From Research to Customers – How Did That Happen?
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Innovation in technology is a business necessity for all companies. Finding that spark of innovation is an incredibly complex task and cannot be accomplished overnight. Many companies leverage research groups to seed new ideas and help drive their business forward. Without research groups, technologies like DB2, Gmail, Kinect, would take years longer to develop and bring to market. The role of research in a company’s business strategy is essential, and a well-executed connection between research and the product groups can yield high impact, compelling results for customers. This is why most product development companies have dedicated R&D departments, but true ROI can only be achieved if the ‘&’ between the R and the D is recognized as a crucial link connecting the academic with the business-oriented world.
Panelists:
Nina Bhatti – R&D Program Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company Bhatti is a technologist by training, an innovator by practice leading Mobile Imaging Applications Research team focused on new products, new markets, new consumer experiences and the transformation of these technologies into commercial offerings. A thought leader, Bhatti has worked as in Intrapreneur within HP since 1996, delivering the design and creation of web, consumer, and lifestyle mobile technologies for some of HP’s largest customers. She has also done extensive research in networking systems, quality of service and network application performance. Bhatti holds a Ph.D. and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Arizona, and has published 45 papers and has 35 patents filed.
Wendy Castleman – Principal XD Research Scientist and Chief Innovation Catalyst, Intuit Inc.After over 20 years of researching people, including 15 years of Experience Design Research, I am now a Principal XD Research Scientist and Chief Innovation Catalyst at Intuit. My role is to help the company to become a premier, innovative growth company through the application of design thinking and customer-driven innovation. Design research is integral to the success of this initiative, as is empowering employees to do their own research to get deep customer empathy and experiment with customers. I’ve worked for Intuit for 8 years, before which I worked for companies including Remedy, Motorola, Philips Consumer Communications and Lucent. I have a PhD in Cognitive and Perceptual Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. I am currently living, learning and sharing in northern California.
Celeste Fralick – Director of Biomedical Engineering, Digital Health Group, Intel Corporation Celeste Fralick is Director of Biomedical Engineering in the Digital Health Group at Intel Corporation and recognized as a Principal Engineer in Intel’s Technical Leadership Program. She was a key developer of Intel’s initial biotechnology strategies, product qualification and life cycle programs, and is active in various biotechnology industry boards, journal editorial staffs, and consortiums. Celeste has a BS (Microbiology & Chemistry) from Texas Tech, MS (Biomedical Engineering), and is completing her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Arizona State University.
Andrea Jessee – Senior Program Manager, Engineering Excellence, Microsoft Corporation Andrea Jessee has spent 16 years in Research & Development. Graduating with degrees in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence, she started her career as a researcher at the IBM Scientific Center in Heidelberg, Germany, working in her field of expertise (Applied Natural Language Processing). 4 years later, she was hired by Microsoft as a software developer to produce the German grammar checker for Office XP. After 7.5 years and 3 shipping cycles, during which she led teams as a developer and program manager, she joined Microsoft Research incubation to offer her product shipping experience to the successful release of a V1 web service, and finally joined a team of experienced Research Program Managers dedicated to the complex process of turning research into reality.
Radha Ratnaparkhi – Vice President for IT and Wireless Convergence, IBM Research, IBM Radha Ratnaparkhi is the Vice President for IT and Wireless Convergence at IBM Research. Radha leads a global research team in the US, China and India towards creating new IBM offerings under the strategic initiative of IT and Wireless Convergence. Just prior to her current position, Radha was the Director of Commercial Systems where she led the research initiative in the area of Cloud Computing. Previously, Radha led and managed the commercialization efforts of a high-end text analytics solution WebFountain. Radha’s experience at IBM also includes her development leadership effort for IBM’s flagship database product DB2 on the mainframe. Prior to IBM, Radha was leading the Java products development team at Informix Software. She started her career in Mumbai, India with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – India’s premier services consulting firm, after completing her Masters of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi.
Mamie Rheingold – Program Manager, Google Inc.
Moderator:
Kate Kelly – Program Manager, Office, Microsoft Corporation
Kate is a Program Manager in Office Shared Services. Her team builds features and tools to ensure Office is ready for worldwide customers. Kate works with a broad range of partners across Office, Windows and MSR on translation and language features such as Full Document Translation in Word. After a complete 180, she joined Microsoft in 2008 following a short stint in the nuclear industry and a few Aerospace internships. She graduated in 2007 from the University of Waterloo in Electrical Engineering. Kate loves shoe shopping and recently took up scuba diving only to discover she is terrified of octopi.
Blog post from KarenT available here: From Research to Product
