Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.

14 - July 13, 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.

DNA links living BC woman with a 5,500-year-old ancestor... bioengineering may create human-animal hybrid organs... algorithms are running our lives... smart cars would be better if apps were developed by everyone... design firm IDEO is changing the world... why your local bank is terrified of crowdfunding... what happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT courses... society's hidden social networks... the United States is competing with China in Africa... Africa's population is soaring... California's Sierra Nevada is being transformed by climate change... new website links young farmers with spare plots of land... the number of registered vehicles on U.S. roads may have peaked... over 50% of colleges will collapse by 2050...

More resources ...

a book by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp: Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global ... a link to the Siemens' Picture of the Future website reporting on major technology trends... a Nature video on progress in growing artificial hearts... a blog post by Frederic Filloux on data journalism... David Forrest

David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and other futures organizations. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: Breakthrough DNA Study Links B.C. Woman, 5,500-YearOld "Grandmother" (Vancouver Sun) - A groundbreaking genetic study led by a team of U.S. and Canadian anthropologists has traced a direct DNA link between the 5,500-year-old remains of an aboriginal woman found on a British Columbia island, a second set of ancient female bones from a nearby 2,500-year-old site and -- most stunningly -- a living Tsimshian woman from the Metlakatla First Nation, located close to both of the prehistoric burials along B.C.'s North Coast near the city of Prince Rupert. The findings are the first of their kind to be generated using powerful new techniques to analyze the complete mitochondrial genome of the individuals studied, reconstructing a millennia-spanning line of maternal descent and providing remarkable new evidence of a people's enduring occupation of a specific geographical area. Human-Animal Hybrid Organs Imagine Organic Implants of the Future (Verge) - As biological engineering becomes more and more adept, scientists will eventually get to explore the limits of what they can craft in the lab. To that end, designer Agatha Haines has put together a conceptual series of custom organs, which could one day be used by humans as an organic way to replace mechanical implants like pacemakers. The "Electrostabilis Cardium" would do just that by using traits from an electric eel to send out shocks at the first sign of a heart attack. Another concept imagines an organ that has been modified with glands from a leech, and can use the leech's saliva as an anticoagulant when it detects pressure from a blood clot. More science trends...

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Previous issues

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories: How Algorithms Rule the World (Guardian) - From dating websites and City trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches (Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola), algorithms are increasingly determining our collective futures. "Bank approvals, store cards, job matches and more all run on similar principles," says Ball. "The algorithm is the god from the machine powering them all, for good or ill." Smart Cars: Fill 'Er Up With Apps (Fast Company) - "Your car is the most expensive computer you own," says Thejo Kote, CEO of Automatic, a startup whose app gives users advice about how they're driving while theyre driving. "But it's a black box. You don't have access to it." Automatic is a well-funded startup that's trying to open up that box and play with some of the diagnostic info that your car collects. It is not alone in seeing the car as an innovation hub. Apple has been agitating to integrate Siri and maps into car dashboards, and forward-thinking carmakers, such as Ford, are starting to build apps on top of the cars real-time technical data. But what's missing is the idea that powered the smartphone explosion: Our driving experience would improve dramatically if the power to experiment wildly were in the hands of everyone. More technology trends...

BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Back to the Drawing-Board (Economist) - The office looks like a cross between a Starbucks and a youth club. Bicycles are piled high in racks; there is a ping-pong table in a corner. Young people sit at long pine benches, sipping coffee and poring over laptops, the males looking as if they are taking part in a beard-growing competition. But do not be deceived by the laid-back atmosphere: this is the London branch of one of the world's most successful design consultancies, IDEO. When it started up in Silicon Valley in 1991 one of its founders, David Kelley, said he did not want to employ more people than could fit in a school bus. Today IDEO has more than 600 employees and offices in eight countries. Why Your Local Bank Is Terrified of Crowdfunding (Inc.) Erik Markowitz "I've written about crowdfunding extensively, mostly from the point of view of entrepreneurs, who view crowdfunding as a cheaper way to finance their business over traditional bank loans. But little has been written from the

perspective of the banks, which are beginning to view crowdfunding's rise as a potential threat to their core business. Nathaniel Karp, the chief economist for BBVA Compass, a midsized bank headquartered in Alabama, issued a report last week that voiced some of those concerns -- as well as potential solutions for banks." More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: What Happens When People in Pakistan Start Taking MIT Classes? (Atlantic) - It's more than 11,000 kilometers from Shakargarh, a city in northeastern Pakistan, to the venerated halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the top universities in the United States. Twenty-five-year-old Khalid Raza lives in Shakargarh but is taking "The Challenges of Global Poverty," a course taught by a former adviser to the World Bank and a professor of international economics at MIT. Recently, while on the bus, he pulled out his laptop and submitted one of his first assignments. The Science of Familiar Strangers: Society's Hidden Social Network (MIT Technology Review) - We've all experienced the sense of being familiar with somebody without knowing their name or even having spoken to them. These so-called "familiar strangers" are the people we see every day on the bus on the way to work, in the sandwich shop at lunchtime, or in the local restaurant or supermarket in the evening. These people are the bedrock of society and a rich source of social potential as neighbours, friends, or even lovers. But while many researchers have studied the network of intentional links between individuals - using mobile-phone records, for example -- little work has been on these unintentional links, which form a kind of hidden social network. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: A US Power Surge in Africa Competes with China (Quartz) US president Barack Obama announced a plan to invest $7 billion over the next five years to bolster electrical access in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Most of that money

