In His Special Topics Course, Professor of the Practice Dr. Quinn Jacobson Explores Innovation Through Competition

Back for a second year, a special topics course takes Information Networking Institute (INI) students through the history of entrepreneurship and innovation. 

Professor of the Practice Quinn Jacobson's 14-693 Special Topics: Insights into Technology Innovation Through Competition shares real-world case studies of how the technologies students learn about today came to be.

“I’m fascinated by the stories of how we got here,” said Jacobson. “I take the class from the early [days of] industry on the hardware side – we go all the way back to the '40s with early computers – to today. I was only [involved] in the latter part of that [evolution] myself, however, I have known some of the people who were there.” 

Jacobson is a member of INI faculty located at Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley (CMU-SV) and co-leads both INI Practicum and the Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) program. He has over 25 years of experience working in major tech companies and startups, and he brings that experience to this course. 

Throughout the course, Jacobson brings in speakers who played a major role in shaping the technology of today to supplement case studies. Last year, he brought one of the technical leads from the FireWire program, a competitor to USB. For Jacobson, it’s important to learn from the winners and the losers when technologies compete.

“USB won,” he said, “But looking at it from someone who was there and designed one of the alternatives, you see there were a lot of things they actually did better than USB. I think it’s important for people starting their career to understand why one project is successful and the other is not.”  

That lesson is a core part of what Jacobson hopes students learn. “I think it helps people think about their career and how they think about their projects,” said Jacobson. “We have an interesting industry. We have lots of celebrated failures, projects that — at the time — failed, but turned out to be very influential. We have people who were part of a ‘failure’ who are then celebrated because their work was so important to later success.”  

Iteration is a consistent part of the story of technology. When recalling the release of the iPhone, Jacobson highlighted the fact that the iPhone as we know it was not the first phone that Apple made, nor was it the only one being developed.

“I want students to appreciate that we inherited this body of work,” said Jacobson. “It didn’t just appear, and we add our little bit on top of it. And when we understand better how we got here, you get this appreciation that this industry has all these great legacies and we’re building upon them.” 

This six-unit course is being offered in Mini 4 of Spring 2026 and is open to a range of students, from engineering to product management to business. It covers a wide variety of technology innovations, from cryptography to GPU design, and is designed to be approachable for anyone who is curious about how technology has developed over time.