December 10, 2007 – 11:52 am
Maybe it’s because I have the subject of innovation on the brain these days, but I couldn’t help thinking about it as I read Atul Gawande’s article The Checklist in the December 10 issue of the New Yorker. Because Gawande is a practicing surgeon, as well as an amazingly gifted writer, he has always been [...]
November 8, 2007 – 3:39 pm
The Urban Institute recently released the report by Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman that I mentioned in my post on challenges to conventional wisdom on innovation—the one claiming that all the “gathering storm” concern about a declining U.S. science and engineering workforce is way overblown. Their title, appropriately enough, is “Into the Eye of the [...]
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:
addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmmwaldrop.com%2FStarclouds%2F2007%2F10%2F18%2Fthree-challenges-to-the-conventional-wisdom-about-innovation%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Three+Challenges+to+the+Conventional+Wisdom+about+Innovation’;
addthis_pub [...]
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 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 [...]
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.
