IdeaFestival

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

Business strategy: managing "from hilltop to hilltop"

Has globalization and the diffusion of information made the idea of sustained competitive advantage obsolete?

In an interview, Richard D'Aveni describes why strategic management by temporary advantage is preferable to long range planning, a state of affairs he labels "hypercompetition." D'Aveni is Professor of Strategic Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and is credited, according to the interview, "with creating a new paradigm in the field of strategic management based on temporary advantages – using rapid manoeuvring rather than defensive barriers."

Comparing the idea to the Lewis & Clarke expedition, D'Aveni says modern business managers must make progress from  "hilltop to hilltop."

Thanks Steve for the link!

Wayne

Measuring innovation takes faith-based failure

Freakonomics recently asked several individuals to provide their take on on innovation - as in, how can a company measure innovation? On Friday, it published a number of their responses.

I was intrigued by one suggestion in particular.

Using the example of the digital camera, one contributor suggested that since truly innovative products are often worse at a launch than competing products, perhaps the key metric is failure. The key then is to fail fast, recognize and embrace risk taking - to fail forward, some failures align with the company vision and some do not - and to identify where new ideas originate. Are they coming from all levels of the organization?

Since truly innovative outcomes aren't generally known until well after the fact, that made some sense. But succeeding at failure during the interim takes another key attribute, faith.

Wayne

Missed opportunities: venture capitalist lists "anti-portfolio"

How many successful companies were initially turned away by venture capitalists who at the time couldn't quite see the business case? Displaying good humor about its mistakes, Bessemer Venture Partners lists its "anti-portfolio," companies like Apple and Google on which it took a pass.   

Hat tip: Freakonomics blog

Wayne

Curry Stone global Design Prize makes IdeaFestival home

The Curry Stone Foundation, which funds activities to support healthy communities and public health, has announced the establishment of the Curry Stone Design Prize for “…exceptional emerging designers with extraordinary design projects or ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity.... Public health is best achieved when all people have access to shelter, health care, clean air, clean water, clean food, education and live in a time of peace," according to a news release accompanying news of the financial gift to the University of Kentucky.

This $100,000 design prize will be presented annually at the IdeaFestival beginning this year.

Developed in partnership with the University of Kentucky, College of Design, the prize is being supported through the foundation established by UK alumnus Clifford Curry and his wife H. Delight Stone of Oregon. 

IF is excited about the establishment of the Curry Stone Prize and the opportunity it presents to greatly expand the design content of the festival, which has hosted such design luminaries as Cameron Sinclair and Adriaan Gueze. More here.

Kris

Be thankful, be happy

Sure there seems to be a fuzzy correlation between gratitude and a generally happy outlook on life. Many of you may know someone like that. Or conversely, perhaps you're acquainted with a hard-headed "realist" who has no time for such huff-puffery.

Still, can the practice of gratitude actually lead to happiness? Dave Munger reports.

Wayne

Homaro Cantu - IF Conversations

Homaro Cantu, Chicago-based chef, inventor, entrepreneur and leader in "molecular gastronomy" certainly brings a non-conventional perspective to food. Where else might a menu tasting consist of actually tasting the menu?

As always, these brief conversations may be found on IFTV at YouTube.

Wayne

I'll be 15 minutes late

How late will you really be? According to Freakonomics, if you like Farecast, which predicts whether fares to certain cities will go up or down, you might also like Delaycast, which, applying some deft math, will predict how late you are likely to arrive.

Wayne

Right vs Wrong; the debate about GRAMMAR

I've been waiting for years for the chance to say this on a grand scale and alas the time has come! When it comes to grammar, THERE IS NO RIGHT OR WRONG!!!!!!!  But you cry, "how so!  Blasphemy"  "Mustn't we protect the language!" NO. You mustn't. We mustn't. There is nothing to protect. The truth is our language has always been changing and will continue to change. There are a few kinks to this way of thinking though.

Wild Cards and Black Swans: How to get the future right and the past wrong

The Long Now Foundation held a couple of public lectures recently on how we get the future right and the past wrong.

LIFT blogger and digital archaeologist Nicolas Nova points out Paul Saffo's January Long Now presentation on being a better futurist.

What makes forecasting hard, according to Saffo, isn't predicting the outcome, but accurately mapping the edges of what might happen. Since change is linear - we can't take one event and extrapolate into the future - what might happen must sometimes be imagined. Saffo:

Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

The Long Now Foundation links to a helpful Harvard Business Review piece authored by Saffo that describes "six rules for effective forecasting." An executive summary of that article is here.

Financial analyst Nassim Taleb, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, followed Saffo in February and discussed "retrocasting" - essentially, how we get the future wrong by misjudging the past. "Black Swans", those history making events that sail into the present, Taleb explained, are often "wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event." I liked this thought:

We compute probability from the success of the survivors instead of paying attention to what didn't happen, but might have.

There are two places whence random things occur, according to Taleb. They are "Mediocristan," which is a realm of random events dominated by the average, and "Extremistan," where spectacular successes and the long tail dominate. Taleb:

You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

According to the blog entry for the event, Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that energy powers Mediocristan, while the main dynamic of Extremistan involves the uncertainty of information. Anything social, anything that involves the brilliance and bane of language, anything you might read on IFblog, hails from Extremistan.

Audio, video and blog entries from the Saffo and Taleb Long Now seminars may be found here.

Thanks Nicolas for the pointer!

Wayne

Nassim Taleb, Paul Saffo