The Entrepreneurship of Innovation

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

So often people ask me, “How does research get out in the world?” When that question comes around, to me it means that someone is not asking how best to write her next academic paper. Rather, generally someone seems to be interested in how innovations can see the light of day in industry. On campus, we have a number of resources that students and faculty can take advantage of: the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship which bridges the academic and business world at the Robert H. Smith School of Business; the Maryland Industrial Partnership which funds partnerships with industry; the Technology Advancement Program which offers resources for developing companies.

Here in the iSchool, Dr. Ping Wang leads research in understanding the spread of IT innovation. His work ranges from analyzing the diffusion of Information Technology Concepts in the PopIT project to providing the much needed data and tools for analyzing innovations of all possible outcomes, included failed innovations in the STICK project. Ping works with teams of very talented faculty and students so I would encourage you to look at his research websites.

Ping also created and teaches a course on Managing IT Innovations in Organizations. Recently, he had a company CEO come to visit to talk to students and faculty about the entrepreneurship of innovation. What follows is a summary of this exciting class!

Ping Wang:

On March 10, 2011, Mr. Tien Wong, the CEO of Lore Systems, visited iSchool and gave a guest lecture on "Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation." He spoke to the iSchool students in "Managing IT Innovations in Organizations," a course created and taught by me with the support by the National Science Foundation (grant SBE-0915645).

In 1992, Mr. Wong founded Unitel (CyberRep) with his three friends, in recognition of quality gaps in the call center industry. Unitel grew exponentially and became a leading company in the industry. In early 2003, Wong sold Unitel to Affiliated Computer Services, a global leader in business process outsourcing. Then he bought Lore Systems, a company providing cloud computing services.

Relevant to IT innovation, the theme of the course, Mr. Wong shared with the students his insights on two specific innovations: digital recording technology and remote predictive dialing. As a career entrepreneur, Wong described entrepreneurship as more of art than science, and more of feeling than thinking. He suggested having “4Cs” as a basis for being an entrepreneur, namely confidence, cash, customer, and executive capability. Mr. Wong continued to talk about the best time to start a business, the lifestyle of being an entrepreneur, problems in expanding the business, and ways to attract investors and raise money. Finally, Mr. Wong offered some advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

The video of this talk is available in two parts: Part A and Part B. This event was made possible by the iSchool's collaboration with the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

The Future of the Past

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

In my March 31 blog posting, I first described the Research Communities of our College. With this blog post, we will look at one example from one particular research community’s work: THE FUTURE OF THE PAST. This Research Community seeks to understand how library and archival materials and processes can suggest how we move forward in the future to preserve, organize, and prioritize what we know.

Dr. Bruce Ambacher is a member of this research community and a Visiting Professor at the iSchool where he coordinates and teaches in the archives specialization of the MLS program. Prior to joining the College in 2007 Bruce spent 31 years at the National Archives and Records Administration in a variety of positions relating to electronic records, digital preservation, standards and archival education. His work included the FBI appraisal project, coordinating the preservation of the Iran-Contra (PROFS) and Clinton Administration electronic records.
Bruce’s current research has been in helping to develop standards for “digital data curation” in collaboration with archivists, Librarians, data curators and scientists. Below Bruce describes where the work is going, and what he is looking forward to in the future.

Bruce Ambacher:
As information specialists we are interested in why and how information is created, why and how it is organized and preserved, and why and how it is used. Preservation, especially digital preservation is key to all of this. We know preservation is not just storing the ones and zeroes. Future users need to know what those ones and zeroes are, who created them, why, and how they are combined. In more formal terms digital preservation involves conveying to future users knowledge of the creator and the provenance, essential characteristics, content, fixity, and curatorial changes to the data over time. It also involves information specialists in developing and maintaining access systems for those future users.

The cultural heritage components of the information community have been seeking ways to ensure the long-term preservation of and access to digital information for more than two decades. The first effort emerged from the groundbreaking effort of the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the Research Libraries Group. Their 1996 report, Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving Digital Information. This seminal work led to a series of international task forces that developed the concepts of what the major components of a digital archives should be, the trustworthy digital repository, and the auditable requirements for various aspects of a digital repository. The first International Standard to emerge was the Open Archival Information System Reference Model, (ISO 14721). The model established a clear common language for a digital archives and a widely accepted standardized view of the structure and process of acquiring, processing, preserving, and providing access to digital information. OAIS became an ISO standard in 2002 just as archives, libraries and data repositories began facing the issue of digital preservation and long term access.

