Wednesday, 4 December 2002 8:30 am
In my November 22 column, I stated that “on demand innovation”, if possible, would require tapping creative technical people and creative business people outside of corporate environments. How could that be done effectively?  Let me go through a hypothetical scenario of how this might work in the not-too-distant future.

Suppose that two researchers at CERN in Switzerland have developed a new plastic with some unique properties.  The properties, although scientifically interesting, are not directly applicable to their field of inquiry. So they place a description of the material and its properties on a worldwide knowledge base computer.  Another researcher working for a disk drive manufacturer in California has been working on holographic disk storage, but has not found the perfect material to meet his performance goals.  By mining the worldwide knowledge base, he finds out about the material invented at CERN, and contacts the researchers there about obtaining a sample.  A sample is sent to California, and testing of it reveals that the new material solves one problem but creates another.  The California researcher wonders whether the new problem might be solvable with different laser technology.  He searches the knowledge base again for laser technology that might meet his needs.  Sure enough, some Russian researchers in Novosibirsk have developed a new type of laser that solves the problem.  A successful prototype is put together in a matter of months that proves out the concept.  It is time to start serious product development.

The engineers at the Californian disk drive company are not very interested in making the new non-rotating holographic storage, however, because it would involve none of their facilities and expertise in coating metal plates, rotating motors, and magnetic read/write heads.   By searching another worldwide knowledge base, the researchers discover that there is a good match with the engineering and manufacturing expertise of a Japanese videodisk maker.  Using the same  knowledge base, they also find good matches with a plastics company and a laser manufacturer, and all are interested in participating in the development of the new storage device.  Because the new non-rotating storage device will require databases to use different optimization algorithms, the team also lines up a database company to help with the performance engineering and algorithmic work. 

To fund the ventures, a venture capital knowledge base is searched, yielding a venture capitalist who has previous experience in both materials and storage technology, and is willing to take on the challenge of finding a management team, structuring the venture, and raising capital.  The appropriate management team is found by accessing a yet another knowledge base.  The new venture is launched, with the ownership being shared between all of the labs and companies involved, plus the venture investors and the startup team.  A successful holographic storage product is launched a year later, a product that none of the companies involved could have produced in the same amount of time and for the same cost by themselves.