jobs: a genius and a bastard.

"They found that inspired people were more open to new experiences, and reported more absorption in their tasks. "Openness to Experience" often came before inspiration, suggesting that those who are more open to inspiration are more likely to experience it. Additionally, inspired individuals weren't more conscientious, supporting the view that inspiration is something that happens to you and is not willed. Inspired individuals also reported having a stronger drive to master their work, but were less competitive, which makes sense if you think of competition as a non-transcendent desire to outperform competitors. Inspired people were more intrinsically motivated and less extrinsically motivated, variables that also strongly impact work performance."

Disruption occurs given two criteria. The first: that incumbents move upmarket to the most profitable segments, ignoring low-end competitors at the bottom of the market. The second: that the low-end competitor introduces a product with a scalable technology or business model advantage at its core that has the potential to displace the incumbent.

This is exactly what Amazon has with the Kindle Fire. It's not just a low-end competitor to the iPad. There is scalable technology at its core that the present-generation iPad lacks — the extensive use of the Cloud. That is why Amazon can get away with shipping a device that has only 8GB of memory. What's more, the Fire has a business model advantage too — Amazon is using content to subsidize the hardware.

Right on. Empathy is the secret sauce.

"are you merely managing an organization, just leading an organization — or are you building an institution? "

"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you‘ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it‘s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven‘t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)"

"what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. Zuckerberg didn’t invent that platform. He was a hacker (a term of praise) who built for it. … just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea."

""Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence. The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem."

"I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures. They also have misconceptions about the creative process sometimes. We do have these people who we give a chance to on the belief they’re right, and can rise to the occasion, and we are wrong sometimes, because we can’t see what goes on in their heads. And our measure, because we can’t see inside people’s heads, is the team. If the team is functioning well, and healthy, it will solve the problem."

One of the best posts of 2010: "The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, though a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on. Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost."

"git is a totally new way to operate on data. It changes the game. git has been described as "concept-heavy", because it does so many things so differently from everything else. After some reflection, I realized that this is far truer than I could see at first. git's concepts are not only unusual, they're revolutionary. Come on, revolutionary? It's just a version control system! Actually it's not. Git was originally not a version control system; it was designed to be the infrastructure so that someone else could build one on top. And they did; nowadays there are more than 100 git-* commands installed along with git. It's scary and confusing and weird, but what that means is git is a platform."

Matt Jones's latest, "talk I gave at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome yesterday, primarily about the territory of “the Internet of Things” moving from one of academic and technological investigation to one of commercial design practice, and what that might mean for designers working therein."

"Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." 2. The paper takes on several longstanding myths about the economic effects of file sharing, noting that many downloaded songs do not represent a lost sale, some mashups may increase the market for the original work, and the entertainment industry can still steer consumer attention to particular artists (which results in more sales and downloads). 3. The authors' point out that file sharing may not result in reduced incentives to create if the willingness to pay for "complements" increases."

"Stanford’s Dr Yock wants to turn innovation upside down. He has extended his bio-design programme to India, in part to instil an understanding of the benefits of frugality in his students. He believes that India’s combination of poverty and outstanding medical and engineering talents will produce a world-class medical-devices industry. Tim Brown, the head of Ideo, a design consultancy, agrees. In the past, he notes, health bosses thought all devices had to be Rolls-Royces or Ferraris. But cost matters, too. Pointing to another recent example of India’s frugal engineering, he says: “In health care, as in life, there is need for both Ferraris and Tata Nanos.”"

"about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society."

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

"Bell’s biographers have gone to heroic lengths to explain away all the evidence. Refusing credit for the telephone just showed Bell’s humility; not being involved in the corporation showed his dedication to pure research. The fact that both patents were filed on the same day is a grand historic coincidence — or perhaps Gray stole the idea from Bell. As a result, Gray is forgotten and Bell is remembered as one of history’s great inventors — not as he should be: a hobbyist and a fraud, forced by love into stealing one of the greatest inventions of all time."

"When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect."

"What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it."