will come in the form of loans to buy American electrical products, along with technical assistance for African policymakers and grants to African entrepreneurs. The investment plan comes at a time of increasing hope about Africas economic future, and in other countries, the ability to invest in it. The World Bank speculates that fast-growing African economies are now like India 20 years ago or China 30 years ago, with the possibility of huge amounts of catch-up growth. How Africa's New Urban Centers are Shifting Its Old Colonial Boundaries (Atlantic) - Twice as populous today as the next biggest African country, Nigeria, which was cobbled together as a colony 100 years ago, has always stood out on its continent as the most ambitious and in many ways fanciful creation of British imperialism. Presently, almost all of subSaharan Africa is growing at sustained rates unmatched in modern history. In this regard, Mali, Nigeria's resource-poor and largely desertified West African neighbor, is fairly typical. The United Nations projects that the country, one of the world's ten poorest nations, will see its population rise to nearly 50 million by midcentury from its present base of about 16 million. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: California's Sierra a 'Living Lab' for Climate Change (San Francisco Chronicle) - In parts of California's Sierra Nevada, marshy meadows are going dry, wildflowers are blooming earlier and glaciers are melting into ice fields. Scientists also are predicting the optimal temperature zone for giant sequoias will rise hundreds and hundreds of feet, leaving trees at risk of dying over the next 100 years. As indicators point toward a warming climate, scientists across 4 million acres of federally protected land are noting changes affecting everything from the massive trees that can grow to more than two-dozen feet across to the tiny, hamsterlike pika. But what the changes mean and whether humans should do anything to intervene are sources of disagreement among land managers. Spreading Sustainable Agriculture by Stacking It on Existing Farmland (Fast Company Co.EXIST) - Many people dream of setting up a little farm somewhere, producing wholesome food, and living the good life. But, of course, agriculture is hard: the upfront costs are high, and the returns uncertain. That's where Farmstacker wants to help. The winner of last weekend's Hack//Meat event, in Palo Alto, it aims to link up young farmers with spare plots of land, minimizing their startup costs, and giving established farmers extra income. It calls itself

"efarmony," after the dating site. More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories: We May Have Already Hit Peak Car (Fast Company Co.EXIST) - You wouldn't know it from the cars that clog streets across the country every day during rush hour, but the number of registered vehicles on the road has begun to stagnate. Michael Sivak, a research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute thinks this may be a sign of a larger phenomenon: peak motorization in the U.S. By 2030 over 50% of Colleges will Collapse (Futurist Speaker) - Thomas Frey "Over the coming decades, the amount of education we consume to stay competitive will increase exponentially. However, the education we 'buy' will increasingly be on 'our terms' not on theirs. We will want education that is relative, timely, available on-demand, and fits within a specific need. And it will need to be far more affordable. For these reasons and more, which I'll explain below, we will begin to see the mass failure of traditional colleges. But out of this will come an entire new education era unlike anything we have ever seen." More future trends...

From the publisher...

Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global

By Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict E. M. Steenkamp Read more...

Trends and Futures... New Books - New and not-yet-published books on trends and futures. A Web Resource... Pictures of the Future - Which technologies will shape our lives over the next ten to twenty years? Siemens' Pictures of the Future magazine reports twice a year on major technology trends and looks at the latest research in the company's laboratories. The magazine includes scenarios of the future, features, reports on associated R&D activities at Siemens, and interviews with internationally-recognized experts.

Multimedia... The Heart Makers (Nature) - Doris Taylor is in the vanguard of researchers looking to engineer entire new organs, to enable transplants without the risk of rejection by the recipients immune system. The strategy is simple enough in principle. First remove all the cells from a dead organ it does not even have to be from a human then take the protein scaffold left behind and repopulate it with stem cells immunologically matched to the patient in need. Voil! The crippling shortage of transplantable organs around the world is solved. (5m 53s) The Blogosphere... Data Journalism is Improving Fast (Guardian) - Frederic Filloux "Data Journalism is thriving. This the most salient conclusion from the second edition of the Data Journalism Awards organised by the Global Editors Network and sponsored by Google. I was part of a 20-person jury, chaired by Paul Steiger, founder of Pro Publica. We had to choose from a shortlist of 72 projects divided into seven categories: data-driven storytelling, investigation, applications (all three for large and small media), and datajournalism section or website. Here are some quick personal findings."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com