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Earlier this month, Dr. Jim Spohrer, IBM Director of Global Universities Program sat down in an interview with Yassi Moghaddam, International Society of Service Innovation Professionals, ISSIP, Executive Director to talk about the future of jobs and the importance of T-shape professional development.
Below are video excerpts of the interview followed by the entire transcript…
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YM – In a new study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne from Oxford University, released last September, it has been predicted that in the next twenty years an astounding 47 percent of American jobs may become automated. What does that say about the future jobs and talent?
JS – Earlier today, I was at Institute for the Future – the topic future of work. Brynjolffson and McAfee at MIT have written a book called “The Race With Machines.” Phil Auerswald addresses related topics in his book “The Coming Prosperity.” The topic is also touched on in a new book by IBM’s SVP of Research John Kelly and his co-author Steve Hamm in their book on the Dawn of the Era of Cognitive Computing – what comes after IBM’s Watson Jeopardy! which won over the best human players in the history of that game.
The simple answer is what happened to people digging ditches with shovels when bulldozers came along? You need fewer people to dig bigger holes, but you need more people doing the work to fill those bigger holes with bigger more ambitious things.
Doug Engelbart the inventor of the mouse articulated it the best, advancing technological capabilities is more about augmentation (people doing more ambitious things) and less about automation (technology doing things that are boring, dangerous, or error-prone for people).
I can imagine all kinds of more ambitious things we will be doing in the future – that is what Smarter Planet is all about – less waste, more sustainability, more resilience, more equitable business and societal systems on earth, and exploration of the oceans, deep earth, and the solar systems
YM – You founded Service Research at IBM, what does Service Science mean, what drove its inception and proliferation, and why is it so critical to the future of innovation and talent?
JS – Yes, I co-founded the first Service Research for IBM Research with Paul Maglio at IBM Almaden. We started with nine people and then worked hard to help as it grew to hundreds of IBM Service Researchers worldwide.
Just like IBM Research, work on new hardware and software technology requires the sciences of physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering disciplines like electrical engineering, we knew that IBM Service research would need science, engineering, and management foundations – so we set out to establish a new area of study Service Science Management and Engineering in partnership with industry, academic, and government partners globally. The key insight was that we needed service marketing, service operations, service engineering, service computing, service design, service economics – what we call the existing service-oriented disciplines – and other areas that were already established to focus on the study of service systems and value co-creation processes that co-elevate the capabilities of service entities engaged in win-win, mutual benefit interactions. This was one of the first hints that we needed T-shaped service researchers, people who were deep in one of these academic disciplines but with breadth across them all. Vargo and Lusch at about the same time published their seminal paper on service-dominant logic – and that provided the new lens for looking at the world in terms an ecology of evolving entities engaged in service-for-service interactions, growing their capabilities over time as well as they got better as resource-integrators.
So service science means the study of the evolving ecology of entities engaged in service-for-service interactions, where service is defined as the application of knowledge for mutual benefits (or value co-creation processes). In that sense, service science can be viewed as more like the science of biology, because like biology service science studies diverse entities like people, businesses, hospitals, universities, and even cities, states, and nations. All complex systems with capabilities, constraints, rights, and responsibilities that have the capacity to apply knowledge for mutual benefits.
Within just a few years, faculty at over five hundred universities world-wide asked for IBM’s help in establishing service-science-related courses or degree programs, often because their government has established new initiatives to understand and improve regional capacity for service innovation, as economists using traditional categories measured more national GDP and jobs part of the service sector, government, health, education, finance, retail hospitality, communications, transportation, etc. as their economies progressed in global competitiveness. This was the second hint that we needed T-shaped service researchers, who had depth in some sector as well as some region/culture, but with breadth across all sectors and regional/cultures.
We wanted IBM Service Researchers to know service science (short for service science management and engineering) and have depth and breadth across disciplines, sectors, and regions and culture – empathy or curiosity to learn about all this great diversity, and seek simple underlying principles that help explain the diversity was what we were looking for T-shaped people is just short-hand for that.
