Guest lecturer at The George Washington University (EMIS)

I had the pleasure of being a guest lecturer at The George Washington University Executive Master of Science in Information Systems (EMIS) program's class on “Emerging Technology” taught by the cool and capable professor Andrea Armstrong. My conversation with the class focused on innovation, which I will share in this blog. As an alumnus of the program, it was great to do a good turn and give back to a program that helped me grow professionally.

My approach to the class was to be provocative and a source of information for the students. After a brief introduction on my background and current areas of interest, I launched into the presentation. The synopsis of the key points of my presentation is provided in this blog.

The areas where I am currently spending my time and energy on innovation are:

• IT automation
• Mobility and pervasive computing
• Big data and data analytics
• Data centers

First, I presented the typical innovation graph (shown to the right of this paragraph) and posed the question: "Why should you believe this graph?" From my point of view I am suspicious of anything that looks like a normal distribution. The world is so complex that I rarely believe it can be synthesized into a pretty curve.  I then challenged the class's thinking about successful Innovators. Their textbook listed five key visionaries who I would not dispute their contributions or the authors’ research. As an innovator, I wish I could have the same impact they had. From my lens, however, the book also should have included all the visionaries’ failures and other work that fills the gap between both the extremes of success and failure. Would a sample show that the pool of innovators analyzed had similar traits, but the outcome was that some succeeded while others landed into obscurity. Maybe good intentions are not enough. Perhaps time and space or something else is the key descriptor.  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers makes a good case for this hypothesis.

After some fun group discussion, we moved to the second point of my presentation:  innovation is likely an idea that germinated over a long period of time.

I provided an example about Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that his theory of natural selection came to him in a “flash,” but after his death researchers poured through his notes and found that his idea evolved over time (no pun intended). My aim during this part of the presentation was to encourage the class members to be passionate about their ideas and not give up on the first try or 100 tries to create something significant.

The third and last point of my presentation was innovation leverages human networks. Using the example of Burning Man (on my bucket list to attend), I posed the question: “Does innovation happen there?” My next slide showed an image of Silicon Valley and posed the question: “How are Burning Man and Silicon Valley different?” After some discussion I opened up the conversation to discover was on the class’s collective mind other than their Capstone project. The most popular topic was how to handle the grey line between the business and personal spaces of employees regarding the use of social media. 

Burning Man

Thank you EMIS Cohort for the opportunity to present to you also to learn from you that day.