Thank you for visiting. I've closed this site and have migrated all the essential information to my new web page. Please visit me at chrislabash.com (or go to https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/chris-labash-web-page/home) Thanks.
You're welcome to poke around this old site, which I'll leave up for a while, but the information, while accurate, is old.
If you'd like to contact me directly, please reach out to me at clabash@cmu.edu.
Whether I'm attending a conference or presenting at one, I always meet a lot of interesting people and learn a lot. Here's a brief listing of some of the better known ones, some of my observations, and links to what I presented.
My colleagues at TechBridgeWorld had a poster accepted at the ICTD conference and so we all went to London. I learned a lot of new things but chief among them was that 80% of the world's population lives on less than US$10 a day, that one out of two children worldwide live in poverty (that's about a billion kids) and that about 100 million kids have no access to education. How can we call ourselves a global civilization and allow this? TechBridgeWorld and similar organizations are working to improve the conditions of the world's poorest. Find more depressing and alarming data here. Then decide what you're going to do about it.
GE has a pretty cool program that they call the Experienced Information Management Program, and Dave Scherb from the Software Engineering Institute convinced them to hold the week-long event for 40-50 hand-picked CIOs and future CIOs at the SEI. I was asked to come up with the name, creative direct and host the event, and talk about innovation. Technovation was a window into the future of systems, software, privacy, applications, customer relationships and the most leading-edge technologies: in short, the "New Normal" of technology. Here's my Prezi presentation on how the New Normal of IT stands for "Innovation Technology."
I hosted a roundtable discussing "CIOs, CMOs and Big Data" and the best practices in making all of the moving parts work together.
My colleague Ari Lightman and I were invited to conduct a workshop on "Innovation Inside + Out." We had about 30 participants who really got into it, which made it fun for us, and for them. One summed it up saying, "both Chris and Ari made for a provocative, engaging day, emphasizing the value of working differently to enhance innovation in the workplace. Thank you!" No, anonymous participant, thank you. We had a great time. Sadly, the E2 Innovate conference is no more, having been folded into other UBM conferences, but the presentation lives on. I haven't uploaded it to Slideshare yet so please email me if you want a copy.
Interop 2012 was its usual big show. My presentation was on "Innovation & Culture." As I said above, I haven't yet uploaded the presentation to Slideshare, so please email me if you want a copy.
Technovation was such a hit in 2011 that GE reprised it in 2012. The theme this year came from my Carnegie Mellon colleagues Jonathan Cagan and Peter Boatwright's book, "Built to Love," but the real mandate of this (and all) the Technovation conferences is summed up by the themeline: "Collaborate. Innovate. Agitate." Click on the title link to see some pictures of the event.Â
The Outsourcing Institute hosts a number of events that focus on different challenges of outsourcing. This one was focused on innovation. I was invited to be a panelist.
Apparently Ari and I didm't come off as the village idiots in 2012, so the E2 folks invited us back, this time to Boston, to update, expand, and deepen the material and the conversations. Which we were happy to do. And I got to wear Google Glasses.
Technovation 2014
Planning is underway for another Technovation event in August 2014. Details to come.
I'm tentatively scheduled to speak at the Back-End of Innovation conference in October 2014. Details to come.