Influencing innovation

RECENTLY I HAD the pleasure of listening to Dr. Hal Varian, the dean of U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, speak to InfoWorld's 25 Most Influential CTOs at our awards dinner in San Francisco.

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I'll admit that I wasn't familiar with Dr. Varian's work, but after hearing him speak, my lack of exposure felt somewhat neglectful. Varian writes a regular column for the New York Times' business section and, with his colleague Carl Shapiro, has published a book that is next on my reading list -- Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. You can also read Varian's online-only article "The Economics of Innovation" at www.infoworld.com/ctozone , and you can check out his live forum, "Building the IT workforce," Thursday, Dec. 12, at 11 a.m. PST at www.infoworld.com/forums . Also a professor in the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, Dr. Varian's views dovetail with the CTO mindset in its focus on how technology and business intersect to drive innovation.

One topic that really captured my attention was Varian's explanation of the concept of "recombinant growth." The term may sound intimidating, but it is actually quite simple. Recombinant growth refers to reassembling existing technologies into something novel, innovative, and ultimately greater than the sum of its parts.

The Wright brothers leveraged their knowledge of kites, the new gasoline engine, and bicycles to invent something new and revolutionary: the airplane. The genius of the Wrights lay in their vision for creating a single mechanism that was greater than the sum of its components.

On the technology and business level, this is the essence of what CTOs do -- we take our understanding of all the different technologies available and combine them in unique ways to deliver competitive advantages for our businesses.

I'll offer a timely example. Like many companies, InfoWorld has rolled out a number of wireless technologies over the past several months to enhance the productivity of its employees. Our headquarters is fully 802.11-enabled, a number of our key employees are avid Blackberry users, and we're doing some tests with 802.11-enabled PocketPCs. On the sales side, we recently adopted Salesforce.com as our sales force automation solution. Both the wireless decisions and the sales force automation were made independently.

Coincidentally, I spent most of my time this week going on calls to our customers with members of our sales team, to study their work habits. A typical problem in the field is the need for a client's phone number that is not within arm's reach. Fortunately for me, Salesforce.com announced a wireless edition launching in December that would allow sales people in the field to interface with their sales database in real time. Our investment in two unrelated technologies -- Salesforce.com and wireless technologies -- combine into an immediately useful innovation that will help drive revenue more efficiently. To a CTO, that's what it's all about.