Tagged : Chinese Academy of Governance

in China, Futures, Platforms, Political Economy, Presentations, Travel

IT Platforms and the Ecology of Innovation">IT Platforms and the Ecology of Innovation

It has been fun being back in Bei­jing this week. My first visit to the city was in 1989 when the streets were still filled with bicy­cles. I’ve been back here about once a year since then yet the pace of progress on so many lev­els is still hard to com­pre­hend. Growth of the ‘Star­bucks Index’ alone is mind blow­ing and seems to be reach­ing Seat­tle or New York den­si­ties. The other thing I’ve noticed is the incred­i­ble focus on effi­ciency; from the three hour turn-around for a visa at the Chi­nese Con­sulate in Zurich (Try that at the US Embassy), to the immi­gra­tion process and flow through the air­port. Yes, the traf­fic is still a night­mare and seems to be get­ting worse. I don’t live here so I can imag­ine there is an alter­nate real­ity I’m not aware of. However, the gen­eral expe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors is pretty impressive.

I had a chance to catch up with Microsoft’s National Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer Sean Zhang on Wednes­day for a great evening of con­ver­sa­tion. I’ll also be able to see Peter Moore and Michael Thatcher before I leave so that’s an added bonus.

The rea­son for the visit to Bei­jing was an invi­ta­tion to present at the Chi­nese Acad­emy of Gov­er­nance today. The Acad­emy is respon­si­ble for train­ing senior civil ser­vants in the PRC admin­is­tra­tion. My pre­sen­ta­tion is titled “IT Plat­forms and the Ecol­ogy of Inno­va­tion” (PDF copy here) and focuses on the how the evo­lu­tion of IT plat­forms has enabled the devel­op­ment of the global ser­vice econ­omy. I’ll take a his­toric look at how these plat­forms have evolved and then will talk about the com­ing dis­rup­tive effects of the ‘Cloud’ plat­form and those which follow.

This is pre­sen­ta­tion comes out of ongo­ing work with Prof. John Zys­man and the team at UC Berkeley’s BRIE. One of the things which is cen­tral but still the cen­ter of a heated debate is how you define an IT Plat­form i.e. rigorously enough for it to be used as an ana­lyt­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion when look­ing at the sur­round­ing polit­i­cal econ­omy issues. The cur­rent def­i­n­i­tion I’m using is:

A con­sis­tent devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment sup­ported by new soft­ware and hard­ware archi­tec­tures, based on stan­dards and avail­able at scale, that enables ser­vice and busi­ness model innovation

This is not per­fect and I’m open to sug­ges­tions about how to improve it. Any def­i­n­i­tion needs to be able to delin­eate his­toric plat­form tran­si­tions in a clear and defen­si­ble way and also be able to help iden­tify when a new tran­si­tion is tak­ing place.

I’m look­ing for­ward to a inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion and debate about the oppor­tu­ni­ties and pol­icy chal­lenges these new plat­forms will cre­ate in the Chi­nese con­text. Should be fun.