Innovation Reading Circle
> Innovation Agenda
> Overview
The Innovation Reading Circle aims to help develop theory around innovation through rich, high-level and well-informed public discussion around key and related texts and discourses... [Read on in Objectives]
> Past event
13: The New economy revisited
> Titles
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr (W. W. Norton, 2008) [Order from Amazon.co.uk]
Nicholas Carr is a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, He writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. He also edited The Digital Enterprise, a book of HBR writings on the Internet. He regularly writes for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business (publisehd by Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.), and Guardian (UK). He is a member of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors. His Weblog is entitled Rough Type. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.
In The Big Switch Nicholas Carr argues that global networks are becoming as important to business as traditional utilities. And that those utilities are maturing to the point that they will tend to be supplied by third parties – such as Google, Salesforce.com and even Amazon – from vast data centres over fat pipes. Like the factories that generated their own power, companies that manage information technology internally will become an anachronism, and IT departments will change beyond recognition – or disappear. More generally, the previous technical revolutions, around printing and power systems, had profound effects on education, culture and social structure, and the revolution in information technology may have effects on a similar scale. But, as societies rely more on the network, the potential to disrupt them in new ways will also grow.
> Took place
10 March 2008
> At
CMP Communications, Enterprise House, 1-2 Hatfields, London SE1 9PG
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> Notices
To find out who took part, see the ‘Confirmed Guests’ section of the the event page on Facebook.
We are grateful to CMP Communications for supporting and hosting this event.
Points for discussion
Some of the questions that we plan to discuss include:
- To what extent can the potential effects of data networks be compared to the effects of electrification?
- How long did it take for electrification to have a significant impact, and what were the barriers to significance utilisation?
- What are the key factors facilitating significance utilisation? To what extent are human factors critical?
- Can we attribute changes at the level of education, culture and social structure directly to the impacts of new technologies?
Related titles
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 2007)
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by Professor David Edgerton (Profile Books, 2007)
Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 by Thomas P. Hughes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)
Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte (Vintage Books, 2000) [First published 1996]
Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence by Don Tapscott (McGraw-Hill, 1997)
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2003)
When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Marvin (Oxford University Press, 1990)
After the New Economy: The Binge... and the Hangover That Won’t Go Away by Doug Henwood (The New Press, 2005)
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy by Andrew Keen (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007)
Productivity, Volume 3 Information Technology and the American Growth Resurgence by Dale W. Jorgenson, Mun S. Ho and Kevin J. Stiroh (MIT Press, 2005). A study of information technology and economic growth since 1995 that tracks the American growth resurgence to its sources within individual industries. [Sample Chapters/Table of Contents Available.]
Background reading, listening and viewing
A revolution is taking shape, Nicholas Carr, Financial Times, January 29 2008. What is happening to computing today is a revolution, the biggest upheaval since the invention of the PC in the 1970s. But it is not without precedent. It bears a close resemblance to what happened to mechanical power 100 years ago... One of the key challenges for corporate IT departments lies in making the right decisions about what [hardware and software] to hold on to and what to let go... In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.... Even large IT consulting firms... which grew rich on the complexity of traditional information systems, are establishing practices devoted to helping clients make the shift to utility services... The time of Gates and the other great software programmers who wrote the code of the PC age has come to an end. The future of computing belongs to the new utilitarians.
The big switch may turn off jobs, Nick Carr, Guardian Technology, January 3 2008. Computing is now a resource like electricity – but where the arrival of grid power expanded the middle classes, the internet is making fewer people richer. [More Guardian articles by Nick Carr...]
Why Tech is Still the Future, Brian W Arthur, Fortune, November 24, 2003. The productivity statistics corroborate that [the information revolution is about transformation]... it will take decades for the digital transformation to work through... the deeper the transformation, the more slowly it takes place. [Full summary in shared bookmark]
Is the Information Revolution Dead? If history is a guide, it is not, W. Brian Arthur, Business 2.0, March 2002. Full use of the technology will arrive eventually. It always has. But this will require that the technology become workable for the user, and that businesses re-architect themselves to make use of it... it won't end when we have blanketed the country with optical cable or have teraflop processors. [Full summary in shared bookmark]
Further Reading, The Big Switch site
Other shared bookmarks for Innovation Reading Circle 13 may be added.
Reviews
Trapped in the grid, Scott Rosenberg, Salon, Jan. 24, 2008
What's the internet ever done for us?, Richard Waters, Financial Times, February 11 2008
Nick Carr’s Big Switch, Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 17th January 2008
Reviewed by Chris Mellor, Techworld, 19 Jan 2008
Reviewed by Bill Thompson, New Humanist, Volume 123, Issue 1 January/February 2008
Interviews
Nicholas Carr – The Argument Over IT, CIO.com, May 01, 2004
An Interview with Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch site
If you have queries about the event please email Nico Macdonald