Kai kurios įmonės reintegruoja jų vidinius inkubatorius

  „Kai kurios įmonės tolsta nuo idėjos, kad savarankiškos, startuolių tipo laboratorijos yra geriausias būdas paskatinti inovacijas.

 

     Pakartotinis įvertinimas atliktas, kai didžiosios įmonės jaučia spaudimą panaudoti pažangiausią generacinį dirbtinį intelektą (AI) naujiems atradimams.

 

     Šios įmonės teigia, kad geriausios idėjos kyla iš verslo viduje, o ne iš kolegų iš atskirų grupių, kurie vėliau turi gauti įmonės įpirką.

 

     „Walmart“ sausio mėn. paskelbė apie planus uždaryti „Store No. 8“ – idėjų inkubavimo padalinį, kuris turėjo keletą partnerių, įsikūrusių Kalifornijos Silicio slėnyje. Arkanzaso mažmenininkas teigė, kad atskira laboratorija nebereikalinga, nes ji sukūrė naują metodą, kuris inovacijas įdiegė giliau visoje įmonėje, suteikiant daugiau darbuotojų galimybę prisidėti.

 

     „Mes laikomės kitokio požiūrio“, – sakė „Walmart“ technologijų padalinio vyriausiasis pareigūnas Anshu Bhardwaj.

 

     Kai kurie technologijų lyderiai teigia, kad yra klaida, kai inovacijos yra atskirtos nuo paties verslo, o tai dažnai gali lemti tiesiog technologijų siekimą technologijų labui. Pasak jų, įmonės rizikuoja patekti į šį modelį, naudodamos AI, sutelkdamos dėmesį į tai, kur gali pritaikyti technologiją, o ne į problemas, kurias ji galėtų išspręsti.

 

     Inovacijų laboratorijų banga prasidėjo, kai įmonės, užkluptos netikėtos skaitmeninių pirmųjų įmonių, tokių, kaip „Amazon“ ir „Google“, sėkmės, įkūrė forpostus technologijų centruose, tokiuose, kaip Silicio slėnis.

 

     Kai kurios iš šių pastangų atsipirko padidėjus elektroninės prekybos pardavimui, įėjimui į naujas rinkas ir spartesne produktų plėtra. „Walmart“ teigė, kad parduotuvė Nr. 8 pristatė keletą naujovių, įskaitant paslaugą, kuri gali pristatyti maisto produktus tiesiai į kliento šaldytuvą, jei klientas susitaria būti namuose arba suteikia prieigą per išmanųjį užraktą.

 

     Tačiau pastangos, sukurtos atskirose laboratorijose, ne visada atitinka problemas, kurias bando išspręsti verslas. Ir verslo kolegos, turinčios esamus darbo būdus, ne visada džiaugiasi kitus naudodamos, sakė vadovai.

 

     Kai kurios įmonės permąsto laboratorijas, kai ruošiasi naujai AI plėtros bangai.

 

     „Walmart“ uždarė parduotuvę Nr. 8 ir perėjo prie „Keturi dėžutėje“ metodo, kuris sujungia darbuotojus su verslo, produktų, technologijų ir vartotojo patirties vaidmenimis, kad nustatytų ir spręstų iššūkius pasitelkiant technologijas. Šis metodas leido „Walmart“ greičiau įdiegti naujus sprendimus, pvz., įtraukti ankstyvo ryto ir vėlyvo vakaro parinktis į pristatymo į namus paslaugą.

 

     „Walmart“ yra prasminga skirti inovacijų pastangas verslo padaliniams, sakė Bhardwaj. „Bet kuriai vienai komandai labai sunku vienu metu būti dalyko ekspertu ir technologijų ekspertu“, – sakė ji.

 

     „Ford Motor“ inovacijų laboratorija Silicio slėnyje dabar labiau siekia pasinaudoti regiono talentų fondu, o ne pradėti misiją dirbti su naujomis technologijomis, teigė automobilių gamintojas.

