UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Burt Swanson: How Innovation Spreads

Professor Burt Swanson serves as the area chair for UCLA Anderson's Information Systems area and is the director of the Information Systems Research Program. He recently published an article in MIT Sloan's Management Review magazine called "The Manager’s Guide to IT Innovation Waves."

The piece delves into a dilemma that had faced IT executives for decades: What IT innovations should be adopted? How does a company implement the newest technological innovations? 

In the essay, Swanson summarizes some of the best practices he's come across through research conducted at UCLA Anderson and from others. Swanson notes that the spread of innovation has often been likened to an organic response, like a wave or a virus. He writes "Once an individual is infected with an idea, he may in turn, after some period of time, transmit it to others. Such a process can result in an intellectual ‘epidemic.’” Later in the piece, Swanson introduces the concept of the "IT innovation wave machine." He writes:

Think of the IT innovation wave machine as a kind of institutional apparatus that serves to produce waves of innovations as just described. Many largely “invisible hands” are busily at work inside the IT innovation wave machine, and their work has a lot to do with the eventual success or failure of the innovation. From the outside, the wave machine produces waves that carry the innovation through five stages: 1) breaking the surface, 2) sending out ripples, 3) causing a squawk, 4) building the swell and 5) riding the crest.

Carol Scott Discusses Marketing Panel featuring Guy Kawasaki, David Burk and Susan Wojcicki

Professor Emeritus Carol Scott is hosting a one-time only marketing panel later this month at the Bay Area headquarters of Google. The panel’s topic is “Marketing – Then, Now and Next.” Scott’s guests are a “who’s who” of marketing experts all of whom are UCLA Anderson alumni: David Burk (’87), a partner with Fleishman-Hillard; Guy Kawasaki (’79), author and former Apple evangelist (and UCLA Anderson’s 2012 commencement speaker) and Susan Wojcicki (’98), a Google senior vice-president. The panel is scheduled for Thursday, February 16.

We had an opportunity to speak with Scott earlier today, to get a preview of the panel.  She spoke to the panelists yesterday.

“The topic is Marketing – Then, Now and Next and what better place to have it than at Google,” Scott says. “All three of the panelists have been entrepreneurs and also worked at large companies, so they are uniquely positioned to talk about marketing on both sides of the coin.”

Scott noted that all three of the panelists went straight into marketing after graduating from Anderson and she plans to have them briefly talk about what the field was like when each began. “We plan to spend more time talking about the current tools and technology, which have changed vastly since they began,” Scott says. “And even more important than the tools, I plan to pose some questions about how the relationship between marketing, companies and consumers has changed, what that new relationship is and how it’s different than before.” Scott also plans to spend part of the panel discussing what’s next in marketing as these relationships continue to evolve. “We’ll be talking about ‘social search.” I’m not even sure what that is yet, but Guy believes it’s going to be a big deal,” Scott says.