Dev Project: Boston Bicycling Mobile App

Your smartphone is a sophisticated, connected sensor platform. The City of Boston is rolling out apps to improve quality of life through its "new urban mechanic" initiative. Through apps like Citizens Connect, we can report graffiti, get streetlamps fixed, and (maybe) even automatically detect potholes. I am working on a project with Nigel Jacob, owner of the mechanic project. As a cyclist, I'm prototyping a mobile app that will make life better for bikers in Boston. If it looks good, his department may invest the time to release it as a production-quality system. This would be a great and low-cost way for the Mayor to follow through on his promise to make the city a "cyclist's dream."

Here's my question for you: What do you want? How can we help? What cycling frustrations could be solved with a mobile app? A few ideas to start the conversation:

• Need: finding bike lanes. Help with route planning.
• Frustration: cars parked in bike lanes. Submit photos of offenders? Automatically detect swerving into traffic when in a bike lane?
• Need: automatic dispatch of police/ambulance after an accident. Detect sudden deceleration followed by extended immobility, message 911 with current location.

How can we use technology and the support of the city to make this a great place for cyclists?

Image licensed Creative Commons by abbyladybug.

Strategy and Stupidity

Corporate strategy is often presented as being like a game of chess. (Better yet, "go" or "pente".) You make your plan, seek to outwit the competition, and emerge victorious through superior execution. The dumber your competitor, the more likely you are to win.

I first became aware that this view was incomplete during my startup days. Our product category represented a tiny but disruptive opportunity to a much larger market. Arguing with or belittling competitors wouldn't just be childish, it could shake confidence in the entire nascent industry.

I am taking a B2B marketing class at Harvard this semester and we just saw a video of an executive who stated this wisdom concisely (I paraphrase):

It's terrible to compete against someone stupid, especially if they don't understand their own cost structure. They'll send themselves into bankruptcy and may drag you with them.

Well-said.

It's easy to recall industries poisoned by unethical competitors; energy trading will live under the shadow of Enron for a generation. I can't think offhand of any industries or markets that were destroyed by a stupid competitor, but imagine that it wouldn't be too hard to find one after some research. Are there any on your mind?

Language: Gendered Address

I am taking a German class this term in preparation for potential post-graduation employment through the MIT-Germany program. It's been fun to reacquaint myself with the language and I'm looking forward to it. There's one unusual wrinkle, though: our professor is a visiting scholar from Wellesley (a women's school). Some Germans have a verbal tick in which they insert "meine Damen und Herren" (ladies and gentlemen) into their speech for emphasis or to pause.

Our professor, on the other hand, repeatedly asks questions like, "Wo denken sie, meine Damen, dass Europa beginnt?" Or, "Ladies, where do you think Europe begins?"

Fortunately, the three Herren in the class think that it's more funny than bothersome.

Note: Photo courtesy of Brown University showing an anatomy class for women in 1900.

Product Review: Agloves

I never imagined that on a tech-centric blog I would be doing fashion reviews, but Agloves sit somewhere between "garment" and "tool." When I found myself on a walk manipulating my touchscreen with my nose, I knew something needed to change. Agloves are a liner-thickness glove threaded through with capacitative silver so that every part of the hand registers on the touchscreen. The fit is a bit strange, but they work as advertised.

Because the gloves are thin, I can do precision targeting like typing. Even hitting small countries in Lux DLX is pretty easy. I'm not sure that the full 10-finger response is all that necessary. I'd probably be happy with an index and middle finger. The real advantage to the sewn-in conductivity is that the lack of a conductive pad means that the gloves can be accurate and have a natural feel. Though not as warm as my nice Black Diamond skiing gloves, they seem insulative enough for most urban applications. They're not stylish, but I'll call them attractive enough that they don't embarrass me.

