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Berkeley Unix which played a key role in accelerating the growth of engineering workstations as well as the Internet

Relational Database Technology, where three major relational database vendors, Computer Associates, Sybase, and Informix, representing half of the annual sales in this multi-billion dollar software industry segment, can trace their database products to companies founded by Berkeley faculty or students

Electronic design automation, where almost all of the major offerings are based on Berkeley technology and the two leading companies, founded by Berkeley faculty and students (Cadence and Synopsys) represent 7,500 jobs and $2.5B annual revenues--over half of the industry revenues and this is an industry that the US dominates

RAID is now a $12 billion per year storage industry segment

Networks of workstations for scalable high performance computing

Velvel Kahan’s IEEE Floating point, for which he won the Turing Award. $1Trillion worth of computers use it.

Infopad: Basis of the Webpad; pioneered by Brodersen & Rabaey, now directing BWRC

Finfet: First IC facility in the nation, Chenming Hu & Jeff Bokor, 20nm channel

MEMS: airbag chip, smart dust…

NMR, GFI, …

These are all in the past now, and I only mention them to show what can be done and what we are sure to do again. But we are about research, about the future, and the Internet-initiated revolution has only just begun! What a time to be straddling the fence in a University, able to observe and influence what is happening throughout the world.

What is common here? These are about infrastructure, not gadgets… we like gadgets too, but broad, infrastructural changes, changing the way we go about things, is what we like to do at Berkeley.

Back in 1992, Stan Shih, the founder of Acer, presented what has become known as the “Stan Shih Smile.” Stan drew a diagram that traced the conversion of fundamental technologies from a process to a product—to a market. He said back then that in the past, the return-on-investment looked approximately like the yellow curve shown here. In earlier times, just about every major ICT company had the same basic technology—say, 5 micron NMOS—and everyone was building approximately the same product—a minicomputer. Data General, Siemens, IBM, Digital, and so on. The most substantial portion of the ROI was attributable to the quality of the design team you had that could take that fundamental technology and convert it to a competitive minicomputer.

Stan went on to say that this picture had changed in recent times and had flipped into the form shown here…

…The so-called “Stan Shih smile.” Nowadays, significant value is accrues to companies who can develop and protect an important, fundamental new technology—companies like Intel with its process & device technologies and x86 architecture, Xilinks with their FGPAs or 3M, for example. At the other end of the spectrum, significant value accrues to companies who can identify and address important new markets—who build the right thing at the right time and can create a franchise; “technology as fashion,” for example.

Of course one still definitely needs a great team to get the job done, but the most substantial portion of the ROI can be attributed to owning and protecting critical new technologies and in understanding and executing against the market and business issues of the time.

Now I know most of you are familiar with the work of Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christiensen, well known for his important book “The Innovators Dilemma” and his concept of a “disruptive technology.” Well, just as a technology can be disruptive, so can a new business model—a new approach to markets, a new way of financing or distributing products and services, a new way of integrating existing markets, and so on. I use the term ‘business model’ in its broadest possible interpretation.

In fact, I believe that the real disruptive opportunities of this time we are in lie more to the left of this image than to the right—that we should be spending more time thinking about disruptive business models and the creation of new categories of products and services, new distribution and support models, and so on—than the opportunities that lie purely on the right.

Moreover, if we can actually include the entire spectrum in our thinking—from technologies to markets and the methodologies that get us there—we have the chance to really make a difference. Throughout this presentation, I will argue that in ICT research and development we should organize ourselves with this goal in mind. To maximize the potential impact of our work, it is more important than ever to consider the application of our research to modern products, systems, and services.

CITRIS began by emphasizing the applications first, and there were a number of reasons for this:

(1)The first 25 years of ICT have been about developing technologies; as mentioned earlier, our faculty believe the ICT revolution has just begun—the next 25 years will be marked by maximum impact in the application of these and to-be-developed technologies

(2)Developing fundamental technologies is what our faculty do and do well and left alone they will continue to do that, and such work is critical. “Bio-Info-Nano” are the topics of the day and our faculty will continue to write competitive proposals and secure funding in these areas. However, balancing that activity with some “force” that emphasizes applications will make the most positive difference to our culture and direction.

(3)Using an application emphasis is the most effective way to break down the barriers between areas like bio, ICT, and nano/new materials and get them to work together on real grand challenge (or even more mundane) problems that require collaboration.

(4)Coming from the application area, we will naturally think about important market and business-related factors like new channels, support and distribution models, how to finance the technologies and its distribution, government regulations, etc. We believe such issues are increasingly important in enabling and proliferating these new developments quickly and effectively.