IdeaFestival

X-Prize: "genius brand"

Burt Rutan, who will speaking at the 2006 ideaFestival in Louisville, Kentucky, won the first X-Prize with SpaceShipOne. But the foundation behind the award has even bigger goals, having just announced a multi-million dollar prize for the first team to completely decode the DNA of 100 or more people "in a matter of weeks." According to the Wall Street Journal, "[T]oday, it would cost around $20 million and take six months to decode an entire human genome."

The foundation's stated goal is "to become a global brand that establishes people as geniuses and innovators."

Fast Company has more.

Wayne

Technorati tags: X-Prize, Burt Rutan, DNA Sequencing, branding, innovation, business of innovation

Measuring return on innovation

What's your return on innovation? Innovation Insiders follows up on the controversial Booz Allen assertion that R&D doesn't translate into innovative products and services. "Return on innovation (ROI) and the three pillars of innovation" has a number of good links to material on quantifying return on innovation.

Like recent Wharton School research suggesting that total quality management programs stifle innovation, much of what business believes about the creative process could be wrong. Getting it right should be a profitable exercise.

Wayne

Technorati tags: innovation, ROI, collaboratory, business of innovation

Tags: "robust, socially accurate and cheap"

The Guardian has a brief piece on Joshua Schachter, the creator of Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. Schachter is notable for popularizing tagging. Here's a good decriptive quote from the article on tagging:

Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, studied tagging and advised Delicious. He describes Schachter as "the first person to figure out the social value of labelling. Any one person's labels are messy, inconsistent and partial, and are therefore much less valuable than formal classification systems. However, if there is a way to aggregate those labels, and therefore their value, they become more valuable than formal systems, because they are robust, socially accurate and cheap."

Schachter recently sold Del.icio.us to Yahoo!. Shirky, who writes extensively on the nature of the Web, is a favorite of mine.

Wayne

Technorati tags: Joshua Schachter, Clay Shirky, Delicious, Del.icio.us, tagging, social bookmarking

Create Like it's 1790!

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law Professor, author of The Future of Ideas and founder of the school's Center on Internet and Society, has something to say about the creative commons. Listen to this fast paced thumbnail history on the development of law and creativity.

Lessig forcefully argues the law has regressed and now increasingly stunts culture by restricting derivative work. For example, the copyright term, 14 years in the 18th century, now stands at over 90 years, extended not coincidentally whenever Micky Mouse is about to pass into public hands.

He believes:

1. Creativity and innovation always build on the past
2. The past always tries to control the creativity the builds on it
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past   
4. Ours is a less and less free society

In his view, current lawmaking (2002) is determined to see to it that "no one can do to Disney inc. What Walt Disney did to the Brother's Grimm."

Filmmakers at the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival also have some thoughts on the artist and distribution on the creative commons.

[UPDATE] I neglected to mention Copyfight, a Corante blog on digital law.

Wayne

Technorati tags: Lawrence Lessig, Sundance, Brothers Grimm, Walt Disney, Creativity, Creative Commons, Innovation

"Brain Fitness," Benjamin

In a bit of Mr. McGuire-inspired dialog, Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, has two words for would be entrepreneurs: "Brain Fitness."

Wayne

Breathless in Davos

CPH127 has a number of links to weblogs tracking the goings on at the World Economic Forum in Davos. When not stunned into silence by the sight of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, the smart set this year is talking about The Creative Imperative.

I know. Some things just can't be improved.

NussbaumonDesign at BusinessWeek has continuing commentary.

Wayne

Technorati tags: Davos, World Economic Forum, Creative Imperative, Creativity, Innovation

Slow knowing

Getting connected doesn't mean staying connected. The Washington Post uses the term "neo-Amish" (blech!) to describe how people find refuge from the clicks and whistles of digital life.

Reading that article, I thought back to a slim volume I purchased about eight years ago called Plain: The Plain Reader, which is full of essays by Amish, Mennonite and Quaker authors. The introduction consisted of a report from a 1996 New Mexico meeting of Luddites called "Technology isn't Progress" and continued on with chapter titles like "Why the Amish Can Live Without Television," "Reclaiming Distance and Space" and "The Place Where We Live."

I will still occasionally reread those essays. They take me to a place I can't fully imagine using a method that by today's standards can seem maddeningly slow. But The Plain Reader, consisting of an alphabet, gathered in words, delivered to me on bound yellowed pages -- is quite literally the only technology that could get me from here to there. Books allied with the imagination can still offer powerful insight. Some librarians, apparently, agree.

Hat tip to the Innovation Insider for the link.

Wayne

Technorati tags: library science, Amish,  Luddite, monasticism, progress, technology, innovation

Measuring the fabric of spacetime

Space.com has more or measuring spacetime near a black hole. Spacetime is a unique dimension created from the combination of time and space. Space.com also has this related 2004 article on how two highly reflective earth orbiting satellites are being "frame dragged" in spacetime by about two meters every year.

Think of it this way. Picture a heavy spinning bowling ball on stretched elastic fabric. The fabric is space time and the spinning ball, earth. In addition to the mass of the ball distorting the fabric as it moves in orbit, the earth's rotation further distorts the fabric, causing frame drag, which science has now been able to measure.

Gravity is the motion of objects following the distortions in spacetime.

Further tests are underway to more precisely describe the shape of spacetime around Earth.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: spacetime, relativity, gravity, science, physics

I am not logical

While I'm riffing on the brain you might as well know: I'm not logical. I need a "higher modesty" to ask myself the tough questions. Science can scan my brain and locate schadenfruede, which dulls my ability to empathize (though not, apparently, my wife's). When I get really worked up about something, I don't think clearly. It's enough to make me think that my thoughts are hopelessly tangled up with my emotional state.

Here are a couple of loaded questions: Can I be reformed? And if not / if so (choose one) what, then, will I think about knowing?

Wayne

Technorati Tags: schadenfruede, emotions, thinking, brain, logic

Beauty, marriage, laughter and Bhudda

Science Blog and Nature observe the human preference for beauty, marriage, laughter and the principles of geometry. 

Wired also has a really interesting article on the brain changes among Buddhist monks when they meditate called "Bhudda on the Brain." Among the suggestions: if the brain physically changes when meditating -- and it does, apparently in proportion to meditative skill -- perhaps compassion (one prominent meditative theme) can grow in our heads.

Developing the compassion center in my brain doesn't exactly give me the warm fuzzies, but it just goes to show that we are what we think.

Wayne

What others are saying: Bhudda, meditation, beauty, marriage, laughter, geometry.