 

     Atsakomybė už naujoves tapo labiau integruota į daugelį „Ford“ funkcijų ir skyrių, sakė atstovas.

 

     Mokėjimo technologijų įmonė „Mastercard“ valdo padalinį „Mastercard Foundry“, kuriame specialios komandos atlieka daugiau tiesioginių taikomųjų naujų technologijų, tokių, kaip kvantinė kompiuterija, tyrimus, tačiau skatina ir visus darbuotojus diegti naujoves su klientais, sprendžiant tikras verslo problemas.

 

     „Kartais daroma klaida, kai organizacijos sako, kad naujovės yra kažkas pašalinio, o ne tai, ką darote kasdien ir turi būti kiekvienos komandos dalimi“, – sakė „Mastercard“ vyriausiasis technologijų pareigūnas Edas McLaughlinas. "Inovacijos yra kaip etika. Ir jos turi persmelkti visą organizaciją."

 

     „Mastercard“ neseniai bendradarbiavo su „Mercedes“, kad būtų galima atlikti skaitmeninius mokėjimus naudojant pirštų atspaudų biometrinį autentifikavimą tiesiai iš automobilio prietaisų skydelio daugiau nei 3600 degalinių Vokietijoje.

 

     Kai kurios įmonės išlieka įsipareigojusios savo laboratorijoms. Jeffas Wongas, „Ernst & Young“ pasaulinis inovacijų vadovas, prižiūri daugybę profesionalių paslaugų įmonės laboratorijų, kurios kuria technologijas tiek savo, tiek klientų reikmėms. Bendrovė gauna penkis kartus daugiau grąžos už laboratorijose sukurtas technologijas – pakankamai, kad jos būtų atviros, sakė jis.

 

     Wongas teigė, kad stengiasi, kad atskiras modelis atitiktų tikras verslo problemas. „Tai labai sunku padaryti“, – sakė jis.

 

     Finansų milžine BNP Paribas Matthieu Soule prižiūri Silicio slėnyje veikiančią laboratoriją, kurios tikslas – įdiegti pažangiausias paleidimo technologijas į banką ir jo klientus.

 

     Kolegos kitose verslo srityse ne visada džiaugiasi jo pasiūlytais sprendimais, sakė Soule. Jis sakė, kad stengėsi, kad naujos technologijos būtų kažkas, ko joms reikia, norint išgyventi besikeičiančiame pasaulyje, o ne tik šaunų papildymą. „Žmonės kartais labiau reaguoja į lazdą, nei į morką“, - sakė Soule.

 

     Verta, kad įmonės atideda išteklius, kad galėtų apsvarstyti „mėnulio skrydžio“ technologijas po 10 metų į ateitį, nors paprastai tik pramonės šakose, kurių produktų kūrimo ciklas yra ilgas, pavyzdžiui, aviacijos pramonėje, sakė Gregas Larkinas, įkūręs pasaulinę verslininkų ir vadovų bendruomenę „Punks & Pinstripes“ ir konsultavęs inovacijų klausimais „Google“, „Uber“ ir „PricewaterhouseCoopers“.

 

     Tačiau laboratorijos linkusios rinktis technologijas, kurios neturi aiškaus kelio į realią verslo vertę dabar ar ateityje, sakė jis.

 

     „Kai turite inovacijų laboratoriją, jūs tik atsakote į FOMO [baimė praleisti] klausimą, o tai reiškia: „Ar tai seksualus dalykas, dėl kurio galime tapti užkluptais netikėtai, jei jis judės į priekį be mūsų?“ – sakė Larkinas.“ [1]

 

1. Some Companies Reintegrate Their In-House Incubators. Bousquette, Isabelle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2024: B.5.

Some Companies Reintegrate Their In-House Incubators

"Some companies are moving away from the idea that stand-alone, startup-style labs are the best way to drive innovation.

