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Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.14 - July 13, 2013 ISSN: 1712-9834
David Forrest is aCanadian writer andstrategy consultant. HisIntegral Strategy™process has beenwidely used to increasecollaboration incommunities, buildsocial capital, deepencommitment to action,and develop creativestrategies to deal with
complex challenges.
David advisesorganizations onemerging trends. Heuses the termEnterprise Ecology™ todescribe how ecologicalprinciples can beapplied to competition,innovation, andstrategy in business.
Highlights from the last two weeks...
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 changingthe 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 competingwith China in Africa... Africa's population is soaring... California'sSierra Nevada is being transformed by climate change... newwebsite links young farmers with spare plots of land... thenumber 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 tothe Siemens' Picture of the Future website reporting on majortechnology trends... a Nature video on progress in growingartificial hearts... a blog post by Frederic Filloux on data journalism...
David Forrest
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David is a member of the Professional WritersAssociation of Canada,the World FutureSociety, and otherfutures organizations.He is a member of theAdvisory Committee of the Institute forScience, Society and
Policy at the Universityof Ottawa.
Innovation Watch
SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories:
Breakthrough DNA Study Links B.C. Woman, 5,500-Year-
Old "Grandmother" (Vancouver Sun) - A groundbreakinggenetic study led by a team of U.S. and Canadian anthropologists
has traced a direct DNA link between the 5,500-year-old remainsof an aboriginal woman found on a British Columbia island, a
second set of ancient female bones from a nearby 2,500-year-oldsite and -- most stunningly -- a living Tsimshian woman from the
Metlakatla First Nation, located close to both of the prehistoricburials along B.C.'s North Coast near the city of Prince Rupert. The
findings are the first of their kind to be generated using powerfulnew 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 apeople'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 limitsof 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 "ElectrostabilisCardium" would do just that by using traits from an electric eel to
send out shocks at the first sign of a heart attack. Anotherconcept imagines an organ that has been modified with glands
from a leech, and can use the leech's saliva as an anticoagulantwhen it detects pressure from a blood clot.
More science trends...
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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories:
How Algorithms Rule the World (Guardian) - From dating
websites and City trading floors, through to online retailing andinternet 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 onsimilar 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, CEOof Automatic, a startup whose app gives users advice about how
they're driving while they’re driving. "But it's a black box. Youdon'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 diagnosticinfo that your car collects. It is not alone in seeing the car as an
innovation hub. Apple has been agitating to integrate Siri andmaps into car dashboards, and forward-thinking carmakers, such
as Ford, are starting to build apps on top of the car’s real-timetechnical data. But what's missing is the idea that powered the
smartphone explosion: Our driving experience would improvedramatically 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 likea cross between a Starbucks and a youth club. Bicycles are piled
high in racks; there is a ping-pong table in a corner. Young peoplesit at long pine benches, sipping coffee and poring over laptops,
the males looking as if they are taking part in a beard-growingcompetition. But do not be deceived by the laid-back atmosphere:
this is the London branch of one of the world's most successfuldesign consultancies, IDEO. When it started up in Silicon Valley in1991 one of its founders, David Kelley, said he did not want to
employ more people than could fit in a school bus. Today IDEOhas 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 viewcrowdfunding as a cheaper way to finance their business over
traditional bank loans. But little has been written from the
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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 Africa’s 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 yearsago or China 30 years ago, with the possibility of huge amounts of
catch-up growth.
How Africa's New Urban Centers are Shifting Its OldColonial Boundaries (Atlantic) - Twice as populous today asthe next biggest African country, Nigeria, which was cobbled
together as a colony 100 years ago, has always stood out on itscontinent as the most ambitious and in many ways fanciful
creation of British imperialism. Presently, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa is growing at sustained rates unmatched in modern
history. In this regard, Mali, Nigeria's resource-poor and largelydesertified West African neighbor, is fairly typical. The United
Nations projects that the country, one of the world's ten poorestnations, will see its population rise to nearly 50 million by mid-
century 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 earlierand 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 dyingover the next 100 years. As indicators point toward a warming
climate, scientists across 4 million acres of federally protected landare 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, producingwholesome food, and living the good life. But, of course,
agriculture is hard: the upfront costs are high, and the returnsuncertain. That's where Farmstacker wants to help. The winner of
last weekend's Hack//Meat event, in Palo Alto, it aims to link upyoung farmers with spare plots of land, minimizing their startup
costs, and giving established farmers extra income. It calls itself
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"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 streetsacross the country every day during rush hour, but the number of
registered vehicles on the road has begun to stagnate. MichaelSivak, a research professor at the University of Michigan
Transportation Research Institute thinks this may be a sign of alarger phenomenon: peak motorization in the U.S.
By 2030 over 50% of Colleges will Collapse (Futurist
Speaker) - Thomas Frey – "Over the coming decades, theamount of education we consume to stay competitive will increase
exponentially. However, the education we 'buy' will increasingly beon 'our terms' not on theirs. We will want education that is
relative, timely, available on-demand, and fits within a specificneed. 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 massfailure 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 andfutures.
A Web Resource... Pictures of the Future - Which technologies will shape our lives overthe next ten to twenty years? Siemens' Pictures of the Future magazine reports twice a yearon 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 activitiesat Siemens, and interviews with internationally-recognized experts.
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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 recipient’s immune system. The strategy is simple enough in principle. Firstremove all the cells from a dead organ — it does not even have to be from a human — thentake the protein scaffold left behind and repopulate it with stem cells immunologicallymatched to the patient in need. Voilà! The crippling shortage of transplantable organsaround 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 byGoogle. I was part of a 20-person jury, chaired by Paul Steiger, founder of Pro Publica. Wehad to choose from a shortlist of 72 projects divided into seven categories: data-drivenstorytelling, investigation, applications (all three for large and small media), and data- journalism section or website. Here are some quick personal findings."
Email: [email protected]
