iMedia

Report: U.S. losing innovation edge

A new non-partisan report (PDF) from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) finds that in the last decade, the country has trended in the wrong innovation direction. The New York Times report on the report is here.

While pointing out that other recent studies have come to different conclusions about the state of innovation in the United States, the ITIF study is compared to another well known, and well received, study, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," which concluded that the world was catching up to the United States in the realm of science and technology, the foundation for innovative activity in modern economies.

Moreover, other governments are not standing pat.

Some countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, Finland and China, are pursuing policies that are explicitly designed to spur innovation. These policies typically try to nurture a broader “ecology of innovation,” which often includes education, training, intellectual property protection and immigration. This is in contrast to the industrial policy of the 1980s in which governments helped pick winners among domestic industries.

The foundation study, according to John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations, is an ambitious effort at measurement. He called its conclusions “a wake-up call.”

Ethnography, business tool

Your company's future direction could come from an unlikely source: anthropology. An in fact, Intel has used trained ethnographers to inform its strategic direction.

Recently, Intel ethnographers have veered into strategic questions. Like many high-tech companies, Intel makes long-term bets on how markets will play out. Will television and PC technology converge? Are baby boomers retaining their PC and TV habits as they age, or are they comfortable shifting to new media? Will smartphones take over most of the functions of personal computers?

Intel can analyze the latest buying patterns and customer surveys for useful data. But people often can’t articulate what they’re looking for in products or services. By understanding how people live, researchers discover otherwise elusive trends that inform the company’s future strategies.

Hat tip: Putting People First

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Economic meltdown a Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan and speaker at the most recent IdeaFestival, has said in a Bloomberg article that the current economic downturn has been exacerbated by a financial system that has become too complex to understand, and could require drastic action to fix.

"Black Swans" are events that cannot be forecast, but change everything.

Taleb also is professor of risk engineering at New York University, and has been a frequent guest on several media outlets in recent weeks.

New (capitalist) world order: "There is nothing more asymetric than an ideal"

In this recent presentation in Sweden, Harvard new economist Umair Haque suggests that the economic downturn is ushering in a different kind of capitalism, what he calls "constructive capitalism". Though he makes a number of interesting points, I'll leave you with one. Because ubiquitous networks have dropped the transaction cost of getting information to near zero, ideals, not more information, matter most. Supple thinking, open action and worthy goals will be rewarded.

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

To excel in math and science, learn rhetoric. Of course.

In this iMedia Kentucky podcast, program director for the AP English portion of the National Math and Science Initiative grant supporting the goals of AdvanceKentucky, Tina Rose, explains why English is important to math and science advanced placement students.

Recorded just prior to the recent teacher training sessions held in Louisville, some background noise intrudes into the audio as tables and chairs were moved about. But it's still very listenable.

She is but one of the many people leading an expectations revolution in Kentucky.

Prosperity map, post-recession: The world is not flat

Human capitalist Richard Florida has published an interactive map at The Atlantic illustrating what cities he believes are positioned to bounce back from the recession. The economic crisis could profoundly alter the nation's geography.

The world is not flat. Florida:

According to an analysis done by Michael Mandel, the chief economist at BusinessWeek, jobs in the “tangible” sector—that is, production, construction, extraction, and transport—declined by nearly 1.8 million between December 2007 and November 2008, while those in the intangible sector—what I call the “creative class” of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals—increased by more than 500,000.... Paul Krugman has noted that the worst of the crisis, so far at least, can be seen in a “Slump Belt,” heavy with manufacturing centers, running from the industrial Midwest down into the Carolinas.

Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can.... Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect.

Whatever our government policies, the coming decades will likely see a further clustering of output, jobs, and innovation in a smaller number of bigger cities and city-regions.

iMedia Kentucky "radio" archives

Just a reminder: most audio collected by iMedia will also be archived briefly on the right side of this page under "radio".

Classroom leaders of "Expectations Revolution" in Kentucky education

Speaking to iMedia Kentucky at the recent training sessions held by AdvanceKentucky last weekend, these are some of the voices of advanced placement teachers leading an expectations revolution in the commonwealth.

Serious games manufacture great experiences

In this brief iMedia Kentucky interview, game designer Jane McGonigal describes the explosion of opportunities in games designed and carried out in real life, not on-screen.

Like smokestacks of another age, such games signal the 21st production of another valuable resource, good experiences. Experience design is valuable to schools, manufacturing, health care, tourism and travel or any industry, really, where happy clients and customers are needed.

Collaborating via games can also help develop new scenarios and contribute in general to the knowing enterprise. And, finally, software derived from good game design, as she points out, is used in businesses to improve teamwork.

Jane McGonigal recently spoke a the 2008 IdeaFestival in Louisville, where she described alternate reality games as "happiness engines".

AdvanceKentucky leading "Expectations Revolution" in Kentucky

Last Friday a revolution came to town when advanced placement teachers in AdvanceKentucky gathered for a weekend training at the Brown Hotel in Louisville.

Welcoming them, Dale Fleury from the National Math Science Initiative spoke for a few minutes about how much of the rest of the world had caught up to the United States in innovation and educational attainment, how the National Math Science Initiative had been created and how it had selected, along with five other states, Kentucky as a partner in a groundbreaking educational initiative. Dale Fleury can also be seen in this iMedia Kentucky video talking about the educational challenges facing the country.

In particular, he noted how those in attendance were part of an "expectations revolution". Have a listen:

Excellence will be needed to meet the challenges of a right brain future. There really isn't a student to waste.

iMedia Kentucky will bring you more audio from the gathering over the next several days.