Unfortunately, these gloves are hard to find at brick-and-mortar stores so you may have to iterate to find your right size. I used the company's online sizing tool (which measures only the width of your palm) to order a M/L pair and had to exchange them for an XL. These gloves have very short-cut fingers, so the M/L pair left me with uncomfortable webs of fabric almost behind my knuckles. Even with the XL gloves, I wish the fingers were longer. Their customer service rep was helpful and friendly, replacing my gloves quickly and without fuss. I was a bit bothered that I had to pay for return postage. Given how personal glove sizing is, I would feel more confident buying with a Zappos-style prepaid shipping return label.

If you want to check your mail during the winter, these will get the job done. I wonder if this will start to become an expected feature in most gloves by next year.

Wind Week @ MIT

Wind Week at MIT just wrapped up. I learned a lot in the special-topics class ESD.930, and particularly enjoyed that the visit from Steve Nolet of TPI Composites enabled me to geek out about prepreg laminates and honeycomb cores. The most thought-provoking talks came during the all-day Friday workshop in which we focused on grid integration. Most of the serious work in wind theory these days is on bidding strategies/market design, as well as in figuring out cost allocations for transmission upgrades and standby generation. These all assume that storage is expensive and we have to think about the grid in a different way.

Eric Ingersoll from General Compression raised a different idea: cheap storage can turn wind from an intermittent resource to a baseload generator. He estimates that 200-300 hours of storage will enable any given facility to be fully dispatchable at a combined cost below that of coal. (And that wind + storage is cheaper than wind + peaker plant.) This raises a lot of interesting questions, like "why not use less storage and call yourself a peaker unit" or "why not chuck the wind and do intra-day arbitrage?" But that's not the point of this post; I'm more interested in the general idea of technical breakthroughs making complex hacks unnecessary.

Remember the beginning of the previous decade? In 2000 we knew that the broadcast model for video would be supplanted by something else, but not what. We knew that the TV of the future would be customizable, timeshiftable, and able to access an infinite array of content. The form of the solution was a huge unknown given the tiny pipes available at the time. TiVo connected a hard drive to the cable box. BitTorrent hooked your hard drive to a world of pirated content via your crappy ISDN line. AppleTV 1.0 did the same thing, but wrapped the juicy content in a razorwire shell of DRM. Deep thinkers imagined legal peer-to-peer multipoint distribution systems and even freely shareable files with embedded advertising. We even briefly flirted with the notion that low-quality YouTube clips of teenagers injuring themselves with fire would replace professional media. Broadband is now a reality and we now pretty much just stream studio TV or movies through Hulu, AppleTV 2.0, or Netflix. The infrastructure necessary to engage in broad realtime streaming of video is quite complex with its Akamai nodes and high-speed backbone, but the user model is radically simplified. We have more or less jettisoned those crazy workarounds and now I can watch old episodes of "Arrested Development" on my phone as I walk to the (T).

System limitations necessitate complex hacks that sometimes have shorter lives than the limitations that spawned them. Will cheap storage turn wind integration into a no-brainer before we implement the perfect intermittent wholesale electricity market? I have my doubts in the short run, but wouldn't be surprised if some day in the distant future we look back on Fred Schweppe's revolutionary power system market designs as a transitional hack.

Liberate Your Data

I discovered a cool tool today which might interest my SDM colleagues: Liberate your Google Groups site! Many of us use Google Groups to coordinate our ad-hoc teams. But how do you preserve your team's work for posterity? The liberation tool exports the entire site to a local directory on your machine. Finally - my entire education on a (surprisingly small) flash drive.

I still have most of my course bibles from my undergrad days. It's a real relief to transform these into a more-portable form.

Pitching Fits

The good news: I filtered through almost 400 of the MIT100k Elevator Pitch Competition entries to the top 60, then placed into the top 12. This let me pitch my clean energy idea to 500 people live and I hear that the video will be seen by a few thousand. Unfortunately, I didn't place in the top 3, so I won no money. At the time, it felt like crushing defeat but I'm trying to look on the positive side and call a top-12 placement an accomplishment.

Here's what I think brought my team to the top:

• Our low-cost/high-effectiveness desalination idea is easy to understand
• It has a clear, profitable business model
• The judges rated me as top 5% in "connects with the audience" and "charisma".

