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lectures > lectures autumn 2003

Technology push and demand pull in innovation

Speaker: Professor James Woudhuysen
4th October 2003

Over the years, the focus in innovation has moved from broad and often 'basic' research and development, done in big laboratories, toward product and service users, their needs and difficulties. As feelings about IT have swung from what Alan Greenspan called 'irrational exuberance' to what we might term 'irrational pessimism', so the doctrine has grown that technology is no panacea.

Is this shift a belated adjustment toward a humanistic perspective, or does it mark, rather, an avoidance of risk and a conservative worship of the market?

James Woudhuysen, a physicist, is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University.

He writes for Management Today and IT Week, and broadcasts for Radio 4's You and Yours.

He helped install Britain's first computer-controlled car park in 1968, and has written about chemical weapons for The Economist.

He has also written a word processor instruction manual, 1983; led a multi-client study of e-commerce, 1988, and proposed that the Internet be delivered via TV, 1993.

He consults for, among others: BT, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Nokia, Yamaha Motor.

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