Visionary Talk

Reflections on Innovation in a Services-based Knowledge Economy

Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology
Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems, MIT

Abstract

Advances in information technology coupled with powerful market forces are transforming just about all aspects of business and society. We can increasingly leverage the Internet and related open standards to look at a whole organization - an enterprise, an industry eco-system or an economy - as a holistic, integrated system, linking together processes, information and people. This talk will explore some of the huge challenges that we face in order to realize the potential benefits of such business and societal transformations, including the ability to effectively design and use highly complex, human oriented, market-facing systems and applications.