The Future of IT and Open Collaborative Research
I have written about my analysis (Cliff Notes level :) of Carlota Perez that the future of IT is very bright for the next several decades. I got a chance to think this through again two days back, when I was on a panel titled "Cutting Edge Research at Corporations," (see info here) at the Pan IIT 2007 Conference. I will write about the conference and especially the panel at a later date, but I got asked a question by the moderator, "You guys are talking about research in IT, do your observations hold for other disciplines such as Biotech etc.?" That gave me a chance to build upon my Carolta Perez theory and I said, "The future of IT is very bright and I believe that IT will be at the center of many new technological revolutions, such as BioTech."
Now that in itself is not profound, but the reason I asserted the last point so vigorously on the panel was that I had just spent 1/2 hr with Marty Tannebaum (Irving Wladasky-Berger had put me in touch with him) and his colleague, Jeff Schrager, of commerce.net. Now many of us know of Marty (I through his involvement in CommerceOne, for example). But his latest project has immediately caught my attention. It is about how "open collaborative research" (call it web 2.0 style if you want, or as I had called it, "open innovation") can be used to solve disease <--> drug matching problem. I cannot do it justice, so I urge you to spend an hour and listen to this: http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/temp/biomedin200-24-may-07-tenenbaum.wmv.
So that is why I said what I said at the panel. But I have been thinking about it since. There are three things I have firmly come to believe.
information management is at the center of all (oki, most of :) the hard problems
traditional AI style, top down ontological approaches do not work when the problems are especially hard (Marty gives a great example near the end of his talk on how the e-commerce community solved htis problem)
open collaboration (application of web 2.0) can be used to tackle many a research problem, such as what Marty is trying to do in medical, but I am quite sure, can be applied in other domains too. Is this the future of all research, not just medical research?
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