Time person of the year is “You”

The Time issue has not hit the stands but the announcement itself is a part of what Jag Sheth and Raj Sisodia call The Tectonic Shift and Tom Friedman calls The World is Flat. The unprecedented collaboration between individuals and the enormous outpouring of volunteerism is all made possible by the web. For example just six years ago e-commerce classrooms would reverberate with examples of how the free Grolier encyclopedia disk had overtaken Britannica. Who would have thought that Wikipedia would overtake all regular encyclopedias with very reliable content? In fact, a prominent advertising executive mentioned recently that yellow pages are now extinct as people typically search Yahoo or Google first. Next folks check out forums and discussion groups for any feedback which is again pretty reliable.

All this means really changing times for supply chains. Folks like Dell in computers who have a finger on the customer pulse – directly will continue to do well. Others in the computer industry must figure out what part of this commodity business value chain  they want to be in. With direct involvement of consumers in auto design things are changing pretty fundamentally. Imagine having direct access to consumer  opinion and feedback 24X7X365 – is your organization and its supply chain ready to deliver ?

Marketing Academic in “Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee”

I had just happened to call Professor Rajesh Chandy on Monday over a problem with a US Patent database paper that my Research Assistants and me were grappling with. We were trying to do electronic searches with key words and Rajesh’s articles were not coming up in the Marketing journals. So I called Rajesh and he was as cordial as ever, and gave me some additional keywords that would help our search. They did.

Today, I noticed that Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez has named 15 business and academic leaders including Steve Balmer of Microsoft, George Buckley of 3M, Samuel J. Palmisano of IBM and a host of eminent others to advise on measuring innovation in the 21st Century. Was delighted to note that Professor Rajesh Chandy is on this committee , the only marketing academic to be so nominated. This is quite an achievement because Economists coming from an older much established Nobel prize discipline always seem to dominate Government advising.  Rajesh’s nomination is a big deal for the marketing discipline and it’s perspective on innovation. Congratulations Rajesh Chandy!

Michael Richards: from privacy to Internet broadcast

The discussion about on line privacy and data security has been so far restricted to the question of your personal data being hacked and someone stealing your identity. This can result in a host of problems which can be quite severe but can be potentially corrected. A whole bunch of things can be done to protect against this kind of problem. These include shopping on well known websites, watching your credit report, destroying credit offers, going through your credit card bills and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum is Michael Richards who immortalized Kramer in Seinfeld. I am a huge Seinfeld fan but quite frankly I did not get the same buzz I always got watching Kramer make the usual "Kramer"  entry in a re-run last night. This has to do not so much with what Richards actually said in the comedy club but the fact that one could watch the real  video on I think tmz.com. I will not link the video because I think the whole thing is just too painful. All this raises the question of privacy at the other extreme as Steven Levy writes in Newsweek.  He mentions the Bank of America video that I had blogged about.

This whole "net star" kind of thing is indeed the new frontier of the whole privacy and Internet question. You can never assume that an audience you are speaking to is only listening or watching. The whole world might watch ! The PR,advertising and communication world has now an entirely new "public" to handle ! This is peer to peer , depends on buzz and is pretty largely volunteer driven. And it spreads like well -" wildfire" !

“Google Answers” withdrawn

I am a big Google fan and really became a fan after I started using "Google Scholar." Google Scholar searches citations of scholarly work and lists them in terms of number of citations. Researchers fume at the inaccuracies of Google Scholar because all scholarly material is not digitized (as yet) and perhaps the Scholar algorithms miss some. Nevertheless, Google Scholar gives you a rough cut and if you are otherwise familiar with the scholarly domain you can quickly pick up what is useful and what are  "algorithmic" faux pax.

Familiarity or knowledge is also crucial to make sense of regular "Google" and "Yahoo" searches. Some years ago academe was quite alarmed at students using search engine sources but seemed to have become more accepting these days.

It was therefore with some interest that I learnt the the paid "Google Answers" service has been withdrawn. Google Answers used human support (freelance librarians) to help answer a question. This is the third product to be withdrwan by Google the others being Google Viewer and Google Voice Search. Not bad at all for the many wonderful new products that Google has in beta. Interestingly Yahoo Answers which is free is still on. 

Commentary is mixed on this development. With forums,wikipedia,blogs etc. somebody who has domain knowledge does not need a paid search- if you don’t know the domain the best answers are gibberish, if you don’t know the person answering, as some of the commentators mention. Fascinating, because even gibberish is completely believable with people who we trust like our garage mechanic and doctor when we might not know much about cars or the human body… "Google Answers" obviously figured this out.

Bank of America Video on YouTube

In my MBA Class on New Product and Service Development I use an excellent case "Bank of America" by Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School to teach how experimentation might be used in development of new services. Before teaching this case we  had more exciting discussions about IDEO and 3M and I was trying to enthuse my students about how innovation can be very exciting even in staid businesses like banking. My students (mostly executives in the South East Connecticut area) had enjoyed the case and its learning but did not really buy my pitch that banking  can be "fun".  During the same class we had been discussing the purchase of YouTube by Google.  After the class was over one of my students sent me the BOA Video link . Judging by the enormous popularity of this video and the major criticism it is receiving on the Internet no one can say that Banking and the Financial sector is "dull" or "boring" ! Check out the video for yourself and have a  Great Thanksgiving!

