Guest Visionaries - Arno Penzias

Dr Arno Penzias was born in 1933 in Munich, Germany. In 1962 he received his doctorate in physics from Columbia University. The previous year he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey.

In 1978, together with his Bell Labs colleague, Robert Wilson, Penzias received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of faint background radiation coming from the 'Big Bang' believed to have touched off the creation of the universe some 18 billion years ago.

From 1981 to 1995 Penzias served as Vice President of Research at Bell Labs and from 1995 to 1998 he acted as Chief Scientist at Bell Labs. In his capacity as Vice President of Research in the late 1980s Penzias led a process of significant restructuring at Bell Labs. "At the core of this dramatic shift in the Research group [was] an increased focus on customers, coupled with Bell Labs' new emphasis on the development of commercially valuable devices and systems."

For further information on Dr Penzias see his profile on the Bell Labs site or the Encarta site

From Barriers To Bridges - Information Engines for our Networked Future

In the industrial era, mass production and hierarchical partition characterized the creation of wealth. Enterprises employed vertical integration, so as to assure control over their processes and the predictability of their outputs. Profits hinged upon large volumes. Mass markets, mass media, and massive economic instabilities dominated the scene.

Today, we live in a world marked by global networks and extended enterprises. In place of the past's captive suppliers, most companies look to world-wide sourcing, so as to assure themselves of optimal efficiencies. Competition abounds. Just staying in the game demands constant reinvention-with special emphasis on speed, innovation, personalization, and buyer focus.

THE INFORMATION ECONOMY

What's so special about the Internet? For one thing, it shifts power from producers to purchasers. It gives everyone-from General Electric to 12-year-old Web surfers-access to information and suppliers around the globe. While analysts and the media extol the Internet's impact upon the societies that it serves, they say little about how social norms have shaped the way it operates. Suffice it to say that the "Net" reflects the culmination of a long term toward ever-freer markets. In the United States, we can trace this trend as far back as the repeal of uniform-pricing laws and the birth of the consumer movement, a half-century ago.

Looked at from the perspective of buyer-empowerment, it matters little whether or not today's networks have had a greater economic impact than earlier technologies-such as railroads or electric motors, say. Alone among all the products of human contrivance, today's information technologies allow purchasers to circumvent more and more of the marketplace barriers which once protected producers from competition. On the production side therefore, information technology not only enables increased efficiency, it mandates efficiency, by making it so easy for potential buyers to opt for a competitor's offer. Moreover, as buyers become more adept at the use of information technology, their power increases.

The result? A nearly-perfect market, one that shrinks cycle times, inventories, and pricing-power-and makes for a more stable economy. As purchasers, this market offers us an unprecedented array of choices, usually at exceptionally attractive terms. Just think how the price of computers keeps dropping, for example. Sellers, it would seem, face tough times, to say the least.

Here then lies the dilemma. Buyers and sellers are the same people. Most of us just switch from one role to the other as the situation demands. As employees for example, most of us must sell our services in an increasingly demanding and fluid labor market. To quote from a recent article on current American job security: "Everybody…it seems, is on commission and on trial."

Hardly a perfect environment, but hardly a hopeless one either. Success stories abound, after all, and not just for the fortunate few. Unemployment stands a record lows in the United States today, and extends to all levels of our society. Moreover, the economic stimulus provided by e-commerce, and the like, is spreading to a rapidly increasing number of countries around the globe-spurred in large measure by rapid advances in three key areas: computers and other information appliances; information infrastructure; and the innovation process itself. In that spirit, this presentation will highlight the motive forces (or "engines") responsible for these advances.

APPLIANCE ENGINES

The performance (at a given price) of components such as electronics, storage media, and displays will climb between ten- and one thousand-fold in just the next ten years alone.

New methods of software production will create much smaller, more portable, and cleaner replacements for many of todays massive bodies of legacy code, such as those we now in telecommunications switching, for instance.

While keyboarding will not disappear, the widespread use of speech and image recognition, position sensing, and contextual problem solving, will allow machines to do much-if not most-of their own "typing" in the coming years.

In the near future, networked appliances will be easier to operate, more reliable, and cheaper to buy than their stand-alone counterparts-thanks to savings and simplifications available through the use of networked resources.

INFRASTRUCTURE ENGINES

Massive growth in fiber bandwidth still lies ahead, offering the prospect of many more wavelengths per fiber and much more bandwidth per wavelength.

A family of networks and networking styles will serves the world's diverse needs-offering multi-net services via common points of entry. In practice, this will mean an individual appliance may obtain service from different networks at different times, depending on the requirements of a particular application.

Explosive growth in both local and long-distance technologies, seems likely to continue, thereby increasing the need for comparable advances in the next-to-last mile. As a result, we can look forward to metropolitan fabrics with more capacity, lower cost, and less complexity.

As information replaces manufacturing as the main source of economic value creation, we may well regard the small-office/home-office as the "factory" of tomorrow. Despite their importance however, SOHO's are still poorly served when it comes to communications. But that will surely change, as a growing number of entrepreneurs target the emerging market for Tiny Area Networks.

INNOVATION ENGINES

As corporate R&D grows in importance, its management must grow in its sophistication-creating and nourishing a portfolio of projects with a mix of risks and time scales appropriate to the enterprise in question. Since even the best of internal R&D efforts can't hope to do the entire job by itself, companies must look outside for much of the innovation they need. In practice, this requires a strategy for acquiring ideas and people through partnership and purchase mechanisms-together with a culture that supports their smooth integration.

With Silicon Valley as their theme, local hot-beds of venture capital are spreading on every continent. Furthermore, we can expect the pace of new company formation to accelerate as each generation of new companies injects a new supply of experience management cadres into the talent pool-people well-schooled in the resilience, flexibility, speed and values that the new economy demands.

Finally, innovation is too important to be left to organizations. In a world in which standing still usually means getting passed over, individuals and teams must constantly reinvent what they do and how they do it. With an already overwhelming-and ever-increasing-number of choices available, we must all seek strategies for choosing well, and being well-chosen.

This paper was originally presented by Dr Penzias at the ICCC Conference in Tokyo, September 1999. We have reproduced it in its original form here and refrained from editing the few typographical errors it contains

If you wish to comment on this contribution, please go to Area 5 - Miscellaneous (including Guest Visionaries) of the Workshop zone.