Open Innovations event at the Computer History Museum

I was asked to attend a conference on Open Innovations, a topic in which we here at Xpree have some interest. The venue for the event could not have been more appropriate: the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Speakers included innovators from Max Mancini from eBay, Rich Friedrich from HP Labs, Roy Levin from Microsoft Research, Roger Meike from Sun, Ike Nassi from SAP, and Marie-Anne Neimat from Oracle.

Unfortunately I missed Max’s presentation (the first of the day), but the next several speakers turned out to be quite interesting; namely, HP’s Rich Friedrich, Microsoft’s Roy Levin, and, most impressively, Sun’s Roger Meike, who went into detail about some of the innovations and innovative techniques used at Sun. Among the innovations he mentioned was Sun’s Black Box (ironically, which is not black), one of which UC Berkeley recently purchased that sits right outside Soda Hall, and the SunSPOT, a rather unique device that lets you design on a high level on embedded devices, which, classically, was a rather difficult proposition.

Visiting Roger’s table after the end of the speaker series, I had an opportunity to chat with Roger as well as play with some of the SunSPOTs. Amusingly, one of Meike’s associates reacted with surprise when he noted that he could run two applications on the same SunSPOT without any problems, something he had apparently never attempted before. As he stated in his presentation (I’m paraphrasing), “We love chasing shiny new objects.” Compared to more structured innovative techniques other companies presented, Sun’s innovation labs seem to allow for more of this freeform growth of technology, which is an exciting thing to see.

For our part, we were interested in seeing how innovations are fostered and dropped by different corporations. It seems to me that most take a sweeping, shotgun-like approach to innovations; throw engineers in the right direction then shake them a little, and good ideas will fall out. In my opinion, greater importance should be given to streamline innovative development to push development forward, not outward. While good ideas do come out of freeform research divisions like Sun’s labs, not everyone is so positioned with the financial security to make such a lab possible. For smaller companies, this is not an option.

For more details on the event (and pictures!), visit http://www.djcline.com/2008/08/20/aug-15-2008-sdf-innovation-and-research-fair/