The Emerging Technology Pioneer

After 37 years at IBM, it's safe to say that Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a company man. From the dawn of supercomputing to the rise of Linux and open source and the Internet, Wladawsky-Berger has been involved with it all. Over the years, he's driven several of Big Blue's core business strategies and helped the company evolve into the innovation powerhouse it is today.

So what drove this Cuban-born vice president for technical strategy and innovation to announce his partial retirement earlier this year? And what's he going to do with his new found free time?

"I don't have a dramatic story to share. I just wanted to spend more time working with universities. And I wanted to teach," he says.

So at the tender age of 62, Wladawsky-Berger is headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall to teach his first graduate seminar: Advanced Technologies, Business Transformation and Innovation. "Partial retirement gives me some extra time," he says.

Wladawsky-Berger is a futurist. And an emerging technology champion. But he's also a business realist. As former general manager of IBM's Internet division he was one of the few raising his hand against the prevailing assumption that Internet-only businesses would rule the world. "No, no, no, I said. Anybody can leverage the Internet for business value. And of course, that's what turned out. The Internet became a major part of every business."

This soft-spoken man with a slight Spanish accent is incredibly articulate. And while he continues to immerse himself in new fields of research, a relative newcomer to the technology scene has captured his attention — virtual worlds. "I drank the kool-aid and haven't looked back," he says. "I am frankly fascinated by our increasing ability to deal with all kinds of applications in a highly visual, interactive way. After all, that is how we generally deal with the world around us."

For anyone not familiar, virtual worlds like Second Life are intuitive, human-oriented interfaces where people come together for a virtual meet and greet. You can stay a while, shop, play some games, interact and co-habitate.

And while platforms like Second Life have certainly reaped a lot of media attention — some not always good — Wladawsky-Berger has taken the idea to a whole different level, with infinite possibilities beyond the mere social networking tool it is today.

"Over the last year, especially when my colleagues in IBM started interacting with virtual worlds, they weren't just playing games, they were experimenting on how to use this virtual world to have more effective distance meetings, to offer distance education courses." Wladawsky-Berger says.

This was his "a-ha moment." "All of a sudden the lightbulb went off," he says. "Suddenly I'm seeing how the types of visualization I used in science and engineering could be applied to many more applications like learning, commerce and communications."

After listening to Wladawsky-Berger, you get a sense of the massive potential this platform has for all kinds of new applications, new ways of thinking and new ways of learning. "My view is that this will be one of the major ways we deal with all applications in the near future," he says.

Are we ready for this? "People are drowning in information," he says. "Biologically speaking, we handle information all kinds of ways but primarily, our brains are wired for sight and sound. But in the last 100 years or so, text-based information has become the primary channel for receiving information. Why is that when it feels like a much narrower channel into our brain?"

A huge movie buff — "I can absorb a lot in a couple of hours" — Wladawsky-Berger believes good directors are able to reach us in a much richer way, beyond the data stream. "They're coming to us through a variety of different channels: music, voice, visual," he says. "We should look at many other applications and ask ourselves the question, how do we deliver them within this type of experience?"

Today, Wladawsky-Berger is happy to keep his feet firmly planted in the research world helping to transform the theoretical idea of virtual worlds into a scientific field of study. But he also believes that within five to 10 years, how we receive, synthesize and experience information will be completely different than it is today.

"This is one of the most fascinating challenges," he says. "What's so interesting is that we do have the tools. We can design business applications in a far more human-oriented way than the way we do it today. It's no wonder that so many of us are so excited about the possibilities."