What if a time-travelling, pre-Apple Jobs & Wozniak applied to Y Combinator without a startup idea?
What kind of problem would YC have suggested for these prospective startup founders to work on?
Why do startup accelerators get into trouble?
Although the ways that an accelerator can get itself into trouble seem to be almost limitless, the reasons why things go wrong can typically be narrowed down to just a few simple causes
Microsoft can beat Google, but only by letting go of a cow
It may be a cash cow, but a ‘Windows first’ policy is holding back Windows Phone in a field dominated by Android
iij Top 15 Upcoming Innovation Leadership Books
Apart from being about new ideas and leadership (which is, after all, the entire reason for the list) there’s not much in common between these volumes, other than each one focussing on some unique but pertinent aspect
Are governments really listening to innovation investors?
The iij compares innovation-friendly policy suggestions offered prior to the UK budget with the measures that were actually announced by the chancellor
What did the budget do for UK innovation investors?
Of the incentives announced in the budget, perhaps the most important for innovation may be the increase in the rate of income tax relief. Share scheme specialist Russell Eisen compares the chancellor’s announcements with innovation champion Julie Meyer’s pre-budget suggestions
One million electric vehicles: is this video the trailer?
Does this talk, four months before the announcement offer the best insight into the thinking behind it?
Maybe Scoble got it wrong and Convofy isn’t just the future of work
Robert’s insight into Adobe’s next OS was probably right, perhaps he just didn’t take it far enough
The angel scene: how much has changed since September?
You’ll probably scrutinise ‘angel disruptus maximus’ Naval Ravikant’s latest video much more thoroughly than I have, just to see how his predictions have changed since the last talk of his that we covered
Sneak preview of MIT research into robot humanisation
Can we build robots that can be taught in the same way that humans teach each other? That’s not how we teach robots now. Is this the way to make robots more useful in natural disasters?
Natural gas: the iij Selected Innovation Briefing
Surprisingly, these influential and outspoken panellists, who you might expect would have opposing views on just about everything, seem to be having a candid, but surprisingly civil conversation about a very controversial subject: was it something in the water?
The iij Top 10 upcoming innovative investment books
This topic is probably the most demanding in the whole field of selecting innovation writing as far as trying to ensure that the subject is being handled in a genuinely insightful way, but I think we’ve found a good selection
Unemployment, social media addiction and startup proliferation
What are the differences in social media activity when comparing employed and unemployed people? Would you take on a job that was underpaid and unattractive, start or join a fun but non-paying, penniless startup, anything so as not to have fewer social experiences to share online?
Must-see video of banker doing something wonderful
‘My twelve year old son has autism, and has a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled upon your video on decimals, and it got through! Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it! We could not believe it! He is so excited.’
Wishing on a starship
Video curation, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the iij Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new innovation videos, to disregard things that have caused them to be ignored or dismissed and to put them into context
iij Selected Innovation Briefing: Biofuels
You’ll need to watch this video if your knowledge of the issues has so far been mostly constrained to news coverage
Sustainable design, but not as we know it?
Going beyond ticking boxes, complying with regulations or keeping up with the latest initiatives, ecological development guru Bill Reed uproots just about everything we think we know about ‘green’ and asks whether we are really delving deeply enough
No potential startup founder left behind
It looks like the enviable track record of startup accelerators like TechStars and Y Combinator derives from identifying something you might call ‘Foundational Capability’ as the basis for startup success, but there is a dark side
The iij Top Twenty Upcoming Social Media Books
What is the range of subject matter in our ‘spring collection’ of (weighty and in some cases expensive) Social Media volumes? Integration, culture, storytelling, journalism, transmedia, immersion, law, enterprise, strategy, teaching, meaning, creativity, identity, invention and belonging
Global View
Two innovation universes, one amazing video
This starts off as a talk about startup methodology but somehow manages to morph into a sales pitch for an intriguing new solar technology. If you’re able to keep up with Bill Gross’s sometimes ferocious pace of delivery, stick with it, it’s well worth the ride
Photosynth as a metaphor for an even bigger challenge
Remember the software that could use lots of casually taken photos of a scene and somehow combine them into a 3D model that you could then navigate in a breathtakingly intuitive way? Well, what if you could do the same with independently created scientific research databases?
