As I reflect on my last nine years in Cleveland for my final xLab newsletter, I’m drawn back to a meeting with the former CTO of a major American manufacturing giant headquartered here. He took me into his office and pointed to a room filled with engineers—his digital transformation team. “We know how to put sensors in products, collect data, analyze it, build apps, and manage data centers,” he said. “But we don’t know how to transform our company’s culture for the 21st century or, more importantly, how to make money from all this technology.”
That conversation reaffirmed a core belief I held then and still hold now: in our technology-driven digital economy, technology alone is neither the problem nor the solution. It must serve a strategic purpose and deliver business goals, all while accounting for its social consequences. There is no such thing as “just technology” or “value-neutral engineering.” Every technology decision is a business decision—with social consequences. Technology shapes how we operate, how we see ourselves, and how we imagine our future. For that reason, technology challenges should never be left solely to engineers. They are, at their core, social, business, and economic problems.
This realization became the cornerstone of xLab. We were driven by three fundamental questions: why, what, and how. “Why” asks us to understand our purpose and envision a better future. We constantly question why the world is the way it is—and why it couldn’t be otherwise. New technologies force us to revisit previously taken-for-granted answers. “What” challenges us to create new, digitally enabled solutions. This is where engineering excels. But a brilliant new “what” answering a misguided or outdated “why” is a waste of resources. “How” focuses on implementing those solutions. This is often where business schools concentrate. Yet without revisiting the “why” and the “what,” even the most innovative “how” falls short of meaningful impact.
I started xLab after more than 70 meetings with corporate leaders in the region to understand what they needed and wanted from an R1 research university—especially a business school. It was a humbling experience to realize the magnitude of the challenges these “legacy” companies faced. At the same time, it was exhilarating to share in their optimism and the possibilities ahead. xLab began with no funding from the university or the school. Yet today, it stands as one of the most successful centers on campus, attracting the best students and a strong pipeline of projects. Its success is a testament to our founding principle: technology alone is neither a solution nor a problem.
As I move on to the next chapter of my career at the London School of Economics, I remain committed to the questions that drove my work at xLab. I am deeply grateful to our board members—past and present—and to our corporate partners. I especially want to thank my dean, Andrew Medvedev, who quickly became xLab’s best sales representative. His relentless advocacy is no small part of xLab’s success.
I want to recognize three people without whom xLab would not have succeeded. Erman Ayday, faculty co-director of xLab, has been with me since day one. We began working together during the COVID pandemic to build a privacy-preserving data-sharing platform. Since then, we’ve weathered wild investors, amazing students, frustrating bureaucracy, and both success and failure in equal measure. Jennifer Thomas was by my side for all of those 70+ meetings in xLab’s early days. She was determined to make xLab succeed, and even after joining Plug and Play, she continued to provide strategic insights at pivotal moments. And I cannot thank Celeste Blau enough. As Assistant Director of xLab, she has been the driving force behind everything we’ve become over the past three years. I had an idea—Celeste made it a reality. Her sense of ownership, creativity, and resilience was the secret sauce of xLab. No text message was too early or too late. I will miss working with her more than I can say.
And finally, thank you all for being part of this adventure. I look forward to seeing xLab continue its quest to answer the “why,” “what,” and “how” of digital transformation.