BIF-3 Storyteller Irving Wladawski-Berger Named to Obama Innovation Team
BIF-3 storyteller Irving Wladawski-Berger was recently named to President-elect Barack Obama's Technology and Innovation Panel which will oversee his "Innovation Agenda," a set of policy proposals that will aim to make government operations more transparent, use high-technology to create jobs and get average citizens more involved in government.
Irving is a great friend of BIF and highly qualified to this post. Through his nearly 40-year career at IBM Irving has been involved with everything from the dawn of supercomputing, to the rise of Linux and open source and the birth of the Internet. Over the years, he's driven several of Big Blue's core business strategies and helped the company evolve into the powerhouse it is today. A couple of years ago he "partially retired" and headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach his first graduate seminar on advanced technologies, business transformation and innovation.
Irving's story at the BIF-3 summit in 2007 is a community favorite. During his onstage interview with Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg he offered his theory on business model innovation, essentially saying that no company can truly reinvent itself without having a near-death experience. He later posted a follow-up reflection to his blog:
"Must a successful organizational re-invention be preceded by the kind of cataclysmic events that open up the mind to new experiences - essentially cleaning the brain from its previous inflexible views of life? The ancient Greeks certainly thought so, as reflected in their tragedies.
So, in reply to Walt's initial question, I told him that I believe that IBM's near-death experience was - in my opinion - an essential part of our successful transformation. We used to think that we were the marketplace - the kind of hubris that the gods in Mount Olympus will absolutely punish. Having invented RISC microprocessors and relational data bases in our research labs, as well as established the IBM PC as the leader in the marketplace, we let others reap the benefits of our work because we were making so much money from our proprietary mainframes, compared to the returns from these puny, emerging businesses. They don't call them tragic flaws for nothing." ~Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Established companies are actually rather good at embracing change if it sustains their current business model and delivers an improved product or service for their customers. Unfortunately, most companies are not good at investing to create new growth businesses while their core business is still growing and successful. And I think that's Irving's point. How many examples of truly deep-seated transformation can you site that did not involve what Irving calls a near-death experience?
What organizations need is an ongoing process to explore new business models (even models that might threaten the current one). What’s needed is a ‘safe haven’ for experimentation - an R&D lab for new business models if you will. That's the proposition behind the Business Innovation Factory. With an iterative approach to validation, BIF is building a platform to explore and experiment with new business models much in the same way new products and technologies are tested today. It's a platform where organizations can keep their current business models up and running while they design and test new ways of delivering value. Important work - because without a persistent process of this kind, I suspect Irving's theory will remain steadfastly true.
Congratulations to Irving! This significant post is well-deserved.
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