A Talk by ex-IBM's CTO at Imperial Business School (13/10/09, 17:00-18:00)

I have registered and reserved myself for an interesting talk tomorrow (13 October 2009) at Imperial Business School, to be delivered by:Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former Chief Technology Officer at IBM,. The topic captivates me to understand how innovation surpasses beyond the time reach and how stakeholders need to be very much responsive. I attempt to anticipate some useful pointers that may surround on issue of technology and regulations (generally). Although it's not a pure legal seminar, I think, it's worthy to look into different perspectives.

The abstract (as totally copied - for notification and educational purpose):

Over the past century, science and technology have been successfully applied to innovation in the industrial sector of the economy, leading to very high productivity and quality, and to the development of highly sophisticated and complex objects like airplanes, skyscrapers and microprocessors.

The services sector comprises between 70 - 80% of the GDP and jobs in advanced economies around the world. Services are ubiquitous across many sectors of the economy, e.g., finance, healthcare, retail, creative industries, business support, education and transportation and logistics. Advances in information technologies have enabled us to bring significant innovation to services and services industries, such as ATMs, reservation systems and supply chain management.

But, we have a long way to go in improving the productivity and quality of services, especially given their large and growing role in advanced, as well as emerging economies. As pointed out in a recent report by the Royal Society (Hidden wealth: the contribution of science to service sector innovation - July 2009), services are not easily visible in the economy, and their nature is not well understood. This makes it difficult for companies, policy makers and universities to support the kind of research and innovation programs in the services sector that have worked so well in the industrial sector.

The seminar will build on the recent Royal Society report. We will explore the differences between "classic" industrial sector innovation and innovation in the services economy. In particular, we will focus on the multi-disciplinary and collaborative nature of services innovation, and the new organizations and leadership structures it requires. We will illustrate the discussion with concrete examples from a variety of industries, including health care, learning, public sector and banking.