Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.

18 - September 7, 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.

a new startup will provide an online platform for scientific collaboration... scientists have grown an embryonic human brain in the lab... Volvo is testing a road that charges electric vehicles... a new search tool produces a graphic network showing the links between patents and connections between technologies... car-sharing could be a massive killer app... Tesla starts building a European car charging network... the future of jobs... a US professor has stopped teaching massive open online courses in defense of higher education... Internet.org could create billions in job opportunities for the developing world... China will have to spend at least $6.8 trillion to absorb rural workers moving to its cities and towns... a German study suggests "carbon farming" as a way to reverse global warming... the world's oceans are rapidly becoming more acidic... Korea builds a smart city from scratch... an American scientist plans to use a super-computer to predict wars and revolutions...

More resources ...

a new book by David C. Robertson: Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry ... a link to the Whole System Design website on developing resilient and regenerative places... a CBC Ideas program on the "end of growth"... a blog post by Ross Dawson on the role of national and ethnic diaspora in driving global

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David is the founder and president of Global Vision Consulting Ltd., a strategy advisory firm. He is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

innovation... David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: Can the "GitHub for Science" Convince Researchers to Open-Source Their Data? (Fast Company Co.LABS) - Science has a problem: Researchers don't share their data. A new startup wants to change that by melding GitHub and Google Docs. Nathan Jenkins is a condensed matter physicist and programmer who has worked at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He recently left his post-doc program at New York University to cofound Authorea, a platform that helps scientists draft, collaborate on, share, and publish academic articles. Miniature 'Human Brain' Grown in Lab (BBC) - Miniature "human brains" have been grown in a lab in a feat scientists hope will transform the understanding of neurological disorders. The pea-sized structures reached the same level of development as in a nine-week-old foetus, but are incapable of thought. Neuroscientists have described the findings as astounding and fascinating. Scientists at Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences reproduced some of the earliest stages of the organ's development. They used either embryonic stem cells or adult skin cells to produce the part of an embryo that develops into the brain and spinal cord -- the neuroectoderm. More science trends...

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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories:

Previous issues

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Volvo Tests A Road That Can Charge Cars And Trucks (Fast Company Co.EXIST) - Charging electric vehicles while they are on the move may seem a bit out-there. But, in fact, we already do it for major groups of vehiclestrams and trains, for instance. French cities have completely wireless trams, and their record is good. After 10 years and about 7.5 million miles, they haven't reported serious problems. In Sweden, Volvo is applying the same technology to roads, opening up the possibility that people would no longer have to fear getting stranded by a dead battery -- a major hurdle to people's willingness to buy an electric car. Led by Mats Alakula, researchers are looking at two types of "conductive charging," both where vehicles would stay in continuous contact with the power supply. Global Patent Map Reveals the Structure of Technological Progress (MIT Technology Review) - Today, Luciano Kay at the University of California Santa Barbara and a few pals reveal a new search tool that exploits the structure of links between patents to study the connection between technologies. In their new approach, Kay and co create a network in which each patent is a node. They assign a link between two nodes if one patent cites another and define the "technological distance" between two areas of the resulting map as the strength of the links between them. So areas of this network are distant if they have few links but close if they have many links. More technology trends...

