Monday March 20, 2000
4:10-5:00pm
Room 124, H.R. Bright Building
In the past ten years, every major corporate research lab has felt pressure to do work that is more relevant to short term profit. Lines were drawn and battles fought, one side struggling to maintain the freedom of unfettered long-term inquiry, the other attempting to speed up the creation of profitable products in the short term. Even in the world of Silicon Valley startups, tension exists between wildly free innovation and profit driven development. Both struggles are related to a technology-driven model of innovation that too often produces solutions in search of problems. In addition, as the advances we make and the technologies we create become pervasive in their global impact, the efficacy and ethics of business and innovation as usual must be questioned. It is time to expand.
What if innovation could also be inspired by real problems and ordinary people in a way that expanded long term research potential? What if a broader more representative population contributed to the innovative process? Might our hit rate of solutions to problems improve? Might we be able to fill jobs currently going begging? Might we push the boundaries of science while increasing the likelyhood of creating solutions to real problems? Might we become more innovative, more effective and more profitable? And might we simultaneously contribute to sustainable technical development AND sustainable human development? Finally, how does this potential change impact the way we teach and the way we train the researchers of the future?
This talk proposes new ways of thinking about innovation and describes experiments in the design process being conducted at four major US universities in collaboration with the Institute for Women and Technology with the support of IBM Research, Xerox PARC, Compaq Research, Sun Labs and Hewlett-Packard.
Dr. Anita Borg is President and Founding Director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT) in Palo Alto, California. She is also a member of the research staff in the office of the chief technologist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and is on full-time loan to IWT. The Institute is an experimental research and advanced development organization focused on increasing the impact of women on technology and increasing the positive impact of technology on the world's women.
Dr. Borg received her Ph.D. from New York University. She worked for four years on a fault tolerant operating system for Auragen Systems Corp (NJ) and then with Nixdorf Computer (Germany). She spent 1986-97 at Digital Equipment Corporation. At Digital's Western Research Laboratory, she developed and patented a performance analysis method for high-speed memory systems. At its Network Systems Laboratory, she developed MECCA, a system for communicating in virtual communities.
In July 1999, Dr. Borg was appointed by President Clinton to the congressionally mandated Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology. Dr. Borg also received the 1999 Melitta Bentz Women of Innovation and Invention Award and the 1999 Outstanding Women's Achievement Award presented by Forbes and IBM. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Dr. Borg is the founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.