In 2003-2006 I served as NARA’s co-chair of the Research Libraries Group – National Archives and Records Administration international task force that developed Trustworthy Repositories: Audit and Certification Criteria and Checklist. TRAC, as it was widely known, quickly became a way to measure whether a digital repository could be “trusted” to preserve digital information. But the document had its limitations.

Under the auspices of the Digital Curation Centre in the United Kingdom, a new international task force was assembled to refine TRAC and develop it into an International Standard. That task force has worked since 2007 to develop Requirements for Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Repositories . RAC is now a draft International Standard (16363). RAC is a rules based document with clear statements of the criteria and of what information or document types could satisfy each criteria.

You can see why I think this June marks a major turning point in the decades long search for digital data curation standards. I will join a small international group of digital archivists, librarians, data curators and scientists to conduct test audits of draft ISO Standard 16363, The audits, funded by the Alliance for Permanent Access, will be conducted at six volunteer digital repositories in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results will be used to refine the draft standard before the ISO member bodies vote final adoption later in 2011.

I believe that in the future the digital curation community will look back on June 2011 as a major milestone on the path toward ensuring trustworthy data by establishing a standard whereby trustworthy digital repositories can be measured and appropriately identified.

Celebrating Research

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

Traditionally a university celebrates the good research of its faculty, staff, and students through promotions, granting tenure, or bestowing degrees. That road to celebration can include: publishing excellent papers in top journals; receiving grants from prestigious funding organizations; giving talks at important conferences and events; even having the national media highlight your research activities and outcomes.

But is that the only time to celebrate? Definitely not--over the past four years the University of Maryland has found ways to celebrate milestones along the way. For example, the Vice President for Research’s Office hosts a yearly university-wide celebration of research for all forms of merit. This year I’m happy to share with you those that will be highlighted from the iSchool:

Paul Jaeger, Cassandra Jones, Mega Subramaniam and John Bertot: Received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for research on access and diversity that supports the Information and Diverse Populations concentration in the Master of Library Science Program. Paul Jaeger and Cassandra Jones serve as concentration coordinators.

Derek Hansen: Co-Authored the highly recognized book on social network analysis: Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World, by Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman, and Marc Smith.

Doug Oard was PI with Co-PIs David Kirsch, David Doermann received a grant from NSF for the "Development and Evaluation of Search Technology for Discovery of Evidence in Civil Litigation"

Ping Wang: Was given Best Published Paper Award (1st place) at 2010 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in the OCIS (Organizational Communications and Information Systems) Division for the paper he co-authored with Neil Ramiller entitled, "Community learning in information technology innovation" published in MIS Quarterly

Bo Xie: Was given a Best Paper Award at the 2011 iConference for the paper: Xie, B., Wang, M., & Feldman, R. (2011) “Preferences for health information and decision-making: development of the Health Information Wants (HIW) questionnaire.”

Jenny Preece: Was made a Fellow of the ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Academy

Ann Weeks, Allison Druin, & Ben Bederson: Received the 2010 American Library Association President's Award for International Library Innovation for the “International Children's Digital Library” (ICDL)

But is that the only time we can celebrate research in the iSchool? The answer is no—for years, we have been recognizing the ongoing achievements of our community in many large and small ways. My predecessor as Associate Dean for Research, Doug Oard used to give at our college assemblies to each of our faculty a “gold star” made from spray-painted cardboard. Each of us that got grants, published papers, or had a research achievement now have these stars hanging in our offices. Our college has had “Research Review Days,” and this year we honored our doctoral students with a poster award competition. The winning posters included: Jes Koepfler’s work on the homeless, Beth Bonsignore’s work on mobile technologies for children, and Dana Rotman’s work on social computing.

In addition, our labs and centers regularly host research events for the public that highlight the good work of our iSchool community. Coming up soon will be the Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s Annual Symposium on May 25-26.

A more recent way we have begun to celebrate the research at the iSchool has been through tweeting! I thoroughly enjoyed when we discovered our Dean was going to be getting an award—there was a flood of tweets highlighting in 140 characters this wonderful achievement! Look for the #iUMD hashtag and you’ll see many of our iSchool students and faculty tweeting away!

Finally, the newest way we will be celebrating the good work of our community will be through this blog. Each week, I will be sharing news, ideas, activities, and energy of the college! Until next week…