October 29, 2007 – 9:48 am
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 [...]
October 19, 2007 – 10:18 am
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 [...]
October 18, 2007 – 10:01 am
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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October 11, 2007 – 12:21 pm
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 [...]
October 5, 2007 – 1:42 pm
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 [...]
October 3, 2007 – 12:02 pm
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 [...]
September 28, 2007 – 5:49 pm
A new book called Blindside will be coming out next week. It’s edited by Francis Fukuyama of “end of history” fame, and is essentially the proceedings of the Blindside conference that was sponsored last year by The American Interest, a quarterly policy journal that Frank co-founded back in 2005. The subtitle of the book (and [...]
September 24, 2007 – 4:37 pm
Dick Van Atta has invited me to give a guest lecture this evening to his graduate seminar on Emerging Technologies and Security at Georgetown University. The presentation, Next Generation Infotech, is basically a meditation on the nature of innovation, using examples from the history and future of computing. Since these are two topics I’ve been [...]
September 15, 2007 – 8:36 am
Since this is the very first post in my very first blog, I thought I would start with a few words of introduction.
Me: The full rundown is on the Biography page for anyone who’s interested. But the blurb to the right pretty well sums it up. Way back when, I got my physics Ph.D. [...]
A narrative history of personal computing and the Internet.
The story of the Santa Fe Institute and the emerging science of complex adaptive systems.
My first book—a study of artificial intelligence.
