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From Lab to Market: Where Technology is Headed—The Research Director’s Point of View

Moderator: Rebecca Henderson '81
Paul Horn Uma Chowdhry PhD '76 Robert Tepper: September 29, 2004; Running Time: 1:14:56

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

How do you conduct R&D in a vanguard technology? These three panelists provide varying perspectives on the question. Paul Horn stands by IBM’s longstanding commitment to its 5.5 billion dollar annual research effort, but with some caveats: “It’s all about the speed of flowing new ideas into hardware, software and services,” he says. You can’t think about innovation without also considering “channels to market.” IBM insists that “researchers spend time in the marketplace so they can understand how their technology can solve real world problems.”

At DuPont, Uma Chowdhry cites a “quietly occurring transformation in the area of biobased materials.” At two centuries’ young, DuPont has a new primary challenge: “How do we transform from a petroleum-based economy to renewable resources such as crops?” Working with partners such as MIT, the company is exploring glucose, methane and nanotechnology to cook up new kinds of fuel, food supplements, and other products—all economically. It’s “a very big dream,” acknowledges Chowdhry. The prerequisite, she says, is that “top management must have an unwavering commitment to the mission as well as time, vision and patience.”

Robert Tepper describes the convergence of two revolutions driving his field forward. The complete sequencing of the human genome, combined with advances in understanding pathways of disease, will enable Millennium’s researchers to create “breakthrough therapies.” Scientists are already “making strides in cancer and inflammation,” says Tepper. Millennium is linking up with industry, hospitals and academia, plumbing the genome to learn “why individuals are susceptible to disease.”

Lecture Details

Location: Kresge Auditorium

About the Speakers

Moderator: Rebecca Henderson '81

Eastman Kodak LFM Professor, MIT Sloan School

Rebecca Henderson specializes in technology strategy. Her current research focuses upon the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. She received an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1981 and a doctorate in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1988. She spent 1981-1983 working for the London office of McKinsey and Company.

Her publications include “Underinvestment and Incompetence as Responses to Radical Innovation: Evidence from the Photolithographic Industry” in the Rand Journal of Economics, and “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and The Failure of Established Firms” with Kim Clark, in Administrative Science Quarterly.

Henderson sits on the Board of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and on the Board of the Linbeck Corporation. She was recently retained by the Department of Justice as an Expert Witness in connection with the Remedies phase of the Microsoft case, and in 2001 was voted “Teacher of the Year” at MIT Sloan School of Management.