Scalable Innovation - a quiz (Session 2-2). Social Networking.

1. What trends can be identified in this Venture Beat article about Mark Zuckerberg's predictions?

2. Name major technology innovations that power the trends you've identified.

Examples of trend categories:

- Business
- Technology
- Science
- Finance
- Demographics
- Social
- Market
- Regulatory
etc...

Lunchtalk: (TED) Back to the Future

From deep in the TED archive, Danny Hillis outlines an intriguing theory of how and why technological change seems to be accelerating, by linking it to the very evolution of life itself. The presentation techniques he uses may look dated, but the ideas are as relevant as ever.

link

tags: lunchtalk, forecast, 10X, s-curve

The random walk of a killer's mind.

M. V. Simkin and V. P. Roychowdhury analyzed behavior pattern of a serial killer who murdered 53 people over a period of 12 years.

We propose a model according to which the serial killer commits murders when neuronal excitation in his brain exceeds certain threshold. We model this neural activity as a branching process, which in turn is approximated by a random walk.

Neat. I wonder if you can model the mind of a serial inventor within the same model. Maybe Edison's diary can be a good data source.

tags: mind, brain, information, social, forecast

Lunch Talk: Philip Tetlock on the fallability of experts.

Philip Tetlock is the Mitchell Professor of Leadership at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research areas and interests include the following: * Learning from experience: How do experts think about possible pasts (historical counterfactuals) and probable futures (conditional forecasts)? And how do experts respond to confirmation/disconfirmation of expectations?

tags:lunchtalk, forecast, knowledge

Mental time travel

Since past is fact and future is fiction, common sense might suggest that different cognitive mechanisms underlie recollection of past events and construction of future ones. There is a fundamental causal asymmetry, and one simply cannot know the future as one knows the past. However, various lines of evidence suggest that mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes(Suddendorf & Corballis 1997). Normal adults report a decrease in phenomenological richness of both past and future episodes with increased distance from the present (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004). The temporal distribution of past events people envisage follows the same power function as the temporal distribution of anticipated future events (Spreng & Levine 2006).
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975

It's quite possible that foresight is, at least in part, a skill that allows us to construct imaginary situations, either in the past or in the future. Maybe that is why exercises like The Three Magicians a The Nine-screen View are so useful during invention sessions.

Reference:
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975 Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007. The evolution of foresight. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2007) 30, 299–351.

tags: creativity, forecast, magicians, 3x3, technique, teaching, method, quote

Surprisingly accurate predictions from 1968:

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies “buy,” and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

This is very close to utility computing of today. On the other hand, predicting physical infrastructure proved to be much more difficult:

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away....

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart.

Somewhat predictably, descriptions of "final needs", like business travel, shopping, and etc. are very well understood. The difficulties arise when people try to forecast change in the often "invisible" infrastructure: roads, networks, transportation devices. The bigger the system, the greater the discrepancy. The same pattern shows up in people's inventive thinking. They tend to focus their effort on "tools", i.e. elements and applications that fulfill a well understood function, and forget about the "distribution", i.e. infrastructure that enables scalable growth.

I wonder if this another case of the availability heuristics bias.