Desicritics Category: BizTech: Innovation

Changing The Mindset - From Scientists To Entrepreneurs

Ashoka Chakra — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 22:33:52 EDT

There are many reasons for the United States' dominance in science. Freedom to operate, (relative) lack of seniority and sycophancy, and availability of funds are among them. Another reason the US has been in the forefront of technological innovation is that it allows scientists to be entrepreneurs. Take a look at the cluster of innovative companies coming out of Universities in California and Massachusetts and you get the picture. Companies span the gamut of fields, ranging from software to biotechnology. In most countries, this dual role is frowned upon, if not forbidden outright.

Such was the case in India as well. For example, in 2001, Swami Manohar and three colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore invented the Simputer, a simple and cheap hand-held computer. However, being employees of a public entity, they could not commercialize their invention. So Manohar and colleagues left and founded their own company, which was in turn bought out by Geodesic. If they had been in the US, they would have had many options including being on the SAB or even a senior executive of the company while still retaining their academic post.

Indian scientists will now have a similar choice. On 24 February, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research issued regulations that permits researchers at government-funded institutions to hold equity stakes in scientific enterprises and spinoff companies.

Approximately 400,000 scientists, about three-quarters of the scientific work force, are employed at public institutions. By bringing India in line with the United States and other Western nations, the new rules should create an attractive environment for talented faculty. The new rules also permit research institutes to hold equity stakes in commercial enterprises. To facilitate this process, the government will encourage the lateral mobility of researchers between institutes and industry. This would also be good of institutions who could reap tremendous financial rewards from successful spin-offs.

So a talented scientist who comes up with a novel idea won't have to play office politics or be sycophantic to his/her boss any more. They can keep their position and at the same time, start a company.

In this instance, it is good that India is following America's lead.

Innovation - That Strange Mythical Animal

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 05:16:13 EST

It was an interesting email that I got from Google Alerts. I have an alert setup for “innovation” as a keyword. The interesting thing is that I get the most interesting and curious hits on that keyword. As it so happens, on the same email, I got referred to a Businessweek article on innovation and another article on how Nortel could not save itself from bankruptcy despite investing heavily in innovation.

Innovation is a tough thing. What exactly is it? Something to do with new things? OK, lets run with it for now. But everybody and his dog wants to be known as innovative. Nothing wrong with it at all. But just like every buzz word, it needs to be treated carefully. People can get into all this innovation business too much and then forget about the basics of business. The two articles given above are interesting examples of this phenomena.

My son has been on World of Warcraft for the past 4 years now and has a good little business running there. So I have a fair idea of what is happening there. He has also managed to rope in my little princess as a magic maid, so that promises to be a good story one day. Anyway, I do appreciate the points made in the article about how WoW has managed to incorporate basic principles of innovation into its game so that it is doing brilliantly. I quote some of the main principles that the authors quote as lessons from the game:

Reduce barriers to entry and to early advancement
Provide clear and rich metrics to assess performance
Keep raising the bar
Don't neglect intrinsic motivations
Provide opportunities to develop tacit knowledge, but do not neglect broader knowledge exchange
Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging performance targets
Encourage frequent and rigorous performance feedback
Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

But I have a bit of an issue here, and that is that the principles seems to be driven from the story and then generalised. To put it in another way, if I had to pick up these principles and plonk it into any other business, i can, very easily, but does that mean that my old business has suddenly become innovative? Or that innovation starts gushing from each pore? No, obviously not. None of these principles are wrong at all. But at end of the day, people have to keep a a laser eye out on the main business of selling profitably.

Which brings us to the second example, that of Nortel. Nortel did everything that these principles said should be done. It turned its attention to new products, it brought in imaginative thinkers, changed its investment policy, new products were gushing out, strategy was changed, people were let go and new people hired, and so on and so forth. But does this mean that they did wrong? No, just that their basic idea of migrating the firm into a new world of web 2.0 was simply not good enough. It just bombed. As a matter of fact, you could point towards its debt load but then again, they already had $2.6 billion in cash. That again was not enough to save it from going under provided its products were good enough to provide a good cashflow. Which it didn't.

Depending upon which product category you refer to, innovative products have a very high failure rate, ranging from 40% to 90% (as reported in the HBR – June 2006 edition). When you are talking about such a high failure rate, to maintain innovative capability is paramount. You have to dust yourself off and keep on working. In a recent research paper where innovation was studied with respect to Sun, what is normally held to be an innovative company. After one of their products bombed, the researchers coin what is called as Innovation Trauma. This manifests itself by disillusionment, cynicism and contagious demotivation.