I walked out of the opening round feeling good about the pitch and its delivery.

Then came the finals night, which didn't go as well. What I'd do differently next time:

• I reworked the pitch based on feedback from the judges in the preliminaries. Their feedback was useful, but the pitch became overstuffed with an "all things to all people" problem.
• I did not connect with the audience. My delivery was uncharacteristically nervous and stilted. I need to reach deeper into that theatrical background and force myself to be ON regardless of whatever else is happening.

We'll be back at the Executive Summary contest in a few weeks. Until then, it's time to get back to interviewing potential customers.

Take Me To Your Leader

After ridiculing CareerLeader, it's time to post about a self-assessment which really works. One of my classes this term is ESD.945 "Systems Leadership and Management". It's a project-based class which looks explicitly at effective teamwork, decision-making, leadership style, and management theory. I have always found it strange that much of being a manager is about leadership, but that business school focuses so much on the nuts and bolts of strategy/economics/accounting. One of our early exercises in this class was to take the "Belbin Team Roles" test. I have to say that I was surprised at the results.

"Know Thyself, Algorithmically": The test prioritizes your teamwork style into a variety of iconic roles. I had always seen myself as a dispassionate, technocratic "coordinator": the one who doesn't care much about the direction of the team as long as everything is humming along efficiently. As it turns out, I'm more of a "shaper", a description which fits over 80% of business school graduates. I have a vision, and dang it if we're not moving in that direction. It's either time that I own up to this tendency, or explicitly walk away from it. Denial helps nobody.

I at least have one trait which is rare among MBA-types. My second-highest score is as an "implementer". Though the name sounds like an individual contributor, this role actually shows strengths in delegation, leading the team towards its goals, and generally making sure that Stuff Gets Done. Implementers are apparently rare in business school, so I do have an edge here.

My team for this class contains another strong "shaper" personality. We're already talking about how to best make sure that we work constructively. This is a conversation which probably wouldn't have happened without the test. Call it an early win.

Electricity Grid: System Balance and Renewable Integration in Hawai'i

The following is reprint of an article I wrote for the Fall 2010 edition of the SDM Pulse. Read it in all its PDFy glory there, or enjoy the web form here. This project inspired what has become my thesis topic, so you'll be seeing much more about Hawai'i here. The project team consists of Kacy Gerst (SDM ’09), Matt Harper, (SDM'10), and myself Karl Critz (SDM ’10).

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The state of Hawaii has great incentive to pursue renewable energy projects. The Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative (HCEI) has provided top-down pressure for change by setting targets of 40 percent renewable energy and a 30 percent increase in energy efficiency by 2030. Electricity costs triple the national average, and gas at the pump is 50 percent more expensive than on the mainland. This combination of political and economic drivers encourages Hawaii to test new systems for energy efficiency and sustainability significantly before such systems are explored on a national scale. For this summer’s course in systems engineering, SDM students undertook to find ways to help Hawaii reach its targets in these two areas: increased transportation efficiency and stable renewable electricity production.

Much economic and policy research has already focused on how to structure incentives in order to meet a 40 percent renewable portfolio standard. Team Grid therefore chose to focus on the less-studied systems issues and incentives involved in integrating intermittent sources of energy, such as wind and solar power, into the electrical grid. While some renewable energy sources, such as biomass or biofuel, act like the status quo fossil fuels and can be ramped up or down as needed, others do not. Geothermal energy installations usually have a fixed maximum capacity and have limited ability to respond to demand variation. Worse, wind and solar sources are entirely at the mercy of nature. A grid supplied by these intermittent sources must work harder to meet demand when the wind stops blowing.

The SDM team deployed a rich set of systems engineering tools to address the problem. Characterizing the proposed electricity grid for 2030 exposed the scope of the problem on the minute and hour timescale. A model of the grid from today until 2030 revealed the connections between generation, demand, investment, equipment retirement, transmission, and stabilization. The team also developed a model of stakeholders to put hard economic values on the cost of blackouts, not-in-my-backyard attitudes, habitat destruction, and behavior change. By using experimental design, the team evaluated a set of portfolios for its economic and social costs. This analysis revealed an optimal set of stabilizers for assuring an adequate energy supply with intermittent resources.

