T-Shaped Professionals: Adaptive Innovators

What skills are needed for the future? This book argues for T-shaped professionals who are adaptive innovators, with broad communication skills and deep problem-solving skills.

We invite readers to explore this question from the perspective of academics, educators, business practitioners, those in government, as well as researchers trying to measure more precisely just what it means to be a T-shaped professional and adaptive innovator.

Yassi Moghaddam, MBA, M.Sc., is the executive director of International Society of Service Innovation Professionals, a non-profit organization that has partnered with IBM, Cisco, GE, and JST to promote people-centered innovation. Yassi has 25 years of service and product innovation experience with Fortune 500 companies like VMWare, Cisco, Northeastern University, Wells Fargo, EMC, and New Venture Partners. She holds an MBA from Columbia University, a MS in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and BS in EE from University of Oklahoma.

Haluk Demirkan is a Milgard professor of service innovation and business analytics at the Milgard School of Business, UW-Tacoma, and a board of director of International Society of Service Innovation Professionals. He has a PhD in information systems and operations management from the University of Florida. With 150+ publications, he has a global leadership in analytics and service innovation with cognitive computing and service-oriented technology. He has 20+ years experience advising 40+ Fortune 500 companies like IBM, GE, Cisco, HP, Intel, and American Express.

Jim Spohrer directs IBM's open source artificial intelligence efforts. He led global university programs, co-founded Almaden Service Research, and was CTO Venture Capital Group. After his MIT BS in physics, he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex. He has a PhD in computer science/artificial intelligence from Yale. In the 1990's, he attained Apple computers' distinguished engineer scientist and technology. With 90+ publications and nine patents, he won the Gummesson Service Research award, Vargo and Lusch Service-Dominant Logic award, and a PICMET Fellow for advancing service science.