Technology & Operations Management
Science-Based Business Initiative Seminars
The Science-Based Business Initiative will sponsor a monthly lunch time seminar on Fridays and will bring academic and industry scientists to campus to describe some of the breakthrough ideas that impact current and future businesses. The intent an intimate group of faculty and doctoral students to gather in a seminar environment, Baker Library102, from noon to 1:30pm for a presentation and Q/A session.
Please RSVP no later than 72 hours prior to the seminar as lunch will be ordered for confirmed guests. To RSVP or for questions on a seminar or to join a mailing list, please contact sbbi@hbs.edu.
2007-2008 Speakers
| 10/26/07 |
John Wilbanks (Science Commons) Accelerating Scientific Innovation Through a Research Commons |
|---|---|
| 11/09/07 |
Bill Lee (Wilmer-Hale) Exploring the proliferation of patents, the development of a meaningful patent portfolio and strategy, the rise of the patent troll and the manner in which the legal system --- both the courts and Congress --- are responding to these developments. |
| 11/30/07 |
Bernie Meyerson (IBM) Semiconductor technology is no longer proceeding down the path of the prior 40 years, the ability to benefit from further scaling alone having been lost. This discontinuity led segments of the industry over a "power cliff" many did not see coming, driving the need for dramatic strategic and organizational shifts. Forced to move to a strategy demanding continuous innovation as the alternative to ongoing scaling, industry R&D expenditures grew at rates rendering prior business models and alignments financially unsustainable. This chain of events has led to a consolidation of competitors around global innovation networks engaged in pre-competitive alliances, and the emergence of a model based upon co-opetition as a business imperative as opposed to an option. Through alliances based upon the integration of both physical and intellectual capital, companies once again have achieved the critical mass required for financial stability. Similarly, new technical models based upon Holistic Design, a systems based view of technology's future, has displaced semiconductor technology as the key differentiator in the global IT arena. This talk will explore the implications these changes have for both our industry and society at large. |
| 12/07/07 |
Frank Moss (MIT) "Inventing a Better Future - and a Better Media Lab - at MIT." Founded in 1980, the Media Lab at MIT became a nexus for industry-sponsored collaborations that focused on bringing the digital age to areas of arts, communication, education and learning. It's charismatic founder Nicholas Negroponte, created this institution and led it for over two decades, but changing economic times and competitive models of university-industry partnerships began to erode some of the Lab's unique identity. In 2006, Frank Moss, a successful software entrepreneur, was recruited to provide new leadership and a forward vision for this remarkable enterprise. The fascinating colloquium h2.0: New Minds, New Bodies, New Identities, held in May of 2007, provided an insight into some of Moss's vision for the future: human augmentation catalyzed by the marriage of medicine and digital technology. Today's talk will provide an opportunity to learn more about the breadth of the Media Lab, and about the challenge of sustaining creativity in a changing environment. |
| 1/18/08 |
Paula Stephan (Andrew Young School, Georgia State University and NBER) "The Economics of Science Revisited." The presentation will be based on Stephan's recent revision of the essay "The Economics of Science," originally published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 1996 and extensively revised in 2007 for the Handbook of Economics of Technical Change, edited by Bronwyn H. Hall and Nathan Rosenberg (forthcoming). The revision incorporates major changes that have transpired during the intervening 11 years. These changes include but are not limited to: (1) a shift of emphasis in the reward structure; (2) an increase in the importance of equipment in the production of scientific research and (3) an increase in the importance of teams in research. In addition, while the original essay was focused almost entirely on the U.S., the revised essay takes a broader perspective. Before discussing these changes, a framework for examining the economics of science is summarized. The presentation ends with suggestions for further research, especially regarding a shift away from studying the productivity of individual investigators to the productivity of labs. |
| 2/8/08 |
Professor Edward Crowley (Ford Professor of Engineering, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) The seminar will explore this program as a metaphor for a set of complex and long-term decisions, not unlike those routinely faced when corporations commit to large capital projects. In the case of NASA, there are two fundamental questions. The first is the technical one: will we be able to marshal the technology, within budget and schedule, to accomplish the mission? There is also a more fundamental question: will the program be "profitable," and sustainably deliver value to the stakeholders, over its 15 year future? An approach will be presented to shed light on these questions, by applying an analytic decision support tool, based on a recently developed algebra of systems. A non-technical review of the program design decisions facing NASA will be presented, along with a more formal analysis. This analysis will indicate the desirable design features of a space system that return humans to the moon. These are the rocket science decisions - the technical design of the project. The same tool will then be applied to the "business" decisions. A stakeholder value network approach will be applied, in which the stakeholders of the program will be identified and their needs enumerated. The flow of potential benefit out of NASA, to the stakeholders, and eventually back to NASA will be modeled. The results will indicate how NASA should best invest its efforts, not only to fulfill the mission objectives, but also to deliver value to the nation in a recognizable way. These are the "business" decisions - and the similarities will be drawn to the case of a multinational corporation engaging in an international partnership to develop a capital intensive joint project. |