The re-evaluation comes as big businesses feel pressure to harness cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence for new discoveries. 

The best ideas come from within the business, these companies say, rather than from colleagues in detached groups who then have to get buy-in from the company.

Walmart in January announced plans to close Store No. 8, an idea-incubation arm that had some associates based in California's Silicon Valley. The stand-alone lab was no longer needed, the Arkansas-based retailer said, because it had developed a new method that embedded innovation deeper across the company, giving more employees the opportunity to contribute.

"We're taking a different approach," said Anshu Bhardwaj, chief operating officer of Walmart's technology unit.

Some tech leaders say it is a mistake to position innovation as separate from the business itself, and that doing so can often lead to simply pursuing technology for technology's sake. Companies risk falling into that pattern with AI, by focusing on where they can apply the technology rather than the problems it could solve, they said.

A wave of innovation labs started when companies, caught flat-footed by the sudden success of digital-first companies like Amazon and Google, set up outposts in tech hubs like Silicon Valley.

Some of those efforts paid off with increased e-commerce sales, entries into new markets and faster product development. Walmart said Store No. 8 delivered several innovations, including a service that can deliver groceries directly to a customer's refrigerator, if the customer arranges to be home or provides access through a smart lock.

But efforts developed in stand-alone labs don't always align with problems the business is trying to solve. And business counterparts with existing ways of working aren't always excited about using them, executives said.

Some companies are rethinking labs as they prepare for the new wave of AI development.

Walmart closed Store No. 8 and shifted to a "Four in a Box" method, which brings together employees with business, product, technology and user experience roles to identify and solve challenges through tech. The approach has allowed Walmart to more quickly deploy new solutions, such as adding early-morning and late-night options to its in-home delivery service.

Assigning innovation efforts across business units makes sense for Walmart, said Bhardwaj. "It's very difficult for any one single team to be the subject matter expert and the tech expert at the same time," she said.

Ford Motor's innovation lab in Silicon Valley is now more about tapping into the region's talent pool than its launch mission of working with startups on new technologies, the automaker said.

Responsibilities for innovation have evolved to be more integrated across many functions and departments within Ford, a spokesman said.

Payment-technology company Mastercard operates a unit called Mastercard Foundry where dedicated teams do more direct applied research on new technologies, such as quantum computing, but that is in addition to encouraging all employees to innovate with customers on real business problems.

"There's a mistake sometimes where organizations say innovation is something off the side rather than something that you do every day and needs to be part of every team," said Mastercard Chief Technology Officer Ed McLaughlin. "Innovation is like ethics. And it has to pervade the whole organization."

Mastercard recently worked with Mercedes to enable digital payments via fingerprint biometric authentication directly from the vehicle's dashboard at more than 3,600 service stations in Germany.

Some companies remain committed to their labs. Jeff Wong, Ernst & Young's global chief innovation officer, oversees a number of labs at the professional-services firm that develop technology both for its own use and that of its clients. The company gains a fivefold return on technologies developed in the labs -- enough to keep them open, he said.

Wong said he strives to keep the stand-alone model in tune with real business problems. "It's a very hard thing to do," he said.

At financial giant BNP Paribas, Matthieu Soule oversees a Silicon Valley-based lab that aims to bring cutting-edge startup technology into the bank and its customers.

Colleagues in other parts of the business aren't always excited about solutions he brings in, Soule said. He said he has been working to position new technology as something they need to survive in a changing world, rather than just a cool addition. "People are sometimes more reactive to a stick than a carrot," Soule said.

There is value in companies setting aside resources to consider moonshot technologies 10 years into the future, albeit typically only in industries with long product development cycles such as aerospace, said Greg Larkin, who founded Punks & Pinstripes, a global community of entrepreneurs and executives, and has advised on innovation at Google, Uber and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

But labs tend to gravitate toward technologies that don't have a clear path to driving real business value, now or in the future, he said.

