February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
3 posts
WatchDragonBot: A platform for cloud-based social robotics (by Adam Setapen)
DragonBot is a new robot platform from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. Specifically designed to support long-term learning interactions between children and robots…(more)
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What are going to be the big debates for 2012?
I just wrote a piece on the Technophobia blog about what I think some of the big themes of debate in digital business and innovation are going to be this year. Or perhaps better: what underlying issues will be driving them.
I’ve highlighted just five concepts, which are by no means intended to be comprehensive. They are:
Human augmentation and the capability gap.
Context and...
December 2011
5 posts
November 2011
4 posts
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On AI's tipping point...
Last night I watched my wife have a conversation with a computer. Not a particularly sophisticated conversation, as conversations go, but it felt like a conversation to her and that’s perhaps more important. She has just received a new phone upgrade - an iPhone4S, and, while she was playing around with it on the sofa next to me, I casually asked her whether she realised the phone was...
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One Plus One Equals Three...
Yesterday I spent a wonderfully stimulating evening at the Royal Institution in London, listening to the well-known broadcaster, teacher and journalist James Burke give a lecture entitled 1+1=3. His was the second in a series of three events on innovation that have been guest-curated for the Institute by Aleks Krotoski around the theme of ’Connections’, and Burke is perhaps most famous for his...
October 2011
4 posts
1 tag
World Policy Journal: Fall 2011 | World Policy... →
This autumn’s issue of the World Policy Journal is dedicated to the subject of Innovation and is full of very interesting articles from writers in various fields.
(The WPJ is the quarterly organ of the World Policy Institute which is a New York-based non-partizan think tank that “develops and champions innovative policies that require a progressive and global point of view.”)
...
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
5 posts
3 tags
On pizza cutters and Tim Harford's 'Adapt'...
Pizza cutters fill me with dread.
Not because they are sharp enough to slice through crispy thin-crust pizza even though they are usually just made of plastic, which, admittedly, I do find a bit weird. No, I’m fearful of them because it struck me a few years ago that they only have a single failure mode, and that failure mode is catastrophic.
The weakest point of a pizza cutter is the...
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Home alone with apophenia
My wife has taken our kids to visit the grandparents this week, while I, having to work, am left here on my own. It’s the first time I’ve spent so much time alone in the house in a very long time, certainly since our eldest was born nearly four years ago. And, although it’s gloriously quiet and my consciousness is able to settle over the whole house, I have been noticing that...
“Control is not an issue any more. When you do this, you manage on trust. You...”
– Erik Veldhoen on Chanel 4’s The Secret Life of Buildings
June 2011
6 posts
“Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The...”
– Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), journalist and political philosopher
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Trying to understand Thinking Digital 2011...
In an attempt to understand all the amazing talks I experienced at the Thinking Digital conference the other week, I’ve created a (tentative) network diagram in Popplet showing all the presentations and the major themes I picked out. As I said it’s a first stab - so if anyone thinks it’s useful and would like to add a theme or additional connections, please let me know!
(Just...
Thriving too: Social Spaces: The Sharrow Pie... →
Innovation in the neighbourhood - well done Sheffield! :-)
5 tags
Innovation Environments and Andrew Marr's...
I was watching the first episode of Andrew Marr’s Megacities on BBC the other night and as I watched it it struck me that there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the development of cities and the relationship between institutional, physical and cultural environments within a company. In the last fifteen minutes or so of the programme, Marr compares Tokyo, Mexico City and...
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Some links that have caught my eye recently...
Web 3.0 and meaningful real-world innovation: http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/
Command & Control hierarchies inhibit innovation - a theatre company is a useful analogy for the alternative: http://www.bqf.org.uk/innovation/2011/05/23/does-your-structure-help-or-hinder-innovation/
Innovation is not problem-solving, it is “…about providing products and...
May 2011
4 posts
1 tag
The Next Men..?
A long time ago I read a 1960s science fiction short story by Howard Fast called “The First Men”, in which a government project, under pressure of war, assembles gifted children from around the world and creates a radical learning environment isolated from their parents and native culture, in which they gradually develop super-human abilities and ultimately transcend our...
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Is cloud computing like mass transit..?
I’ve been thinking today that - leaving all rational, legitimate objections to cloud computing aside for a minute and just speaking about how it’s perceived ‘psychologically’ - cloud computing, (or at least SaaS) is a lot like choosing to travel by train or air rather than drive: You know consciously that letting someone else take you there is far safer than you driving...
April 2011
1 post
“It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without...”
– Robert Kegan in Immunity to Change
March 2011
3 posts
“…the most important and significant insight I have learned: Do not mention...”
– Yigal Chamish, (Knowledge Management in Organizations – What do we know today?)
1 tag
1 tag
January 2011
9 posts
The Maker Generation in the Enterprise – confused... →
In this post JP Rangaswami brilliantly, I think, captures many of the essences of the institutional and inter-personal culture of creative knowledge work that is emerging - from empowering people with control over their own tools; to the relationship between strong shared values and free choice of work tasks (loosely coupled, strongly aligned!); to the true implications of cross-functional...
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Rounding up Predictions Season 2011
To celebrate the end of techy prediction season (and hopefully, the end of ‘post-Christmas back to work shock’!), here’s a list of some of the best articles and reports I’ve seen:
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011
IDC predictions for 2011: Welcome to the New Mainstream
Trends in the Living Network: Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the...
“Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far...”
– David Shenk, author of The Genius in All of Us, in an article for the BBC.
3 tags
Of herds and hosting...
About a month ago, Kevin Kelly wrote a short post called “Prepare for flash crowds” in which he talked about the herding behaviour of people online and the poor readiness of the spaces they herd to. I’ve been thinking about this for a while as well, ever since a couple of years ago Steven Fry turned into whatever the opposite of King Midas is, by inadvertently overloading...
Building Open Innovation Capabilities in Small... →
Whether or not it’s really feasible (or necessarily desirable) to encourage staff to engage with open innovation intermediaries, this post does highlight some critical competencies that are hard to engender, especially, I would say, in medium sized company’s where diktat is not an effective means of creating behaviours.
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Of slippers and innovation...
I’m not into slippers - never have been, never wanted to be. And I’ve always been pretty sure that if I did possess some slippers, I’d never wear them.
However, two things happened just before Christmas that inspired me to buy a pair: firstly it got really cold, especially in the attic office I use on my working from home days; and secondly I found myself in a shoe shop...
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end,...”
– Historian Robert Darnton quoted in Steven B Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”, describing pretty much perfectly how I use evernote, delicious and tumblr ;-)
December 2010
5 posts
The 101 Most Useful Websites on the Internet →
This is a pretty good list I reckon, and I especially like that they’ve produced it as a pdf for you to print out as a poster - I think I’ll go and stick a few up around the place :-)
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Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and... →
Ross Dawson and the guys over at Trends in the Living Network have published a 3-page visual ‘trends framework’ that captures their thinking about the Internet’s impact on the connected world, technology, economics, governance and the social sphere.
Their model covers the last decade - the components of which they label ‘exatrends’ to indicate the vast overarching...
