Brains For Sale

Consider the case of Boston Coach. The car-service company (owned by Fidelity Investments' venture-capital unit) wanted to install wireless technology in the cars of its 900 drivers to help improve scheduling. But to maintain its on-time guarantee, Schieber says, Boston Coach was very conservative in the number of reservations that it took. "I suggested that they had a bigger problem than technology," he says. "They had a big math problem staring them in the face."

That math problem? An old brainteaser known as the "traveling salesman," which involves determining the best route for a salesperson to take in order to make the most calls in a certain period of time. Boston Coach's complex version of the problem was the perfect mind-cramping poser for Schieber. He figured that with the wireless technology IBM was installing in the company's dispatch centers, there would be gigabytes of data coming in that could be used to create a better schedule for drivers every few minutes, if necessary. Moreover, Schieber believed he could build a system that would allow drivers to pick up more customers in a day, increasing Boston Coach's sales volume but still meeting the on-time guarantee that was the company's core strategy.

Hazary Arjune, Boston Coach's chief information officer, says the idea of applying something as abstract as math to a real-world problem that had frustrated the company for years was met with some trepidation. "We know our business; we know limousines," he says. "Our dispatchers carry all this knowledge in their heads."

Schieber, curbing his desire to show off how quickly math could solve the problem, hung out in fleet operations at company headquarters just north of Boston, asking questions and getting to know what the dispatchers knew. Then he built a computerized dispatch system called "fleet optimization," which created schedules that took almost everything into account, including marrying a driver's personal schedule with the company's needs. "You have these stereotypes of scientists--that they are propeller heads or that they can't be let out of the research labs," Arjune says. "But then you meet people like Baruch." What started as a technology sale turned into a far bigger project, including installing Schieber's optimizer in Boston Coach's nine offices around the country.

The IBM scientists who've worked with customers seem to find the experience invigorating, too. "For many of our researchers, there's nothing better than validating their ideas in the real world," says Peggy Kennelly, vice president of IBM's On Demand Innovation Services. Schieber knows that feeling firsthand. "You have such a sense of power when it only takes you a few minutes using math to solve a problem that a businessperson has been struggling with for years," he says.

Fara Warner (farataye@yahoo.com) is a Fast Company contributing writer.