Interview: Satish Nambisan

Nambisan is an associate professor of technology management and strategy at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as a widely-recognized researcher and thought-leader in the broad area of technology and innovation management. Over the past ten years or so, he has conducted research on several important issues related to product development, technology strategy, innovation networks, and information technology. Through his countless articles in premier management journals, he continues to influence both research and practice in the above areas. He holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and MBA and Bachelor of Technology degrees from India. He was a Visiting Faculty at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in 2006. His latest book, The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World, was co-authored with Mohanbir Sawhney and published by the Wharton School Publishing in November 2007.

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of Nambisan. The complete interview is also available.

Morris: What are the underlying principles of collaborative or network-centric innovation?

Nambisan: We identify four core principles of network-centric innovation. First, the partners involved in the innovation initiative should have a set of shared goals and objectives. Second, they should also have a shared “world-view,” – a common way of interpreting the external environment so that they could adapt to changes in a coherent manner. The third principle, social knowledge creation, emphasizes that much of new knowledge created will be through interactions among the different partners. The fourth principle, architecture of participation, relates to the need to offer all the partners a well-defined system to support both the co-creation of value as well as the fair appropriation of value.

Morris: What are the four basic models and key elements of network-centric innovation?

Nambisan: The framework is a very intuitive and simple one based on two dimensions. The first dimension considers the nature of the innovation space – whether it is well defined or something where the goals are not clear at the beginning, but will emerge over time. The other dimension is how much control you want to exercise. Is it a highly centralized network or is it a much more community-oriented or democratic type of network? Based on those two dimensions, one can identify four different types of network-centric innovation.

The first is the “Orchestra” model – wherein the innovation space is well defined and a dominant firm calls the shots. The Boeing 787 project is a good example of that. Boeing assembled a set of global partners whom it could trust with the process of creating entire sections of the plane, from concept to production. The design and development tasks were not just outsourced to these partners. Instead, partners made financial investments in those tasks.

In the second model, the “Creative Bazaar’, the innovation space is much more emergent, but it still involves a dominant firm. As in the case of a bazaar, you can go and get relatively raw ideas and then bring them inside and develop them, or you can buy well-baked product concepts and the only thing you would have to do is bring them inside and get them to the market. As noted earlier, a whole lot of players ranging from InnoCentive, Nine Sigma, etc. to innovation capitalists are involved in intermediating the transactions between the inventors and the firm.

The third model “Jam Central” is one wherein the innovation space is emergent and at the same time there is no one dominant firm; it is a community. As in a jam session, the community members actually share in the responsibility to govern the network, or to manage the flow of the music. There’s a lot of improvisation — nothing is really turned down. That’s how the innovation evolves. In our book, we use the example of the Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI), a community-based innovation initiative launched by a group of academic scientists to find cures for various tropical diseases.
The last model, the “MOD (Modification) Station” model, is one wherein the innovation space is well defined, but still there is no dominant firm. It is governed by a community. One of the interesting examples we came across was Sun Microsystems’ OpenSPARC Initiative (www.OpenSPARC.net). Sun put a version of it on the open-source community and allowed people to innovate on that platform. Here is an innovation architecture that is well-defined by one firm, but it gets innovated upon in a community. The output from that innovation actually belongs to the community, so it’s an open-source license.
Within each of these four models, we identify the different types of roles that companies can play, either as the dominant firms or intermediary roles. It’s not only crucial to identify the model that fits your company, but also what kind of role you will play. Then you can look at what kind of process infrastructure you need to build internally to support that kind of role. You can also look at the IP-related issues and other organizational structures that you might need to implement or establish to support the role that your company plays.

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If you wish to read the complete article, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.

You are invited to check out the resources at these Web sites:

www.ssireview.org/images/articles/2009SU_Feature_Nambisan.pdf

Additional resources are available at these Web sites:

The Global Brain Web: www.theglobalbrain.net

Nambisan’s professional page: http://www.rpi.edu/~ nambis

His innovation blog: http://nambisan.typepad.com

Developing a Love of Reading

Books to love

I have a confession.  I love to read.  It started with comic books, then progressed to the Hardy Boys, and then really took hold with all of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout (I own the entire collection, and re-read them every few years).  I admit that I took a brief trip into Mickey Spillane for awhile (no, I didn’t tell tell my mother).  But for as long as I can remember, I have loved to read.

I speak to residents of retirement communities, and recently one such resident had to move from independent living to assisted living.  He is quite a man, and has read all of his life.  In World War II, he was among those who liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp just a short time after Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at the camp.  (If only they had gotten there a little earlier).  Well, this man moved into assisted living because he has lost his sight.  His greatest loss, in his own words:  “I can’t read any longer.”

My bias is clear.  We need a new generation of folks who love to read.  So I read with enthusiasm this article, A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like, in a recent New York Times.  The approach is simple.  The teachers let the students pick their own books, rather than assigning every one the same book to read.  It’s a middle school inititative, sweeping across the country.  Here’s the key paragraph:

But fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.

One Book at a Time

“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

Is it working?  Not for every student, but it is for some.  Here is a letter that every teacher longs for:

In the final week of school Helen Arnold, Jennae’s mother, sent Ms. McNeill an e-mail message thanking her. “She never really just read herself for enjoyment until she took your class,” Ms. Arnold wrote.

This is a primarily a business book blog, usually dealing with business issues.  Here’s a business issue worth pondering – how do we build a generation of people who love to read?  Because if we succeed at this, more will read all types of books – including good business books.

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Personal note — a suggested place to start:  with either Some Buried Caesar, an early volume, or The Doorbell Rang, a later volume, and maybe his best.  These present Nero Wolfe and his Watson, Archie Goodwin, at their best.

About those E-versions of books… The worry mounts

Go to the article to click on the visual for a better view

I have written before about the danger to the “traditional book” (you know — the kind you hold in your hand, the kind with a cover, and pages, and the smell of books if they are old enough) posed by the arrival of the Kindle and its rivals.  The worry is spreading far and wide.

Here are the words of the head of a major French publishing group:

Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned.

His complaint is primarily the fixed price of $9.99.  Out-of-copyright books have no author to pay, and the current hard covers are $9.99, which means:

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

I don’t know the ultimate outcome of this battle.  It is still very early.  But one look at sales figures for Kindle versions of best-sellers and you learn that the market share is rising faster than most imagined it would.  And it is still in its infancy.  As I have said, just wait until Apple comes out with a reader, as is rumored.

And– market share, price point — these do not touch on another key feature, the sheer convenience of the product.  You can literally carry an entire library in your hand.

Let’s keep checking back in on over time.  It is going to be an interesting ride.