Category Archives: Complexity

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]

Embracing Deep Uncertainty

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 [...]

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