So what do you do to improve matters? The researchers suggest that individuals who were championing and pushing innovative products should be given time to disengage from their previous work. Second, they need to conduct post-mortems on the failure to find out why that happened and if they can learn from the results. Third, this postmortem is best if its done collaboratively by the original team or a team of some sort, an innovation anonymous, if you will. Fourth, seed the failure aspects into a new project so that the old failure is uplifted by the excitement of the new project while the new project is calibrated downwards by the caution of the old failed project. Expectations management.

So what do you do? Here’s something that we are trying to do. The British Political system is pushing heavily on the idea that Britain has to become an innovative idea. Pretty good stuff, but how do you deal with innovation? I have recently been invited to join a group on Innovation which will assist in coming up with strategies to improve the UK innovation footprint. It is not easy. Actually, anybody can come up with a good idea. Ideas are dime a dozen, but to get from the idea stage to a company which is stand alone, has some cash in the bank, has a good order book with some good client companies, ah!, now that’s the holy grail.

So what we are hoping to do is to provide that bit of a helping hand from the corporate and government sides. If a small firm does have a good idea, we will get together and try to do two things, (1) try to assist in framing the new idea as something that is innovative in terms of resolving a business problem and (2) try to assist by championing it inside our firms. Obviously no money and all that stuff, but in my experience, innovators fall in love with the idea rather than how it will resolve the problem.

They forget that we are in business to sell (anything, potatoes, widgets, credit cards, etc.) to somebody who can pay for it. Do not want to go into detail, but the idea has to be something that somebody is willing to push his hands into his back pocket and put out money. So despite having great ideas, if you forget the basic elements of selling and making products that will sell, all those innovative ideas will be useless.

Technorati Tags: innovation

Iran Launches Indigenous Satellite

Aaman Lamba — Tue, 3 Feb 2009 07:37:15 EST

Iran joined the select group of spacefaring nations today when it announced the launch of a domestically-produced satellite, Omid ("Hope"), aboard its Safir-2 rocket and that it was "successfully set into orbit." This coincided with the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah, and on the heels of President Obama's announcement of a new era of detente with Iran. This is Iran's second satellite, after Russia launched the Sina-1 in 2005.

In the recent book, The Inheritance by David Sanger, Washington Post correspondent, which deals with the legacy inherited by President Obama from the Bush administration, he opens with the Iran issue and how it was handled by the Bush team. Coming soon after their intelligence failures with Iraq, they were far more circumspect and cautious than they perhaps would have been otherwise. Far from harbouring active regime-change fantasies, the book reveals that the administration sat on compelling evidence that Iran was likely pursuing an active weaponization program (pp 64-69, "The Laptop of Death") that was broken by the New York Times in 2005, and was even shared with the IAEA earlier that year. Even so, the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 showed that the design program for an atom bomb had been suspended ("Project 111") even as the civilian enrichment program continued. The author also reveals how skilfully Iran exploited American concerns post-Iraq and undermined the new Bush strategy to involve the other powers like Russia, China, and the Europeans by playing one against the other.

Iran's new launch comes after last August's launch of a similar rocket capable of carrying a satellite to orbit. The Omid is positioned as a data processing and television transmission satellite, although concerns of dual-use technology and the potential for the combination rocket to be converted to carry a warhead will likely raise fears around the world.

President Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying, "Iran's presence in space with the aim of expanding monotheism, peace and justice has now been officially recorded in history."

Book Review: Nagios - 2nd Edition

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:52:39 EST

The book comes across as a wonderful companion for utilizing Nagios- an open source system and network monitoring tool. There are twenty six chapters covering a lot of depth and variety with respect to Nagios.

There are five main sections in the book, viz. Source code to a running installation, In more detail,The web interface and other ways to visualize Nagios data, Special applications and Development. Some of the more unusual topics worth mentioning is the configuration for external notification via SMS and via email, monitoring room temperature and humidity, monitoring SAP systems via plug-in check_sap.sh and via SAP's own monitoring system CCMS and monitoring oracle database with oracle instant client.

The chapters are very concise and readable especially for the system, network or other infrastructure administrator already hard-pressed for time. One of the important facets of this book is that although there is an attempt to present the useful information, it also motivates the reader to go further and explore based on the suggestions and hints that is provided in the book.

To summarize, a highly recommended book for interesting and very useful topics in present-day IT infrastructure.

Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:54:02 EST

In addition to a very noticeable acknowledgments section, here is a book for system administrators trying out a new language to reduce their difficult and sometimes repetitive tasks. In fourteen chapters the authors have tried to do a commendable job for presenting Python as a language that could be used with little bit of learning.

Among the system administration tasks that are tackled via Python in this book, there are chapters dedicated to documentation and reporting, networking, handling data, SNMP, package management and building GUI s among others. One of the important additional tasks i.e. backup and restore seems to have not got the attention it deserves from the system administration perspective. This is true in spite of the newer scenarios where there is separate role of storage administrator as a specialist within system administration is coming up in most organizations and setup handling the massive growth in data storage and maintenance requirements.