| 2/15/08 |
Dyann Wirth (Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health) Topic: "From Genomes to Drug and Vaccine Discovery: Challenges and Opportunities in Malaria." Dyann Wirth is the Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Disease and Chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is an internationally recognized leader in the area of malaria, and has led groundbreaking research in the understanding of the life cycle of the malarial parasite, P. falciparum. Her commitment is to the successful development of new therapies which can effectively treat this very significant public health problem, and is the Director of the Harvard Malaria Initiative, which works across continents to bring new insights and ultimately new medicines to the people suffering from this disease. Her current focus is on creating new public/private/academic sector collaborations that can effectively address this problem in world health, and is working with The Broad Institute, Genzyme Corporation, and various international health organizations to build a new paradigm for both discovering new drugs and getting them effectively distributed in the developing world. Dr. Wirth is the recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Award in Molecular Parasitology, past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and Chair of the WHO/UNDP/World Bank Tropical Disease Research Steering Committee. Through her efforts, the importance of new drugs for the treatment and ultimate eradication of malaria is receiving global attention. |
| 4/4/08 |
Woodward Yang Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University Topic: "The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing." Semiconductor manufacturing has been the engine driving the Information Revolution by providing continually more powerful and cheaper computing hardware. Moore's Law is often cited when referring to the clockwork doubling of semiconductor manufacturing technology every 18 months over the past 30 years. The semiconductor industry's continual pursuit of Moore's Law has yielded ever smaller transistors but at the cost of ever more expensive fabrication facilities. There are now clear signs that each successive generation in semiconductor manufacturing technology is providing diminishing returns in terms of higher performance and lower manufacturing cost. Powerful new economic forces are now reshaping the industry as leading semiconductor manufacturers such as Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola, and AMD struggle to regain profitability and competitiveness. Taking a lesson from the automobile industry, we applied the principles and philosophy of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and were able to radically improve the manufacturing efficiency of an advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility operated by an Integrated Device Manufacturer (IDM) at the forefront in technology and operational excellence. These improvements were realized without any new equipment or change in product design or technical specifications. The implications of these types of changes in the operational management of semiconductor manufacturing are profound and will create new opportunities for growth in the semiconductor industry but along a different vector from Moore's Law. |
| 4/11/08 |
John Maraganore Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Topic: "Building an Innovation-Based Biotechnology Company." Today's pharmaceutical industry is more starved than ever for innovation. Decades-long growth strategies have largely failed. For example life-cycle management to avert patent expiries, direct-to-consumer advertising of "incremental" drugs, and reliance on internal R&D for "blockbusters" have not proven successful. The pharma industry is looking to innovation as a way to control the market-based forces driving constraints on drug pricing and reimbursement, and as a way to fill their diminishing pipelines. Alnylam is focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of RNAi therapeutics, a promising approach for a whole new class of innovative medicines. Our progress and efforts will be discussed. |
| 4/25/08 |
Rebecca Eisenberg University of Michigan Topic: "Noncompliance, Nonenforcement, Nonproblem? Rethinking the Anticommons in Biomedical Research." A decade ago the biomedical research community was ringing alarm bells about the impact of intellectual property rights on the ability of scientists to do their work. Controversies and delays in negotiating terms of access to patented mice and genes, databases of genetic information, and tangible research materials all pointed toward the same conclusion: that proprietary claims were undermining traditional sharing norms to the detriment of science. More recent studies have found that, despite some notorious complaints, patents have rarely actually blocked academic research. Some commentators have attributed the limited impact of patents on research freedom to obliviousness on the part of researchers, who do not know or want to know if they are infringing patents, and cost-benefit analysis on the part of patent holders, who have not found it worthwhile to enforce their patents against researchers. Others have suggested that the explanation lies in the continuing vitality of sharing norms, with an emerging corollary of ignoring patents in the context of academic research. What are the implications of these studies for the patent system? If researchers are, for the most part, getting away with activity that would, in theory, subject them to infringement liability under current patent law, does it follow that the current patent system is adequate to accommodate the needs of the scientific community? Is the combination of heedless infringement and forbearance from enforcement a satisfactory workaround that obviates the need to change patent law to make researchers law-abiding? |