If you're a small company, you can get your agenda out of the intellectual atmosphere around you just by being alert. If you're a big company, or a university, you can't. And this is one thing that both my employers have in common. It's probably the only thing they have in common - that they're concerned with making the agenda for computing of the future. When I was writing my one side of paper, I divided computing research into four kinds, and I'm going to say something about these in turn.
Algorithms are what computers do.
You can't get a computer to do something unless you've got an algorithm for doing it. Conversely, a computer that is doing something which isn't an algorithm is considered to be broken. This means that the study of algorithms is absolutely central to progress. And it's a sobering thought that only 35 years ago sorting things into order came under that heading. Only 35 years ago.