XP2021 Experience Report: Five Strategies for the Future of Work: Accelerating Innovation through Tech Transfer

This experience report outlines five tech transfer strategies developed over a period of 25 years at four Global 1000 companies (HP, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Nortel) to mitigate R&D challenges associated with duplicated effort, product quality, and time-to-market. The five strategies accelerate innovation through open knowledge sharing, rather than licensing intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. The strategies are based on corporate tech forums, conference panels, exploratory workshops, research reviews (at universities and companies), and talent exchanges. While the initial objective was to foster the corporate adoption of software best practices, over time the strategies had broader impact on company innovation, including incubating cross-company R&D collaborations, capturing organizational memory, cultivating and leveraging external research partnerships, and feeding company talent pipelines

Scheduling to maximize participation

Abstract. We study a problem of scheduling client requests to servers. Each client has a particular latency requirement at each server and may choose either to be assigned to some server in order to get serviced provided that her latency requirement is met or not to participate in the assignment at all. From a global perspective, in order to optimize the performance of such a system, one would aim to maximize the number of clients that participate in the assignment. However, clients may behave selfishly in the sense that each of them simply aims to participate in an assignment and get serviced by some server where her latency requirement is met with no regard to the overall system performance. We model this selfish behavior as a strategic game, show how to compute equilibria efficiently, and assess the impact of selfishness on system performance. We also show that the problem of optimizing performance is computationally hard to solve, even in a coordinated way, and present efficient approximation and online algorithms.