Chief of Confusion
We have finalized the program for the Summit, and have had some exciting last minute speaker confirmations.
One is John Seely Brown (also goes by JSB or Chief of Confusion), who was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His work on the human context in which technologies operate, as written up in The Social Life of Information for example, is a guiding light for RiOS, as it connects well with our own research into how to improve ICTs for the people actually using them.
Seely and his collaborators' insights into innovation, especially in "edge places" like India and China, will bring an interesting perspective to the Summit. What can we learn from these places, important not only because of its own IT industry in the case of India, but also because they are grappling with some of the major development issues the Summit will address.
And India and China are not incidentally the emerging markets many high-tech companies are after. One of the Summit's breakout sessions will focus on the bop (that's short for bottom of the pyramid, as this corporate focus is called following the work of C.K. Prahalad), and we have recruited Al Hammond from the World Resource Institute (WRI) to lead this workshop. The WRI is an independent research institute based in Washington, and its next billion project is one of the most comprehensive databases on a wide and diverse range of bop efforts, many involving ICT. Hammond will be presenting some of the project's most recent research on Future Markets.
The whole program will be posted on the Summit's website and on this blog in the near future, so be sure to check back.
RiOS