The sad part about innovation…. Can we really be innovative without being creative?

A few days ago I read an article from Invention to Innovation by Mohamed A El-Erian, the former CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO. The article made me think more about Invention, Innovation and Creativity.

One of my favorite classic movies of all times is Modern Times, starring Charlie Chaplin. It is the kind of movie I can watch again and again and it will always make my day. One of my favorite parts is the “invention” presented in the beginning of the movie. This scene attracts me because of two main reasons:

1- The brilliantly implied criticism about the automation of industry;
2- The creative and simple ways to make us laugh like kids;

The objective of this post is to debate a little bit about item number 2, described above; to open a dialogue regarding innovation in our day with the Millennials and the previous generations who I refer to as “classic”.

A crucial part of my job is to identify, evaluate and convince student candidates in order to recruit the best talent from top universities. I also seek to strike a balance between company objectives and new hire expectations. I also have to determine how these newly hired employees will work together with “classic professionals” and how to become a cohesive team.

The hiring process requires a lot of time and effort from all of the different teams within the company. In my humble opinion, this process is the most important for any company’s sustainability. A few months ago, I lead one of these recruitment process events at two top universities in the Boston area. One of the key phases of this process was the group dynamic. Usually, we request that students from 2 or 3 different groups create a product where the only rule is to deliver a new idea (i.e., product or service) in 30 minutes. The students always deliver great ideas through their presentations that become integrated with my candidate evaluation process.


Many of their final ideas are invariably IT related: applications, websites or platforms, even though they come from diverse backgrounds including business, finance and IT. I’m surprised that they do not create simple ideas that improve our lives. I’m not looking for ideas to put in a Sky Mall magazine, but all the ideas now are only IT related. Is there only IT focused innovation and creativity?


Today, IT is part of our reality and like David Kirkpatrick from Forbes said; “Now Every Company Is A Software Company”. We embrace IT in order to take advantage of the shortcuts that IT provides to innovate and to expand the horizon IT has created in the last years.

I miss the simple and brilliant ideas that came together with creativity, like the creation of Velcro for example, that was created from the insight of the Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral, who got the idea when a plant got stuck in his pants. Although he was an engineer and applied science and IT to invent velcro, the creativity was right there too.

Ultimately, I’m happy about this culture of innovation and entrepreneurship that surrounds us on a daily basis, but in my view, innovation mixed with creativity is better. Yes to be simple, creative and innovative may not be easy,but that is because we are in Modern Times, with Modern ITideas.

A safe way to mix pleasure with business; 3 lessons that movies can teach about IT. One Big Data tale.

Probably most of you have had the frustration or pleasure to watch a remake of a classic movie, or maybe, if you are millennial, classical movies are just “NEW” movies. There are 3 things that I’ve learned from movies that apply to IT:
1. We invariably try to “remake” technologies/movies, because they are really good or now is the moment to open the door to new possibilities;
2. Some classics (technologies/movies) you will never be able to reproduce or improve on;
3. In many cases, the “critics’ opinion and market hype” are more important than (technologies/movies) themselves;
In today’s world, we often are not inventing, we are actually RE-inventing and/or improving concepts, especially in IT and in the movie industry. Sometimes the remake of a movie is better than the original. For example, I like the “new” Thomas Crown Affair better than the original (classic). But in some cases, the classic is so good that it is difficult, if not impossible, to improve on, like the movie Casablanca.

IT in many aspects is like a movie; full of remakes and reinventions. Similarly, IT in many ways is really the same, just with different names and buzzwords such as “big data” and “cloud computing”.

Recently, in an article entitled Big Data Expertise Much Tougher to Fake, written by Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, he explored how Google has created a new way to analyze huge stores of data (Cloud Dataflow). He mentioned in the article one of the big limitations around Hadoop technology’s inability to do “batch” operations, which means ordering a computer to perform an operation in bulk and then waiting for the result. You might ask a mainframe to process a company’s payroll as a batch job, or in a more contemporary example, analyze all the search terms that people in Texas typed into Google last Tuesday. Here again, we have
the Mainframe concepts rising from the ashes.

My first job, more than 15 years ago, was as a Mainframe Cobol developer. I still remember my IT friends saying, “My God! Cobol is dead, the future is in desktop applications (client - server)”. Still, for a time, I continued as a Cobol developer, but their comments remained in my head. I was spending my time and money on this, but would the technology change?
However, as time went by, I learned IT always changes and reinvents itself. With IT, we always have to study more and more, but the essence, like movies, doesn’t change that much and one day, just when the Mainframe concepts appeared to be dead, cloud computing and big data are here requesting higher capacity and batch processing.

Maybe, like the Thomas Crown Affair, the original, which is about a bank robbery, was perfect for its time, but the remake focused on the heist of a masterpiece and used new technology like the “Gartner” hype cycle. Sometimes, a classic (like mainframe) is so good that we embrace it, and accept that some classics never die or cannot be replicated (like Casablanca).

Don’t get me wrong, today I’m an enthusiast, advocate and provider of new technology in mainly three spheres, with my personal market hype:
• Motivate new generations of eager innovators;
• Reshape the way IT delivers fast business results;
• Create delightful customer experience;

In fact, “don’t (always) believe the hype”: classics serve as the basis for present and future innovations.

Bye Bye Hadoop? Or just Wow… Cloud Dataflow.

Yes, life is a loop!!! IT is a loop!!! And I love IT.