Erotema

Yet another restart, this time from my new Macintosh.

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posted by Wayne D. Wilson @ 2:23 PM 1 comments

Restart

posted by Wayne D. Wilson @ 1:50 PM 0 comments

Innovation through industrial R&D

Today I read an article in a business magazine about how GE is going to revitalize it's revenue growth through innovation from research. This took me back two days to the 4th of July, which we spent at Greenfield Village. A pretty good place to celebrate America, despite it's remove from the events of 1776. Henry Ford had both Thomas A. Edison's Menlo Park compound as well as Wilbur and Orvile Wright's bicycle shop moved to Greenfield village to preserve them for posterity.

Two of these three names are still in everday use and GE is a distant descendent of the Wizard of Menlo Park. Edison's output spanned a range of areas, with over a 1000 patents in his lifetime, it would have to.

While the Wright's were entirely focused on a break through with no short term commerical opportunities, Edison also worked on breakthroughs. Unlike the Wright's, who were otherwise employed, Edison used his many incremental improvement patents to finance his work, which included some entirely new devices, which would not make money until entire commercial systems became available. Motion pictures is a good example. A movie projector needs a camera, a set of newly skilled movie makers, studios, production and distribution systems and movie theaters before it can start making money. This was a long term systems building project.

GE is working with some exotic materials, such as nano-particles, but it seems that GE is talking about incremental improvement in existing systems.

The only really fundamental development these days, that I can think of, would be quantum technology. While quantum applications can be imagined, and their properties worked out theoretically, it's the building of models and the experimentation on those models as a process of invention that seems lacking.

Building electromagnetic devices was readily done in Edison's day's. An inventor, such as Edison, could equip himself with a dozen assistants skilled in mechanics, chemistry, physics and literature research, house them in an isolated, yet state of the art laboratory and proceed to build and experiment on devices. Today, it probably takes someone the size of GE or some national government to work on the quantum devices. And, without a reasonable near term payout, today, as it was in Edison's day's, existing large sources of money are unwilling to back entirely new inventions that will require entirely new systems to support them.

posted by Wayne D. Wilson @ 3:32 PM 0 comments

Revolutions

Thomas P. Hughes, in the 2000 Gould lecture at the University of Utah, talks about industrial revolutions and the criteria to be used to evaluate whether there is an information revolution.

His conclusion is that there is, and that depending on how you count, the information revolution is the Third Industrial Revolution. The first being the British Industrial Revolution, the second being the American Industrial Revolution, is the third a national phenomena or a world wide phenomena? Is the Information Revolution the New World Order?

One of the most telling indicators of an industrial revolution, to me, is the flurry of interrelated innovations that characterises the early stages. These innovations create a series of mutually interlocking developments across a broad swath of activities. For example, Hughes describes the Second Industrial Revolution like the First as involving 'new interlocking means of transportation, new power sources, new materials, mass production of consumer goods, advances in industrial chemistry, and innovative modes of production."

Hughes suggests that such interlocked developments are still in their formative stages for the Information Revolution and that bio-technology has not yet been fully integrated.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, social and political changes accompanied the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. Hughes sees in a change in managment practices evidence of such change. I find this the most provacative part of his analysis. The change in management practices resulting from Fordism and Taylorism to such new practices as flat, distributed, flexible and entrepreneurial practices is his evidence. He finds in the counter culture movement of the late 60's the seeds for the new managment practices. I will have to re-read my Rozak (The Making of a Counter Culture, 1969).

posted by Wayne D. Wilson @ 8:10 AM 0 comments

We can make up for it in volume.

Today's Information Week contains an interesting article about the Bush Administrations new coordinator of health care IT, Dr. David Brailer.
The article starts this way:

"There's a growing sense among members of the health-care industry that if they don't take action soon to better use IT to improve health care and lower costs, the federal government will dictate policies and possibly even tech standards. And it's a sense of dread, thanks to the fresh memory of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a set of tough federal rules governing the way medical information is gathered, stored, shared, and protected that has forced considerable compliance-related spending."

Now HIPAA, mentioned above, has increased the cost of health care so far. So, someone thinks by threatening a 'son of hipaa', which will increase costs yet again, industry will be rushed into spending more money to lower costs?

More than likely the health care IT providers will be rushing to government offices trying to get whatever their software does written into regulations as a must have!

posted by Wayne D. Wilson @ 3:07 PM 0 comments