How handing healthcare ownership back to the patient might just work
It’s a funny old world where it takes Wired Magazine to show the medical fraternity how truly unintelligible (but life-critical) gibberish can be transformed in ways that allow us to take control of our own well being
The Open Startup Constitution
I have no idea if any startup working within these constraints could possibly work. I’m even not sure what the benefit, if any, of doing anything like this would be. But it’s got a kind of crazy logic to it and I have decided that it will be fun, or else, so here goes: on day one, the open startup has no secrets…
I Think, Therefore I Pivot: The Lean Startup Philosophy At Work
I just read this question on Quora: ‘What good books tell the story of the business model iterations and pivots of a notable company?’ My response is not a book, but a video of a talk at Y Combinator Startup School
The iij Top 10 Upcoming Agile Books
These titles aren’t available yet, but you may need to move quickly once they are. Agile software development may be rapidly moving into the mainstream, but that doesn’t mean the innovation in that field is slowing down
Banking: what’s coming next?
Where in the world are the next systemic bubbles? Can we conceive of interventions which might genuinely mitigate the risks? Are the biggest challenges to banking innovation technological, cultural, governance related, or socio-geographic?
Rethinking space on earth: NASA and sustainable buildings
The Mars Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit’s mission planning software contributed to the technologies which were developed for this mind-bogglingly ambitious building project, producing what may be the most sophisticated environmental control system on the planet.
Cleantech startups: early exit strategies and beyond
What does cleantech look like from a strictly ‘risks and returns’ perspective? What new investment approaches will make the most promising government funded emerging technologies a realistic prospect for scalability and growth?
Heading for collision: scholarship traditions and Anything 2.0
Innovation and academia might seem inseparable, but ‘novelties’ such as collaborative research and digital deliverables are often still seen by academic authorities as being an unacceptable encroachment upon the sovereignty of the paper-bound work of the solitary scholar
Startup death spiral? Surely not!
Maybe it’s just something that nobody wanted to talk about. Large organisations had, over the years, paid countless professors to study the shortcomings of large organisations, leaving the trials and tribulations of the startup unstudied, waiting for Steve Blank to one day notice something shockingly consistent about the way most startups spin out of control
Thousands of lean startup devotees bravely endure shaky YouTube video
Yes, it’s Eric Ries classic ‘Minimum Viable Product’ presentation. It’s so absorbing that you soon stop noticing the jitters. Oh, and no, you can’t even cheat by just listening to it. There are slides. And if you saw it in 2009 but you did nothing about it, shame on you, it’s time to watch it again.
Marketers target our invisible connective tissue, offline and online
We’re leaving trails behind us, both offline and online, inside and outside social media, that we don’t notice, but marketers do, and they’re using them to spot our closest friends, betting that they’ll share our tastes and would probably buy what we bought if they were approached.
Where does user generated content end and video journalism begin?
You don’t need to be a journalist to record reality well. But if you can regularly produce credible content, what do you want to be? How should ‘video news gathering’ fit into that question?
Which UK universities offer innovation management degrees?
Management may be a ‘Cinderella issue’ in the innovation news space, eclipsed by social media, entrepreneurship and mobile technology. Nonetheless, academia is responding to growing industry demands for accredited innovation management capability
Customer Development. Trendy Phrase. Gimmick?
It doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia article yet (as at 2nd of February 2011). It came from someone called Steve Blank and a book from 2005, and yet it’s the hottest thing at all the top business schools. This video interview explains why
Angels teach Venture Capitalists how to accelerate startups
The new breed of angels: as much ‘startup coentrepreneurs’ as they are investors. Executive control, once obligatory, now seen as a liability, is being replaced with new brands of investor offerings which minimise dilution and instead creatively collaborate to facilitate leanness and opportunistic market agility. VCs are keenly studying this new wizardry
The most inspiring introduction to Open Science. Ever.
