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 distraction.
- Scope and ‘delineation’.
- Monopolies and closed platforms.
- New business models going mainstream.
If you’re interested in any of these things, please read the post and comment if you disagree or have any questions.. :)
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 three similarly titled and seminal documentary TV series from 1978, 1994 and 1997. In those programmes, he charted the causal chains of ideas and influences, people and inventions, across the breadth of human history.
World Policy Journal: Fall 2011 | World Policy Institute
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.”)
Three articles are, I think, of particular note:
“The Big Question” is a series of short essays by prominent innovators and scientists working in fields such as biomedical research, artificial intelligence, cyber-sociology and sustainable technologies and economic development.
“Innovation Starvation” is an essay by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in which he describes (and bemoans) the barriers our global society now faces when trying to do large-scale innovation.
As a potential (sort of) solution to Stephenson’s dilemma, Stephen Ezell’s “A Bretton Woods for Innovation” suggests bringing state-driven innovation under a global governance framework.
There’s lots of food for thought there and in the rest of the issue, and I enjoyed reading it :-)
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.
Innovation Environments and Andrew Marr’s Megacities…
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 London with each other and effectively presents the first two as extremes of institutional control (or lack of it) - and disfunctional as a result - while London, in his view, strikes a fruitful balance. Now the analaysis might be shallow and cursory, as well as biased, but nonetheless I think there’s much to think about here. Especially the idea that a combination of new technology and an institutional environment that allows for certain kinds of ‘illicit’ behaviour create cultural openings that integrate people without resulting in chaos.
It also made me think about the impact of predictability on a culture, and reminded me of Caspar Berry’s excellent talk on uncertainty at Thinking Digital the other week in which he (successfully I think) tried to convince us that unpredictability is what makes life worth living. Unfortunately I can’t link to his talk as the talks haven’t been published yet, but I will when they are…
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 services and capabilities people don’t even realize they lack.”:
http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/wordpress/2011/05/innovation-is-not-problem-solving/ - Cognitive Bhehavioural Therapy- influenced development programmes can be dangerous & require proper buy-in & understanding on the part of participants:
http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2009/12/robert-kegan-lisa-lahey-immunity-to.html - “To-don’t” lists:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/8469638/Think-Tank-Why-we-all-need-a-To-Dont-List-just-like-Moses.html - The minimalism of Miffy:
http://lateralaction.com/articles/miffy/
Innovation Technology panel at the RSA (annotated audio)
Panel discussion on the subject of Innovation technology conducted at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in February 2007.
The speakers were:
- Richard Lambert (Director General, CBI)
- Professor Mark Dodgson (Technology and Innovation Management Centre, University of Queensland)
- Professor David Gann (Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London)
- Peter Bressington (Director, Ove Arup and Partners Ltd.)
- Alan Schafer PhD (Vice President Technology Development, GSK)
- R Lemuel Lasher (Vice President and Managing Director, Computer Sciences Corporation)
Social Innovation Competition 2008
Quick post about the finalists of this years competition organised by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
The winner of the $50,000 first prize was Husk Power Systems who work with small villages in India to convert rice husks which are an agricultural by-product into a sustainable fuel for electricity generation via a gassification process, and then convert the rice husk ash that’s left over into a cement product for house construction. Ingenious!
First runner up was an initiative called Planting Empowerment which takes carbon offset investments and uses it to lease forested land from small farmers in Panama and pay them to monitor it, in order to provide them with an income that both removes the need to deforest and gives them a stake in their preservation.
Second runner up was an organisation called Swayam who are setting up a peer-to-peer investment scheme to support the university education of students from developing countries in return for a percentage of their post-graduation salaries. This seems like a private-sector version of the British top-up-fees system (as well as looking like an interesting investment opportunity, although the assessment of new students and therefore the accuracy of the information provided about them to investors is dependent on local NGOs who I’d imagine are fairly vulnerable to regulatory capture.)
