Abstract
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.
Biography
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former Chief Technology Officer at IBM, had focused on innovation and technical strategy for IBM for 37 years. He was responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments critical to the future of the IT industry, and organizing appropriate activities in and outside IBM in order to capitalize on them. He led a number of IBM’s companywide initiatives including the Internet and e-business, supercomputing, Linux, and Grid computing. He continues to consult for IBM on major new market strategies like Cloud Computing and Smart Planet.
In March of 2008, Dr. Wladawsky-Berger joined Citigroup as Strategic Advisor, helping with innovation and technology initiatives across the company. He is helping to formulate Citigroup initiatives related the future of global banking, including mobile banking, Internet-based financial services, and financial systems modeling and analysis.
He is Visiting Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, Adjunct Professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School, and Senior Fellow at the Levin Institute of the State University of New York. He is a member of the InnoCentive Advisory Board, the Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations Board, the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Scientists, the Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago and the Board of Visitors for the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
He was co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, as well as a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He is a former member of the University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories, of the Board of Overseers for Fermilab and of BP’s Technology Advisory Council. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A native of Cuba, he was named the 2001 Hispanic Engineer of the Year.
Dr. Wladawsky-Berger received an M.S. and a Ph. D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
If you would like to register for the event or for enquiry, please contact Lucinda Gleeson.