Some of us feel compelled to invent new technologies; some of us feel compelled to invent ourselves. A rare few do both. Kim seldom talks in any great depth about his personal history. He came to the United States from South Korea at the age of 14. He knew no English; he had no money. He lived in Maryland, in subsidized housing, wearing clothes from thrift shops. Sometimes he went without food for days. By his own account, his home environment was tense, unbearable. His nose would bleed from the stress. In an interview several years ago for the Academy of American Achievement, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, Kim acknowledged that at one point as a teenager his misery was so profound that he concluded he had two choices: He could either take his own life or make something of himself. "I'm at rock bottom," he realized. "It's going to have to get better than this."
It didn't--at least, not right away. His father kicked him out of the house at 16, and he went to live with a sympathetic high-school teacher and his wife. He was a good student, with an aptitude for math and science, but he lived in a haze of sleep deprivation. He would go to classes, study for a few hours after school, catch a couple hours of sleep, and then go to work at the local 7-11 from 11 p.m. until dawn. When his shift was over, he would head back to school again.
His grades got him into Johns Hopkins. By then, the personal computer had caught Kim's attention. "I guess I was different," he says. Most college students interested in computers at that time wanted to buy one--he wanted to build one. While still an undergraduate, he joined a PC startup company formed by some people at Hopkins. (It initially did well but later collapsed.) He also joined the U.S. Navy, which, after graduation, led to an officer's commission on a nuclear submarine.
The subsequent pieces of his life fit together with an almost predetermined logic. He married, had two children, earned a PhD in engineering at the University of Maryland. He then started a technology consulting business, which led to a startup company that created a communications device--the Yurie box, named after one of his daughters--that aided in the complex transmissions of voice, digital, and video signals. While working on Yurie in the mid-1990s, Kim--who has described himself as a "crazy risk taker"--went $400,000 in debt by mortgaging his house and maxing out his credit cards. Paying those back after he sold the business to Lucent in 1998 wasn't a problem.
His path to the top of Bell Labs had a detour. In 2000, while he was working at Lucent, he was offered the presidency of the Labs. He turned it down; he thought he didn't have the proper research experience. Instead, he became a professor at the University of Maryland. Four years later, Patricia Russo, Lucent's CEO, asked him again to run the Labs. And this time, he accepted.
One morning in October, in a conference room that abuts his Bell Labs office, Kim is battling a fever and a chest-rattling cough while laying out his research plan for the next few years. He really should be home in bed, he admits, but there's too much to do. Projects involving the incorporation of Alcatel's European research group into Bell Labs, for instance, need his input or affirmation. Wealthy beyond anything he imagined during his graveyard shifts at the 7-11, he dismisses the notion that money is what motivates him. "There are people in the hedge-fund and financial sectors who have made so much money," he says. "But what have they created? What value?" The goal of the innovator, as he sees it, is to have a positive impact on your company, your country, and yourself. He approaches the task with a deep social responsibility, even a sort of patriotism. "How are we going to compete with China? How are we going to compete in the world?" Kim asks me. "We can't possibly compete with their low-cost labor. We have to compete in innovations."
"People in the financial sector have so much money," says Kim. "But what have they created? What value?"
Kim is not especially dismayed by the challenges Bell Labs faces both in the United States and abroad. It's not swagger so much as a belief in steadfast forward movement. "I'm very comfortable in chaotic environments," he explains. "It's no more chaotic than when I first emigrated to the United States. I didn't understand the culture. I didn't understand the language. I didn't know the people. Everything was confusing, even the food." You can get the sense that for him, the professional and personal are not unconnected. Innovation, like growing up, sometimes needs to get done in the midst of adversity.
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Recent Comments | 13 Total
February 15, 2008 at 2:20pm by Anand Sanwal
This article is pretty interesting and Jeong Kim who heads up the group is undoubtedly a great innovator. Some of Kim's interesting insights & actions as the head of Bell Labs include his use of a venture capital type approach to innovation as "Kim has grouped the Labs' more audacious research efforts under what's now called Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, or ALV."
This skunk-works for innovation makes a lot of sense. And several interesting ideas are emerging from these efforts which the article details.
But the article is prone to a few flights of hyperbole including Kim's theory on innovation which is described as a cube. Although calling it dimensions and visualizing it as a 3-D box sounds impressive, there is nothing particularly amazing about this. This is a framework that many management consultants have come up with and hawked to their clients or that strategic venture groups have come up with. It's a simple matter of setting up a x, y, and z axis and putting each dimension down and then plotting points to your heart's content. It's a slight variation on some long-held views of innovation and not innovative in of itself. The idea that innovation needs to be managed as a portfolio of options is spot on but again, nothing particularly earth-shattering about that. The framework is pretty standard stuff.
The second example of hype is Kim and his idea that you can quantify innovation in a mathematical formula. This sounds like a nice luxurious pursuit when you have a bunch of mathematicians on staff as you mention, but the portfolio view that a framework would offer is probably enough to help prioritize innovative opportunities. I see little to no prospect for a generally applicable mathematical formula for innovation coming to light, and I'm not sure this makes much sense to pursue. For innovation, the old adage that "it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong" seems to be pretty spot on. Management and innovation as science is inherently impossible no matter how interesting/alluring the prospect of this is. There is no way to say "Add this + this" and you'll have a great company or you'll have an innovation. I'm sure such a formula will result in a book which will sell thousands of copies because this type of mathematical elixir is what some are hoping for. But its value is dubious.