The best portfolios focused on simple solutions that use existing infrastructure. It is not, strictly speaking, economical to maintain oil-fired power plants when they will only be used infrequently. However, compared to other storage technologies it is much less expensive (economically and socially) to keep these plants maintained and ready to step in when the sun and wind cannot provide. The team therefore recommended that the Public Utilities Commission guarantee that low- utilization oil plants be compensated by ratepayers.

Unfortunately, such plants are unable to take extra energy when the wind is blowing strong and demand is low (“down-regulate”). To react quickly to unexpected changes and stabilize the grid, the team also recommended the use of chemical energy storage devices such as batteries or fuel cells. Since the storage would supply broad grid benefits, it makes sense that it be controlled by the electric company and not by individual wind/solar developers. The general benefits of storage should also qualify investments for public subsidies similar to the producer tax credit offered for wind and solar developers.

In addition to these two themes, the team also found benefit in (1) dynamic billing policies to shave demand during peak times and (2) streamlined siting for transmission lines and geographically distributed intermittent sources. Each of these policies will create the strong grid Hawaii needs to reduce its fossil fuel imports and assure the continued services upon which its economy depends.

These projects were developed in close collaboration with Michael Duffy at the National Renewable Energy Lab, who provided continuous feedback and guidance to SDM students throughout the course. The teams thank Duffy (who received a master’s from MIT and a PhD from Ohio State University) for his mentorship.

Your Opinion, While Interesting, Is Irrelevant*

With the recent introduction iPhone OS 4.1, Apple is creeping forward in functionality. Much like iOS4, this latest release mostly contains enhancements which I can't use (HDR photography is iPhone4-only) or don't care about (GameCenter/Ping). One welcome and less-publicized feature is full Bluetooth AVRCP support, which means that I can finally use "forward" and "back" controls when the phone pairs with my car.

The iOS platform now represents about 1/3 of Apple's revenue, so it's hard to argue with success. There are dark corners of the user experience on this device which haven't received much attention since launch. As a product manager, these would annoy me like a sore tooth. There is a truism of product development which states "If you're not embarrassed by your v1.0 product, you waited too long to release." All products, no matter how mature, will always have some sort of deficiency. Deciding which ones are important to your customers and which ones just irritate a niche subset is a critical skill.

* Title inspired by Pragmatic Marketing, taking the ego out of product management one framework at a time.

Entrepreneurship: The Flip

I'm at Startup Bootcamp listening to Mick Mountz of Kiva Systems talk about his early experiences with the company. (They make a way-cool automated material handling system which turns warehouses and distribution centers into a robotic ballet.) His step 1 in a startup is (of course) "get a whiteboard and a business card." With a good idea and some customer-funded development, this eventually lets you change the world.

Step zero, though, is something I had never heard before. He calls it "The Flip". It's the moment when you decide "fuck it, I'm doing this." After the flip, he answered his phone "kiva systems". He had no product, no customers, no staff, and hadn't even incorporated. But it became real in his head.

I have heard talks on every detail of entrepreneurship from inception to funding to exit. But this is the first time anyone has talked about something like The Flip. I like the intentionality of this concept. It feels like there needs to be a ceremony for this.

karlcritz.mit.edu

My colleague Rafael told me about the MIT scripts service, which means that I now own karlcritz.mit.edu. It simply redirects to this blog, but it's a cool URL to own. To my other classmates, this takes about 5 minutes to set up. (Though it helps to know a thing or two about MIT's athena unix environment.) Thanks, Rafael!

