Educational reform as we know it will die
Renowned educational critic Steve Peha is unconvinced that any of the current or proposed major educational reform initiatives will change anything. Ever.
How does nature create nano size motors?
There’s so much talk of biologically inspired innovation, I thought it was about time to start tracking down briefings on ‘how nature got there first’
Dragging small traditional businesses into the startup innovation ecosystem
Small traditional businesses? They’re already ‘inside’ the startup world, aren’t they? No. They typically know nothing about such things as Lean Startup, Startup Weekend or Y Combinator, and even when they do, they think it has nothing to do with them. Are they right?
iij top 20 upcoming innovation books for 2012
There’s a growing interest in introducing an entrepreneurial approach to innovation, whether its happening inside or outside the established organisation
Toys as inspiration: Shrinky-Dink startup epiphanies
At 12 am one night in 2007, a revolutionary engineering idea popped into Michelle Khine’s head. The rest is history (and chemistry, physics, biotech, nanotech, solar: she seems unstoppable)
Has Scoble suddenly turned anti-Lean Startup?
He just said: ‘I hate the term “minimal viable product.” That’s like telling me “we’re shipping without any features because, well, our investors and advisors told us to ship and fix the product later.”
What on earth does a conservation entrepreneur do?
Is it just all about ‘making the right noises’, or can they make a real difference?
Innovation competitions: why we need more of them
We’d all be forgiven for imagining that TechCrunch Disrupt and the DEMO Conference were the only regularly held innovation competition events worth talking about, as far as the tech media were concerned. So imagine my surprise…
Calacanis: I’ve never filed any patents
Jason ‘Mr. Startups’ Calacanis may not do patents, but he has just done an episode of his weekly TV show where he brought in a seasoned patent attorney and a prolific inventor to take us through the latest developments on the US patent scene
What’s it like when outside the box is inside the box?
Intrapreneurship is not for the fainthearted. Inside established organisations, officially-sanctioned bastions of executive dragon slaying can sometimes be found, filled with fearless risk-takers discretely licensed to systematically shred the company rulebook in their tireless search for innovation
Can you get sustainable power stations for nothing?
Industrial energy waste turns out to be the most surprisingly overlooked opportunity to make outrageous returns on investment. Energy efficiency in industry is a shockingly untapped market. Modernisation at a single large industrial plant can free up an entire power station
Just before the Mac is born, a strange request from Steve Jobs
He asked some industrial designers to come up with something that was “Bob Dylan songs”. His cryptic demands have been described as ‘intentionally unreasonable’. But maybe that’s why they worked
Has the last fence fallen? Outperforming human emotional sensitivity
Computers understand us if we talk to them as if they were stupid. But when humans talk to each other, we talk in complex social riddles that have always left computers utterly confused about our intentions. Until now.
Is the right to found a startup a basic human right?
Is prohibiting this pursuit an infringement upon the freedom of the individual? Should we make this something that anyone should be able to do, wherever they are in the world?
Failure to prepare users: why is this still happening?
From the ‘this shouldn’t be innovation, but unfortunately…’ department. You need to be able to answer all of these questions. Don’t wait for the users to ask them
Could your avatar steal your soul?
The practical essence of your personality will soon be surprisingly easy to steal. The coming generation of virtual reality will be able to appropriate so much of what it is to be you, that things could get seriously out of control
Haunted old hotels where guests pay to stay for microseconds
Today’s occupiers are in many ways no less ethereal that any lingering spirits which might still be roaming the lonely corridors and passing silently through walls
NASA is all about space, right? No? What then?
They have another mission-critical job that you probably didn’t know about. They are required to make air travel on this planet safer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly for everyone
In at the birth of biotech investment
Biology has replaced chemistry as the primary science behind drug discovery: how did this transformation begin, who was involved, and how did it get funded?
What will Google do now search is suddenly dying?
Investment legend Roger McNamee says mobile has already killed search. Smartphone users hardly use search. Is Google no longer the gatekeeper to the web, business, the world? Will Google+ put them back in the money? Does today’s ‘Facebook for business’ launch roll the dice once again?