The video never went viral, probably because it has an unexplained ‘interlude’ after 42 minutes 57 seconds which makes it seem to end at a random point. This bizarre showstopping moment didn’t deter your intrepid iij innovation hunters (it actually resumes after about a minute of onscreen weirdness) from recognizing a gem and it certainly shouldn’t stop you watching it
Sound bites are just not enough: what is Jeff Immelt really like?
This video of about an hour gives us a long look at the man and tells you quite a lot about what he thinks about leadership and innovation. Does it give us enough to help us predict how he’ll do in his new position as leader of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness?
The iij Top Ten Startup Books for the start of 2011
Shame on us for not managing to get a top ten startup book list out at the end of last year, but most of these titles are barely a month old. Some are obvious choices, but others are quite specialised and deserve more attention than they’ve received
Where are the droids we’re looking for?
Are we on the threshold of Asimov’s robot dreams? We can’t make humanoids useful enough. We can’t make them cheap enough. Why not?
What’s it like when government and business publicly sit around the same table?
We’re making no claims about whether it’s a good or bad idea, whether it works or fails. But the meeting in this video is real and the people in it are from the very top on both sides. The ‘fly on the wall’ perspective has a unique and unprecedented feel
Choosing Tech Careers: Biotech vs. Consumer Tech
Most of the consumer technologies of 20 years ago seem ludicrously primitive today, whereas, for many diseases, current biotech leaves us almost as powerless to prevent the suffering and death of millions today as we were generations ago. However, it still offers the tantalising prospect of unlocking nature’s technology, and potentially rendering all our diseases and current consumer tech obsolete
Humble colossus of computer science: Don Knuth’s saga
Quiet and unassuming, but with a wickedly dry sense of humour: the iconic ambassador of the algorithm has a life story which deserves a wider audience than just computer scientists, who are as likely to have read his Art of Computer Programming as to have listened to Dark Side of the Moon
The iij Top 10 Sustainability Books
A painfully difficult new year’s choice amongst a host of highly relevant titles covering a dizzying array of essential issues, but we gave it our best shot.
Clash of innovation news titans
An epic transatlantic on-air wrangle over Google’s future. Veteran BBC innovation investigator Peter Day vs. US prediction guru Mark Anderson. They each put up a characteristically robust performance. But who won? Whatever, it was riveting radio.
Criticism of the iij? Too many solutions, not enough new unsolved problems
Far too often, we only present problems when someone wants to talk about their solutions. So here’s a seriously problem-rich, solution-craving topic: The Economic Impact of Biodiversity
Sustainability: the IT nightmare that never was?
Everyone can see how Big IT could feel threatened by accusations of becoming one of society’s most voracious consumers of energy. And yet, it turns out that IT and sustainability are probably inseparable
Required reading for the intrepid innovation reporter
Those of us afflicted by the innovation reporting bug, confronted daily by a seemingly limitless diversity of complex issues, need all the help we can get
Say anything you want to, we trust your judgement
Encouraging your staff to be unfettered champions of your values carries the risk of them ‘going native’. They may side with outsiders who might want to hold you to those values when they seem to conflict with your immediate operational goals.
Lean investing: what is it?
Dave McClure is not exactly a shy or timid voice in the startup investment community. He offers the unique perspective of someone who describes themselves as a geek who became a startup founder who moved on to become an investor in many startups.
Corporations to integrate social into business in 2011
So says respected social media researcher Jeremiah Owyang. And he’s got the facts and figures to back up his claims. He also advises how to do it, how not to do it, and how to make money helping others do it.
An unexpectedly fresh perspective on nanotech
So this set of conference videos was supposed to be about regulatory issues. Shockingly perhaps, it turned out to be neither alarmist scaremongering nor shameless cheerleading.
Ron Conway, archangel, on video, on how it all began
He’s been investing in a new company every six days for fifteen years. What’s that like? He secured Google’s first Venture Capital when Google had six people. What was that like?
Disrupting Silicon Valley
If Silicon Valley investors began diverting more of their energies towards increasing entrepreneurial diversity and inclusion, could this put their impressive track record of success at risk?
Emotion: the new weapon of choice for experience designers?
