iMedia

"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.

Business innovation: Top Ten Books of 2008

BusinessWeek lists its top ten innovation-related business books of 2008.

Research: Innovation a group activity

Research: Innovation happens between people, not among lone geniuses.

Truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don’t always realize it.

Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, calls this “group genius,” and in his book of the same name he introduces a scientific method called interaction analysis to the study of creativity. Through studying verbal cues, body language and incremental adjustments during team innovation efforts, Mr. Sawyer shows that what we experience as a flash of insight has actually percolated in social interaction for quite some time.

Janet Rae-Dupree is a regular contributor to the New York Times on innovation. Another highly recommended article is on the value of improvisation in organizations, "Can Executives Learn to Ignore the Script?"

Joy is a Business Strategy

[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival] It's often been said that innovation and ideas are the currency of modern organizations. Without being able to take new data and assemble and reassemble it to reach new conclusions, businesses can't hope to gain the strategic advantage on their competitors that comes with a completely fresh and compelling take on an old problem. Often left unsaid is how innovation occurs.

But one genuine parallel to innovation, I think, is improvisation, and one way to experience that is through improvisation theater. While reading professional facilitator and improv'ateur Johnnie Moore lately, it occurred to me that his take on Everything's an Offer contained an important insight into how innovation occurs. This was trenchant:

I'm currently reading Everything's an Offer, by Rob Poynton. He is probably the most articulate thinker about the value of improvisation in organisations. His book is a real treat.

When I met Rob a few years ago, he said something that lodged deeply in my mind. He repeats in in his book (my emphasis):

People laugh at improvisation not because it is funny, per se, but because it is joyful. If you go to an improv show and watch the audience rather than the players, what you will see is that they aren't laughing at jokes.

Poynton points out that even bad or banal jokes draw delight because the audience instinctively responds, not to the joke, but to the interplay between the actors.

Could joy a business strategy?

Poynton's book has been added to the iMedia book list, right-side column on the blog.

Bill Bishop on the "Big Sort"

One of the more intriguing ideas I heard last week at the Visioning Kentucky's Future Conference in Covington was offered by panelist Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort. He identified one deceptively simple reason for the difficulties now facing the country. It's voluntary.

I caught up to him - see below - following the taping of a KET show "What's The Big Idea?" that will televised December 22. You'll want to watch to hear some very provocative suggestions by the assembled panelists - one drew nervous laughter from the live audience - to move Kentucky forward.