Myths and truths of customer loyalty in online communities
Free workforce? Marketing substitute? Unpaid website content generators? If you’re hoping for a way to ‘exploit the well-proven willingness of loyal customers to contribute tirelessly to your online promotion, generating enormous traffic and business, and asking for nothing in return’ you need help
Innovation where it’s needed: malnutrition
The name Plumpy’nut may sound quirky, but this ridiculously simple product idea is already keeping countless famine-struck children from starvation and will save millions of lives
Time for a twist in the ARM story?
Instead of fanning the flames at the bonfire parties regularly held all over Cambridge to celebrate the outstanding achievements of chip designer ARM holdings, perhaps it’s time to splash on just a little cold water
Windows Phone 9 = Kinect + Projector?
Is that a 31 inch Minority Report interface in your pocket?
Mainframes in our cultural DNA: gone today, here tomorrow?
The detail of our individual genetic makeup is already being used to make diagnoses and treatment decisions, albeit in a slow and cumbersome way. The sheer scale of the computational horsepower that doing this in real time will demand promises to bring the hulking mainframe computer back from the grave
Steve Blank, triumphant pioneer of…
It’s a video of Steve Blank’s first talk after finishing his pioneering Lean LaunchPad course at Stanford
30,000 Clinical Pathology Labs For A Dollar
No British press coverage for a major innovation story: biotech legend Una Ryan secures funding from both the UK’s Department for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation
The philosophical assumptions of social media
Platforms such as FaceBook have come under criticism for not offering ways to differentiate ‘types of friends’, and as such, not being ‘truly social’. Whilst this may be true, philosophers, sociologists and cultural anthropologists would argue that fixing this may introduce just as many problems as it solves
The iij Top Ten Upcoming Mobile Innovation Books
Surprisingly, we had the opposite problem to our usual one with this category: this time we were not quite as inundated with contenders
iij haunted by epic discovery failure
For some unfathomable reason, we’ve never covered anything on games design luminary Will Wright, and if that wasn’t bad enough, we never even knew that his latest major project wasn’t even a game.
Is the whole lean startup thing really nothing more than UX?
If you’re thinking: “Aha! at last, a lean startup skeptic! I always suspected all that MVP and pivot stuff was really just snake oil!” then this video is for you. But buckle up, you’re in for a bumpy user experience
The science? Social. The people? Mechanical. Sort of.
This lab is turning the way social science research is conducted on its head, and that’s not just because the whole thing is online
Technology
Industry downloaded
Today’s dark satanic mills may soon turn darker still, once we start printing everything in three dimensions. Far less satanic, tomorrow’s mills may be our homes, as ‘economy of scale’ becomes uneconomical and mass production goes niche
What do neuroscientists really know?
Why is neuroscience suddenly such a hot topic right now? Is it just that the latest brain scan technology allows us to see more detail? The answer is yes, but the implications are far bigger
She’s busy composing new biological symphonies
What’s happening to bioengineering, in the ‘post-life-synthesis-announcement’ era?
Shattering our Customer Relationship Management delusions
Ever wondered what would happen if anyone actually bothered to check out those incessant claims everyone makes that ‘customer service standards are constantly improving’?
Source code of human vision recently cracked
The more you think about what she’s saying, the more shockingly unthinkable it seems: can we now really see what an eye sees without us needing its brain in order to see it?
Self-help 2.0 is self-gamification
Disappointingly, behaviour change through ‘just gamifying your own health tracking’ doesn’t always work very well. Why not? It just might turn out that, for most of us, personal health tracking is not really a single player game.
Rather go blind? UI enables user to EXCEED his sighted efficiency
Justin Romack’s demo has to be slowed down quite a bit for us sighted folks watching the video
No, it wasn’t “touch” that Jobs saw in that first demo
Touch screens had already been around for ages on that day in 2005. He was well aware that if you had just put one on a phone, it wouldn’t have been worthy of the Apple logo
Lean Startup, but without Eric Ries?
