innovation

05 Jan 10

the inherent conflict between the creative destruction involved in free-market capitalism and the innate human propensity to avoid risk and change
we must have continuous, rapid technological and business-model innovation to grow our economy fast enough to avoid losing power to those who do not share America's values — and this innovation requires increasingly deregulated markets and fewer restrictions on behavior
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- An economy built upon constant and relatively free innovation is inherently difficult to sustain in a democracy. This is not so much a matter of anti-market ideology as of the painful realities of economic change. Innovation forces change, and the pain involved tends to be felt immediately while the benefits are usually diffuse and harder to perceive in the short term.
- It is therefore natural for people to organize to prevent the spread of significant innovation.
- In America, people in similar situations rarely assault property en masse, but
  they do form political coalitions to pass laws that restrict innovation
- It is understandable that the enormous waves of innovation always sweeping over a dynamic free-market economy will arouse great unease and opposition. But for that economy to prosper, the unease and opposition must be overcome.
- Ever-increasing productivity involves the use of human capital in new and constantly evolving ways. This is great for growth, but can be very hard on the people displaced.
- Almost all industrial policy ends up protecting existing institutions
- As a result, industrial policy normally preserves jobs that a ruthless market would eliminate, and subsidizes the kinds of new technological developments that can be exploited by existing large firms. But these favored developments are rarely the sources of new high-wage jobs — and so such policy is more often a recipe for controlled stagnation than for continued growth. The attempt to protect ourselves from the pain of change ends up creating a sclerotic economy that, in the long run, puts everyone at greater risk.
- One obvious response is to use the political process to both slow down the rate of innovation to an acceptable pace and redistribute the country's economic output in a manner designed to maintain social harmony.
- our position in the global order means we cannot afford to go easy on ourselves and constrict innovation. Quite the opposite: We need rapid growth just to keep up.
- It is hard to exaggerate the strength of America's competitive position in the world economy in September 1945: The United States accounted for an absolute majority of all global manufacturing output, had the world's most technologically advanced economy with ample supplies of natural resources, and could protect this state of affairs with an essentially invincible military that possessed a nuclear monopoly.
- The wealth-creation engine of the post-war world was designed in America, but available to other nations too — and so in time those that had more advanced economies before the war (predominantly Western Europe and Japan) re-industrialized to the point that, by the 1970s, they began to challenge America's position.
- Opting for social democracy instead of innovative capitalism, Europe has ceded this share to China (predominantly), India, and the rest of the developing world. The economic rise of the Asian heartland is the central geopolitical fact of our era, and it is safe to assume that economic and strategic competition will only increase further over the next several decades.
- Were America to retreat from global competition, sooner or later those who oppose our values would become strong enough to take away our wealth and freedom.
- It is hard to exaggerate the chaotic conditions under which something like a third of American children are being raised — or to overstate the negative impact this disorder has on their academic achievement, social skills, and character formation. There are certainly heroic exceptions, but the sad fact is that most of these children could not possibly compete with their foreign counterparts.
- A welfare state can best perform its basic function — buffering the human consequences of the market, without unduly hampering its effectiveness — where enough widely shared social capital exists to guide the behavior of most people in a bourgeois direction. But as it performs that function, the welfare state creates incentives that push people toward short-term indolence, free riding, and self-absorption — thus undermining the very norms, and consuming the kind of social capital, it needs to operate.
- This new regime also accepts a much higher degree of income disparity based on market-denominated performance, and it expects that most people will exploit the resulting demand for talent by moving from company to company many times during a career.
- Despite these complicating factors, a few trends still emerge rather clearly. First, average living standards have continued to rise since 1980. Second, the real hourly wages for a typical non-supervisory job have not increased very much over this period. Third, this wage stagnation is at least partly explained by the rising costs of health care — which, because of the American system of employer-based health insurance, are usually deducted implicitly from what workers see as wages. Fourth, personal indebtedness has risen dramatically over the same period and accelerated rapidly during the past decade — so that at least some of the increased consumption was simply borrowed. And last, income mobility — the likelihood of an individual's moving up the relative income distribution — appears to have declined slightly over the past three decades, according to multiple studies by the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and Chicago.
- As the unsustainable high tide of post-war American dominance has slowly ebbed, many — perhaps most — of our country's workers appear unable to compete internationally at the level required to maintain anything like their current standard of living. And a shrinking elite portion of the American population, itself a shrinking fraction of the world population, cannot indefinitely maintain our global position.
- unfortunately, by a combination of carelessness and design, we appear now to be embracing a counterproductive response to this daunting dilemma.
- the reason the government has been forced to prop up financial institutions isn't that they are too big to fail, but rather that they are too interconnected to fail. For example, a series of complex and unregulated financial obligations meant that the failure of Lehman Brothers — a mid-size investment bank — threatened to crash the entire U.S. banking system.
- focus on creating walls that contain busts, rather than on applying brakes that hold back the entire system
- Our reforms should establish "tiers" of financial activities of increasing risk, volatility, and complexity that are open to any investor — and somewhere within this framework, almost any non-coercive transaction should be legally permitted. The tiers should then be compartmentalized, however, so that a bust in a higher-risk tier doesn't propagate to lower-risk tiers
- To function effectively, though, America's schools need to be improved dramatically. Our basic model of public schooling — accepting raw material in the form of five-year-olds, and then adding value through a series of processing steps to produce educated graduates 12 (or more) years later — reflects the vision of the old industrial economy. This worked well in an earlier era, but improvements that might have kept this model up to date have been stalled for decades. We now need a new vision for schools that looks a lot more like Silicon Valley than Detroit: decentralized, entrepreneurial, and flexible.
- a market in which funding follows students, and far broader discretion is permitted to those who actually teach and manage in our schools
- Fourth, we should reconceptualize immigration as recruiting. Assimilating immigrants is a demonstrated core capability of America's political economy — and it is one we should take advantage of. A robust-yet-reasonable amount of immigration is healthy for America. It is a continuing source of vitality — and, in combination with birth rates around the replacement level, creates a sustainable rate of overall population growth and age-demographic balance.
- We have chosen a strategy that provides low-wage gardeners and nannies for the elite, low-cost home improvement and fresh produce for the middle class, and fierce wage competition for the working class.
- Instead, we should think of immigration as an opportunity to improve our stock of human capital. Once we have re-established control of our southern border, and as we preserve our commitment to political asylum, we should also set up recruiting offices looking for the best possible talent everywhere: from Mexico City to Beijing to Helsinki to Calcutta. Australia and Canada have demonstrated the practicality of skills-based immigration policies for many years. We should improve upon their example by using testing and other methods to apply a basic tenet of all human capital-intensive organizations managing for the long term: Always pick talent over skill. It would be great for America as a whole to have, say, 500,000 smart, motivated people move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens.

