"Open Innovation leveraging IBM Watson" class in UC Berkeley

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.