invention vs innovation

Communications of the ACM published a great paper in June 2009 by Ken Kraemer et al about OLPC (one Laptop per child) and the failure of the program to achieve even remotely its ambitious goals. I applauded the paper, for its thorough-going analysis of economic, political, and technical issues -- seldom does ACM or IEEE indulge in wideranging analysis of the multiple facets that go into engineering successes or failures, and this was a landmark article. See it at http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/6/28497-one-laptop-per-child-vision-vs-reality/fulltext

The program failure, though few like to use that epithet, is palpable: against a goal of 150 million units in five years (not exactly one laptop per child for the globe, since there are 3 billion or so), the program has delivered 350 thousand machines. Hitting 0.2% of market goals in many companies would be considered "a miss"

Oddly, the article, good as it was, did not address perhaps the most fundamental issue of the project, which in our view would be the question of whether the machine could deliver the right educational experience for the intended user. At our MediaX center at Stanford, we try hard to imagine and construct experiments to test exactly such premises. And we had presented Kentaro Toyame of Microsoft Bangalore with a great lecture last October on exactly this point. You can see it at http://mediax.stanford.edu/video/toyama.mov

So I wrote to the editors, and lo and behold, they printed my submission, which you can view at http://mags.acm.org/communications/200908/?pg10&pm=2&u1=friend

Kinda fun...