02 Jan 10

How Pixar fosters collective creativity

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collective-intelligence creativity innovation human-based-computation

16 Dec 09

How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned through Failure | Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson

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entrepreneurship strategy innovation self-improvement decision-making

15 Dec 09

The X Prizes for news (and media) « BuzzMachine

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innovation journalism social-media

What is the core problem the prize is trying to solve? It can’t be just about getting more revenue for existing companies or thinking of another way to tell a story or, Lord knows, making something cool. The best expression of the problem will yield solutions that must be groundbreaking and new, quantum leaps undertaken on daring, hope, and hubris. Innovation won’t come from incremental changes to an existing structure.
News shouldn’t be defined as we do today, for the winners of the prize may create something we haven’t seen yet. Our definition of news is probably just about a community informing itself – better informed individuals and society (”better” as defined by them).
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- Time spent online in social sites and blogs accounted for 17% of time overall – vs. 0.5% for newspaper sites, according to separate estimates (and advertising on social sites doubled while it plummeted for newspapers
- How do we measure engagement?
- engagement is more about ownership: people believing that and acting as if they owned this thing. It’s theirs – as Wikipedia’s and craigslist’s communities believe they own those properties and as each of us believes we own our Facebook pages or Twitter feeds or blogs
- the measurement has to be made by a combination of metrics – say, time combined and attitudes
- News sites – like most media sites – are still selling what they used to sell in their old media: space, time, eyeballs, scarcity. Google won business away from them by selling something else: performance.
- If you know that much about people to be hyperpersonal and if you are incredible good at targeting – at discerning intent and delivering relevance – then the efficiency, effectiveness, and value of marketing there would skyrocket.
- in our New Business Models for News, we ended up with a equivalent number of people doing journalism in our hypothetical market, only they weren’t all in a single newsroom. Most worked in entrepreneurial ventures that many of them owned, and they as a group devoted far more of their time to reporting. The net result, we believe is more journalism because it is more efficient journalism.