Sony PlayStation 3 launches in two hours

I had tuned in the CBS evening news and was marveling at just how well Katie Couric is handling the job when I was blown away by the Sony PlayStation 3 launch story. Anthony Mason of CBS was interviewing a guy who has been standing in queue since Monday ( three nights and days) to grab an early chance at getting the PlayStation 3.  This person was actually making a list of people waiting and had taken on the volunteer role of regulating the crowd which has stretched several blocks in New York. I checked stories around the country and Canada and the frenzy is everywhere ! Apparently the detailed graphics is a major attraction and the sweat of the basketball player is synchronized with the extent of "virtual" effort the animated player makes. Sony executives are "sweating" because they have 60% of the 10 B $ market ( Just how big is 10B$ – i.e. almost equal to Lipitor the cholesterol drug!)  and things should go just right so soon after the battery problems. Sir Howard Stringer the first non-Japanese CEO of SONY has a tough job in his hands – to reclaim Akio Morita’s SONY that invented the Walkman and a company that has been needlessly slipping. In two hours we’ll know and going from the buzz PlayStation 3 should be a great hit in this holiday season.

Dems,outsourcing and innovation

With the Democrats seizing control of the US Congress and Senate everyone involved in global outsourcing as suppliers or providers would wonder how things are going to be – going forward. To investigate this – I started looking up what folks are saying ….

For those of you watching campaign ads – you would remember that outsourcing was practically a non-issue this time  unlike the 2004 Presidential election. As the shopfloor.org blog reports manufacturing in the US needs a different kind of help including lowering legal,tax, energy and I’ll add healthcare costs. Information week echoes this from Michigan auto industry where outlawing outsourcing is probably going to loose Michigan the new South Korean Kia Factory and its potential new jobs.

Continuing on the jobs situation is research by Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University who suggests that there are enough undergrad engineers in the US  and yet companies are going overseas for the lower cost. In the same story from Duke and reporting a different study Arie Lewin  (a highly respected  organization and international business scholar ) suggests that the engineering talent is simply not growing for  R&D and companies are going overseas for the talent . This  is spurred by declining enrollment in Graduate Engineering and Science programs among US students.

While it is to early to predict decisively what Dems will do with outsourcing – I’d guess that they will focus on innovation being the next stage of outsourcing on one hand, and revamping American High School and Undergrad Science and Engineering Curriculum on the other. With all this has to come more funding for research in this area , irrespective of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power.

Trust,Privacy and Web Science

I recently asked a college freshman about which email account he uses with friends. Apparently most of the freshman’s friends use some chatting feature in Facebook and don’t normally send email but like using AOL chat occasionally. However  college students country wide are quite cut up that everyone (prospective employers included ) can now open an account on "Facebook" without being in academia. This is an "invasion of privacy" fumed  several students…

What is privacy and how does trust operate on the web ? This is the subject that is finally finding priority among the Computer Science academic community. In fact, the inventor of the World Wide Web  Tim Berners-Lee is heading up this project  and computer scientists are in general recognizing that the web has both engineering and social dimensions. The literally exploding nature of social networks on the web including Facebook, MySpace, the social bookmarks manager del.icio.us and for that matter Wikipedia  are bringing together people like never before. They are delighted to leave  free and correct advise on web forums and blogs (I recently fixed my misbehaving garage door opener by searching for answers on garage door forums  ) and formal innovation management has barely started noticing…… these are really exciting times and I am glad that an whole community of marketing scholars had started work on this consumer trust thing before the dot com problems of 2001. In fact, one of my papers that identifies "trust" as an important driver of online buying behavior finally got published in 2006.

Now that the leading computer scientists have started explicitly recognizing the societal and human aspects of computer science the new interdisciplinary "web science" should start catching on.

Fall Back, NE Storms and Halloween.

Today clocks were turned back an hour in the North East ( Spring Forward Fall Back) and yesterday there were wind storms in Connecticut. They didn’t appear very serious but have been deadly with two deaths reported.

For a while we didn’t mind the high winds as they seemed to be blowing the fall leaves away and in fact friends who came over last evening mentioned that our electricity supplier Connecticut Light and Power was actually offering wind powered electricity in our area.  Mild winds were back today and we lost power several times and outages were being reported by the electricity company on an hourly basis.

Losing power several times on a day when you just adjusted all the clocks is interesting because you have to re-set the time on all the electronic clocks , including the microwave and VCR. Another chore is to re-set the Internet cable and VoIP phone.  Things got a bit spooky when the lights went off after dark with Halloween just round the corner. Let’s hope that power is restored completely before Halloween on Tuesday.   Mild unreliability of electricity supply in the US makes you aware of most places in the world where electricity is not there or  can be routinely sporadic. Suppliers frequently have their own power generation as back-up and for larger service deliveries have supply locations in different countries.

From Kansas – an academic speaks out

I was in Kansas City in April for a Sales Management Conference at the University of Missouri at Columbia. This involved a two hour drive through flat tranquil fields and then to a surprisingly high tech and rather grand  University of Missouri. I must confess that the "O" word crossed my mind during this drive as the farmland looked "flat" and reminded me of Friedman’s  "The World is Flat". It’s rather ironical that one of the first news reports of a senior academic talking about the "O" word should come from some of the "flattest" terrain in the US that I have seen.

The news reporter has a wounded headline " KU Provost touts outsourcing" and reports that the new KU Provost Richard Lariviere told the audience of 70 at the Alvamar Country Club that outsourcing was not only inevitable but desirable for the growth of the US. Clearly the reporter did not take kindly to the erudite Provost’s remarks and judging by the comments on the news story , neither do several readers of the Lawrence Journal World of Kansas City.  From reading the news report all that Dr. Richard Lariviere asked for was a greater focus on educating the American work force in the right skills and manner to take advantage of the global outsourcing phenomenon.  Unless the community starts recognizing the new world  reality it is hard for the existing workforce and more importantly the academic community to start re-tooling the curriculum to enable the American worker to continue enjoying the best living standards in the world.  A bit like "unless you are in it you cannot win it" – simply denying globalization is not useful for anyone. But  Dr.  Richard Lariviere  has made a start and I wish other academic leaders start speaking out as well.