While the examples presented are useful, there are some variations that could have made the book a more useful read. For example, in the example 5-9 about connecting to an SSH server and remotely executing a command, the password seems to be required in clear text. One variation could be an answer to the question “Would it be possible to use encrypted password so the script can be read and run by any less privileged user?” Another thing about the discussions is a frequent reference to books for further reading within the text. While it is a good idea, sometimes the list of books of further reading could have been given at the end of each chapter.

All in all, the book is giving a clear idea for using Python as a tool for system administration. Further reading and experimentation is definitely recommended to the readers after going through this book. Absence of major discussion on backup and recovery scripting is a big gap within the book of this nature.

Book Review: The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today

BangaloreGuy — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:56:27 EDT

Firstly, congratulations to the editor and to the authors. Writing a book about the future, especially a compilation of essays on what the future might hold from 60 brilliant minds is usually something that comes up from a governmental organization - carrying out the same in a private space is commendable. One wishes more such endeavours are undertaken!

The preview for the book was interesting enough. There was mention of Nobel Peace Winners writing about wars - not just any wars, but nuclear wars. There were mentions about forced marriages amongst other things!
Whoa! I wanted to review it already!

There's always this lingering taste of a "slip betwixt cup and the lip", and in this case, it kind of seemed true, on starting with the book. But then, I discovered that this book's like a hamburger, almost. The starting and ending parts are (almost) plain, boring and somewhat poorly written (relatively). Its the essays in the middle that provide the taste, and some of the more compelling reading.

If you're going to read the book, I suggest that you dump the first 30 pages or so, and you might want to consider a similar number to dump at the last too - they're just a conundrum of blase writing, wishing for horses, and some stupid Utopian dreams mixed with some serious over the top thinking - "you're not allowed to marry X 'cos your gene pool's bad". Hello?? Someone miss the Stallone movie? (Demolition Man)

So, almost a quarter of the book's plain bad. There, I said it. Bad. Oh but, don't run off, the rest of the book makes up for it. There are a few essays that really should be the only ones they should have published - and boy, they're good.

Some pieces like that of Craig Newmark, founder of "Craig's list", are a joy to read - funny, witty, and a peekaboo at the future. Some like the Internet co-founders' piece on how humans will transcend their, what he calls "biological barriers" are marvellous - its been lucidly written, backed up by facts known currently - and it doesn't go Utopian, or look at the glass being half-full, but points perceptively to a future.

The prescriptions/predictions written by these authors - the "meat" in this hamburger of a book, are marvellous - because they deal with our present, and project from there to the future. They're all futurologists - to extend the term, slightly. Very clear cut cases made for embracing the new technologies that will help feed the world, feed the growing economies' appetite for energy with energy from sources that will not damage the world. There are cases made that describe how and why the environment can be saved - rainforests in the amazon etc., - quite a few with sound logic, facts and examples to buttress their future projections.

In fact, I would think any responsible government of a large country would want to do a similar thingy - but make it large enough to pull government policy out of it. In fact, for India - a country which has been rather slow to change - except in the greed with which natural resources are being plundered - this sort of a book, or a study would be a wonderful way to set-up for the future.

Book Review: Refactoring SQL Applications

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:26:28 EDT

Refactoring SQL Applications is a book on a useful subject for database and tuning specialists and other IT personnel frequently tasked with unruly SQL applications hogging precious resources which can be better utilized.

Besides discussing and providing tips and techniques to improve SQL application re-engineering on all important fronts, the utility of book would is in that most of the exercises have MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server approaches. The discussion does allude to specific examples for one of the three databases as per the concept being sought to clarify.

The topics discussed include possible implications of the auto-commit mode in JDBC, appropriate use of joins and indexes, detecting and correcting parsing issues and transaction management and basic tips to run trace on queries and analyzing them among others.

One of the possibly advanced concepts for this subject is in refactoring flows and databases using effective parallelism and physical and logical database changes to improve the performance. The must read portion of this book undoubtedly would be the eight chapter which compacts and distills the wisdom of the discussions into a set of tasks that can be performed when a SQL application is coming up for refactoring.

One of the undeniably useful tips that the author concludes by, is to avoid an over-reliance on wizards and advisors and be ready for the frequently iterative nature of performance improvement techniques.

To summarize, the book is a must have for the database practitioners and IT specialists working in this field. It would have been interesting to know what tips and techniques that the author would have suggested for improving the performance on the critical Oracle RAC clustered setups.

Book Review: Building Embedded Linux Systems

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:44:08 EDT

Building Embedded Linux Systemsis a comprehensive reference for the topics it seeks to cover. There is a largely successful attempt made to cover topics across the entire spectrum of embedded Linux systems right up to the development of the RT Patch which can be applied to a Linux kernel and the kernel rebuilt to have facilities similar to real time operating systems.

