Mission, Vision, Strategy and Plan

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In early October I attended a couple of IEEE events in and around Glasgow Scotland. The first was an IEEE Technology Summit focused on CleanTech Solutions at the Glasgow Convention Center. The second was an Innovation Summit at Cameron House near Loch Lomond.

The CleanTech Solutions Summit was organized by IEEE Technical Activities. This is the IEEE organization unit that includes the various IEEE Societies and Technical Councils. The three day event covered many topics around creating more sustainable technology and using technology to reduce our carbon footprint.

The image below was from a panel discussion on making semiconductors with less energy with international experts from several organizations involved in semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

The Innovation Summit was a two-day experiment to find new ways to attract and evaluate proposals for innovative ideas in the IEEE. There is an IEEE board committee, called the New Initiatives Committee, or NIC, which has a few million dollars annually set aside to fund strategic IEEE activities. Some of these require smaller amounts of funding and are generally completed within a year. Some of the more ambitious project require considerable funding and take up to three years to complete.

With the creation of the IEEE Strategic Plan last year from 2025-2030 and the work in the IEEE board Strategy and Alignment Committee with the various parts of the IEEE to determine how these goals are going to be achieved over the next five years, funding for these activities is an important enabler.

This year IEEE President Kathleen Kramer created an ad hoc, chaired by Fred Shindler, to explore ways in which IEEE can pursue and fund activities to further these strategic goals, particularly ambitious efforts that require lots of time, attention and money.

The image below, from the Summit, shows from left to right, Mary Ellen Randall, current IEEE President Elect and President in 2026, Fred Shindler, Innovation Summit organizer, and Kathleen Kramer, 2025 IEEE President.

To prepare for the Summit, requests were made to the IEEE membership for proposals for consideration at the Summit. I believe that there were over 80 proposals made and of those about 20 were considered during the Summit. These ranged from some very practical proposals on topics such as AI for Predictive Optimization and Efficient Maintenance in Mining Trucks and the Technological Development of a Low-Cost Device for the Classification of Dried Cocoa Ban Quality Using and Image Processing and Computer Vision to IEEE enhancement focused proposals particularly those for providing benefits to society.

Among the IEEE enhancement focused proposals were ones on enhancing the IEEE program for getting kids interested in engineering and providing teaching resources for teachers called Try Engineering using AI to tailor these resources to the needs of individual students, deal with different languages and to help teachers create lesson plans using these resources than align with country and state guidelines.

Another very interesting one was focused on using AI to advance scientific advancement by tracking unfulfilled searches on IEEE Xplore, the IEEE document library, to identify technology blind spots.

Small groups of IEEE volunteer leaders and staff in attendance were selected to evaluate and develop these various initiatives and the proposals often changed during the course of the discussion from the original proposal. The group then made a 5-minute pitch and answered questions about their proposal and the various proposals were then evaluated by those who heard the pitches. Below is an image of one of these groups making their pitch.

Perhaps some of these initiatives will be developed further and funded by a future initiatives funding program in the IEEE which will succeed the current New Initiatives Committee. There is much good work to be done by the IEEE to further our professions and provide value and opportunities to the people of the world.

IEEE volunteer leaders and staff met in Scotland to explore CleanTech Solutions and to develop ideas for evaluating and developing ambitious new initiatives to achieve our 5-year strategic plan.