I’ll be attending a one-day conference titled “The Globalization of Services” at Stanford on the day this blog entry is posted. The gathering shows an A-list of speakers, including researchers and “industry leaders” from Silicon Valley, India, Mexico, the Philippines and China. According to the description,
…The conference will (1) Compare outsourcing locally and globally, examining differences that arise from differences in skills, institutions, regulations, technologies, process and coordination requirements, (2) Take a global view of the value-chain, examining the quantity and quality of skills in service delivery, migration and process management, verticals, and the impact on ownership structures and complexity of work done. (3) Examine the roles of cross-border participants: venture capital, product developers, etc.
Coming on the heels of my reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, I’m especially interested in witnessing the interaction between the academicians and the business people on a movement that, as Mr. Friedman writes so eloquently, is heralding “fundamental changes — like the rise of the nation-state or the Industrial Revolution — each of which, in its day…produced changes in the role of individuals, the role and form of governments, the way we innovated, the way we conducted business, the role of woman, the way we fought wars, the way we educated ourselves, the way religion responded, the way art was expressed, the way science and research were conducted, not to mention the political labels we assigned to ourselves and to our opponents.”