"When you have an innovation lab, you're only answering the FOMO [fear of missing out] question, meaning: 'Is this a sexy thing that we might be caught flat-footed if it moves forward without us?'" Larkin said." [1]

1. Some Companies Reintegrate Their In-House Incubators. Bousquette, Isabelle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2024: B.5.

 

When the President Is a Follower, Not a Leader

 

Barton Swaim offers a cogent encapsulation of "Joe Biden's Long Career of Conformity" (op-ed, April 9). This is a president whose most salient quality is his willingness, and eagerness, to go along to keep his career moving along. 

It may be this very pliability that catapulted him to the pinnacle of the political profession. The factions of the Democratic Party, eventually including its powerful left wing, saw an anodyne, nearly empty vessel into which to pour all its aspirations. 

"I seen my opportunities and I took 'em," as a notable Democrat of yore once put it.

One can easily conjecture that Mr. Biden, deep inside himself, knows that this flexible approach is what brought him to the White House. So why could we have reasonably expected his presidency to be anything other than an exercise in discerning the direction of the wind to determine where and how to proceed? As Mr. Swaim points out, how could we possibly expect a second Biden term to be any different, except in degree?

Mark M. Quinn

Naperville, Ill.

---

Mr. Swaim explains Mr. Biden's career clearly, but he should have used a different term instead of "conformity." He should have said what Mr. Biden has been ever since he nearly flunked out of law school: a follower.

Mr. Biden learned quickly that Delaware voters didn't care if you didn't have an original thought in your head as long as your politics didn't affect them personally or financially. That gave him an excuse to never work a real job.

Fifty years later, Delaware still doesn't care. I hope the rest of the nation, however, has learned the lesson of what happens when you elect a follower in a time of Democratic Party extremism.

Andrew Rokita

Wilmington, Del.

---

Ronald Reagan was often called the Teflon president. Given, as Mr. Swaim writes, "Mr. Biden's pliability is his most notable quality," should he be referred to as the Play-Doh president?

Gregory Marshall

Marietta, Ga." [1]

1. When the President Is a Follower, Not a Leader. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2024: A.14.

Lithuanian schools and universities cannot withstand global competition, so neither will we all

"After the doors of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports were closed by its head Gintautas Jakštas, many problems remain unsolved not only in schools, where the mid-term examinations of students in the eleventh grade were scandalously failed. The latest global ranking of universities revealed gaps in higher education as well - Lithuanian universities cannot withstand global competition.

 

The Minister of Education, Science and Sports, who has not worked for more than a year, explains his resignation as a result of disagreements in the Government regarding how the problems arising during the intermediate examinations of the eleventh grade should be solved.

 

G. Jakštas claimed that he was not satisfied with the work culture of Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė's team in solving problems in the field of education. According to him, there is a lack of sufficient freedom to decide and implement decisions they believe in.

 

In a comment submitted to BNS by the communication group of President Gitanas Nausėda, it is said that, in the opinion of the country's leader, the resignation of G. Jakštas is "the only correct decision in the situation in which the education system has been brought".

 

It seems to have led to a dead end again.

 

The education system in our country has gone through many perturbations, which were loudly called in the name of reforms and which were undertaken by almost every government. However, with the exception of constantly alternating decisions regarding one or another, one way or another preparation of high school exams, when students received new surprises almost every year, curriculum changes, teacher strikes, etc., education policy in Lithuania never progressed to real reforms.

 

in 2023 at the end of the year, Andreas Schleicher, head of the Education and Skills Directorate of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), stated: Lithuanian youth lack skills, a quarter of 15-year-olds do not have basic knowledge of mathematics, and vocational education is considered a second, inferior, type of education.

 

According to him, one in four 15-year-olds in Lithuania does not have basic knowledge of mathematics. According to A. Schleicher, it is important that each student is advised on learning methods, learning is coordinated, and mid-term examinations take place. Both teachers and parents could advise which learning method is suitable for a particular child.