The third hint came when we started looking at service innovators both inside and outside IBM and noticed that some of the best innovators and entrepreneurs were also T-shaped, or Pi-shaped, M-Shaped, and beyond – the best IBM innovators and the entrepreneurs often not only depth and breadth, but often depth in multiple areas. For example, in academic Herb Simon of CMU, helped establish the fields of computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, organization theory, and won a Nobel prize and economics – with depth in technology and engineering, people and organizations, information and economics – in this sense, Herb Simon could be thought of as one of the early service scientists, who was not just T-shaped but M-shaped and beyond.
YM – How do you define Service Innovation? and who is a Service Innovator?
JS – Well let’s start with service – defined as the application of knowledge for mutual benefits (or value co-creation processes). Service innovations scale the benefits of new knowledge globally, rapidly, and profitably. So a service innovation often is a technological platform like a smart phone or an organizational platform like the franchise business model that allows the benefits of new knowledge to scale globally and rapidly. However, service innovation can not only be technological or organizational in nature, they can also be regulatory in nature – new rules and laws can be service innovations, that spread the benefit of new knowledge globally rapidly and profitably.
So service innovators can be engineers, business practitioners, policy makers, academics who find new ways to help students learn complex things (that spreads the benefits of new knowledge) – and these innovators or entrepreneurs are often T-shaped people.
YM – Could you describe the characteristic of a T-person?
JS – The simplest definition of a T-shaped person is that they are better at team work than I-shaped people. I-shaped people are good at talking to other I-shaped people like them. T-shaped people can talk with I-shapes in their area of depth, but they can also have productive conversations with specialists from many other areas. Beyond productive conversations, T-shapes also have an empathy or an attitude that makes them eager to learn more about other areas of specializations.
Prof. Louis Freund of San Jose State University has been working on a way for people to code their resumes or vita to better understand their MyT-Scores, and gain insights into what sorts of professional development activities could make them more T-shaped.
YM- What role can our higher education system play in the development of T-shape talent?
JS – The more faculty that encourage team projects as a component of their course the better from the standpoint of developing T-shaped talent. However, even more than that faculty that include industry mentors who help challenge the student teams with projects, and the more the challenges require engineers, business, social science, and arts & humanities students to work together to come up with ideas for making business and societal systems smarter – the better. This will really help the students to become more T-shaped through many team-based challenge projects – that look at applying knowledge from courses to help make smart service systems that benefit customers.
YM – What innovation is necessary for that in our higher education system?
JS – The main innovation is to rethink learning, discovery, engagement as not three separate silos at a university – teaching research community-service – but to rethink them as an integrated whole. More faculty adopting multidiscipinary team based projects with industry mentors working on real-world challenges that build up the social networks of their students would be a good first step. For example, making sure their students have LinkedIn accounts, and that faculty start a LinkedIn group with members of their classes, and any industry guest leturers or mentors would be a good first step too.
YM – What would you advise to young people entering universities today?
JS – Find the entrepreneurial faculty and students at your university and find ways to work with them and help them. Ask the faculty who teach their courses, what professional associations they belong to, what journals they read for cutting-edge knowledge, and what conferences they go to. Ask the faculty, which of their student have gotten jobs in industry or started companies, and how the students apply what they learned in the course in their jobs or lives. Ask about students who graduated and went overseas, and live and work in different regions and cultures. Ask the faculty for more team based projects that engage real-world challenges.
YM – What advise do you have for young professionals who are looking at 20-30 years ahead?
JS – You will probably have many different jobs roles in those 20-30 years, and be part of several different organizations. More and more you will have to be a T-shaped lifelong learner to be successful and make the most of these opportunities.
YM – What do you see the role of professional societies to be?
JS – Professional associations provide a set of professional connections that can stay with you across your whole life, even if you change jobs, organizations, etc. Professional associations tend to be great places for I-shaped people to stay connected, but ISSIP.org is designed to be a 21st professional associations that co-creates value with all the I-shaped professional associations – and provides an opportunity for all professionals to become better T-shaped service innovators as well.
So business, academics, government, social sector are all important, and professional association – are a key type of organization in the social sectors that links people across business, academics, government, and social sector.
More and more it is just not what you know, but the value of your social networks for linking you to future opportunities.