Escaped From the Lab: SPLASH 2017 Workshop Report
Workshop discussion at:
SPLASH 2017, Vancouver BC, Canada
October 22, 2017
Workshop mission
The discussion in this workshop focused on four big ideas:
- Innovation is different today than 30 years ago
- Today, there are few big industrial labs
- More innovations come from universities, startups, open source communities, and standards communities
- Innovations often fit into an "ecosystem" (a family of tools, services, and environments)
- this makes them more usable, but customers may struggle with a "lock-in" problem
- (difficult or impossible to change ecosystems - try to move from Apple to Android or AWS to Google)
- Today's economic model for integrating innovations into products and services
- corporate acquisitions rather than 100% internal product development
- In programming language innovation, the "lure of the cool" is an important factor for users
Workshop raw notes
The complete workshop "raw notes" are available as an HTML file -- see
http://manclswx.com/workshops/splash17/workshop_raw_notes.html.
Links to earlier workshops on "Escaped from the Lab"
Workshop report
What is an innovation?
- Invention = creating something new and novel
- Innovation = creating something new that has value for society
- innovation may create or develop something of value from recent and not-so-recent "inventions"
- innovation may "integrate" inventions into something that really helps people
- innovation includes applying inventions in a new context
Innovations are not just isolated cool things...
- an innovation will often create a new ecosystem (in order to be useful to users/customers)
- or it may "extend" an existing ecosystem
Innovations: from brainstorm to product
- Innovations come from many places, not just research labs
- An innovation may need to grow in a protected environment (accelerators and incubators)
- to get more funding, support, mentoring
- and develop a set of good business contacts
- Integration into real-world products and services
- Option 1: Traditional internal development
- Option 2: Acquire an innovation from another company
- Option 3: Release your innovation as open source
- Option 4: Create contests and grand challenges (to get other people to do the hard work)
Sustaining your innovation
Once your innovation escapes from the lab, how do you keep it going?
Here are some practical ways to get more users, customers, and revenues:
- building funding and visibility
- venture capital funding
- models for getting early users: freemium model / trusted tester model
- get attention of the media, "influencers", and social networks
- crowd funding
- getting feedback, building quality
- customer surveys
- tracking data in github (whose changes are getting the most pull requests)
- defending your innovation
- patents, copyrights, licensing
- speedy delivery (using fast delivery of new features to deter competition)
Advice for programming language experts
As a "language expert", you will never get rich -- because you are working on "enabling technology" that is invisible to many people. But there are other rewards:
- going to conferences, writing papers
- getting people to use your stuff (new languages and new tools)
- our goal as language innovators... helping people to do more with less
- but... there is the risk that your users will move on to something "cooler"
For more information, visit the workshop main page:
Last modified: Oct. 23, 2017