Event Announcement: Democratizing Innovation on May 2nd, 2011
HOW?
Bring your favorite unique and innovative product to the event!
Everyone will get a limited number of stickers at the entrance. If you love the product someone brought or love why they love it, you can give stickers to them. Prizes will be given to the ones with the highest number of stickers.
If you would like to bring a product that you made, prototyped, or manufactured, you can pitch it to the whole audience! This will give you a chance to promote, get feedback, and even find team members to help you take your product to the next level. Make sure to get the ‘I want to pitch’ ticket and hurry – spaces are limited!
LIKE?
A product you purchased, made, prototyped, or manufactured. No B2B products please.
Unique = Not yet reached the masses (we all know about iPad2.)
Innovative = Products that make use of new technologies, new materials, or existing ones through inventive design + Your interpretation (Check out blog.curisma.com for inspiration.)
WHY?
Fun to discover cool products!
Networking - great crowd of entrepreneurs, designers, engineers as well as tech & design enthusiasts
Delicious hors d’oeuvers + cash bar
Cool Product Giveaways to the people who bring the coolest products (it can be a product that you purchased) to be voted by the attendees
Brought to you by Curisma, MIT Sloan E&I Club, and MOMIT
Software Lemmingineering
Recently I’ve read interesting article about ”Software Lemmingineering” written by Alan Davis in 1993.
Lemmingineering is a process to engineer systems by blindly following techniques the masses are following, without regard of the appropriateness of those techniques. Davis presenting a well-known fact that in many cases engineers follow leaders without asking themselves whether that’s a right path and whether that’s a path they really want to take. Author’s provides several examples of “lemming” paths and criticizes some of these paths. Lemming paths discussed: Structured programming, Object-oriented programming, Software process maturity, C programming language, Software prototyping, CASE, Software reuse, COTS path.
In the end of paper author provides advice on how to properly evaluate projects instead of blindly following ones:
- Set realistic goals and be realistic about chance of success
- Don’t believe the hype
- Be cautions, but don’t ignore every path
- Don’t forget your goal
- If you achieve your goal earlier, stop
- Whatever you do, do not follow any path just because everybody’s doing this
I have mixed thoughts about this article. Although I agree with Davis, that in some cases it is simply amazing how group of charismatic people can influence and lead masses to do some unreasonable things, but may be sometimes it worth making mistake to find better alternative afterwards?
Startup companies are great example of how people can believe and work hard on something which has very little chance to succeed. Statistically only 7% of startups survive. Building successful startup is an extremely exhilarating experience; it can make adverse effect on people’s wealth, health and personal life, but nonetheless people still trying that. Would successful startups emerge into multibillion businesses if people wouldn’t follow lemming paths? How many failed startup it takes to create next Google, Apple or Amazon?
Another question we have to ask is how to assess success of “lemming trail”?
Davis uses object-oriented programming (OOP) is an example of the path which seemed promising at the beginning, but may not bring expected results at the end. I agree, but are there better alternatives for enterprise software development? OOP may not be the best approach, but it is obviously good enough – the one which enterprise software developers found optimal for their needs.
Not every person can be the leader and to be successful we need lemmings too.
MIT Sloan Sales Competition 2010
As a proud member of MIT Sloan Sales club, I’ve volunteered to help organize Sloan Sales Competition 2010 this fall.
Sloan Sales Competition is a fascinating event where top business schools students present their sales pitches to industry leaders, who judge contestants sales skills.
First stage of the competition is a telephone sales pitch when students call assigned judges and trying to sell something one-on-one. Then selected finalists meet at MIT to present life dales pitches to the judge panel.
I’ve started to search for competition judges and contacted some of the MIT alums and industry leaders. Received some positive response and built initial list of potential judges for this event.
Last year’s Sales Competition was a huge success and we hope to make it even better this fall.
Back to school, Fall 2010
This exciting moment is on again – new school season has started! It is delighting to feel academic atmosphere and meet classmates again after the summer break.
This fall semester I am taking System Architecture (ESD.34) class taught by Prof. Crawley and Software Engineering (ESD.355) class taught by Prof. Leveson. Both classes promise to be interesting and to provide some new knowledge.
In her class Prof. Nancy Leveson teach software engineering from different angle. She is not getting down to specific technologies, programming languages or other tools, instead professor consider higher level software engineering issues, such as software safety, software development project management, software failures analysis, etc. As part of homeworks there is quite a lot of readings assigned for this this class and we have to write critical paper for every article we read.
Being already familiar with System architecture class from IAP 2010 semester in January, I was curious which topics we are going to discuss this fall. Professor advocates universal system architecture, which can be applied to any area of the industry. One aspect which I really like about this class is that Prof. Crawley teaches students to take multiple factors into the account when building new systems. Beside core technology, legal, environmental, political and other factors should be considered.
Jounal of principles 1
Professor Edward Crawley who teaches ESD.34 Systems Architecture class recommends to create journal of principles where we should collect various principles which we can learn from MIT lectures, books or personal experience.
I like this idea because it is a good way to memorize valuable information which can be useful in the future.
Here are some of the principles I’ve collected so far:
Principle 1: Primary goal of any system architecture is to best meet the needs of the system it is created for
Source: SDM System Architecture class
Principle 2: Every system operates as an element of a larger system and is itself composed of smaller systems
Source: SDM System Architecture class
Principle 3: Simplicity if one of the key system design factors as long as functional requirements are not affected.
Source: SDM IAP design lectures, Prof. Guillermo Aguirre
Principle 4: Interface facilitates every component which crosses the boundary
Source: Prof. Ed Crawley
Principle 5: Product innovation is being followed by process innovation. Process innovation usually comes to play when product is mature.
Source: Prof. Jim Utterback
Principle 6: Leadership is not a onetime thing, but a consistent behavior
Source: Prof. Shalom Saar
Principle 7: The process and sub-processes are not linked in any explicit manner, as the system decomposes into elements or the elements aggregate into the whole
Source: Prof. Ed Crawley
Principle 8: In general, there is always a tension between flexibility and optimality in architecture. For example, layered architecture provides a huge advantage of being very flexible, but at the same time it could be less efficient than monolithic architecture because of potential interface inefficiency and information overhead.
Source: SDM System Architecture class
To be continued…
MIT SDM boat trip
Last Saturday me and my lovely wife Tamara have joined an MIT SDM boat trip. Thanks to Avi this trip was very well planned.
We met with SDMers at 9:30 am at Chales River Kayak&Canoe in Nahanton Park, Newton and spent around 3 hours paddling our
boats on Charles river while enjoying wonderful summer weather.
In the mid of the trip we took a lunch break and stopped at the Millenium park to enjoy the company and have interesting discussion.
It was funny to see lots of turtles and ducks on such a close distance. In some places water was surprisingly shallow and our boat even scratched the bottom of the river a couple of times.
It was a good physical activity and on the next day we felt some pleasant muscle pain. While whether allows we hope to find time for another boat trip this summer.
