The JP Allen Blog

Corporate entrepreneurship is the idea that large corporations can overcome their “risk-averse cultures” that “stifle innovation” and learn how to “create, develop, and sustain innovative new businesses”.

I’ve prepared a new executive lecture session on the opportunities offered by new information technology for promoting corporate entrepreneurship, broken down into three categories:

• Collaboration through ‘social computing’ – enabling people to find each other and not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’, let voices and ideas be heard, and allow people to describe and categorize knowledge in the way they find most useful.
• Analytics and business intelligence – finding ways to take advantage of the masses of data being collected by firms.
• ‘Mass collaboration’ with the outside world – linking to innovation capabilities outside of any one business.

But can mere technology make a difference? Conventional wisdom says that corporate culture and leadership ultimately determine whether businesses can become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and that technologies are just tools. I wonder. Maybe the technology itself, if it connects enough people together, can be the source of significant change. Let’s see what our visiting executives have to say.

The slides are available here. This session will be part of the USF Corporate Entrepreneurship Latin America program for the ADEN Business School of Argentina, rated as the top MBA program in Latin America by Latin Trade magazine. Thanks to my colleague Carlos Baradello for organizing the session.

In business schools, my academic specialization is called Information Systems. Information systems researchers study the design and use of information technology in all kinds of organized human activity: businesses, government, schools, hospitals, even social movements.

Information technology offers us the possibility of changing the world for the better.  Humanity now possesses a mind-boggling ability to store information, process it, and send it around the world for almost no cost.   And the raw power of information technology is still doubling every couple of years.

Over the past few decades, we information systems academics have found that turning better information technology into better human activity is hard work.  The difficulties can come from many different sources–technological complexity, organizational confusion, human frailty–but all stem from a common truth: the absolutely central role that information plays in organized human activity. When you try to change the guts of anything, it can get messy.

A big part of what we information systems people do is try to figure out what works, and what doesn’t (through the use of examples, methods, applications, frameworks, theories, and the occasional display of exaggerated enthusiasm or despair).

At a deeper level, though, the whole idea of improving things through technology is a tricky one.   For one thing, what does improvement mean?  For whom?  Some applications of information technology have definite ‘winners and losers’.  The results for different groups can vary greatly, depending on specific decisions about how to store, process, and access information, and how that information is tied to human activity.  Whose needs are most important?

Second, it’s not obvious how much control people really have over the outcomes of any technology-based change.  The world of information technology is full of ‘unintended consequences’.  Perhaps this is inevitable, because we’re dealing with the most flexible of technologies, supporting the most flexible and open-ended of human activities (such as decision-making and communication). While we information systems experts might strive for the timeless bits of wisdom that will always translate better information technology into better human activity, our potential ‘silver bullets’ of advice will always have these fundamental limitations. Human activity, and human technology, is too ambiguous for it to be otherwise.

The joy of information systems, for me anyway, lies in this intoxicating mixture of awesome technological power and the mystery of social activity, combined with the possibility that things really can get much better if we use our knowledge to avoid the mistakes of the past.  Being involved with information systems gives me the chance to make a huge difference.  And it puts me right where the action is in the modern world–business, the global economy, politics, health care, the media, and modern warfare are all difficult to get a handle on without some understanding of how the information systems process works.  Though it sometimes makes my brain hurt, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Last night, our local ABC 7 news featured my startling insights into the recent iPhone pricing uproar. When Apple dropped the price of an iPhone from $599 to $399 after only two months, even Apple’s crazed fanbase rebelled. The early adopters got labelled as “losers” (or worse) for buying too soon.

You can find the ABC7 news story and video clip here. If you’d like the whole story in higher resolution, there’s a link to a (large) movie file here.

Remember: when you do a media interview, they usually choose the juiciest soundbites…

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Update: my clip went national today on Good Morning America and on the abcnews.com site. Story and video clip are available here.

The national story ran under the titilating title “$599 iPhone Buyers: Hipsters or ‘Losers’?” Where’d they get that word from?