CareerLeader - This Much We Know

It's hard to provide recruiting support for SDM students. We have 5-7 years of experience and a rather novel degree which combines management with a hard-to-explain corner of engineering. On-campus recruiting and career fairs are targeted at more entry-level positions or (at Sloan) investment banking/management consulting. SDM-appropriate jobs are often not advertised; companies may not even realize that our expertise exists. One service offered by our career services department is the "CareerLeader" assessment. It is supposed to help you sharpen your focus and figure out what kind of job to look for. Having taken the test, I'm not sure it told me anything I didn't already know.

The results are near-tautological. One section asks the test-taker to perform a series of binary rankings: "Would you rather be recognized as brilliant or would you rather make a social contribution with your work?" After a near-comprehensive search of the trade space, we are presented (voila!) with a ranking of our preferences. In another section, we are asked to rank our interest in such areas as "managing technical projects." Indicating high interest in this area means that the summary will tell you "you are interested in managing technical projects!". Again, the insight is stunning. I am not sure what I expected out of this assessment, but I was hoping for some emergent insight into my interests rather than a regurgitation of my answers.

For what it's worth, here's what the test told me:

• You have a strong interest in Application of Technology. You take a systematic, engineering-like approach to solving problems and understanding systems and processes.
• You also have a notable level of interest in Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking. You enjoy solving business problems by taking a conceptual "big picture" approach, exploring abstract ideas and the "what ifs" of a business or industry, and considering broad economic and social trends.

This is pretty spot-on, if obvious. Furthermore, the test tells me that careers I should consider are:

• R&D Management
• Product Management
• Management of New Product Development
• Entrepreneurship

Again, it's just what I told the assessment but at least it's accurate.

Thanks to the hard-working SDM career office for trying on this one. I'd be interested in hearing from you if you extracted value from this assessment. Did it tell you something you didn't already know?

Dirty Power / Shift the Baseline

At an MIT Energy Initiative talk last week, a representative from China"s electric company told us about China's aggressive green energy goals for the next few decades. On one slide, he talked about reducing carbon emissions by 45% per unit of GDP. This sounds great, until you realize that China expects to grow its economy 6x in the same period, so you are looking at a 3x increase in carbon. Putting the two slides together, I felt a bit hoodwinked.

This has been a constant point of contention between the developed and the developing world. Our post-industrial economies hum along efficiently and provide us with a standard of living unimaginable to our grandparents. Meanwhile, 5 billion people are struggling to lift themselves out of a pre-industrial existence. Instituting a nation-by-nation carbon cap freezes the status quo in a manner that probably should be unacceptable to a group of people who largely don't even have indoor plumbing.

In a static, closed system it shouldn't matter much whether you auction off a quantity-limited set of carbon allowances or impose a carbon tax. The magic of price/supply elasticity dictates that the outcome should be the same either way. But that magic only applies within one nation. How do you decide ahead of time the allowable carbon output for each nation? Can you? Should you?

Would you set caps or targets normalized to GDP as implied by the Chinese representative? Could such a system kick an economy while it is down? (A local depression would reduce your relative carbon allowances, making it harder to recover.) Is is verifiable?

There is a simplicity in taxing emissions rather than auctioning quantity limits. A roughly consistent worldwide price on carbon would automatically and dynamically adjust emissions as economies develop and become more or less energy intensive. It is much more transparent and implementable than a single global allowance auction. It would enable developing nations to grow and increase their absolute and relative output while still recognizing the cost of that growth.

Nobody wants to mire developing nations in poverty. Nobody wants them to have a free ride either. We need a regulatory framework which recognizes that 1/3 of the world is growing faster than laws or treaties can adapt.

SDM Summer 2010 review

Another semester, another chunk of knowledge. Summer term is a bit accelerated at MIT since it tries to pack a full semester of content into fewer weeks. Classes meet for more hours each week and the workload per unit time is higher. Fortunately, the institute is air conditioned.