Christensen article on technology's potential to disrupt education (i'm reading "disrupting class" now, this may be more efficient)

""Ford was really saying ... breakthrough innovations don't come from market research ... [but] from the singular vision of an inventor pursuing his or her own passion, cutting a Gordian knot that others simply accept as "the way things are." ... some truly amazing innovation [is] happening on the net, in alternative energy, & in life sciences ... many of those innovations will come from harnessing the collective intelligence of all those people ... But it won't just be to give them what they want; it will be to put them to work in new ways, getting them to contribute ... Breakthroughs ... driven by the data we all contribute; similar effects will soon be felt in personalized medicine, robotics ... Joseph Campbell said that the Knights of the Round Table were the archetypal myth of Western civilization, the idea that each of us, alone, must go off into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, populated by monsters, on a quest to make the world a better place." summary by preoccupations

proposes that rates of global innovation have been declining in recent decades, since 1914 by an analysis of U.S. patents, which seems contradicted by independent data, and since 1873 by a subjective analysis of "important innovations," which may have greater general merit.

fight it

Watch the video. Think Quicksilver for Firefox. Looks fantastic! "first prototype of a natural language web service connector called Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that adds a command panel to any web page. Ubiquity will look familiar to Quicksilver, Launchy, or Enso users: you invoke Ubiquity with a key combination and the text field drops down command suggestions as you type. Ubiquity's built-in command set consists of "user-centric mashups" that let you perform tasks using various web services in one place using natural language."

"the evidence presented indicates that the rate of innovation reached a peak over a hundred years ago and is now in decline. This decline is most likely due to an economic limit of technology or a limit of the human brain that we are approaching"

The topic of innovation comes up often here, so let us review some basics

The social network provides important lessons for executives—and a key forum for innovation and experimentation

Innovation happens at edges Youth shouldn’t be discounted, their demographic group has edges as well, edges where innovation takes place We need to build platforms that sustain many open edges in order to foster innovation

behind their nostrils. They had to be for breathing, didn’t they? He tried to come up with an alternate hypothesis, and couldn’t—but then he couldn’t come up with a way to confirm his own hunch, eithe

standard growth theory misses an essential feature of this "economic web" of goods and services

pro tools plugin to manipulate individual notes. wow. via kk's ct2: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ct2/~3/262132737/single-note-control-in-recorde.php

good piece from Tim Wu on the tech policy direction that the next US president should take

"presents our list of the 10 technologies that we think are most likely to change the way we live."

We've lost our Everyman ability to build, maintain, and repair the devices we rely on every day. And that's making it harder to solve the country's nastiest problems

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do.

People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.

Editors and writers trawl the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months.

computer games that can help players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need to survive in a changing world.

"Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist ... propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions ... is the only one in which capitalism can survive."

an industrial process called SkyMine that captures 90 percent of the carbon dioxide coming out of smoke stacks and mixes it with sodium hydroxide to make sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas--that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation.

In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't.

“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. Common ground. Inclusiveness and shared responsibility is a particularly American principle first noted and celebrated by Alexis de Tocquevi

Nice collection from Ernest Adams, with whom I worked at EA.

Excellent article on innovation "People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea"

Now that we're curbing some of our "brilliant" ideas because we understand the economic externalities, might we reconsider some of the things we do for what the longterm social externalities might be?

Overview of phones that are much more open. Had my eye on the N800 for a while...

1. Multicellularity 2. The eye 3. The brain 4. Language 5. Photosynthesis 6. Sex 7. Death 8. Parasitism 9. Superorganism 10. Symbiosis

Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Real learning si a cycle of questioning, experimenting, and reflecting. It's how we convert curiosity into an innovative solution, so learning must BE the work, not something separate fr

increased connectivity in the 18th century - through scientific journals, postal mail, the advent of the encyclopedia and other reference works - is an increased connection between two different types of knowledge, “propositional” and “prescriptive

Paper or plastic? Neither, say William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Why settle for the least harmful alternative when we could have something that is better--say, edible grocery bags!

"It's that man down the corridor," he explained. "Every time I go by his office he's just sitting there with his feet on his desk. He's wasting your money." "That man," Ford replied, "once had an idea that saved us millions of dollars. At the time, I bel

The Center for Law and Innovation of the University of Maine School of Law supports Maine's investments in science and technology by studying and teaching about the role of intellectual property law in economic development.

blo Picasso did this copy of a Raphael drawing when he was 17 years old,” the professor told the students. “What have you people done lately?” It’s a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday. It surfaces

Teaching English in Taiwan Working in Taiwan Overseas

The goal of the GIDb is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and videogames.

Its creations earn patents, outperform humans, and will soon fly to space. All it needs now is a few worthy challenges