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Emerging Technologies: The Innovators’ View

Moderator: Padmasree Warrior
Yair Goldfinger Phillip A. Sharp Jay Walker Iqbal Quadir: September 27, 2006; Running Time: 1:28:14

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Innovators are like jazz musicians... or like permanent teenagers. These and other analogies flowed, as top-flight tech inventors tried to put their fingers on the precise nature of innovation and how it can best be coaxed into existence.

Yair Goldfinger draws on his Israeli background to back up his notion that everyone has a creative bent, which awaits some catalyst to emerge. The Israeli Army, he says, is very small, “and they teach you from day one how to improvise.” If the rope is too short, you find the alternative. The culture of this small country, “surrounded by enemies” and short of investment money, forces collaboration among groups from different disciplines, with one innovation leading to the next. “Innovation is tied to time and place,” he says.

Like pornography, innovation is hard to define, says Philip Sharp, but when we see it, we recognize it. Not only is it part of the fabric of our culture, so much so that we in the West “take it for granted like air in the room,” but innovation is “the defining mode of the future.” Fifteen years from now, all we perceive as ordinary today “will be completely different.” And opportunities are greater now than at any other time in human history, Sharp believes. MIT, where “innovation is part of the drinking water,” can teach students how to master certain problems and “increase the probability enormously that they will be involved in innovation.” Sharp, reflecting on the complex, seven-plus year process involved in bringing pharmaceuticals to market, sees innovation as the product of an individual mind, but harnessed within teams.

When Jay Walker looks in the mirror, he sees a “serial innovator.” While serendipity sometimes operates, the “vast majority of innovation occurs where opportunity meets preparation….The harder innovators work, the luckier they get.” Innovation is “the unexpected effective solution to a problem,” not “an artistic dimension or personality trait.” Walker embraces innovation in politics and the arts, where profitability may be besides the point. But he sees among all innovators unhappiness with the status quo. Innovators especially require mentoring. “If you’re young, you need someone who gives you comfort that rule-breaking won’t take you to a dead end.” The biggest challenge for inventors involves storytelling -- communicating to others why their product solves a problem better. Good innovations require effective “propagation mechanisms.”

One recipe for innovation, says Iqbal Quadir, involves blending two different things that come together to create a third thing. Qadir “didn’t invent cellphones, and someone else invented microcredit,” yet he brought these elements together ingeniously in Bangladesh to create low-cost phone access for a hundred million people. So for him, “innovation is the difference that makes a difference.” Don’t mistake his work for social entrepreneurism, though: “If you solve a problem…society is happy to pay you for the difference that you’ve made.” In many countries, entrenched powers resent bold thinking, and try to quash it. “You see a bird pecking grains. Put a glass in between and after a while, the bird stops pecking. Human beings in difficult countries give up.” Such countries “need disruption, to get things moving again.” Newcomers bring fresh blood, and “once an innovation succeeds, they may have more resources to take bigger risks and try something more crazy.”

Lecture Details

Location: Kresge Auditorium

“Innovators are fundamentally, permanently dissatisfied people. They’re unhappy -- not good with the status quo thing. The difference between not liking it and being an innovator is that innovators decide to do something about it.”

Jay Walker

About the Speakers

Moderator: Padmasree Warrior

Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
Motorola Incorporated

Padmasree Warrior has worked at Motorola since 1984. She currently leads a global team of 4,600 technologists, guiding creative research from innovation through the first stages of marketing. She also serves as a technology advisor to the office of the chairman and to the board’s technology and design steering committee.

Before assuming her current role in January 2003, Warrior was corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola’s energy systems group. Warrior was corporate vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and was elected a corporate officer in 2000.

Warrior received an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India.

Warrior served on the Texas Governor’s Council for Digital Economy, and is a member of the Texas Higher Education Board review panel. She was one of six women nationwide selected to receive the “Women Elevating Science and Technology” award from Working Woman magazine in 2001. She also is a director of Ferro Corporation.

Yair Goldfinger

Co-Founder and CTO, Dotomi Co-Founder, ICQ

Phillip A. Sharp

Institute Professor
Founding Director McGovern Institute for Brain Research
Nobel Laureate in Medicine 1993

Phillip A. Sharp received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Much of Sharp’s scientific work has been conducted at MIT’s Center for Cancer Research, which he joined in 1974 and directed from 1985 to 1991. He subsequently led the Department of Biology from 1991 to 1999. Sharp is co-founder of Biogen, Inc and also co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals.

He earned a B.A. from Union College, KY, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1969.

Sharp has authored more than 300 scientific papers and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2006, he received the National Medal of Science.

Jay Walker

Chairman, Walker Digital LLC Founder, Priceline.com

Iqbal Quadir

Co-founder and Director, MIT Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship

Iqbal Quadir founded GrameenPhone, the largest telephone company in Bangladesh. From 2001-2005, he was a fellow at Harvard's JFK School of Government, teaching how technologies can affect change in developing countries. He is now co-founder and director of the MIT Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship, and organizing projects providing electricity, fertilizers, and potable water in Bangladesh and other countries.

He received an M.B.A.(1987) and an M.A. (1983) from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. with Honors (1981) from Swarthmore College.