Where Is the Next Frontier of Innovation?

The Point Lobos thrusts its pug nose into the blue-gray waters of California's Monterey Bay. On board squats Ventana, a remote-operated vehicle roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. The unassuming probe has seen more of the ocean floor than almost any other vessel in history, and on this cool morning, she is on her way to making her 2,000th dive. Named after the Spanish word for window, Ventana carries the dreams of dozens of scientists and engineers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

This morning, Ventana has one of Jim Barry's dreams secured to her steel bottom. Beneath a gaggle of electrical cords, mother-boards filled with microprocessors, lights, computers, thrusters, and a high-definition digital camera, three clear-plastic cylinders ride along smoothly as Ventana glides 1,200 meters to the bottom of the underwater Monterey Canyon. There, a robotic arm gently places the three cylinders on the seafloor. In about a month, Ventana will return to pick them up.

The cylinders will measure how much oxygen is consumed by organisms in the deep ocean. Why does that matter? Because scientists are studying whether deep-ocean storage of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide, which would be trapped by smokestack filters) could solve global warming. Barry, a benthic ecologist, wants to be certain that addressing that problem won't kill sea creatures -- or harm them so much that they stop reproducing. His plastic cylinders use the same data-gathering methods that a medical researcher uses to study blood gases.

Welcome to one of the new economy's next frontiers. With Silicon Valley in disarray, it would be easy to conclude that the technological principles that fueled explosive growth are in retreat. Easy -- but wrong. The innovation paradigm at the heart of the new economy is alive and well -- and insinuating itself into fields that, at first blush, seem to have little to do with business. "A lot of oceanic exploration is stuck in pre-World War II models of science," says Jim Bellingham, director of engineering. "Now we use data management from the Net, we take microsensors from the medical industry, and we use supercomputing to help us model the information that we're pulling from the oceans."

Total Teamwork

Drive south from San Francisco, along the black ribbon of Route 1 as it hugs the northern coast of California. To the east rise the peaks of the coastal mountain range -- explored, analyzed, farmed, and fenced for centuries. To the west, the Pacific Ocean heaves and swells into the sinuous scoop of Monterey Bay. There, in a series of massive underwater canyons that would dwarf the Grand Canyon, the seabed plunges in some places to 4,000 meters. And we know almost nothing about what's down there.

"The biggest discoveries in ocean science are yet to be made," says Bob Vrijenhoek, who sits with his back to the bay in his office at MBARI. Vrijenhoek, an evolutionary biologist who spent most of his career at Rutgers University, is the quintessential teacher-scientist. His specialty involves one of the newest discoveries in ocean science: hydrothermal vents, where ocean water seeps through cracks in underwater-volcano lava, becomes heated, and releases back into the cold water above. Before the mid-1970s, no one even knew that these "hot seeps" existed -- let alone that they held the remarkable life-forms that survive in them. "We used to think the deep sea was like a desert: constant, static, virtually dead," says Vrijenhoek.

It's precisely that sense of eye-opening discovery that interested David Packard, the Silicon Valley legend, in funding an oceanic institute. Packard established MBARI in 1987. Along with the startup money, Packard offered up a management mandate for the institute. He wanted engineers and scientists to work together on equal footing and to solve problems in a spirit of collaboration. As at Hewlett-Packard, big thinkers would work with clever tinkerers to create breakthrough tools.

Packard's mandate was considered so important that it is now cast in bronze in MBARI's lobby. But it takes a lot of work to get from mandate to methodology. That's the job of Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist who has trained with the U.S. Navy SEAL team in underwater demolitions, and who became president and CEO of the institute four years ago. At that time, life at MBARI did not exactly live up to Packard's vision. "The engineers were like Kelly girls," McNutt concedes. "Their time was scheduled, the scientists had the ocean offices, and no engineers sat at the table to talk about projects."

McNutt, who grew up in Minnesota, far from any ocean, worked quickly to give MBARI's engineers more of a say -- in part because of her own experiences in the research world. For 15 years, she had toiled away as a geophysicist at MIT, where she says she felt hamstrung by the lack of teamwork between scientists and the school of engineering. MBARI was a place where she could bridge such gaps. "I completely bought into David Packard's belief that scientists and engineers should work together," she says.

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