Telephony Live: Bell Labs president outlines future of innovation

This also means having a mix of experienced researchers from across disciplines and new ones without the “curse of knowledge,” or being limited by their experience. It will take time, too, Kim said, illustrating his point with a song Mozart composed at age five, but noting that he didn’t create a masterpiece until age 20. Being smart is not good enough, Kim said. Outside the Bell Labs organization, Kim also called for collaboration from the government, universities and commercial businesses.

Bell Lab’s historic challenge when it was with AT&T was to overcome the distance in a voice network to connect everyone. The organization did so relying on Metcalfe’s Law, which stated that the value of a network increases with the square of its nodes. Kim pointed out that this challenge has been overcome and as an onslaught of data has come on to the network, so too have new challenges that render Metcalfe’s Law outdated. It should be the potential value of the network, Kim said, using a movie with a gorilla casually snuck in to illustrate today’s information overload. “The challenge of our industry is to convert that into real value,” he said.

Kim described the Bell Labs dilemma as inherently tied to the market. Disruptive research was disruptive to the organization when the market was stable, but incremental research in a turbulent, hyper-competitive environment also was the highest form of risk. In preparation to speak to a Chinese audience about innovation, he asked co-workers to translate the word. Without a direct translation, they were left to break it down into what it really meant. According to the English dictionary, “innovation” was the introduction of something new affecting change. A part of this means that timing is important. In today’s market or the future market, the impact could be incremental or disruptive, Kim said, and the process could be analytical or artistic, depending on if the outcome is known.

Kim also illustrated how the industry could learn from the study of spider webs — what Kim described as adaptive self-configuration networks. Spiders, with tiny brains and no perspective on what they’ve built, through a simple algorithm are able to constantly check the tension of their webs and balance the intricate construction from the center. The physics of the spider web could be applied to communications systems, essentially creating an aware network in which millions of nodes could optimize themselves.

“The point of innovation — the reason we innovate — is to make a big impact,” Kim said. Some of the these innovations in the works include the quantum computer, with significant implications for security and cryptography; a micro-project focused on overcoming the challenges of small cell phone screens through projection; and several others, many still yet unimagined.