iMedia

Publishers and virtual currencies

The stand alone publishing business is a tough one. How can publishers take advantage of game economies?

Business innovation in 2009

BusinessWeek takes a look innovation in 2009.

In 2009 the world was no longer flat; much of it was flat broke. Deflated by slumping sales and income, companies roundly did what innovation consultants say they never should—they cut spending on research and development.

Richard Florida: Creativity is the most important economic force

Describing how he arrived at the idea of a "creative class" and placing it in economic and historical context, Richard Florida talks about the fundamental economic force reshaping modern economies today - an ability to innovate, or to add creative value based, in part, on mental alacrity and a certain emotional IQ, but more importantly, in a larger willingness to view people as a potential to be maximized instead of costs to be minimized. Put another way, while it's certainly true that many agricultural or industrial activities can and will continue to provide jobs, today it's human creativity that is adding wealth.

Publish it! teaching

In a subtle but powerful shift in how learning is changing, the Innovative Educator writes about six different ways teachers can move from a "hand it in" to "publish it!" culture.

"Shoot for the Moon, not the tops of trees"

The new book Googled: The End of the World as We Know it, demonstrates that innovation is by its nature unpredictable and powerful. Christian Science Monitor :

Ken Auletta, an author and a longtime columnist for the The New Yorker, documents the meteoric rise of Google from its humble beginnings through its multibillion-dollar profits in his latest book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. As the latter half of the title suggests, Auletta’s work is more than just a history of Google and a biography of its principals. It is rather a tripartite inspection of modern technological innovation, the decline of traditional media (print journalism, music CDs, etc.) and its revenue stream (advertising sales), and the ways in which Google serves as a flash point for many of the successes and controversies surrounding the Digital Age.

The unofficial motto of the organization known for its unorthodox workplace and tens of billions in revenue is "shoot for the moon, not the tops of trees." Just as Google rose to challenge Microsoft and its business, the company's ambition and size doesn't make it invincible either, but it does show just how one well executed breakthrough innovation can change everything.

There really is no useless knowledge

Appearing at the IdeaFestival, A.J. Adams, author of The Year of Living Biblically, The Know it All and The Guinea Pig Diaries, talked at length about his life-as-experiment and the idea that there really is no useless knowledge. Jacobs spoke at the IdeaFestival last week in Louisville. A live account of his presentation is here.

A Biology for Altruism

[cross-posted from the IdeaFestival web log] Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of Biology at the University of Louisville, has been doing research on the evolution of goodness in humans and non-humans for the last twenty years. As he points out here and in his 2008 IdeaFestival presentation, altruistic behavior can be found throughout the animal kingdom. His forthcoming book, "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose" is a tale of both natural and American history and will be the subject of talk planned for IF'09.

Wayne

Health care system a very sick patient

"Disruptive" innovator Clayton M. Christensen is out with a new book, The Innovators Prescription, which applies innovation to an industry in desperate need of it. Harvard's Working Knowledge points to one culprit in the crushing cost of the modern health care system, a calcified business model trapped in a lousy regulatory and reimbursement system:

In the past, business model innovation was common in health care. When the technological enablers for the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases emerged, most patient care was transferred away from hospitals to doctors' offices, and away from the doctors to the nurses. However, business model innovation has stalled in the last three decades. Regulations and reimbursement systems currently trap in high-cost venues much care that could be provided in lower-cost, more convenient business models. Other disruptions fail because they lack new value networks that combine business models into coherent ecosystems that allow them to disrupt their predecessors.

What is talent?

The science and culture site, The Edge annually poses a question to which its resident hive of leading scientist and researchers propose an answer. For example, in 2007 that question was "what are you optimistic about, and why?"

This year the site asks "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

In a response that might interest readers of this blog, Harvard's Howard Gardner, author of Five Minds for the Future, suggests that through an interdisciplinary approach, the nature of talent might be described.

Creating the "knowledge commons"

As the original pioneer of open source knowledge, the library gets credit for a pretty remarkable idea: knowledge is for everybody. But more than that, making knowledge freely available benefits everybody. Taking that theme and applying it to the digital world, Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman writes about Maura Marx and the Open Knowledge Commons, a new project funded by the Alfred Sloan Foundation to coordinate the efforts to build an Alexandrian library for the digital age. At issue:

Formerly with the Boston Public Library’s digitization project, Marx sees the project of a universal digital library as an extention of the work Josiah Quincy Jr. and others took up when they formed the American public library movement - the availability of knowledge that would be 'free to all'. In a digital age, Marx argues that an open knowledge commons needs to be without enclosure, encompassing both all recorded media and the 'cognitive processes applied to it' - the uses of that media - and maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone. Her vision is broader than just having access to all texts digitally, but being able to do complex, cross-text work like named entity analysis and text extraction on a huge corpus.

Of course, it’s not as simple as putting all the world’s books in a pile and scanning them one at a time. There’s a great deal of complex legal uncertainty around what libraries can and cannot do with scanned books. Public libraries are possible - in intellectual property terms in the US - through the doctrine of “first sale”: if you’ve bought a book, you can lend it to others, if you’d like, rather than forcing them to buy their own copy. It’s not so clear how this applies in a digital age, and there are open questions about copyright, licensing and fair use in a digital age.

As a result, most of the projects working on a digital library are starting with content that’s out of copyright.

Check out Ethan's post if you get the chance.