 

According to the OECD representative, a good balance needs to be struck so that the leaving exams reflect what is assessed in the curriculum. It is already known what the results of the inspections organized by the ministry this year were. In the wake of a storm of dissatisfaction, it is stated that the results of mid-term examinations can be disregarded - if the students so wish. In this case, they would have to take longer matriculation exams next year.

 

In response to the outcry over the midterms, the ministry is set to overhaul the split exam model "from the ground up". A decision on it is intended to be made by June, after consultation with the educational community.

 

"Abolishing such a model would be a step backwards," said G. Jakštas.

 

It is not known what steps and in which direction the minister's successor will take, it is only clear that there is no time left for new "discoveries". The new Government will be not able to deal with this also, while will undoubtedly raise its "educational reform" banner. And again from the starting line.

 

Against this background, the affairs of the other "wing" of education are not very optimistic. In the world ranking according to academic disciplines, Lithuanian universities did not rise in any positions - they fell or remained where they were.

 

In total, the QS World University Rankings by Subject study, conducted by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, evaluated more than 16,000 university programs at 1,500 universities in 95 countries. The world's best universities are ranked according to 55 academic disciplines. "The number of universities participating in global rankings is increasing every year, so the competition is also increasing. Therefore, it is not surprising that this year's evaluations of practically all Lithuanian universities in individual fields are worse than last year", comments Prof. Dr. Juozas Augutis, rector of Vytautas the Great University (VDU).

 

Still, you should be surprised - at least a little.

 

Vilnius University, Vytautas the Great University, Vilnius Tech and Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) lost their positions to others and fell in the ranking. The Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater and Mykolas Romeris University did not move from their places.

 

The position of Lithuanian universities in the global ranking dr. Dainius Žvirdauskas, director of the KTU Engineering Lyceum and president of the Association of Lithuanian School Heads, explains by the lack of resources.

 

"We should think about how to organize all the educational activities of the university in such a way that we meet the set indicators. And, of course, those indicators are often made in such a way that it is difficult to achieve them. 

 

Anyway, it shows that we are a kind of periphery of innovation and science. We are a small state, we have a small population of people and, probably, we have also scattered our resources, not focusing them on performance indicators", he thinks.

 

By the way, about resources. Funding for university system is steadily increasing. However, according to Dalius Misiūnas, rector of the ISM University of Management and Economics, it also has its drawbacks or side effects.

 

"We are still stuck at the level where it is not ideas that are financed, but attempts to absorb the financing are given money. And that problem is even getting worse. Higher education in Lithuania faces the same problem: quality is measured by counting publications. That publishing of articles becomes just for its own sake. More and more jobs are created, which means more funding. But the money to keep those jobs is simply eaten up, regardless of the fact that funding for higher education is growing," he said in an interview with VŽ.

 

According to the head of the ISM, there is a clear trend that there are fewer and fewer studies that reveal something new, even more studies about studies or even generalizations of the same studies.

 

Teachers are constantly on strike, demanding higher salaries and smaller classes, ministers traditionally appease them with promises, and the teaching process itself either stagnates or suffers from increasingly "innovative" solutions.

 

According to the mentioned VDU rector, due to the increased competition, higher education has either stagnated or fallen in the global ranking in most educational subjects. Why are Lithuanian universities giving up positions? Making excuses is easier than picking up the gauntlet of a challenge?

 

  By the way, Estonian universities managed to rise in the ranking."

 

Competing in the economy is possible only on price or qualification. Our prices in Lithuania are European, so that opportunity to compete has already ended. Since Lithuanian schools and universities cannot withstand global competition, to compete using qualification is also not available. Therefore, it is not worth building a life in Lithuania, because poverty awaits. Let's urgently introduce dual citizenship, so that we don't lose our language and culture when we leave.