Regards,
Anand Sanwal
Author, Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management
Investile Dysfunction blog - www.corporateportfoliomgmt.typepad.com
December 30, 2008 at 6:35pm by Michael Plishka
Interesting article though I tend to agree with Anand's comments. However, mathematics and models help give us insights into behaviors/phenomena even if they are only partially correct:
http://zenstorming.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/the-mathematics-of-innovatio...
Insights are always a good thing.
January 8, 2009 at 5:31pm by Will Meysing
I smiled as I read the article on the 12 most creative people of 2008. It was my reaction to reading about someone else who is proclaiming why others should join this secret club.
It is a group of members with invisible activities, rituals and club by-laws.
An idea – comes to mind – because of our biochemistry and neuron specialty centers – connecting together – into a triangulated structure that causes our cognitive function.
All we can do is attempt to create models (3-D Box) that are incomplete – inaccurate and un-functional – to share with each other as by-products of interpretation. It is what you cannot construct with models and/or math – that we so want to comprehend.
But a dog whistle can be heard by your pet but not by the human population. We cannot – as humans – be a member of that canine hearing club.
The same with talking about a 3-D Box and its mathematical formula for the creativity process. The attempt is flawed from the get-go because creativity does not need a terrestrial fulcrum – or gravity – or an up side and a down. It does not need any particular language or scientific rules based on our society. Like a duck decoy by the lake – it is an image of imitation – and if it tricks a live duck to interpret its reality as friends of a feather – the hunter gets a duck dinner. You need a model with math that encircles and creates focus on what we cannot yet comprehend – with formulas that regulate what rules of language, equation and graphic model (duck decoys) we can use because it is all up to the “real duck” and the universal codes of function whether such efforts – as proclaimed in this article – will ever amount to something applicable to sustaining our daily lives—like a tasty duck dinner.
William C. Meysing, President
Corporate Builders, Inc.
January 8, 2009 at 5:31pm by Will Meysing
I smiled as I read the article on the 12 most creative people of 2008. It was my reaction to reading about someone else who is proclaiming why others should join this secret club.
It is a group of members with invisible activities, rituals and club by-laws.
An idea – comes to mind – because of our biochemistry and neuron specialty centers – connecting together – into a triangulated structure that causes our cognitive function.
All we can do is attempt to create models (3-D Box) that are incomplete – inaccurate and un-functional – to share with each other as by-products of interpretation. It is what you cannot construct with models and/or math – that we so want to comprehend.
But a dog whistle can be heard by your pet but not by the human population. We cannot – as humans – be a member of that canine hearing club.
The same with talking about a 3-D Box and its mathematical formula for the creativity process. The attempt is flawed from the get-go because creativity does not need a terrestrial fulcrum – or gravity – or an up side and a down. It does not need any particular language or scientific rules based on our society. Like a duck decoy by the lake – it is an image of imitation – and if it tricks a live duck to interpret its reality as friends of a feather – the hunter gets a duck dinner. You need a model with math that encircles and creates focus on what we cannot yet comprehend – with formulas that regulate what rules of language, equation and graphic model (duck decoys) we can use because it is all up to the “real duck” and the universal codes of function whether such efforts – as proclaimed in this article – will ever amount to something applicable to sustaining our daily lives—like a tasty duck dinner.
William C. Meysing, President
Corporate Builders, Inc.
January 8, 2009 at 5:35pm by Will Meysing
I smiled as I read the article on the 12 most creative people of 2008. It was my reaction to reading about someone else who is proclaiming why others should join this secret club.
It is a group of members with invisible activities, rituals and club by-laws.
An idea – comes to mind – because of our biochemistry and neuron specialty centers – connecting together – into a triangulated structure that causes our cognitive function.
All we can do is attempt to create models (3-D Box) that are incomplete – inaccurate and un-functional – to share with each other as by-products of interpretation. It is what you cannot construct with models and/or math – that we so want to comprehend.
But a dog whistle can be heard by your pet but not by the human population. We cannot – as humans – be a member of that canine hearing club.
The same with talking about a 3-D Box and its mathematical formula for the creativity process. The attempt is flawed from the get-go because creativity does not need a terrestrial fulcrum – or gravity – or an up side and a down. It does not need any particular language or scientific rules based on our society. Like a duck decoy by the lake – it is an image of imitation – and if it tricks a live duck to interpret its reality as friends of a feather – the hunter gets a duck dinner. You need a model with math that encircles and creates focus on what we cannot yet comprehend – with formulas that regulate what rules of language, equation and graphic model (duck decoys) we can use because it is all up to the “real duck” and the universal codes of function whether such efforts – as proclaimed in this article – will ever amount to something applicable to sustaining our daily lives—like a tasty duck dinner.
William C. Meysing, President
Corporate Builders, Inc.
January 29, 2009 at 2:12am by Brad Arnold
I have trouble believing people like Kim who preach "innovation" because of the difficulty in approaching people with "non-consensis reality" concepts. For instance, there is a private company in California called Magnetic Power Inc (www.magneticpowerinc.com) that is developing a solid state power generator (wrap a solenoidal coil around a magnet-the magnetic gradient can be exploited for more energy than it takes to power the coil-MPI exceeded break even in 2004). Good luck trying to interest people in this silver bullet energy technology (I am not an agent nor associated with MPI, but am a global warming activist). How about a technology to convert CO2 from coal-fired power plants into fuel profitably (4th generation fuel production)? "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." --Albert Einstein. But: All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Innovation is entertaining and supporting "truth" before it is accepted as self-evident, but do you know how hard it is to find people who are interested in a truth until it is consensis reality? Frankly, I think many people pay lip service to "innovation," but really they just want to continue with the same old thinking and will reject any truth that isn't accepted as self-evident.