11 Dec 09

Ideas vs. Inventions

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innovation intellectual-property ideas inventions

An idea is just a problem statement.
An invention is a solution to that problem.
Ideas aren't patentable --
only inventions are.
you've minimized some legal
risk --
but at the cost of maximizing your business risk
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- First, most people won't share your enthusiasm for your idea --
  even if it's a good one.
  People mentally resist change --
  they cling to the status quo.
  The overwhelming majority of people exposed to your idea
  will reject it out-of-hand.
- few people who may pick up on it and think it's a good idea
  are too busy to develop it themselves.
  There's a great deal of work required
  to go from an idea to a good design.
  They have their own priorities they're working on.
- I do believe now that creative, ambitious people
  should be discouraged from "inventing" things,
  and instead taught to look for problems and opportunities --
  things other people want, and will pay for right now.

09 Dec 09

How to encourage big ideas

web.mit.edu/...creative-research.html - Preview

ideas innovation research funding MIT

The work shows that biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures wind up producing about twice as many highly influential papers as some peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets.
The researcher has to believe that short-term failure will not be punished.

08 Dec 09

Harvard Kennedy School - Lant Pritchett

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innovation research people harvard

Lant Homepage

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innovation research people harvard

06 Dec 09

Isn’t it time we became more innovative about how we innovate? « excapite

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business innovation outsourcing human-based-computation

02 Dec 09

Enterprise innovation articles

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innovation process business

ideas are just the front end of innovation. Without the back end of innovation – the capacity to effectively screen ideas, align them with strategy, allocate resources to them and manage them successfully toward commercialization – all of those light bulbs and eureka moments will never add up to much.
if you ask them what their company actually does with all the ideas – how many of them have so far been turned into experiments, how many are receiving more serious funding and attention, how many ventures are heading for commercialization, and how much money those ventures are expected to generate – people’s answers tend to become a lot more vague
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- sparkplugs would be completely useless if there were no engine around them
- What most companies are missing today is an “innovation engine”: a high performance organizational system that can continually pick up promising ideas and transform them into powerful new ways to create value and wealth.
- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, originally pitched his personal computer idea to Hewlett-Packard, his employer at the time. But HP had no organizational mechanism for connecting a freaky engineer and his “crazy invention” with the political and financial infrastructures of the company. There was simply nowhere for his idea to go; no way to get a small amount of experimental capital and some time to test its potential; no coaches or mentors in the organization who could help him push his idea forward; no management processes that had been set up to support his work as an innovator.
- do the executives who run our company’s core business demonstrate genuine interest in radical, new ideas by redeploying adequate resources behind them?
- there are many types of innovation – such as process innovation, cost innovation, service innovation, strategy innovation, business model innovation, or management innovation – that won’t fit very neatly into a typical product development process which tracks an idea from stage gate to stage gate.
- If you talk to successful innovators in large companies, you usually hear a familiar story: “I succeeded despite the system.” If would-be innovators can only succeed in an organization despite the system – if they have to fight their way heroically through a minefield to push their ideas forward – then by definition, innovation is not a systemic capability in that organization.

