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 get good “agenda-setting” stories—that is, articles and op-eds that start from a cogent analysis of the issues, but then go on to lay out a specific, practical, concrete policy agenda for moving forward.
I told her that I know one or two people (to put it mildly) who might have some opinions in this area. But rather than just send her a bunch of names and papers, I thought I would try to get an online conversation going here on Starclouds, and see if we could do some collective brainstorming.
So—consider this a call for comments. Is our innovation/competitiveness policy on the right course? Are officials even framing the issues in the right way? And if not, what directions should we be going?
Remember-specific, concrete, practical…
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 and collective intelligence. It includes cases authored by Cory Ondrejka, co-founder and CTO of Second Life; two of the principals at Ideo, the famed Palo Alto design firm; strategy & collaborative innovation gurus Tom Malone (MIT), Bhaskar Chakravorti (McKinsey), and Philip Evans (Boston Consulting Group); a protagonist in the failed DARPA “market for terrorism risk; and authors from Innocentive, Harvard Business School, Science Commons, and Ashoka.
The issue looks fascinating, and I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, here is an official blurb about Innovations:
Innovations: People Using Technology to Address Global Challenges
http://mitpress.mit.edu/innovations/ [free content and subscriptions]
Innovations is a journal for, and about, people using technology and novel modes of organization to address global challenges. The journal was launched in the Winter of 2006 as a publication of MIT Press, jointly hosted at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) and George Mason University’s School of Public Policy (Center for Science and Technology Policy). Philip Auerswald and Iqbal Quadir serve as the journal?s co-editors; John Holdren is the chair of the journal’s advisory board. The leadership of the journal is shared and supported by an international editorial board, with guidance from an advisory board whose members (in addition to Holdren) include two former U.S. Presidential Science Advisors, a former NASA Administrator, the chief counsel on the House Science Committee, the publisher of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, and R.K. Pachauri, co-recipient (on behalf of the IPCC) of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
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: Read More »
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 in my book Complexity
, which I guess is why I was invited.) IPL isn’t necessarily going to focus on Santa Fe’s specialty, complex adaptive systems, although that does seem to be a starting point. But IPL is meant to have the same kind of focus on transdisciplinary science-getting physicists talking to biologists, computer scientists talking to demographers, and so on. The idea is that real-world problems like global warming or sustainable development couldn’t care less how universities are organized into departments; they have to be addressed from every perspective at once. So let’s give researchers a place where it’s easy to work on cross-cutting problems together.
To hear the organizers tell it, the need for such a refuge is even more acute in Europe than it is here. Read More »
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 butterflies. (Thus the headline above, which I cribbed from the SciAm cover.) But what I really found intriguing as I was researching the story was the way the technology was being driven by consumer choices. IMOD is competing in a very tough market, dominated by LCDs. But it promises big advantages over LCDs in terms of low power consumption (= longer battery life) and being reflective rather than backlit (= readable in bright daylight, as opposed to effectively turning black.) Neither advantage would matter all that much except that more and more people are wanting to use their cell phones for text messaging, Web browsing, playing games, watching videos, playing music, etc, etc, all of which make long battery and readability critical.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether IMOD can deliver, versus some other LCD alternative like OLEDs. But in the meantime, the contest is fun to watch–and a reminder that technology is driven as much by social choices as by its own internal DNA…
Enjoy the article!
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 areas like information technology, where trend lines like Moore’s Law would seem to make it easy. But it’s really a meditation on the nature of innovation, using examples drawn from computer history (many of which I talked about in my own book, The Dream Machine
.)
I can’t just post the chapter whole, because it’s copyrighted to the Brookings Institution Press. But basically I make two points: Read More »
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 the conference) pretty well sums up its theme: “How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics.” The book ends up with a lot more questions than answers; forecasting is damnably hard, especially the future. But most of the chapters are worth a look.
I mention this because one of the chapters is mine: I use a lot of examples from computer history to explain why it’s hard to do forecasting even for IT, where you’d expect things like Moore’s Law to make it easy. But I’m actually going to save that discussion for a later post. My immediate concern is that this chapter was actually just the middle part of a longer paper (and longer conference presentation) about the perils of technological forecasting in general, which I did in collaboration with Caroline Wagner at George Washington University. Not surprisingly, I think it contains some pretty good stuff. Here’s the original summary passage:
We define the notion of deep uncertainty, which makes prediction effectively impossible in most cases. We explain why that’s OK-because an effort to explore the future can give you a great deal, even without prediction. And then we explore how we can still confront the future quite effectively by embracing deep uncertainty.
Unfortunately, for reasons too mundane to bear repeating, everything besides that central section wound up on the cutting room floor. So, with Caroline’s permission, I’d like to rescue those portions here. Enjoy. Read More »
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 thinking a lot about, I thought I would share the presentation here. Some highlights: Read More »
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. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then, for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with the lack of jobs in physics, I got a master’s in journalism. I’ve been working in that field ever since, and have remained fascinated by science and technology of all kinds—as well as math, engineering, national security, politics, history, film, bicycling and a good deal more besides. My main claims to fame, such as they are, include 10 years as a reporter at Science magazine during the 1980s, plus a couple of reasonably well-received books that I shamelessly advertise just below the blurb.
The Blog: I’ve decided to start blogging for a variety of reasons, Read More »
My first book—a study of artificial intelligence.
