I use this blog to gather information and thoughts about invention and innovation, the subjects I've been teaching at Stanford University Continuing Studies Program since 2005.
The current course is Principles of Invention and Innovation (Summer '17).
Our book "Scalable Innovation" is now available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Scalable-Innovation-Inventors-Entrepreneurs-Professionals/dp/1466590971/
"Elon Musk, co-founder, CEO, and chairman of PayPal, shares his background: He was accepted into Stanford but deferred his admission to start an internet company in 1995. His company was zip2 which helped the media industry convert their content to electronic medium. Then, he sold the company for over $300 million and never came back to Stanford." tags: youtube, lunchtalk, innovation, media, space
Pew Research Center released its report on Youtube and news. According to the report, Youtube now dominates Internet news and even beats TV in the current events category.
(July 16, 2012)
Seven years after it was developed by three former employees of PayPal, the reach of YouTube is enormous. The video sharing site is now the third most visited destination online, behind only Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook, based on data compiled by Netcraft, a British research service. According to the company's own statistics, more than 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The site gets over 4 billion video views a day. Slightly under a third of those, 30%, come from the United States.
Fully 71% of adults have used sites like YouTube or Vimeo at some time, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. That is up from 66% in 2010. And 28% visit them daily.
Even Google with its deep pockets and broad user base has trouble competing with Facebook, an established player in the social media industry.
Feb 28, 2012. WSJ -- Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three
minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to
seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to
comScore, which didn't have data on mobile usage.
Behind the lack of engagement are Google's difficulties in differentiating Google+ from Facebook.
Youtube seems to be a much better social media property for Google than Google+. Unlike Google+ it addresses a new need with a new technology.
If Google enters the enterprise market with Google Apps, then Google+ can become an internal enterprise version of social networking, especially on mobile devices.
TED's Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation -- a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter ...
Invention of air conditioning can be claimed by several people. But one person in particular, inventor and entrepreneur, Willis H. Carrier turned the technology into a highly successful business.
( this 6 min video clip is from a NOVA documentary)
You can trace the evolution of his thoughts and business models through his patents: from A Method for Heating and Humidifying Air (US Patent 854270 filed in 1906), to air conditioning of movie theaters in 1934 (see below).
From a theory perspective, note how the system "flips", from grafting the new technology onto old solutions, to accommodating and making it incredibly successful through building it right into the infrastructure.
I'm finishing up The Social Animal, by David Brooks. One phrase caught my attention because it illustrates current transition from documents-centric computer interfaces to stream-centric ones:
The unconscious treats information like a fluid, not a solid. (p.239).
With twitter, the humanity's unconscious found a way to satisfy its need for ceaseless stream of background chatter: crowd-wisdom, crowd-sourcing, crowd-everything.
I wonder, what would be the next step in this direction.
In a TED talk, Daniel Pink says that on creative tasks direct incentives, e.g. "the faster you solve the problem, the more money you get", make people perform worse, not better.
On one hand, we know, since Stanford psychologist Robert B.Zajonc's experiments on cockroaches, rats, chickens, and humans, that pressure and incentives improve a creature's performance on standard tasks. Cockroaches ran faster in familiar mazes when compete with other cockroaches; chickens peck faster at food when other chickens are around, etc. When the problem is unfamiliar, for example, a cockroach is given a new maze, the mere presence of other cockroaches increases the time the cockroach needs to solve the maze. To summarize, pressure brings out standard responses, usually, based on training and/or experience.
On the other hand, complete freedom of action doesn't necessarily brings creative results. Though Pink cites Google's 20% free time rule - it's often said that googlers are free to spend 20% of their work time on whatever they want - there's very little evidence that the rule works. My contacts within and around the company say that, due to lack of results, the program has been either completely scrapped or significantly reduced in scope. Besides, we all, even the creative types, face deadlines - there are papers to be written, inventions to be made, business deals signed, etc. Often, it's easy to mistake abundance of procrastination for lack of creativity.
Thus, we have a "creativity" dilemma:
- pro: We should use incentives and deadlines because they make people work harder to deliver on their tasks
- contra: W should not use incentives and deadlines because they bring up standard non-creative solutions.
Though I don't have a full solution to this problem, I believe at its crux lies the confusion between creativity and spontaneity. To me, there's seems to be an implicit assumption that creativity cannot be taught. Bot nobody really knows what creativity is. [Some, like psychologists R.E.Nisbett and M.Csikszentmihalyi, even say that creativity as a human trait does not exit at all.] Therefore, to solve the dilemma we have to question the "can't-be-taught" assumption", especially, in the area of technological creativity and problem-solving. In my personal experience, I was taught to be an inventor, and I either taught or helped other people to learn how to solve problems creatively. Some of it was spontaneous, but most of the time we relied on methods rather than luck.
tags: emotion, source, map, 10x, psychology, process
Friday, June 18, 2010
1963. A demo of a Graphical User Interface with the computer. During the interview, the reporter asks, "Can the computer work with a three-dimensional object?"
Isn't it amazing how in 50 years breakthrough ideas become "obvious".
tags: interface, computers, information, history, example, technology, video
The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds [1]. Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed. Whilst being carried, the shells offer no protection and place a requirement on the carrier to use a novel and cumbersome form of locomotion — ‘stilt-walking’.
Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only "Oh lord."
The company [Twitter] recently raised another round of funding at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
To twitt or not to twitt: that is the question.
tags: distribution, 10x, payload, youtube, five element analysis, information, infrastructure
A graphical score animation of Beethoven's 5th symphony. A marvel of beauty, complexity, and control.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Ray Kurzwell, arguably the Edison of our times, talks about patterns of exponential growth in information technology (YouTube video). He illustrates his predictions with various graphs, including successive accelerating S-curves (screen shot below):
Interesting throughout.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Seth Godin talks about his newest book "All Marketers are Liars".
02:50 into the video he says: "Technology gives you a shot at marketing".
This is control point of the first kind: "remarkable product", i.e. something that gets you a foot in the market's door. Two more control points to go: ... still need to find good words to describe them.
No one is taking credit for a presidential campaign ad buzzing around the Web via YouTube that plays off Apple Computer's famous 1984 Super Bowl ad teasing the introduction of the Macintosh. But bloggers have their own theories--and plenty of them--on its origin and its significance as an example of a new political advertising frontier resulting from emerging and converging media."
