When Watson meets Open Innovation
It was interesting to note that UC Berkeley
opened undergraduate class titled "Open Innovation leveraging IBM Watson"
at Hass Business school in UC Berkeley from Fall semester, this year. I came
across this class during my web navigation of Henry Chesbrough's Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation. I thrilled to see this course and the thought occurred struck
me that it is the symbolic example of Watson ecosystem and father of open
innovation actually undertook the mission of raising future talents who will
ultimately marry the Cognitive computing with open business model as T-shaped professionals.
Those
of you who are not familiar with open innovation, Open innovation is a term
promoted by Henry Chesbrough, faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California,
in a book of the Open Innovation published in 2003. Wikipedia kindly illustrates
open innovation as, "Open
innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external
ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as
the firms look to advance their technology".
It
was particularly interest given my Ph.D research areas were centered around open
innovation and open source business model and IBM Watson Ecosystem announcement
also direct related to my business relationship with leading South Korea
Electronic company for their future business model. Watson,
the name for the IBM supercomputer best known for crushing “Jeopardy!” contestants,
is prepping its “cognitive computing” technology to be utilized by third-party
developers for the first time via a Watson cloud service called the “Watson Ecosystem.”
According
to Haas Student Blog, IBM has selected UC Berkeley, among less than a dozen
universities, to participate in IBM Watson’s cognitive computing course to be
offered in Fall 2014. According to Spohrer, Director of IBM Global University
Programs, Watson can be built for any discipline , whether it is for business
discovery, financial advice, retail, or medicine. The class is an opportunity
for innovative students to utilize their creativity and go beyond oneself to
help people through the Watson computer. Spohrer hopes this kind of cognitive
computing will allow more flexibility in communication to be incorporated in
one’s daily life, versus the current form of programming which necessitates
expertise in special or unique languages. The students will compete against six
other top schools to win $100,000 to seed their venture. Most importantly, the
group gets to own the IP they created.
How Watson can contribute to business?
OK
then, this collaboration between IBM Watson and UC Berkeley naturally lead us
to ask the question why?... Why Berkeley Hass school open the class within
center for corporation innovation in UC Berkeley? I may not portray the full
picture here, but probably I can attempt to do some jigsaw puzzles...
university is another locus of open innovation particularly when new paradigm
of technology is emerged. Think about early 60s' IBM efforts on computer
science discipline. IBM constructed beachhead in Columbia University for birth
of Computer Science Discipline at that time, do you now can see the another
Deja-vu?
Soon
after Watson demonstrated the capability of answering complex queries within 3
seconds from “Jeopardy!”
contestants, IBM directly start to explore Healthcare
diagnose application area such as disease diagnose from Smart Phone. Motivation
here is, getting smarter with technology that analyzes and understands natural
language content, it's going to open a door to having companies look at the
potential. There's traditional databases
on one side, there's keyword search on the other, but right in this middle, in
this sweet spot where people are struggling to get greater precision to get
greater breadth in answering information
needs. Here's some potential uses for IBM's Cognitive Cloud services from
Watson:
1. Watson
the shopping companion: On a mobile device with location services on,
Watson could track your current location and give you competitive rates for
products you want across several outlets in your vicinity, and alert you if
you’re about to pass a certain store that has what you’re looking for. In other
words, if you’re in a shopping mall, and several stores have the item you want,
Watson could automatically find the lowest available price for whatever you’re
looking for (once you set your location parameters) and direct you there.
2. Watson
the personalized contents aggregator: Watson could tap into news
applications or aggregators like Flipboard or Zite and read aloud news bits its
user is asking about, but Watson would hopefully be able to remember its user’s
preferences and, over time, begin automatically pulling stories it knows the
user will probably be interested in. For instance, if a user constantly asks
Watson for news about weather and typhoons, Watson could scan the news
constantly and recommend certain news stories related to science and climate
change – anything relevant to the user’s interests.
3. Watson
the nurse: If WebMD could integrate Watson into its symptom checker,
assuming Watson could hold a conversation and remember prior details, users
could tell Watson about all of their symptoms, and Watson could return lists of
possible conditions and medical solutions, be it home cures or recommending a
doctor visit. Furthermore, Watson could search deeper through WebMD to
recommend certain drugs or home treatments, or even locate and contact a nearby
pharmacy to go pick up medicine.
4. Watson
the contact center agent: Most of contact center agents devoted to follow
the Q&A guidance computer screen, and reality is, they were often flustered
to catch up exact prescript on time and even miss the question during the
conversation. What if Watson provide the personalized self-service experience
for clients by dynamically developing personal profiles from unstructured data almost
real-time?
5. Watson
the research discovery agent: What if all the research related information
on the planet including global patent information and up-to-dated research
information have loaded into Watson system through real-time searching and
crawling? Would it be nice if Watson identify the rear studies and information
sources while building a case for original research?
Why UC Berkeley?
Garwood
Center for Corporate Innovation( formerly Center for Open Innovation) in Hass
School of Business was known for source of Open Innovation study. The Center houses
the Open Innovation Program, the Berkeley Innovation Forum, a membership
organization dedicated to sharing knowledge about innovation challenges. Prof. Henry
Chesbrough is faculty director of this center and He is the first person to
clearly define the new innovation strategy that is restructuring R&D
worldwide—open innovation. His first book was Open Innovation in 2003 followed
by Open Business Model, Open Innovation: Researching new paradigm (R&D),
and Open Service Innovation.
Given Prof. Chesbrough's footprint in
R&D, business model and service innovation from the context of open
innovation, we can easily guess that students in Management of Technology track
in Hass School may explore the way to create new business model based on Watson
Cognitive Computing paradigm in conjunction with new user experiences and new
service innovation more in open innovation and collaborative manner.
This course will let undergraduate students
access to the Watson Developer Cloud to learn about the technical aspects of
cognitive computing, including ingesting, building and training a corpus, and
then in the second half of the semester, using that information to build a
cognitive app and developing a business model as a precursor to taking their
ideas to market. The students taking this course will be among the first to
have hands-on access to the cutting-edge Watson technology, enabling them to
develop innovative ideas to solve the most pressing problems of industry and
society. Gartner Inc., a research firm predicts that 4.4 million IT jobs will
be created to support Big Data by 2015.
Epilogue
To me, this is interesting move to academia
as well as IBM from the lens of open innovation. Watson Cognitive Computing
paradigm itself probably seemed not able to flourish within IBM company
boundary alone given the complexity and string necessity of cross discipline confluence
between business model, use cases and different expertise in industry and IT
skills.
So this class is perceived as another type
of data scientist course armed with enterpreneurship and business model
innovation, so ultimately enabling them to develop innovative ideas to solve
the most pressing problems of industry and society.
I wish all the best in success and great
advancement of open innovation between IBM and UC Berkeley.
**The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.
