New Course in Techology-based Business Transformation

to be offered in Fall 2007

June 1, 2007

ESD Visiting Professor Irving Wladawsky-Berger, recently retired vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, will be teaching a new course in fall, 2007. In ESD.57 Technology-based Business Transformation (listed in the MIT catalog as Technology Advances, Business Transformation and Innovation), In this course, he will examine how to leverage emerging, major technologies to significantly transform a business or even a whole industry.

For many years, Irving's key responsibility at IBM has been identifying emerging technologies and market developments involving information technologies, and then organizing the appropriate activities within and outside IBM in order to capitalize on these opportunities. This new course will draw heavily on his personal experiences with technology-based businesses, in particular, the efforts he led to organize IBM's Internet and e-business strategies in the 1990s.

The course will explore the interplay amongst the many factors that go into developing a business based on technologies as broad and complex as the Internet. Over the semester, the class will take a detailed look at the technology and market environments, strategy formulation and execution, and organizational and cultural issues. A number of guest lecturers that will share with the class their own experiences in these various areas.

The course is intended for students who have a strong interest not only in the development of new technologies, products and services in the lab, but also in organizing such technologies into a successful business in the marketplace. This class will be particularly valuable to students with work experience who aspire to manage technology innovations in business. As a class project, students will select an industry in which they are familiar and which is in the process of rapid changes due to technology advances. They will then formulate a strategy and plans for leveraging the technology and market changes to start a business in that industry or transform an existing business, which will be shared with the class.

The class will be given on Thursdays from 1:00 - 4:00 pm.

Questions: irving "at" irvingwb.com.

Also, please see Irving's blog, http://www.irvingwb.com/, where he has been writing about many of the topics to be covered in the course.