ESD.763 covered supply chain logistics from a very high level. I didn't walk out of this class feeling like I could design and run a supply chain on my own, but I now feel that I have a solid grounding in the issues and the fundamentals. We started with some good mathematical grounding in Markov chains and queue theory. Then we covered a rich set of cases to see how these theories are applied in the real world. Learning about 7-11 Japan was mind-blowing. Hourly resupply with shifting stock throughout the day? Insane. This class only ran for the first half of the semester; having its workload disappear just as other classes ramped up was scheduling genius. I appreciated that Professor Martinez-de-Albeniz would challenge poorly-thought-out answers with harsh and well-deserved reality.

15.514 Financial and Managerial Accounting should have been painful. Who wants to spend three evenings per week learning about accounting in the summer? It turned out to be much more engaging than I thought it would be. I viewed the class as "defense against the dark arts." I never plan to do any accounting myself, but I feel that I should now be able to spot and understand a severe irregularity if someone tries to sneak it by me. Professor Scott Keating was committed to both our understanding and keeping the material as engaging as it realistically can be.

ESD.33 Systems Engineering reminded me of my employee training on the "Design V" back at Ford. This was mostly familiar material, and it suffers a bit by being so loose and heuristic-based. It's necessary material but I don't see a systematic way to teach it. This class, however, was responsible for my favorite project of the summer: an examination of the electrical grid in Hawaii. (Separate article on this to come.)

ESD.945 SLaM Lab Praxis was the first formal "leadership" training we have yet had. In this class we covered decision making, setting strategic directions, how to disagree productively, and how to respond to changes in the external environment. This was good material and Professor Michael Davies delivers it with passion. There is a good chance that I will be taking the followup class this Fall.

And now, three weeks off for some backpacking/kayaking/thesis-writing.

Wave Goodbye

Google has stabilized Wave. The occasional miss should not be a surprise in a company with a freewheeling, beta-oriented culture. There is something to be said for the argument that Wave was poorly communicated. If you have a new product and can't describe what it is in a paragraph of text, you have a problem. Who is it for? What do you do with it? How does this make your life better?

My theory is that Wave failed because of its invitation strategy. Wave is a communications platform. If you can't use it to communicate with anyone, it's useless. In school, we frequently form fast ad-hoc groups for projects and problem sets. Wave would have been perfect perfect for this since email is too unstructured and Google Groups is too heavyweight. I tried early on to sell a few of my teams on Wave, but quickly gave up when we ran into invitation/registration problems. When you only have a week to get your team moving, tool overhead is something you can't afford.

Google's Buzz has been maligned for lacking any meaningful functionality, but it did the right thing in becoming available for everyone, everywhere, immediately. I appreciate Google's caution in wanting to ramp Wave in a controlled fashion, but a slow rollout can be death for a social product.

Lines, Spirals, and Product Development

A talk this week on product development included this diagram about the "product requirements death spiral". As befits NASA, it casts iteration in development as a black hole which can only be escaped by finalizing a design and achieving escape velocity. A different part of the same talk covered "Death, Taxes, and Change Requests." When working in heavy iron industries like aerospace or automotive, I can understand a certain weariness about design changes.

The telling comparison is to look at the agile software iterative development spiral. It assumes and even celebrates changes, viewing development as an experimental process. Lessons learned from one prototype are applied to the next version. Changes aren't the exception, they are part of the process.

Once upon a time, I got frustrated when a broad-consensus group design decision was reversed later in development. It seemed inefficient to backtrack. Eventually, I learned that paper prototyping and whiteboard sketching can only take you so far. Stakeholders will always change their minds. In fact, they should. We learn so much by seeing an implementation in the flesh that the product can become markedly better if we listen to those lessons.

Lately I have been wondering how to port this more nimble and experimental software model back into the physical world. I enjoy working on software precisely because of this level of freedom. But there is a lot of appeal to building something out of atoms instead of bits. I wonder if someday 3D printing and rapid manufacturing will enable true iterative development on heavy iron.

