iMedia

Unexepected paring: Astronomical Medicine

The Revolutionary Minds Think Tank series points out the unexpected and beneficial relationship between two seemingly different disciplines, astronomy and medical imaging. Pulling a quote from the Astronomical Medicine page at Harvard, it says

While astronomy and medical imaging seem very different, both fields search through large amounts of image data looking for meaningful patterns. For example, a physician may inspect a patient's MRI scans looking for signs of disease, while an astronomer will analyze radio telescope image data to find evidence of a new star being born. The two sciences have separately developed many techniques to analyze, visualize, and catalog complex multi-dimensional imaging data, but seldom have experts from the two areas worked together.

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.

"What's very dangerous is not to evolve"

In touting his new hit product, Kindle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may indeed be channeling his inner Steve Jobs. The device might do for text what the iPod has done for music. But there's a much bigger lesson to be learned, according to Fast Company: "What's very dangerous," Bezos concludes, "is not to evolve."

Kentucky companies vie for financing to commericalize UK, UL research

At the YoungStartUp Ventures forum in New York City, Kentucky has two companies pitching today for Series B financing - AllTranz, commercializing technology from University of Kentucky, and ApoImmune - commercializing technology from University of Louisville.

The Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation has invested in both companies through the Kentucky Enterprise Fund and both are clients of the Innovation and Commercialization Centers - Von Allman Center for Entrepreneurship in Lexington and the Enterprise Corporation in Louisville.

Matt McGarvey
Vice President, KSTC

State of venture capital

At the YoungStartUp Ventures in New York City,  Stephen Davis, partner at Goodwin Proctor, states that a healthy economy requires a strong venture capital infrastructure.

A panel of venture capitalists had the following to say - the current downtown in activity is a resetting of expectations; recession culls the herd; products getting funded are not "nice to have" but "need to have"; early stage money is more important now than ever before - the seed investors are discerning who is going to make it.

The amount of capital going to "green" technologies will continue to outpace all others.

Matt McGarvey
Vice President, Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation

Paul Saffo: U.S. entering "creator economy"

In the latest BusinessWeek innovation podcast, futurist Paul Saffo describes the emerging creator economy and traces its origins to the crushing success of the consumer economy. It's brief, so have a listen.

Shower door innovation

When first developed, the inventor thought the technology might be good for shower doors.

So how is the United States doing in the innovation department? LCD inventor George Heilmeier has some ideas.

Kentucky Innovation: Commercializing 3D Scanning and Nanotechnologies

From visualization technologies to nano-templates, participants at the April 2009 Kentucky Innovation and Entrepreneurship Conference describe the technologies that they hope to commercialize.

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.

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".