Singapore
My career has focused on how new technologies emerge and diffuse as a professor and consultant. After working in a semiconductor factory for two years and receiving my PhD from Carnegie Mellon, I was one of the first to recognize the potential for smart phones during the late 1990s and early 2000s in Japan, and I worked with several Western companies (2003 book, Mobile Disruption). I was also recommending to mobile service providers as early as 2004 that they should focus on apps long before the iPhone was released in 2007. The research done as part of this consulting earned me the NTT DoCoMo mobile science award in 2004. After I began working at the National University of Singapore, I was also one of the first to recognize that new technologies were not quickly diffusing and that most were vastly overhyped. My Linkedin account reports daily on this evidence and the need for better assessments of new technologies. I am conversant in economic assessments of VR, AR, AI, 5G, delivery drones, smart homes, wearables, and many others. This capability was achieved through many years of research beginning with teaching a unique course on the economics of new technologies that that built from my Stanford University Press book, Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries. The course, and the supporting research present a methodology that helps entrepreneurs and investors find better opportunities and avoid many of the loss-making businesses that currently comprise today’s startup bubble. Building from this course and my academic research (5 books and about 50 academic articles), I have been writing extensively on new technologies over the last few years in popular websites such as Slate, Fast Company, MindMatters, MarketWatch, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum and Issues in Science & Technology. I have been a keynote speaker at many conferences, both virtually and physically. My lates book is f Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding, and Exploiting Investment Bubbles in Tech. The book helps readers understand the economics of startups and why 90% of Unicorn startups are unprofitable. The two biggest reasons are tech-lite ideas that have little chance of raising productivity above existing businesses and when new technology has been considered, startups have assumed that a new technology would diffuse so fast that they didn't have to identify which customers and applications would be the first.
Working with a variety of companies, universities, and venture capital firms, including many keynote speeches on startups, AI, and other technologies
Consulting on the future of work and new technologies