Disrupting Photons

Technology-watchers have been predicting that cell phone cameras will replace single-function cameras since the first featurephones were released. The serious photographers who write on the subject have now embraced the digital SLR over chemical film, but still laugh at the idea that the tiny optics of a phonecam could ever subsume a dedicated device. Today, I saw evidence that the laughing is over and that phone manufacturers have moved on to the next phase in the tech transfer attitude chain. ("first they mock you, then they fight you, then you win")

There is a billboard just outside Logan airport which says "If it has a ringtone, it's not a camera." This is obviously a defensive move from a threatened incumbent. I am writing this from MIT's Killian Court where hundreds of tourists pour forth from buses each day to photograph each other in front of the great dome. An informal survey shows that about half are using cellphone cameras. Personally, I take more pictures with my blurry iPhone 3GS camera than with my fancy Canon s90 or my rugged Pentax w80. The iPhone 4's camera is even better and will probably represent even more of my picture-taking when I purchase its successor. The idea of a cell camera replacing a single-purpose device is already here for the majority of consumers and is just around the corner for everybody but the most serious artiste.

My tech strategy classes last semester covered many such turning points. We have seen the signs and they are all here. I am imagining the New England lake-ice industry with a billboard in 1920 saying "If it came from a machine, it isn't ice." Sailboat makers could claim "If it has propellers, it isn't a ship." Gas lighting manufacturers might try, "If there is no flame, there is no illumination." This campaign comes off just as desperate, and just as doomed.

Semester 1 in the rearview mirror

My first semester is now done. Some thoughts on my classes:

• Disruptive Technologies: We learned a lot about the Clay Christensen innovation model during IAP. It was presented as a well-packaged, clear, consistent model for understanding the dynamics of the marketplace. This class is an extended series of footnotes, caveats, and counterexamples which show that the simple model isn't the end of the discussion. Group project: understanding the impact of low-cost 3rd generation PV solar technologies. We predicted that Balance of System costs will keep 3G solar out of the utility-scale market indefinitely, but that opportunities posed by BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaic) to lower BoS costs will create a viable market once the technology's durability issues are resolved.
• Engineering, Economics, and Regulation of the Electricity Grid. My favorite class this term. A detailed, real-world look at exactly how the magic of always-available power actually works. I had no idea that the system was this complicated and how the incentive structures really work in the industry. Fascinating to learn what "deregulation" really means.
• Technology Strategy: Heavy overlap with Disruptive Technologies. (same instructor) It was cool to read some seminal books of the field and then have the opportunity to interview the authors at length in class.
• Real Options: "How to introduce a stochastic distribution function to your business plan". Really useful content burdened by an unwieldy class organization. Downright painful use of inappropriate tools to the problem. Unpleasant for structural issues, but the material is compelling enough to save the class.
• User-Centered Innovation - discused earlier
• Thesis Seminar - I may have a thesis topic soon. Yay.
• Enterprise Architecture - A not-yet-rigorous approach to enterprise transformation. I had hoped for an engineering approach to management, which is not really what this class is about. Good to know, though, especially if I ever need to roll out an IT system in a large company.

Of course, the most valuable stuff at MIT comes outside of classes. I volunteered with the Clean Energy Prize, which deserves a post all of its own. Stay tuned.

A Dynamic Pricing Thought Experiment

Imagine that all residential electricity customers experience real-time pricing. We all have smart meters and smart appliances which enable customers to register a spot price beyond which the user is willing to automatically curtail use. Imagine that a popular air conditioner manufacturer ships its unit with a default curtailment price of $.25/kWh. What is your ideal bid?

You certainly don't want to leave it set at the user default. Your bid will be lost amid the others. If you value your comfort, a bid of $.26 will clear out the vast mass of people who just leave their appliance set at the default while still preserving the lowest possible bid. I'm not sure what a $.24 bid says about you, though. Maybe that you're cheap and want to capitalize on savings before everyone else?

ERCOT (in Texas) already limits the pool of demand resources because they can react so fast to an event call that the system goes into overvoltage. I wonder if device manufacturers will be required to ship their smart appliances with a randomized default bid to prevent a sudden shutoff of half the air conditioners at a substation.

The world of real-time pricing is going to be a fascinating place in ways the academics haven't even begun to consider.