“There are venture firms here in The Valley that won’t even fund a company unless they employ lean startup methodologies”
The new iij top 20 upcoming lean books
At least five of these forthcoming titles major on a healthcare or safety aspect, illustrating just how far this particular management approach has come from its original niche
Bill Gates in a TV trivia contest with tech legends Doerr, Alsop, Kapor, Joy and Frankston
Computer Bowl 1990, pitting the East Coast against the West Coast (apologies to any other legends present but not listed above)
Computation: digital today, analog tomorrow?
Nature chuckles at our feeble, stumbling efforts at computation. Its analog computing resources effortlessly deliver dazzling practical intelligence at microscopic scale with zero tolerance for wasted power
Biomimetic business modelling?
If McKinsey’s believe in it, then even if you are unsure, you’d better get the best briefing you can: these videos may raise just as many questions as answers, but they’re a good starting point
What can you see at a trillion frames per second?
At that speed, you can see things that you shouldn’t be able to see at all, things that the camera isn’t actually pointing at. Wherever light has been, as it bounces around our world, it can tell us a story about its journey, letting us ‘see around corners’
Is the written word holding back mathematics teaching?
Are astonishing recent successes with word-free math teaching making a mockery of the traditional textbook approach?
Turning a classroom inside out
We’ve known for some time that relevant learning which takes place outside of lessons seriously improves attainment levels. Surprising breakthroughs in motivating learners to do this are being reported in highly challenging educational environments
The antidote to socially-mediated dislocation: the infinite neighbourhood
Somehow, something as seemingly mundane as an ‘online errand service’ is helping us discover surprising new ways to support each other
The iij Top 10 Upcoming Nanotechnology Books
The subjects include: nanomechanics, nanoelectronics, nanocomputing, nanoimaging, nanowires and nanofabrication
Put it all on Jack?
Twitter? Maybe he just got lucky. Square, the way to pay with your phone? Others may beat him to it. Square, the way to turn the rest of us into merchantpreneurs? Mr Dorsey may yet live to rule our world
Sustainable engineering: the carbon issues
We’ve been looking for a green engineering video ever since our last article on the subject. This excellent briefing definitely makes up for the wait
Innovation, meet thy nemesis: healthcare services
Please, no more innovation! Just let us come to terms with the last lot of changes! We prefer standardisation to innovation! This is the sector where innovators are really gladiators
Giants like PepsiCo, Time Warner and Pfizer talk candidly about how Social Media impacts them
When things go wrong, you could sometimes be forgiven for imagining that big institutions are indifferent to the effects of social media. This video should clear that up, at least for these household names, which seem fully engaged
Guitar perfectly in tune when its strings aren’t
No motors, gears or levers. 100% virtual physics and yet 100% real acoustics. It doesn’t make sense, but it works breathtakingly well. The catch? It isn’t cheap. Yet.
Startup mentoring as reality TV
What’s it like being interviewed by Paul Graham when you’re applying to Y Combinator? Watch this unmissable video of intense grilling and inspired brainstorming in front of a live audience
Yeah, like, there’s this professor that GROWS electrical kit
Apart from biology, our physical world is mostly either dumb, rock hard, or both. We use that hard, dumb stuff to make durable things like tools, vehicles and buildings. Biology, although soft, squishy and smart, somehow also manages to grow incredibly hard things, like shells and teeth. Maybe biology can teach us better ways to make hard stuff too
iij Top Ten Startup Weekend Videos
I had to work my way through an enormous number of clips to put this together, but I still only scratched the surface. I had to do it now, because soon, there are going to be just too many to even attempt this with any sense of purpose.
Investment banking students morph into urban mushroom farming phenomenon
Even if you find the average recycling innovation story boringly predictable, this one, as it gathers momentum with one ludicrously lucky sustainability discovery after another, will have you cheering along with the audience
The iij top 20 upcoming design books for innovators
These titles are at the leading edge of thinking about where design and innovation meet. Not just in predictable design territory, such as consumer products or web and mobile apps, but also in such diverse fields as cultural development, physiological experience analysis and architectural kinetics
Extreme uncertainty over startups as a solution to everything
Startups attempt innovation under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Is it possible that we can find new ways to solve the world’s biggest problems using ‘extreme uncertainty’?