Could it be true that we’ve finally mastered the art of controlling users’ emotions? This talk by a design consultant claims that this is what their research has made possible
A replicator you’d give your right arm for
This video includes the most memorable anecdotes I’ve ever heard. “What’s that doing in there?” his freaked-out girlfriend asked. “Well, I just wanted to see if the artificial leg I just made was dishwasher safe”
The rebirth of the rebirth of distance
It’s been quite a while since the last big fuss about ‘peak oil’: hardly surprising, once oil fell from its pre-crash peak. A guy who made a lot of that fuss is back giving his post-crash perspective in a video. He believes the ‘local vs. global’ balance could be about to change
At last! A new video introduction to nanotech
We know, we’ve kept you waiting. The last video intro to nanotech that iij posted was from a lecture given in 2008. This much more up to date talk was given just a few months ago: it was worth the wait
When social innovation is a matter of life and death
But does it scale? What if scalability, instead of being assessed in terms of ‘financial growth potential’, has to be measured in terms of ‘social impact’?
What’s the impact of crowdsourcing on the media?
What does crowdsourcing mean to an editor? Asking the audience. Doesn’t sound so radical, does it? But within mainstream media, the very term is plagued by controversy. This revealing video gives the view from some leading pioneers, both in the back room and on the front line.
The apps creators are on fire
So many ideas, all coming at you at once. Don’t expect these people to pour anything onto the flames but gasoline. iPad (and tablet) apps from a content creation perspective
We’re universities and we’re being globalized
The developing world has an insatiable hunger for everything our best universities have to offer. Are those universities doing enough to address this?
Financiers pay the ultimate price in socially-funded horror
This impressive panel investigates radical funding ideas for new projects. Included is the possibility that it might be possible to dispense with ‘investors’ altogether, in some cases with amusingly ‘horrific’ alternatives
Do you know the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry?
Remember ‘the 12 principles of green engineering’ that we covered? The same researcher was involved in putting these different sets of principles together
Who IS this guy?
Never heard of Oliver Kreylos? You will. He’s just transformed the Kinect from a hands-free game controller into a holographic camera. The demo blew many minds, quickly getting a million YouTube hits. He didn’t think it was that impressive: check out what he’s working on now
Where does nanochemistry belong in the world of nanotech?
To get some insight into this new discipline, you might find this video describing the background to a researcher’s eureka moment well worth watching. It’s a talk by Geoffrey Ozin, widely regarded as the father of nanochemistry
Next year’s innovation books
A carefully selected (but woefully incomplete) list of some fascinating titles that you can’t buy yet
The next big thing in innovation : Recursive Resource Reduction
If you want to innovate more effectively, you need to iterate faster. Scoble cites Oracle’s Larry Ellison as having a recipe for increasing efficiency in an unproductive team (by successively reducing headcount) and offers this as a way to keep a team small enough to iterate rapidly.
Creating capability: finding the founders of the future
I’m building a theory on how Y Combinator gets such amazing results. I’ve concluded that it has nothing to do with the usual suspects
The startup incubator: economic policy panacea or money-pit
Does Y Combinator’s unquestionable success justify using ‘startup incubators’ as the basis for strategic innovation policy?
Why not pay the unemployed to create startups?
Or how you might create the really big society. Yes, it will probably create some serious chaos. But who said being disruptive should be tidy?
Unlikely tale of a bike created by twiddling three buttons
One of the great music biz anecdote clips, Jim Steinman’s surprising gifts as a gonzo raconteur prove worthy of the acknowledged master of that art, Peter Ustinov
Would replacing some bankers with meteorologists have prevented the crisis?
It wasn’t greed after all. Neuroscience shows that experts make illogical decisions when confronted with unprecedented circumstances, because experience can force you to unconsciously override logic in favour of your established beliefs. Experts in entirely unrelated fields need to be brought in on crucial decisions
Major study shows that most research is wrong
Question. Where would you expect to find an article with the title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”? Answer. On a US government website that publishes research findings.
Calculations which affect just about everything sped up a billion times
The issues are enormous, the implications profound. What we’re being told is incredibly exciting. But some really important questions seem to have been left unaanswered