Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.

03 - February 9, 2013

ISSN: 1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

David Forrest is a Canadian writer and strategy consultant. His Integral Strategy process has been widely used to increase collaboration in communities, build social capital, deepen commitment to action, and develop creative strategies to deal with complex challenges. David advises organizations on emerging trends. He uses the term Enterprise Ecology to describe how ecological principles can be applied to competition, innovation, and strategy in business. David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and other futures organizations.

scientists say brain connections account for our unique personalities... Harvard professor studies how ideas spread... Google's trillion-dollar driverless car... man with total colorblindness hears colors through a chip in the back of his head... growing resource constraints argue for a recirculating economy... global supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to a range of risks... new online reputation systems could change science... unions are dying, what will replace them?... Indian investors are forcing Ethiopians off their land... urbanization in China will magnify social problems... water needed for energy protection will double in the next 25 years... Papua New Guinea plans to mine billions of dollars worth of deep-sea minerals... digital manufacturing is creating a third industrial revolution... global power will look different in 100 years...

More resources ...

a book by Paul Rosenbloom on computing as the fourth great science... a link to the Tweetping website showing a real-time global map of activity on Twitter... video of a talk by Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh on building a formidable brand... a blog post by Clay Shirky on the fate of higher education... David Forrest Innovation Watch

He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: Brain Connections Contribute to Our Unique Personalities (Discover) - Every person thinks and acts a little differently than the other 7 billion on the planet. Scientists now say that variations in brain connections account for much of this individuality, and they've narrowed it down to a few specific regions of the brain. This might help us better understand the evolution of the human brain as well as its development in individuals. Each human brain has a unique connectome -- the network of neural pathways that tie all of its parts together. Like a fingerprint, every person's connectome is unique. To find out where these individual connectomes differed the most, researchers used an MRI scanning technique to take cross-sectional pictures of 23 people's brains at rest. Harvard Professor Finds that Innovative Ideas Spread Like the Flu; Heres How to Catch Them (Fast Company) - Enter network science, an emergent discipline drawing from sociology, medicine, and statistics. Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis is one of the most prominent figures in the young field - he's made foundational investigations into how products, sneezes, and behaviors are spread by networked contagion. "Things don't just diffuse in human populations at random. They actually diffuse through networks," Christakis says, noting that we live our lives in networks -- the same as hunter-gatherers. Today our networks are the web of relations you have between friends, coworkers, siblings, and relatives. Where you are in that web lends special properties. More science trends...

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Newsletter Archive

Previous issues

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories: Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car -- Part 3: Sooner Than You Think (Forbes) - Chunka Mui - "In 2008, a state-of-

the-art driverless car could go two blocks on its own on a closed course at 25mph. By 2012, the driverless car could operate in real-world conditions at 75mph. Such rapid progress offers great hope that the tremendous benefits in safety and savings I laid out in Part 1 of this series are attainable. The pace of progress also means that the disruptive ripple effects discussed in Part 2 might soon have strategic relevance for companies participating in the multi-trillion-dollar part of the economy that relates to cars. But we're left with two crucial questions: How soon could the driverless car become a reality? When should incumbents, venture capitals and entrepreneurs start paying serious attention? The short answer to both questions is: sooner than most think. This article explains why." To Hear Color, This Man Embedded a Chip in the Back of His Head (Smithsonian) - From birth, Neil Harbisson lacked the ability to perceive color. Because of a rare condition called achromatopsia -- total color-blindness -- he always lived in a black-and-white world. But with the help of inventor Adam Montadon, Harbisson developed the "eyeborg," a device that he wears on his head that translates colors into sound. The camera senses the color frequency in front of him, then sends different audible frequencies to a chip embedded in the back of his head. Using the same color-sound language, he now also translates music into colors to create art -- painting a multi-chromatic modernist representation of a Justin Bieber song, for instance. And as he explains in the film, his ability to perceive color through sound has expanded into the realm of the superhuman; he can now "see" infrared rays, and soon, he hopes, ultraviolet as well. More technology trends...

BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: With Resources Running Short, It's Time to Move to a Circular Economy (Fast Company Co.EXIST) - On average, developed-world citizens consume 1,764 pounds of food and drink annually, 265 pounds of packaging, and 44 pounds of new clothing and shoes -- 80% of which finds its way to incinerators, landfill, or wastewater. It "comes to a dead end," as a new report puts it. This is the "take-make-dispose" model of consumption. But there is an alternative: a circular economy, where instead of mining millions of tons of new inputs, you recover, reuse, and reconstitute as much as possible. Why? To reduce pressure on the environment, obviously; but also to reduce pressure on companies, which face growing resource constraints. The Ripple Effect (Deloitte) - Supply chains are becoming highly sophisticated and vital to the competitiveness of many

companies. But their interlinked, global nature also makes them increasingly vulnerable to a range of risks. A number of internal and external forces are converging to raise the risk ante for global supply chains. Some are macro trends such as globalization and global connectivity, which can make supply chains more complex and amplify the impact of problems that may arise. Others stem from the push to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs. Although trends such as lean manufacturing, just-in-time inventory, reduced product lifecycles, outsourcing, and supplier consolidation have yielded compelling business benefits, they have also introduced new kinds of supply chain risk and reduced the margin for error. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: After Aaron, Reputation Metrics Startups Aim to Disrupt the Scientific Journal Industry (Tech Crunch) - Richard Price "Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and a second time to read it. The heart of the problem lies in the reputation system, which encourages scientists to put their work behind paywalls. The way out of this mess is to build new reputation metrics. The changes to reputation metrics in science that are underway are reflective of how reputation is measured online: Twitter has followers and retweets; GitHub has followers and forks; StackOverflow has reputation; Facebook has likes and comments; YouTube has view counts. An ecosystem of startups is working on building these new reputation metrics in science, including my startup Academia.edu, as well as Mendeley and ResearchGate (other important players in the space are PLoS and Google Scholar). All three platforms have passed 2 million users and are growing fast. In three to four years, all the world's scientists will be on one or all of these platforms." Unions Are Dying. What Comes Next? (Fast Company) Love them or hate them, in the 19th and 20th centuries labor unions helped establish a middle class, ensured professional standards for some industries, and secured access for all workers to benefits like the weekend, the minimum wage, the 8-hour day, and maternity leave. They also helped workers learn, share information, and turn out the vote. That was then. In increasingly flat hierarchies and team-based work, even the basic division between "labor" and "management" doesn't make a lot of sense in many contexts. The question to be asked now is, how will some of these same jobs, of representation and negotiation for better pay