Ironic descendant of massive iron rod-through-brain accident survivor
One irony is that Fred Gage is one of the world’s leading figures in neuroscience, a discipline which was largely spurred by Phineas Gage’s miraculous survival. Another relevant irony (noted in the Wikipedia article about Fred) is that Phineas (1823 – 1860) had no children
Tragic inspirational hero Randy Pausch’s muse? CMU’s drama professor
It all begins with an existential crisis: Professor Marinelli tries to Google himself (just before Google exists) and learns of the man who, in 1909, founded the futurism movement, Filippo Marinetti
Can entrepreneurialism be automated?
If Artificial Intelligence is going to automate the world’s entire workforce, we’re all going to need to give up any hope of employment and become startup entrepreneurs and innovation investors instead. They couldn’t possibly automate those, could they?
Online display ads that hardly anyone hates: just a dream?
Even if you don’t know what on earth a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is, this panel video offers fascinating insights into the latest things that are keeping people in the online display ad world awake at night
Yes folks, it’s artificial artificial artificial intelligence
This is about using what The Economist calls artificial artificial intelligence (like Mechanical Turk, which uses people as artificial computers) to enhance (artificially intelligent) machine vision
Will continuous brain scanning implants make jury trials unnecessary?
Neuroscience offers the prospect of an incontrovertible record of the intentions behind everything we do, so jury trials may eventually be deemed unnecessary. But no chip implanted? Guilty as charged!
Congratulations! you’re eating the world’s first human(e) hamburger!
No dead cows, just real, sustainable beef, made with nothing but yummy stem cells and a touch of magic! All yours for a sizzling €250,000 each. And they’ll get cheaper and cheaper with every passing year (can we call that Moo’s law?)
Gimmicks: innovation gone wrong, or just critics being rude and short-sighted?
When we call something a gimmick, we’re describing a feature which seems unimportant to us. But we can be so very wrong
Three quarters of a billion educationally deprived early learners worldwide: unacceptable, maybe unnecessary
Educational miracle worker Sugata Mitra doesn’t take on small challenges. His original breath-taking discoveries overturned everything we knew about early self-teaching. He’s back with enough equally shocking, more recent findings to justify you watching for fifty minutes.
What are video games turning us into?
Monsters, zombies, heroes or villains: which of these will we become if video games turn out to be shaping the character of future generations?
Google’s take on native apps vs. HTML5 before Motorola
An onstage tournament in which in-house advocates from either side make their case in front of a live audience and we all try to read between the lines
Is procedural synthesis just a mirage?
Carmack systematically trashes proceduralism
The iij top twenty upcoming biotech books
Biotechnology book publishing is soaring. It’s making the job of keeping track of ‘what are the most interesting titles coming out, and when?’ almost impossible. This is our first attempt
Is the AirBnB situation a gift?
“Customer service here, we’ve decided to do whatever we can to put right this terrible thing that happened to you when you used AirBnB. For a start, can we have your bank details, so that we can immediately deposit a million dollars”
Where does 3D entertainment end and the rest of 3D innovation begin?
How do you draw the line between entertainment and non-entertainment uses? Who drives the innovation? Does industry get its inspiration from cinema and gaming, or is the entertainment business merely exploiting the technological advances made by the manufacturing industry?
Honey, I printed the kids
They’ve already managed to print a kidney, so it’s only a matter of time. The replicators used are very affordable mods of off-the-shelf inkjets, but the cartridges? You guessed it
The future of apps is not apps: it’s nanoplatforms
They look like apps but they’re really stealth development tools which give your customers the ability to build themselves their own app for your service
The iij top 10 upcoming customer service innovation books
Where is customer service innovation really happening right now? Is it mostly in sales, brands, marketing, call centers, e-commerce, retailing, CRM, products, social media, mobile, games, finance? These titles show that it’s taking place over the entire spectrum
From the ‘highly influential videos you’ve never seen’ department
Before the current mainstream recognition of ‘gamification as a business strategy’, these issues were rarely taken seriously by outsiders. Now that we’re all interested, these videos are an utter revelation, even to many insiders
Is there a Solid State Drive in your near future?
