At
the close of 2020, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine released the report, Information Technology Innovation:
Resurgence, Confluence, and Continuing Impact. As the chair of the
report committee, in this talk I will give a high level overview of the
report, and then describe how my experiences in the GVU Center and in
the HCI community informed by contributions to the study.
This series of reports, starting in the mid-1990s, illustrate the
complex nature of information technology (IT) research and the
interdependencies among various subfields of computing and
communications research. This work has dispelled the assumption that the
IT sector is self-sufficient by highlighting how government-funded
university research has been instrumental to the sector’s commercial
success. The 2020 report extends the earlier work by describing key
patterns in how research over time has significant cumulative impact,
and exploring the ultimate impacts of IT innovation on major U.S.
industry sectors.
The report identifies and describes two patterns, resurgence and
confluence, reflecting the path from federally funded academic research
to economic impact in the US. Resurgence provides examples when economic
return follows a period of diminished interest and investment followed
by a resurgence of new ideas and enablers leading to significant impact.
Confluence provide examples of IT innovations combined with deep domain
expertise, design and production knowledge, and new business models to
create transformative results in other major sectors.
These reports are best known for its graphic representation of “tracks”
that visualize the interplay between academic, industry research, and
industry development culminating in commercial impact. The 2020 report
now extends this graphic illustrating how streams of innovation combine
in powerful ways across US industries.
My personal journey with this work includes the 2015 National Academies
workshop that collected first-person narratives that illustrated the
link between government investments in academic and industry research to
the ultimate creation of new IT industries. In 2018, I helped create a
“GVU Tire Tracks” as part of the Nostalgic Futures project that captured
GVU’s impact in Graphics & Animation, the Web, Visualization and
Visual Analytics, Augmented and Virtual Reality, User Interface
Software, Ubiquitous Computing, and Wearable Computing. Through each of
these experiences I gained an understanding for how human-centric
research has a long track record in innovation captured by diverse US
industries.