Some of the important subjects in the book revolve around root file system content - explaining how to build a root file system with some intricacies, storage device manipulation, root file system setup within the embedded system's storage device, setting up boot loader among the available options and setting up networking services based on software packages. There is additional discussion for the topics covering real time Linux variants.

One of the interesting discussions is about handling software upgrades. There is the file system requirements and also the possibilities to be considered for fail-safe software upgrades. There is a step by step procedure for implementing this facility using an example system layout. Other interesting discussions includes enabling remote administration with SNMP for the embedded device mostly as an SNMP agent and the common pitfall made by novice embedded Linux system builders while using Telnet service to neglect some configuration detail related to ptys.

The examples and guidelines given are reader-friendly, the text is clear enough for immediate application of the concepts. Considering the breadth,depth and lucid manner of discussion of the topics, the book is a must have as a reference for the technologists working in this field.

Book Review: The Art of Debugging

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:56:03 EDT

One of the frequently overlooked parts of many a computer engineering syllabus, namely debugging, is the topic of discussion for this book. The subject is addressed focusing on the usage of three debugging tools GDB, DDD and Eclipse with a more or less heavy reliance on Gnu Project Debugger(GDB) developed by Richard Stallman.

While GDB uses the command line syntax, DDD offers a GUI front end and Eclipse is an IDE for debugging working on top of GDB or some other debugger.
Starting from some basics of debugging and the three basic mechanisms for pausing, viz. breakpoint, watchpoint and catchpoint, the authors have discussed the topics such as inspecting and setting variables, debugging program crashes, debugging in multiple activities context such as client/server network programs,threaded code, etc. as well as special topics such as programs unable to compile and debugging curses programs.

There is also a discussion for making best use of text editors, compilers and other features in the debugging context. The book concludes with suggestions for using GDB/DDD/Eclipse for languages such as Java, Perl and Python.

Most of the examples are in line with the theory and bring out the concepts clearly. There is the repeated comparison of usage of the three debugging tools for the same example so the reader can draw their own conclusions and grow on their own favorite debugging tool. Some of the more interesting intricacies are occurring in the chapter where program crashes and the client server program debugging is discussed.

While the examples in this book are extensive, one of the useful additions to this book could be a list of unsolved and debuggable code for further practice. This could bring out a few more expert debuggers from the readers of this book. All in all, a good book in an area where interest is difficult to inculcate due to widely dispersed documentation.

Chandrayaan-I - Not A Waste of Money and Resources

thunga — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:52:13 EDT

Critics say that the "Chandrayaan Mission was a waste of money and resources". In a country like India, the money and resources could have been better used in development activities which would increased the livelihood of so many people lying below the poverty line.

Please say "aye" if you are naive enough to buy this argument. This logic is very similar to that used by our once-charming politicians to promote khadi industries when modern industrialization would have added more value to the country and the people around it. Sir M. Vishveswariah added more to irrigation by building the dams in Karnataka than if the money had been spent on giving seeds to the farmers. There is an inherent lack of understanding amongst the people in India about the use and potential of technology to improve the well being of the people. The media instead of educating through clear thinking and bringing in rationale to decisions, have taken the sidelines to just report opposing views of any issue without stating the merits or demerits of either side.

This article will be heavily biased towards the advantages that India is going to obtain through the Chandrayaan mission. I would love the hear arguments against the same!

Through the Chandrayaan mission, there will be two kinds of distinct advantages. The first being the technology transfer and increase in the utility of technology and the other being the political cultural shift the country vis a vis other countries in the region and the world.

The Technology utility advantage would be the value added by the technology to the economy and the people. The experiments done on the moon for its soil and other chemicals would improve chemical research in the country and might lead to breakthrough ideas in chemical industry which will improve the livelihoods of so many people. This is not just relevant to the chemical industry but also to other allied industries from physics, software, materials to half of the things that are used by the people of India.

The technological transfer advantage is the amount of money or other value add obtained by sharing this technology with other countries. It is the same as technological utility advantage but obtained by exchange of information and technology instead of promotion of technology internally.

Political-Cultural Shift advantage to India

As we know only 3 countries have the capability to do space walk and less than 10 countries have been able to launch their own satellites. Space has been a very important criteria in terms of signaling the strength of a country from the 1960s when the USA wanted to show its power against the USSR. It will hopefully give more brownie points to India which will influence others to heed to the words of the Indians.

Three cheers to the people behind the mission. Special cheers to Mylswamy Annadurai and Madhavan Nair. We should celebrate this event as a very important step in not just the progress of science research but in the economy of India. Eagerly awaiting for the 48 hours to pass to hear more good news :)