Ron Fulbright

IPC incorporated: a student-run IT services company for experiential learning

The Informatics Professional Corporation (IPC) is a C-corporation staffed and managed by undergraduate students in the Information Management & Systems (IMS) program at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Service in IPC satisfies an internship requirement in the curriculum and gives students real-world experience and a head start in making personal contacts in the local business environment. Many internship jobs are menial and unpaid positions. Last year, one of us (Routh) hit upon the idea of giving students a real-world opportunity by creating a real company incorporated in the state of South Carolina complete with a board of directors, stock issues, and an executive management team staffed solely by students. This paper describes the genesis of IPC, lessons learned, and the experiences of the inaugural class of interns at IPC. IPC has become a great source of pride among the students and students have shown an unexpected level of maturity. Many students are remaining associated with the company even though the internship is complete and intend to make it their permanent job after graduation. IPC represents an interesting new model for learning and is worthy of consideration as a vehicle for experiential learning in other information technology programs.

I-TRIZ: Anyone Can Innovate on Demand

Would it be nice to have Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the world record holder for the most number of patents, consult with you on your next project? Would it be wonderful to bring Thomas Edison in anytime you needed some innovative insight for a day? What if you could consult with Nikola Tesla when faced with your next critical problem? How much better could you solve problems if you could bring the collective innovative force of the entire human race to bear on your next project? This is the promise of I-TRIZ. I-TRIZ is the modern extension, and ongoing development of TRIZ begun some 65 years ago. ITRIZ represents the distillation of human innovative thought down to a set of principles, tools, and methodologies that can be taught to anyone making it possible for anyone to innovate on demand. TRIZ, I-TRIZ, and new educational initiatives are described as well as potential long-term implications of everyone having the ability to innovate on demand.

Cognitive Augmentation Metrics Using Representational Information Theory

In the coming era of cognitive augmentation, humans will work in natural, collegial, and peer-to-peer partnerships with systems able to perform expert-level cognition. However, we lack theoretically grounded fundamental metrics describing and characterizing this kind of human cognitive augmentation. The pursuit of such metrics leads us to some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of information and cognition. We define a cognitive process as the transformation of data, information, knowledge, or wisdom. We then employ representational information theory to calculate the effect a cognitive process has on the information. We then use that metric as the basis for deriving several other metrics such as cognitive gain, work, power, density, and efficiency to analyze a cognitively augmented human. We also propose a metric called the augmentation factor to indicate the level to which a human is augmented by working with one or more cognitive systems.

Incorporating Innovation into Iterative Software Development Using the Inventive Problem Solving Methodology

Iterative software methodologies allow development teams to be agile in their response to changing requirements. However, the software development team is usually at the mercy of requirements changes, rather than being part of the project engineering staff defining the changes to the solution architecture. Therefore, projects tend to implement inferior solutions. Integrating a project-level innovation technique called Inventive Problem Solving into agile software development methodologies such as the spiral model, the Rational Unified Process, and Scrum, allows the development team to affect the overall solution architecture utilizing their expertise in information technology to the maximum benefit. As a result, more creative, innovative, and efficient solutions to the problem are conceived and implemented.

On Measuring Cognition and Cognitive Augmentation

We are at the beginning of a new age in which artificial entities will perform significant amounts of high-level cognitive processing rivaling and even surpassing human thinking. The future belongs to those who can best collaborate with artificial cognitive entities achieving a high degree of cognitive augmentation. However, we currently lack theoretically grounded fundamental metrics able to describe human or artificial cognition much less augmented and combined cognition. How do we measure thinking, cognition, information, and knowledge in an implementation-independent way? How can we tell how much thinking an artificial entity does and how much is done by a human? How can we measure the combined and possible even emergent effect of humans working together with intelligent artificial entities? These are some of the challenges for researchers in this field. We first define a cognitive process as the transformation of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. We then review several existing and emerging information metrics based on entropy, processing effort, quantum physics, emergent capacity, and human concept learning. We then discuss how these fail to answer the above questions and provide guidelines for future research.

Innovation assurance using BACUP and Jobs Theory

Purpose Companies and organizations use various innovation governance structures, processes and metrics to make decisions about allocation of resources to the development of an innovative idea. Although many metrics measuring the process of innovation and the performance of the enterprise have been developed, a fundamentally solid and complete metric speaking to the quality and viability of the innovative idea itself is lacking. The business, applied innovation, creativity, unmet user needs and problem-solving (BACUP) model of innovation quality is proposed as such a metric based on viewing innovation from the five different viewpoints mentioned in its definition. BACUP is shown to facilitate discussion and analysis in innovation theory and is proposed as a tool allowing any innovation governance structure to achieve innovation assurance by mitigating risk and uncertainty and maximizing an innovation’s chance for success. Design/methodology/approach The BACUP framework was inspired by researching definitions of innovation and coming upon a survey in which different definitions were obtained from several different roles in companies and organizations. To use BACUP as a metric, the author and research assistants made qualitative judgments about innovations. Several judgments were obtained independently and consensus was plotted on the BACUP graphs. Findings BACUP can be used to illustrate and discuss major concepts in innovation theory. BACUP can be used to compare the relative viability of different innovative ideas. BACUP can be used to detect vulnerabilities in innovative ideas and provide information to innovation management and governance so that corrective measures can be taken. BACUP can be extended by other researchers and practitioners. Research limitations/implications In its current form, BACUP is not a quantitative tool; however, the authors envision other researchers applying existing quantitative tools and incorporating them into the BACUP framework. Practical implications BACUP is an innovative idea quality metric employable in any existing innovation management/governance structure or methodology. BACUP also gives practitioners a way to engineer innovative ideas into successful innovations. Social implications BACUP can lead to predictable and repeatable improved innovation outcomes, resulting in superior solutions to problems in all domains. Originality/value The BACUP framework is a novel, multi-dimensional view of innovation. Application of BACUP as a metric yields a new type of capability for innovation governance called innovation assurance.

Teaching innovation-on-demand in an undergraduate information technology program

Innovative Problem Solving is a methodology for developing incremental improvements, or innovations, for any type of system. IPS represents a powerful critical and alternative thinking skill we wish to instill in every graduate of the Bachelor of Arts in Information Management & Systems program at the University of South Carolina Upstate. A new three credit hour course teaching IPS, called SIMS 307: Systematic Innovation, has been added as a required course at the sophomore level. Some of the course material was adapted from an existing professional training class historically taught to post-baccalaureate working professionals with an average age of 35. Adapting the course for students with an average age of 20, very little professional experience, and only one year of college education has required much effort. This paper describes IPS and some of the challenges overcome in designing and delivering the course.