Process, yes; innovation, of course

It seems everyone is talking about processes these days.
You hear things like the way to add to the bottom line is through a more complete and productive process. Or, if we can squeeze more out of this process, we will generate more product which will add to the bottom line.
That all makes sense. The more productive a company, is the more it can produce and that will add to the bottom line. Very smart; very effective.
But that is all with existing products and existing technology. My question is where is all the new product innovation? New ideas and new sources of revenue.
Two of the world’s biggest innovators must be thinking the same thing because Intel and Microsoft are planning to finance two groups of university researchers to start over and design a new generation of computing systems.
If the research succeeds it would enable the development of new kinds of portable computers and would help computer engineers tackle areas as diverse as speech recognition, image processing, health care systems and music.
The research grant, worth $20 million over five years, will create independent labs at Berkeley and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, that can reinvent computing. Each will work on hardware, software and a new generation of applications powered by computer chips containing multiple processors. The University of Illinois plans to contribute an additional $8 million to the project and the Berkeley project is applying for an additional $7 million from a state-supported program to match the industry grants.
The new research came in part from an increasing sense the industry is in a crisis of a sort because advanced parallel software has failed to emerge quickly. Most programmers today still write programs that solve problems in a serial fashion.
Where is the automation industry’s next great innovation going to come from?
Talk to me.