BYU-Idaho chief talks technology

The best technology is the technology that wins.

And the best technology company, according to Brigham Young University-Idaho President Kim Clark, is the company that develops the technology that meets the needs, in creative ways, of today's consumer.

Clark, former dean of the Harvard Business School and keynote speaker of a Utah Technology Council educational breakfast Wednesday, said there are many different ways to arrive at winning technology in today's fluid economy.

The technology sector has gone through a tremendous upheaval in the past 30 years — from the dominance of IBM to Microsoft and Dell. It has become more "modular," Clark said, focusing on developing pieces of the whole, independent but working in concert with other "modules," rather than the whole in one piece.

And there's power in that model, Clark said.

Modularity makes complexity manageable, he said. It enables work to continue simultaneously on pieces that eventually will work together as part of the whole. Modularity welcomes experimentation and creates options.

Within that evolving modular framework, there is no single winning strategy. But smart leaders understand four basic principles, he said. They don't expect traditional competition — they expect turmoil, competition that hits in a "cluster." Winners use mergers and acquisitions to become a leading company in some slice of the industry. They structure their company to reduce its footprint, and exploit the advantage that creates to the return on invested capital. And they'll use open source methods to clone complementors' products.

"Open source development is a very powerful way to develop particularly software," Clark said. "It will be very important. And the value of cloning your complementors' products is that you then have a way to maintain discipline out there in the marketplace. You get good prices and innovative products, and you see lots of stuff happening out there in the market. It's a very clever strategy."

All of this, he said, in the pursuit of the ultimate objective.

"The magic is not in the technology," Clark said. "The magic is in matching the technology with the customer needs in very creative ways. . . . When people think about best technology they usually think of it in technical terms rather than its application. But the best technology always wins.

"By definition, the best technology is the technology that wins. That's why it's important to develop a perspective that's not driven solely by physics, chemistry, biology or the basic sciences but by what people need, and the value it creates. Often, it's not the most spiffy technology or the most advanced technically."

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