and benefits, and of information sharing, networking, and political advocacy, be done by organizations that succeed unions? More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Indian Investors are Forcing Ethiopians Off Their Land (Guardian) - Research by the US-based Oakland Institute suggests many thousands of Ethiopians are in the process of being relocated or have fled to neighbouring countries after their traditional land has been handed to foreign investors without their consent. The situation is likely to deteriorate further as companies start to gear up their operations and the government persues plans to lease as much as 15% of the land in some regions, says Oakland. In a flurry of new reports about global "landgrabbing" this week, Oxfam said that investors were deliberately targeting the weakest-governed countries to buy cheap land. The 23 leastdeveloped countries of the world account for more than half the thousands of recorded deals completed between 2000 and 2011, it said. Deals involving approximately 200m ha of land are believed to have been negotiated, mostly to the advantage of speculators and often to the detriment of communities, in the last few years. China's Urbanization Risk: Magnified Unrest (Wall Street Journal) - China's new leaders seem to be placing their hopes for economic growth on urbanization. They see an upsurge in demand for a whole range of services -- from housing to schooling and health care as the rural population is increasingly pulled into the urban economy. But high urbanization has its costs, argues a new report from Beijing Anbound Information, a private think tank that advises a number of local governments around China. Chief among those costs, the report says, is the magnification of social problems -- and in a country with a considerable amount of social friction, that certainly is something to consider. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Water Demand for Energy to Double by 2035 (National Geographic) - The amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production is on track to double within the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. And even though

fracking --high-pressure hydraulic fracturing of underground rock formations for natural gas and oil -- might grab headlines, IEA sees its future impact as relatively small. By far the largest strain on future water resources from the energy system, according to IEA's forecast, would be due to two lesser noted, but profound trends in the energy world: soaring coal-fired electricity, and the ramping up of biofuel production. We're on the Verge of a Scary Undersea Gold Rush (Grist) National Geographic's feature story on deep-sea mineral mining sets up a scary proposition for the Solwara 1 site in Papua New Guinea especially, where one company hopes to blaze a path into the deep with new mining technologies that could allow for the scooping up of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of deep-sea minerals. More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories: The Third Industrial Revolution (Economist) - The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers' cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week's special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides. The Rise of City Power (World Future Society) - What, in your mind, will be the most powerful entity in the world 100 years from now? As we look around us today, it's easy to point to a single nation as being the most powerful. But will that still be true 100 years from now? The most powerful entities in the future could be large multi-national corporations, giant associations of people or companies, religious groups, clusters of countries such as NATO, perhaps some new entity that controls technology like ICANN, or something else entirely? Adding to the confusion of this question, what actually defines power? Is it money, clout, influence, an ability to control a large military, or some combination of all of these? Will the notion of power be defined differently in the future than it is today? These are all important questions to ask because powerful entities define who the powerful people are. Caught in the middle of all this influencewrangling is the lowly city, an entity now subservient to states

and countries, and often lost in the commerce of daily life. Are cities likely to remain at the lower end of the clout spectrum, or is there some new kind of power-shift afoot? More future trends...

From the publisher...

On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain

By Paul S. Rosenbloom Read more...

Trends and Futures... New Books - New and not-yet-published books on trends and futures. A Web Resource... Tweetping -Tweetping is a map that shows where everyone in the whole world is tweeting from in real time. Multimedia... Zappos' Tony Hsieh: Building a Formidable Brand (Stanford Business) - Tony Hsieh, CEO of fast-growing online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos.com, takes happiness seriously. There's surprise free overnight shipping upgrades for VIP customers, and a corporate face so friendly that lonely people are known to telephone Zappos' corporate call center at all hours just to talk (the longest phone conversation so far lasted eight hours.) Hsieh is such a rockstar that he has 1.7 million followers on his Twitter site and the retailer has landed more than once on Fortune magazine's annual 100 Best Companies to Work For list. Two Zappos fans even got married at the business' Henderson, Nev., offices; there's a video of the upbeat ceremony on the company's website. Since taking over as CEO, Hsieh has vowed to do whatever it takes to keep his employees, customers, and vendors happy -- even if it might not seem to make the best business sense -- because his strategy leads to profits in the end. Hsieh discusses his unorthodox approach to building Zappos -- widely praised in corporate circles as a playful, innovative, and zany company with a fiercely loyal customer base. (54m 41s) The Blogosphere... Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken (The Awl) - Clay Shirky "I wrote a thing last fall about massive open online courses (MOOCs, in the parlance), and the challenge that free or cheap online classes pose to business as usual in higher ed. In that piece, I compared the people running colleges today to music industry executives in the age of Napster. (This was not a flattering comparison.) Aaron Bady, a cultural critic and doctoral candidate at Berkeley, objected. I replied to Bady, one thing led to another, the slippery slope was slupped, and Maria Bustillos ended up refereeing the whole thing here on The Awl."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com