First Semester 2010

Innovation and Technology

Instructor:

Professor Greg Tangonan1

Semester SY2010-2011

Course Description

Though technology plays a very important role in our lives, we seldom reﬂecton how a technological breakthrough happens or even on how it develops.This course is aimed at students as future technologists, the focus is on stra-tegic thinking and the role of innovation in changing the technical landscape.We address questions like: what makes something hot, how new technolo-gies have developed, what makes for technology into a business success,and how do successful technologies lead to whole new industries? Thiscourse surveys themes like technology and society, creation of new technol-ogy companies based on new ideas, and global competitiveness. We willneed to understand the technical basis of new developments but our objectiveis to understand the global context of technology development as well.The course is intended as a capstone course that develops a strategic over-view of technology and applying this knowledge to the Philippine scene. Thiscourse complements their students

skills in science and engineering disci-plines. Being aimed for young technologists at the start of their careers it issupposed to be a fun course rich with student presentations, discussion andinteresting reading. The instructor or guest speaker will oftentimes just cata-lyze student discussion. This class could make learning and investigating newideas, summarizing new ideas, and judging the potential impact, an integralpart of their lifelong learning.The competitive landscape is changing rapidly, todayfocused R&D and product development teams in de-veloping companies can compete globally. The originsof the “ﬂattening” of the competitive environment willbe a major focus of the class lectures and studentpresentations. Our efforts will be to understand howthese forces affect the Philippines. We will study thestrategic role that intellectual property – patenting, li-censing, and trade secrets – plays in securing for entrepreneurs their intellec-tual equity.

Innovation and Technology

Innovation and Technology First Semester 2010-11

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First Semester 2010-11

Course Objectives

The course will develop skills in strategic thinking about technology and soci-ety. The course will hone student

s presentation skills, especially in makingconcise and insightful presentations on technical topics.This course will develop information gathering, information analysis, and criti-cal thinking skills that will prove useful in your future careers.

First Semester - How Innovations can radically change our lives.

Students will analyze the development of the iPod / iPad and how the newiPad/ iPhone ﬁts within a strategy that will remake Apple and change severalindustries. The hot new iPad that costs only $499 with WiFi only is a real stra-tegic breakthrough for Apple. The focus will be on developing new applica-tions for these tablet devices in new markets like personal health manage-ment and personal wellness. This is also a story ofworld class Innovation as driven by highly focusedteams led by super-innovators like Steve Jobs. Sothis class focuses on the Innovator as the creatorof new industries, by asking: What is the innovationprocess of Apple? How have they come up withtremendous new products -Mac, iPod, iPhone andnow the iPad - that are truly game changing inno-vations. To this end the students will start by ana-lyzing the innovation process of Apple by a class reading of

Inside Steve

s Brain

by Leander Kahney. At the same time the students are going to be chal-lenged to understand the booming market of applications for these new de-vices. They will analyze applications in a speciﬁc ﬁeld like gaming and deter-mine the potential impact on the Industry of new media platforms like theiPad. Then the students will then present their idea for a new application andwhy they believe it can sell. No need for coding of the applications now, theobjective is to develop the concept for a new ap-plication so it is very attractive to users.This semester

s focus areas are SustainableSolutions for Energy Environment and Applica-tion to Improved Health and Wellness. We willbegin the discussions by looking at the majornew innovations in these ﬁelds for the last twoyears, by reading different surveys of hot newideas and innovations for 2009-2010. This sur-vey will lead directly to student presentations on

Innovation and Technology

Innovation and Technology First Semester 2010-11

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First Semester 2010-11

new technical ideas and their impact - like solar energy systems, nano-materials and new biomedical devices, and softwareas a service.Given that the students will also be ﬁnding thesis top-ics for this year

s undergraduate research, we will em-phasize developing an overview of the overall signiﬁ-cance of their topic. Basic questions we tackle are:What can be the impact of my research? Can I getclose to the state of the art by focusing on fertile tech-nology areas? Is industry already interested in thistopics area? For those doing a thesis, this exercisecan really help crystallize the motivation for doing re-search.The students are required to present a ﬁnal presentation on one of the manybooks in our Innovation Center library. A 20 minute presentation on the book

smajor ideas is required with 10 charts maximum.

Prerequisites:

This course is open to upper division engineering and sci-ence students participating in thesis projects. Since the class does NOT re-quire higher math or science skills, non-technical majors are encouraged toparticipate. When necessary they should get help from the more technicallyoriented students in making their presentations rich in technical details.

Readings, Information sources, and Seminars:

A bibliography is given below for the First Semester class. Materials down-loaded from the Faculty

s own subscriptions to variety of sources will be madeavailable to the students. These materials have been obtained from sourceslike the

The Economist

Scientiﬁc American, Technology Review Maga- zine, IEEE Spectrum,

, and the

Wall Street Journal

. Extensive use of Pod-cast materials on Innovation are also available, notably Stanford University,MIT, and TED Talks have lectures that students can learn from. Students areencouraged to listen to several Innovation Podcast on the Web in developingtheir class presentations and developing their applications.

Course Requirements

Meeting deadlines for presentation is of great importance in evaluating stu-dent performance. Students are required to make four major presentations tothe class and to participate in meaningful class discussions of presentations.In most cases, the presentations and proposals are Power Point slides (5

Innovation and Technology

Innovation and Technology First Semester 2010-11

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