Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World (Hardcover)

by Henry Kressel (Author), Thomas V. Lento (Contributor)
Key Phrases: contract fabs, top transistor, magnetic disk storage, New York, Year Source, Bell Labs (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Drawing on a lifetime of experience in the industry, the authors offer some answers and also explain how the industry base can flourish against lower wage competition."
-Abstracts of Public Administration, Development, and Environment

Product Description
Everybody knows that digital technology has revolutionized our economy and our lifestyles. But how many of us really understand the drivers behind the technology - the significance of going digital; the miniaturization of circuit boards; the role of venture capital in financing the revolution; the importance of research and development? How many of us understand what it takes to make money from innovative technologies? Should we worry about manufacturing going offshore? What is the role of India and China in the digital economy? Drawing on a lifetime's experience in the industry, as an engineer, a senior manager and as a partner in a venture capital firm, Henry Kressel offers an expert personalized answer to all these questions. He explains how the technology works, why it matters, how it is financed and what the key lessons are for public policy.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 422 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521862906
• ISBN-13: 978-0521862905
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #839,865 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Digital Revolution, April 25, 2007

By	Peter D. Scovell (Kanata, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Dr Kressel has captured the disruptions in society caused by fundamental shifts in the technology base dating from 1948 with the invention of the transistor and culminating in the recent emergence of IP networks as the dominant technological force behind our data and communications network. The early chapters deal with the history and impact of these important technologies and for those readers with a need to understand these technologies in greater detail, appendices are provided that take those interested into a journey of discovery into the important fundamental technology discontinuities such as Integrated Circuits, their scalability and limits, logic gates, semiconductor memories, semiconductor lasers and LEDs, photodetectors, fiber optics, and LCD displays which are used throughout the networks of today. These early parts of the book also point out the importance of the protocols that are used to transport data as well as the underpinning software methods that are used to build the networks without which engineers would not have been able to build today's Internet. Again, appendices are provided on these topics for the enquiring reader.

The book takes the reader through the early technology shifts that have enabled the knowledge economy and the author has mapped these changes to very basic but nonetheless revolutionary shifts in software, semiconductors, wireless and fiber optics. These dislocations taken together with the emergence of the venture capital industry and the entrepreneurial spirit fostered in the technology centers in Silicon valley and elsewhere, provided the mix for the revolutionary data networks to emerge which would have far reaching societal changes in later years. The book describes this journey and along the way the author draws our attention to the demise of the industrial central laboratories that nurtured the early inventions that gave birth to these technology dislocations and whose gradual disappearance in the 1960s and 1970s released large numbers of very bright scientists and engineers into both government laboratories and most importantly, small business start-ups. These in turn provided the incubators that gave birth to such technology behemoths as DEC, Intel and others.

Dr Kressel then shows us that the improvements in the secondary education system in the United States fuelled these new companies and together with significant venture capital, nurtured a large number of new companies. These companies had the heft to eventually produce the high performance optical systems, computers and servers necessary to populate early distributed data networks. These were born out of US government-sponsored activities to devise resilient data networks that could survive potential threats emerging from the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s. These networks eventually were to become the Internet, a pervasive network that now has affected us all and which provides us with the infrastructure today to instantly communicate on a global scale and to provide an easily searchable database that enriches both our work and home lives. The author shows how the technology has disrupted many industries and has resulted in the loss of many companies who have not been able to respond to change in a timely fashion. He demonstrates that the Internet has given birth to countless companies that capitalize on the network to provide new services and industries but also points out that it also threatens today's telecommunication companies since the high available bandwidth agnostic to the flow of voice, data and video provides new opportunities for a new breed of service providers to bypass the legacy voice networks.

These technology shifts also bring about the emergence of knowledge and capability in other parts of the world and provide the infrastructure to transfer the manufacture of these key products and in some cases, their design. This in turn could threaten the developed economies by hollowing-out the industrial sector of these developed nations and stimulating the economies of the developing nations, which now can service their own needs. Dr Kressel concludes by pointing out that developed economies must develop internal policies that protect their important leading products and their manufacture while still providing a competitive framework that fosters new products to renew the cycle.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Data Driven Analysis of Disruptive Technologies and Financial Innovation, May 4, 2007

By	Barton W. Stuck "bartstuck" (Westport, Connecticut USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In the interest of full disclosure, I have had the opportunity to work with Dr Henry Kressel on a variety of Warburg Pincus engagements since 1990. I attended MIT from 1964-1972, and learned first hand how many companies were started by MIT alums, such as Bose (by Amar Bose), Analog Devices (by Ray Stata), and DEC (by Ken Olsen), as well as seeing my classmate Bob Metcalfe create the most widely used network technology today, Ethernet (akin to the electrical power outlet), and then 3Com. While at Bell Laboratories, I saw the advent of UNIX, the rise of DARPANet leading to the network of networks or Internet, the advent of local area networks (I represented ATT on Project 802 Local Area Network Standards) which permitted networks of computers to share printers, storage, and network access as if they were a single computer. I was involved with the original funding of Ciena, the first commercially successful optical transmission equipment vendor, with moving Uniphase into telecomms to create JDSUniphase as a vendor of optical components and modules, and Covad, one of the first data only Competitive Local Exchange Carriers. With that as backdrop, I found the book to be full of insights, driven by excellent data analysis: good analysis leads to surprising insights, and I found many of them throughout.

The discussion of financial innovation and the mechanisms to commercialize the technical innovations is in my view without equal and is worth the entire book (and the other sections are outstanding!): the issues are precisely delimited, the creation of lega structures to facilitate commercialization, to align the interests of customers, investors, and companies, indeed the term venture capital was created because no bank would lend money to a business with no customers or revenues yet there was a clear need for such funding and the financial payoffs could be huge. This chapter merits particularly detailed rereading to understand the terse lessons dispensed here.

The sections on manufacturing restructuring, globalization, governmental oversight, and industry structure take us back to one fundamental truth: there are two major businesses, transportation and communication, and the communication business is still undergoing an incredible revolution today and for the next twenty odd years (at which point biotech and materials science advances will be in full flower).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Innovation: The Way it Really Works, June 13, 2007

By	Stephen G. Chappell (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Competing for the Future" is a thought provoking journey through digital electronics starting with the transistor and laser, proceeding through computers, fiber optics and the internet, and ending with a prescription for the future prosperity of the United States that includes technology innovation, risk capital and advanced manufacturing. It is fascinating as Dr. Kressel examines the interactions between the technological innovations themselves, the source of the R&D as it moved from US industrial labs to world-wide start-ups, the funding of the R&D as it evolved in parallel, the tight coupling between R&D and advanced manufacturing, and the role of governments.

Dr. Kressel provides a unique perspective because he is walking this road. He helped create the digital electronics age while he was at RCA Labs with his pioneering work in lasers. After a successful career there, he moved to Warburg Pincus where he funded many of today's successful digital electronics startups. His hands-on experience and lively anecdotes bring the book to life.

This book is "required reading" for anyone who wants to understand the future of hi-tech innovation and what that future might hold for the United States and for the world.