need to look at the trends in media, investment choices, employment opportunities, in students' plans and in research programs' emphasis. We basically have to look at the big picture, which is getting more and more complex than before. There are many various factors, which create push and pull forces. Now, info/bio/nanotechnologies are losing ground but energy/health/aging/water/materials are gaining ground in attention and popularity. Customers are looking for solutions and not technologies. Well, that's not really new. We need to listen before we talk, we have to think before we do.
We now see that almost everything in our world is revolving around IT. He suggests that we should enter into new alliances like bioinformatics, geoinformatics, etc. We are now beginning to see this interdisciplinary programs where computer science is being used in different applications. In U of T, we now have a bioinformatics program that is a collaboration between Biology and Computer Science. Computer science algorithms can be used to solve biological problems like for example genetic algorithms and genetic programming for sequencing DNA and for deciphering the human genome. To develop new tools, we need to understand the area.
Where are the obstacles to this line of thinking? It's a result of our culture which encompasses our arrogance, we are worried about pumping publications/visibility/promotion, the research that we are doing is narrow so we need to broaden our horizons, there is an overhead of switching interests and understanding problems, universities are unwilling to change their traditional line of education, etc. There is also a loss of cosy relationships. Basically, we need to have open culture, we need to open ourselves, not close them.
The conclusion of the talk is that if we are not there, then the alliances will come to us.
On Technorati: markets, products, research
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