22 SEP 2017 by ideonexus
Trade and Large Populations are Needed to Sustain Innovation
The most striking case of technological regress is Tasmania. Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology. Human beings reached Tasmania at least 35,000 years ago while it was still connected to Australia. It remained connect... 1 
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notes11 JUL 2017 by ideonexus
Engineering New Ways to Think About Things
One cluster looks, for example, for new ways of representing and understanding complex systems. A second cluster aims for more access to knowledge by undoing contemporary media’s restrictions (such as the restriction of the screen, which produces, with its peek-a-boo access to complexity, impenetrable forms of knowledge such as the trillions of lines of code, written on screens and then stared at on screens). A third cluster explores new forms of representing time, and a fourth one more eff...
1 25 FEB 2016 by ideonexus
Sequencing and Confluence to Inspire Technological Innova...
...innovation often occurs through sequencing—building on prior innovation. Recall that suitcases didn't used to have wheels. Then someone created a suitcase with two wheels. Now many suitcases have four wheels. What helpful improvement on the suitcase might come next?
I've pitched this question to students, who then produced amazing renditions of future suitcases, with elements like GPS tracking devices and built-in digital scales that check whether a suitcase is over a weight limit—or ...16 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Innovation is Not Enough
The idea that successive waves of innovation are the main driver of long-term performance in a new or emerging business—or an existing one, of course—appears to be sound when viewed in the abstract. Clearly, innovations in technology, processes, and methodology have occurred, sometimes dramatically, in the U.S. and world economies. Whole new businesses emerged over the past two centuries as advances in manufacturing, transportation, services and communication came in sometimes rapid, succ...Folksonomies: innovation business
Folksonomies: innovation business
1 notes
notesA lesson from the dotcom era of business, where companies thought if they could simply out-innovate competitors they would survive despite burning through investment money.
04 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Ideas Power the American Economy
Ideas are what power our economy. It’s what sets us apart. It’s what America has been all about. We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it. We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger. When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.
And because of th... 1 notes
notesThe Human Genome Project returned $140 for every $1 spent.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
America is Naturally Anti-Science
In the end, politics is about story. Robert McKee, Hollywood's master of storytelling, views the world from the top of America's other great cultural export—its movies.
"1 think that the American ethos is not science-friendly and never has been," he says. "The American model is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Guys who never went to college and who were geniuses and invented things, and people like them. The inventor versus the scientist. Somebody who can go west, discover gold mines, and cr...Science is hard work, America is about the dream of Hollywood. We are living on the benefits of science, but will those innovations become cultural rituals if we won't do what we need to do to promote science and education?
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Chinese Cultural Innovations Turned to Ritual
When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years a^ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there, and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered traces of some higher branches of science that h had been lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer exist...
1 An account of the amazing art and inventions found in China, but how these had turned into unquestioned rituals--performed exactly over and over again through the ages without alteration or innovation. The culture had stagnated.
06 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Scientific Progress Crushes Conservativism
Innovations, free thinking is blowing like a storm; those that stand in front of it, ignorant scholars like you, false scientists, perverse conservatives, obstinate goats, resisting mules are being crushed under the weight of these innovations. You are nothing but ants standing in front of the giants; nothing but chicks trying to challenge roaring volcanoes! Folksonomies: innovation progress
Folksonomies: innovation progress
1 notes
notesFree thinking and innovation are forces that cannot be stopped.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Innovation Means Recombination
...the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation.
We are in no danger of running out of new combinations to try. Even if technology froze today, we have more possible ways of configuring the different applications, machines, tasks, and distribution channels to create new processes and products than we could ever exhaus...Folksonomies: innovation combinations
Folksonomies: innovation combinations
1 notes
notesTake innovations and recombine them to produce new innovations. We have so many innovations today that the potential in immense.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Workers Are Being Perpetually Displaced by Technology
The third explanation for America’s current job creation problems flips the stagnation argument on its head, seeing not too little recent technological progress, but instead too much. We’ll call this the “end of work” argument, after Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book of the same title. In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that “we are entering a new phase in world history—one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the gl... 1 notes
notesWe are innovating ourselves out of jobs for everyday people.
