Posted with permission. Provided by Dr. James Spohrer in response to a request from Phi Beta Iota for a “snap-shot” overview of the “soul” of IBM going into the 21st Century.
1. Cities: here is a short IBM video (YouTube 4:15) on cities as the nodes in the planetary system of systems
Features Mike Wing, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Julia Grace. Cities as planetary accupunture points of intervention. Cities are HUMAN–computers cannot handle the unpredictable. Dominos analogy–everything is interconnected and knowledge or information are the “energy” being exchanged among individual people, the HUMAN element. It is the mixture of people and hardware, and software that is so elegant and exciting.
2. Universities in Cities: My current job at IBM builds from the notion that universities are the knowledge batteries of city/regions… see slide #34 in this presentation on Service Science: Progress and Directions (64 Slides), connected with Handbook of Service Science (Springer, 2010). NOTE: Downloading presentation enables viewing of Notes for each slide.
Overview of IBM University Programs focusing on 5 R's (Research, Readiness, Recruiting, Revenue, Responsibilities); Quality of Life balance between local and global optimization; Ecology–study of all things in relation to all life forms; and Holistic Service Systems with cities and within cities, universities, and the fundamental “intelligent” building blocks. Emphasis on information information exchanges and life-long learning. Slide #34:
3. Connecting Universities and Cities Locally and Globally: My global team at IBM University Programs is funding connecting the universities locally with their cities, and globally with each other – networked improvement communities in Doug's language… Really connecting service systems, see Slide #16 in this presentation.
4. Becoming a Network of Service Systems: My last job at IBM was building a global service science community, with the view that the world is interconnected service systems entities, with factories and farms as service systems (value-co-creation systems) as well… for example, when a major German factory becomes transparent and invites the customers inside to build their own cars… co-creation within new ecologies (YouTube 6:43).
5. Holistic Service Systems Evolving Better Whole Service: I am very interested in automated greenhouses and 3D printers, as agriculture and manufacturing technologies get put in a box, and made part of holistic service systems that provide “whole service” to the people within them, explored here (Blog posting with two embedded videos on Seasteading and Casino-Hotel Venetian as a whole system, a city within a city but better).
6. Accelerated Learning: In the end, holistic service systems (with people inside them) have accelerated learning from each other, and become the building blocks of larger and larger scale holistic service systems…. households, universities, cities, states, nations, continents, worlds, etc. See slide #22 in this presentation.
Slide 22 Definition: A holistic service system is one that can support its primary populations, independent of all external service systems, for some period of time, longer than a month if necessary, and in some cases, indefinitely.
Collective intelligence of “holistic service systems” accelerates learning to improve quality of life for people within them.
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