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BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Google Car + Uber = Killer App (Forbes) - Chunka Mui "As I've argued before and expand upon in my upcoming book, The New Killer Apps: How Big Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups , massive car sharing is the long-term disruptive scenario enabled by driverless cars. In the US, for example, more than $2T flows from car-related spending, encompassing suppliers, carmakers, dealers, financing, service, repairs, insurance, energy, rentals, taxes, etc. With massive car sharing, a significant portion of these expenditures are potentially eliminated and much of the rest could be thrown up for grabs due to new business models and changes in the competitive landscape." Why Tesla is Focused on Oil-Rich Norway As It Expands Beyond the US (Quartz) - Just off the European E18 highway some 210km south of Oslo lies an industrial park called Brokelandsheia. It is an unassuming cluster of a few hundred workers, a small collection of warehouses, a Statoil gas station and a 24-hour cafe and hotel called Cinderella. Next week, the Cinderella cafe is going to see a surge in business: It is the
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location of one of six supercharger stations Tesla has built in Norway. They will all be operational by this weekend. Teslas plan is to cover Europe with superchargers -- fast, free charging stations for Tesla's electric vehicles (EVs) -- roughly 200 km apart, and Norway is the first country outside the US to get them. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Jobs, Robots, Capitalism, Inequality, and You (Tech Crunch) - Jon Evans "This has not been a great decade for the average American. The recession ended in 2009, but median household income remains 6.1% below what it was in December 2007 while the income of the top 10% rose. Meanwhile, productivity growth has been exceedingly sluggish on both sides of the Atlantic." 'Star' Coursera Prof Stops Teaching Online Course in Objection to MOOCs (GigaOM) - In an about-face highlighting the ongoing debate surrounding massive open online courses (MOOCs), a professor held up as a "star" in online learning by MOOC providers and the media has decided to cut ties with Coursera. After reaching more than 40,000 students through his non-credit "Introduction to Sociology" MOOC -- and getting the front page treatment in The New York Times -- Princeton professor Mitchell Duneier told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he will no longer teach his class out of concerns that it could undermine public higher education. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: If Internet.org Succeeds, the Developing World Will Gain Billions in Online Work (Forbes) - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of the Internet.org initiative, a partnership that aims to make Internet access available to billions of people worldwide. Some are criticizing this effort, calling it a self-serving business project masked by an altruistic veneer. But I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. No one can deny that global Internet access would benefit Facebook and the other companies involved, but it would also bring huge benefits for billions of impoverished people. One massive potential impact has
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been relatively ignored -- the impact on work and the ability to bring jobs to people around the world. China Urban Migrants' Cost Seen at Least $6.8 Trillion (Bloomberg) - China must spend at least 41.6 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion) over two decades to integrate rural workers living in cities and towns so the country realizes benefits of urbanization, a United Nations report said. Spending may exceed 75 trillion yuan in a scenario with a higher rate of investment to improve living conditions and housing quality, according to the report released yesterday in Beijing. The studys baseline assumptions are for the urban population to rise to 976 million in 2030 from 666 million in 2010 and integrate about 210 million migrant workers. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Could Carbon Farms Reverse Global Warming? (Scientific American) - A recent study by German researchers presents the possibility of "carbon farming" as a less risky alternative to other carbon capture and storage technologies. It suggests that a significant percentage of atmospheric CO2 could potentially be removed by planting millions of acres of a hardy little shrub known as Jatropha curcas, or the Barbados nut, in dry, coastal areas. But other experts raised doubts about the study's ambitious projections, questioning whether the Barbados nut would be able to grow well in sandy desert soils and absorb the quantity of carbon their models predict. Rising Levels of Acids in Seas May Endanger Marine Life, Says Study (Guardian) - Rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are causing a potential catastrophe in our oceans as they become more acidic, scientists have warned. Hans Poertner, professor of marine biology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and co-author of a new study of the phenomenon, told the Guardian: "The current rate of change is likely to be more than 10 times faster than it has been in any of the evolutionary crises in the earth's history." More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories:

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Tomorrow's Cities: Just How Smart is Songdo? (BBC) - Built with smart technologies very much a part of its DNA, it sits adjacent to Seoul, already regarded as one of the hi-tech capitals of the world. So has the experimental city, dubbed by some as a "city-in-a-box" because of its reliance on technology, been a success? Building a city from scratch offers challenges as well as opportunities. In South Korea, part of that challenge is to deliver a markedly smarter city than Koreans are used to. The Predictive Maths of War (The Kernel) - Kalev Leetaru doesn't know where the next revolution will start. But he really wants to. So the scientist is feeding his super-computer, Nautilus, at the University of Illinois, with news articles. So far, Nautilus has been fed a hundred million articles from worldwide media outlets, collected over the course of thirty years. Leetaru encodes the news according to geography and tonality, or sentiment, and has thus created a network of around a hundred trillion semantic connections. More future trends...

From the publisher...

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
By David C. Robertson Read more...

A Web Resource... Whole Systems Design - Whole Systems Design utilizes an interdisciplinary team of land planners, ecological designers, builders, and educators thatlive intheir designs -- "We unify conventionally disparate fields to develop resilient and regenerative places. Since the practice of modern architecture and land design is usually far removed from the consequences of its application it reliably produces dysfunctional spaces unfit for vibrant people and other living things. This distancing of designer from the designed is why these fields have consistently failed to deeply protect and enhance human culture and biological diversity for the past few generations. Our practice is part of the design-build, owner-builder movement that is transcending the industrial process which has passed for 'design' for far too long." Multimedia... The End of Growth (CBC Ideas) Economist Jeff Rubin and environmentalist David Suzuki might seem an unlikely pairing. But theyve been touring Canada together, talking about the natural limits to growth from their very different perspectives. We listen in as they try to convince a Calgary audience that we've already exceeded the capacity of the planet. Jeff Rubin is a former Chief Economist and Chief Strategist at CIBC World Markets. His book,The End of Growth is a follow-up to his earlier bookWhy Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller. David Suzuki is a geneticist, environmentalist, broadcaster and the co-founder and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation. He has written over 50 books, includingThe Legacy: An Elders Vision for Our Sustainable

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Future. The Blogosphere... The Immense Role of National and Ethnic Diaspora in Driving Global Innovation (Ross Dawson) - Ross Dawson "Innovation always stems from diverse connections between ideas and people. Bringing in different viewpoints from around the world necessarily provides more opportunities for the new. Moreover, in the many stages of the innovation process there are almost certainly points where resources or capabilities from other countries can create better outcomes. In my travels I have often seen how national and ethnic diaspora have been at the heart of the connections between nations."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com

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