Enterprise Collaboration and
Innovation Support Systems
(GE/IE 498 ECI):
Course Introduction
Xavier Llorà
Illinois Genetic Algorithms Lab &
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
xllora@uiuc.edu

What’s the plan for today?
• What will I learn in this course?
• Course structure and grading
• I want to learn about your background
• Two innocent exercises
• Something to watch
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 2

What will I learn in this course?
• Creativity and innovation
• Information technologies (IT) on enterprise settings
• Key question through out the course:
“How can I take advantage of (my company’s) IT to
support and foster innovation and creativity?”
• Creative and innovative processes are human and social
activities
• Technology for technology sake is not the measure
anymore
• Consumers are now used to measure technology
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 3

What will we cover in this course?
Creativity and innovation
•
– Basic concepts
– How to model innovation and creativity?
– Techniques to help people to be creative
Information technologies
•
– The web has change the way business are conducted
– The web has become “the” communication medium
– Social patterns of interaction had taken over the web (in less than 10
years!)
– Learn just enough of these technologies to make you dangerous out there
Informatics of people
•
– Social networks and how to model them
– Benefits of having the people in the loop
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 4

What am I looking for in this course?
Enjoy teaching you some of the basics of the technologies that are
•
changing our way of doing things
Motivate you to drop some of your common everyday assumptions
•
about what can or cannot be done
Face you with what means creating “disruptive” human-centered
•
technologies
You to participate:
•
“No one learns from others’ experiences”---Grandma saying
You to help me bend the course in the direction of your interests,
•
because eventually this course is about people
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 5

Course lectures (I/II)
• Lecture 1: Introduction
• Lecture 2: Creativity and innovation
• Lecture 3: Let’s play
• Lecture 4: The web with a human spin: blogs, wiki, etc.
• Lecture 5: The schema of a simple web app
• Lecture 6: A few enterprise storage concepts
• Lecture 7: The semantic web? XML, RDF, RSS, XHTML,
POP, IMAP, AJAX, ugh?
• Lecture 8: Connectivity everywhere: graph modeling 101
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 6

Course lectures (II/II)
• Lecture 9: The unstructured data contains a clue
• Lecture 10: Innovation and visual concept maps
• Lecture 11: Summarize and drill: Helping to avoid
cognitive overload
• Lecture 12: Social means interaction (I): Learning what
you like
• Lecture 13: Social means interaction (II): Influence
diffusion in social networks
• Lecture 14: Enough theory, show me some action
• Lecture 15: Project presentations
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 7

Course grading and Office Hours
• Course grading
– Participation: 15%
– Homework: 30%
– Project: 40%
– Final exam: 15%
– Absolute grading with cutoffs
(A>85%, B>70%, C>60%, D>45%, E>20%, F)
• Office hours
– Let’s see if we can find and empty spot
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 8

I want to learn about your background
• Your turn. Background, experiences, and interests
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 9

Two innocent exercises (I/II)
• Exercise 1:
Using only four strokes, and without lifting the pen,
connect all the dots
(Michal Michalko (1994). Thinkertoys, Ten Speed Press, 1994)
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 10

Two innocent exercises (I/II)
Can you do it again only with 3 strokes?
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 11

Two innocent exercises (II/II)
• Exercise 2: Write down your answers to
– Creativity is…
– Innovation is…
– What do I do to be more creative/innovative?
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 12

Something to watch
Two TED talks (http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/)
•
1. Sir Ken Robinson, author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative”
2. Malcom Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Blink”
Homework: Discus the post you will find in the DISCUS communities
•
system
http://www-discus.ge.uiuc.edu/discus-communities/
(Do not forget to leave your email before you leave
so you can get the account information and instructions)
GE/IE 498 ECI - Spring 2007 Xavier Llorà © Spring 2007 13