A remarkable tale of a technology whose blistering speed comes at a price that this beleaguered expert on the perils of inadequate backups is totally convinced you should be prepared to pay
Game-changing technology, no venture capital
Tractors, farm equipment, built at around one eighth the cost. Industrial equipment too. Superior design. Handmade quality. Problem? Investment. Solve it, and Jakubowski becomes a household word. That might just happen anyway.
Where is the computational juggernaut driving open science?
Science is ‘going virtual’ in a big way: rapidly escalating computing horsepower is turning lots of real-world research into simulation-based experimentation. Is this helping or hindering the latest open science initiatives?
And so then you just reduce the scale by fifteen orders of magnitude…what?
No, you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to find this fascinating: bio-integrated electronics is full of unimaginably weird but useful things you can do with things like, you know, live brains. It’s all about making electronic things rubbery
Metagamification in Minecraft
Just trying to describe why over two million viewers think this frivolous-looking video is jaw-dropping will inevitably come out sounding like gobbledygook to all but those who already fully appreciate the sensational breakthrough it represents
Khan Academy 2.0?
After my initial TED-talk-inspired enthusiasm, I became seriously disheartened by the seemingly unanswerable criticisms of Khan Academy’s fairly unadventurous ‘talk and chalk’ style tutorial videos as not really representing a genuine step forward in education. But…
Tearing sharing to pieces: why openness is about more than sharing
Sharing is useful, right? Motherhood and apple pie, surely? The stampede of sacred cows being ruthlessly sacrificed in this extraordinary video bonfire of academic vanities lends it an intoxicating but perhaps far too beefy aroma for some
Exchanges for startups: no longer just pre-IPO, maybe ‘post IPO era’
The investors need to be wealthy ($1m+) and few (maximum 500) and the business too small to IPO. Facebook tore that last rule apart. What if the other rules are also eventually relaxed?
A game where humans can beat IBM’s Jeopardy-winner?
It would have no problem with repetition, but it might find avoiding hesitation difficult and preventing accusations of deviation pretty much impossible
Agile methodology applied to non-technology: success shock!
Arts authorities caught publicly admitting to experimenting with ditching the ‘waterfall ‘ approach (where committees endlessly prepare vast unread(able) reports before anyone even considers trying anything new) only to discover that they can get strategic projects done quickly and well after all. Gasp!
Large Hadron Collider on a chip
We’re going beyond innovation here. Instead of the latest technology, we’re getting a tantalising glimpse of things that don’t yet exist, but are making exciting progress in the lab and could ultimately represent enormous advances in almost every field of science and technology if they fulfil their promise
Ending the nightmare of blurred vision for half a billion poor
Even the dramatic recent reductions in the cost of spectacles and cataract operations are not doing enough to reduce the catastrophic impact that untreated sight conditions have in the third world, but strangely enough, our appetite for HD on our mobile phones will fix this
Prosthetics beyond disability: the bionic user experience
Looking for a video covering the latest developments in the interface between flesh, mind and machine, from fully functional transplants to limb replacements offering superhuman capabilities?
Snail mail about to fail?
They’ve got until October, then the US Postal service expects to run out of money. This video shows Congress trying to find out “Where have all the letters gone?”
Can America still pick winners in the energy innovation race?
An opportunity to watch Steve Chu, US Energy Secretary, running us through a list of technologies which he hopes will help America reassert itself in the rapidly intensifying struggle for competitiveness and maybe even its very survival
World record for the most innovations in a single experience?
A YouTube clip of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page playing a slow soulful country music version of a classical Chopin prelude with jazz-style backing at London’s Royal Albert Hall accompanied by a giant church organ. He was using a guitar internally modified so that you could bend its B string by pulling down against its shoulder strap peg in 1983
Sustainable, reversible science: beyond green, maybe even beyond renewable
This astonishing video takes environmental innovation to its outer limits: you’ll need to be pretty imaginative to find a way to invest in the ideas it explores
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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?
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?
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?
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
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
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
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