30 Nov 09

Learn the five secrets of innovation - CNN.com

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entrepreneurship innovation

five skills that separate the blue-sky innovators from the rest -- skills they labeled associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and discovering.
What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.
- in evolutionary computation, this is called recombination - on 2009-11-30
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- they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions
- innovation is not an inherent trait, but a set of skills that people can learn
- Data says that people who have more varied connections hear more diverse information, and see patterns before other people
- He says the goal is not simply knowing lots of people, but knowing people from varied backgrounds, who work for different companies, in different industries, have different skills, and deal with different issues, so that you are exposed to varied ideas.
- When it comes to developing your ability to innovate, Ventresca recommends simply setting aside 30 minutes a week to talk with a contact you wouldn't normally talk to -- for example someone you met at conference six months ago.

INSEAD - Faculty & Research - Hal Gregersen

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entrepreneurship innovation models people harvard

29 Nov 09

Is Your Company Brave Enough for Business Model Innovation? - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

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business innovation !check

How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work Andrew McAfee - McKinsey Quarterly - Business Technology - Strategy

www.mckinseyquarterly.com/ghost.aspx - Preview

human-based-computation knowledge-markets business innovation MIT

“emergent social software platforms”—highly visible environments with tools that evolve as people use them

Open Innovation: Open innovation progress in last three years

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open-source innovation human-based-computation academic

A Human-Centred Innovation Approach – Why Market Researchers and Product Designers should be best Friends « Netnoblography

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human-based-computation innovation

01 Nov 09

The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route 128 In The Dust

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entrepreneurship innovation social-networks

She noted that Silicon Valley had an amazing dynamism about it. There were extensive professional networks, job hopping was the norm, information was exchanged openly, and the culture encouraged risk taking. The Silicon Valley ecosystem supported entrepreneurial experimentation and collective learning. In other words, Silicon Valley was a very open network—a giant social networking site working in analog before the concept of such a thing even existed.

This organizational mechanism was in sharp contrast to that of Route 128. Dominated by large, vertically integrated, and secretive minicomputer producers such as DEC, Wang, Prime, and Data General. Technology, skill, and know-how were trapped within the boundaries of the large corporations.
the meritocratic openness of Silicon Valley made it a magnet for non-traditional talent and immigrants
3 more annotations...
- The Northeast cultural block I think is largely and network that tends toward compartmentalization based on the school you attended. I am generalizing, of course, but it’s my experience. Sitting at dinner in the Northeast inevitably there is a contest of schools, where you went and where your kids are going, often with legacy guarantees. Sitting at dinner in Silicon Valley (well, actually, it’s often breakfast before work) no one cares where you went to school. It’s about the work, the ideas. The chance to get rich or to feed the addiction of creating new stuff that changes the world of technology is the topic.
- My barber in Los Gatos felt equal to us all, and had grand plans for his software project, and could get a hearing. That’s tough in the Northeast Corridor, as Princeton, Harvard, MIT, et al networks are largely closed. An odd thing is there are a lot of those folks in Silicon Valley, but in our meetings it rarely comes up as a ticket of entry.
- I chalked this up to a difference between East coast and West coast. Here your pedigree isn’t important. It is all about how smart and ambitious you are. There it is as you say.

14 Aug 09

BBC - dot.life: Has Twitter's popularity peaked?

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innovation trends

09 Oct 07

Post New Requests Here

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innovation knowledge-markets software

Ideas for new software. Post yours here to see it materialized! - alexko on 2006-11-18

John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion

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innovation people

Alex Ko's Library tagged innovation → View Popular

Keeping America's Edge > Publications > National Affairs

How Pixar fosters collective creativity

How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned through Failure | Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson

The X Prizes for news (and media) « BuzzMachine

Ideas vs. Inventions

How to encourage big ideas

Harvard Kennedy School - Lant Pritchett

Lant Homepage

Isn’t it time we became more innovative about how we innovate? « excapite

Enterprise innovation articles

Learn the five secrets of innovation - CNN.com

INSEAD - Faculty & Research - Hal Gregersen

Is Your Company Brave Enough for Business Model Innovation? - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work Andrew McAfee - McKinsey Quarterly - Business Technology - Strategy

Open Innovation: Open innovation progress in last three years

A Human-Centred Innovation Approach – Why Market Researchers and Product Designers should be best Friends « Netnoblography

The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route 128 In The Dust

BBC - dot.life: Has Twitter's popularity peaked?

Post New Requests Here

John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion

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