Harvard Business Review, Al Gore and Creative Destruction - What does that have to do with IMS?

May 28, 2009

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

I guess not a lot is keeping you all up at night since no one fessed-up. I lose sleep frequently given my type A personality but that’s a whole different thought topic for a separate blog. However, this “all is quiet” response reminded me of another article I read recently in the Harvard Business Review.  My favorite passage, which I think describes what’s happening amongst us is this... “This hesitancy to make waves becomes stronger in times of general economic turmoil.”

I certainly recognize that many of us are too worried about our own jobs to present an out-of-the-box idea right now and so hopefully my blog can stoke the fires on your behalf.  With IMS nearly here and the economy still in a fragile state, I am reminded of my attendance at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas in early April.  This trade show was huge – certainly much larger in size than I had expected and the keynote speaker on the last day totally caught me off guard -- Al Gore!

He said a number of things that were witty, insightful, self deprecating, etc.  But a phrase from his talk that I had never heard before has stuck with me: “creative destruction.”  It made me think about our wireless world and how significantly technology has changed in only a short decade or two. The concept is, effectively, that to drive an economy forward we will yield to a cycle of creative destruction…think of the typewriter to the computer, land line phones to cellphones and PDAs to today’s touch screen Blackberries and iPhones.  These creative ideas were at a cost to an existing technology but what manifested itself at the end was an even bigger opportunity for market growth.

Gore continued on and offered up what could be current "creative destructors" presently in our midst.  He talked (not surprisingly) about the greening of our energy grid.  Replacing infrastructure that, although costly, time-consuming, and a whole host of other factors /reasons to object to the idea results in a stronger, more thriving economy in the end. Jotting his ideas down here seems anti-climactic to the actual talk, so let me just say, if you have the chance to here him speak live, you should do it.  Ok, so after that show, I came back to my office and googled “creative destruction.” Then my brain started to think about what creative destruction is happening before our eyes right now?  What will we see at IMS that we can classify as “creative destruction?"  

If I parallel Gore’s infrastructure change into RF EDA, I can envision the tool infrastructure trend to be that of full flow design environments vs. disparate point tools that require extensive, time-consuming manual effort.  Look to AWR for inclusion of AXIEM and recently-acquired Analyst for 3D FEM EM into our design environment.  Look to ICED in the DRC/LVS flow.  Look to our founding member status in IPL (interoperable PDK libraries) to move IC vendors to a common PDK philosophy.  Look to our AWR Connected partnerships with Anritsu, Mentor Graphics and shortly Rohde & Schwarz.

Or if I look to our foundry partners like TriQuint, Win and Cree to name a few, there are on-going infrastructure tussle over GaAs, GaN, SiGe, BiCMOS etc for a whole host of applications and markets.  Two topics that immediately come to mind from the IMS' technical program that could be a possible creative destructive topic are: Is GaN ready for system insertion?  and  SiGe/CMOS RF-IC Phased Arrays: will they be used in defense and commercial systems?

Digging a bit deeper, this reminded me of something a high-level person at a big foundry shared recently with AWR....Foundry X is using the current economic uncertainty/time span to review its strategy - to develop new technologies as well as to fill in the details on older ones that we have been too busy (i.e., cranking out wafers) to address.  Is Foundry X and others exploring these new technologies  in anticipation or preparation or precaution to creative destruction?  Time will tell. 
 
In the end, creative destruction is about breaking down legacy barriers in order to spawn new products and grow new markets or expand current market share in a way that advances and benefits the entire industry.  It takes an eye for the future, not the past, and AWR is and always has been a company with its eyes on the future and the possibilities that lie ahead…most importantly how our flagship Microwave Office design environment can provide you with the RF EDA infrastructure /  innovations that will reduce your time to market and give you a competitive edge today, tomorrow and well into the future! 
 

Comments

[Pat Hindle]

Sherry, great entry on innovation. I was at the Gore talk also but was more fixated on his Green comments about how wireless can lead the way. I agree that there are some businesses that will totally change due to creative destruction so we need to always look for new opportunities and ways of doing business.

[ScottWW]

"Creative destruction" -- an excellent phrase to apply to the microwave industry, Sherry! It has that perfect suggestion of nostalgia. I'm just old enough to remember the very impressive Varian and Raytheon tube exhibits in the IMS days gone by. There was that sense of power and awe and danger you could get from TWTs and Klystrons that's just not the same with uW semiconductors. Now mind you, I'm young enough to not miss that stuff too much. Seriously, at my first IMS show, I thought I was in the wrong building and had mistakenly walked into a plumbing exhibit! Now the IMS show is a much better reflection of the ongoing innovations in the microwave industry. Consider the advances in RFICs seen in recent years! As you suggest, IMS is the perfect place to both celebrate and lament the latest technological advances and the changes they bring about.