Monthly Archives: October 2007

Comments, Please: A Policy Agenda for Innovation?

Last week I had another conversation about innovation with my editor friend—the same editor who had asked me earlier about challenges to the conventional wisdom in innovation policy. She pointed out that it’s very easy for the magazine to get articles and op-eds that diagnose the problems with our innovation system, but much harder to [...]

Collaborative Innovation and Collective Intelligence

In response to yesterday’s post on challenging the conventional wisdom about innovation, with particular reference to the third point about the importance of “intangibles,” Phil Auerswald from the George Mason University School of Public Policy sent me the latest issue of the journal Innovations, which he co-edits. The theme of this issue is collaborative innovation [...]

Three Challenges to the Conventional Wisdom about Innovation

I was recently chatting about innovation with an editor friend of mine, and she asked me what unexplored questions I thought should be addressed.
Well, I don’t know how “unexplored” they are, but here are the three questions I sent her:

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Santa Fe in Europe

I’ve just gotten back from the town of Almen in The Netherlands, where I attended a symposium held by the Institute Para Limes: a new organization that is hoping to establish itself as a European counterpart of the Santa Fe Institute in the United States. (I described the founding of SFI at great length [...]

From Flight to Bright

I just got my advance copies of the November 2007 Scientific American, which has my article on the new IMOD mobile phone displays by Qualcomm. (”Brilliant Displays,” pg. 94.) The interferometric modulator (IMOD) technology itself is pretty cool; basically, it’s a high-tech, controllable version of the iridescence seen on the wings of certain tropical [...]

Innovation Lessons from the History of Computing

As I promised last week, I wanted to talk a bit about my chapter in the new book Blindside, edited by Francis Fukuyama. Because the book (like the conference it was based on) focuses on prediction and forecasting, I framed the chapter as a discussion of the near-impossibility of trying to forecast technological outcomes-even in [...]

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