Earlier this week, IBM unveiled “Watson,” a computer that the company claims represents significant new progress in natural language processing, analytics and system design: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/. Named for IBM’s founder, Watson will face the ultimate test in language processing in Febraury, when it faces off against human Jeopardy champions on the popular game show. The Watson “DeepQA” architecture is designed specifically for understanding and delivering precise answers to questions posed in natural language — a separate INFO 202 blog post in itself — but I think this initiative is interesting from an innovation perspective. IBM seems to be hyping Watson as much as it can (the upcoming Jeopardy competition has been likened to when chess champion Garry Kasparov took on a computer in 1997) as part of an effort to make Watson the most outward-facing component of its innovation operation. This is an interesting approach to the diffusion component of the innovation value chain: by publicizing Watson on Jeopardy, IBM hopes to bring attention to (and find potential customers for) its work on technology that sure, could help a computer win at Jeopardy, but could also be used to help diagnose illnesses or solve problems at customer support centers, just to name a few potential applications.
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