Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 11.

19 - September 22, 2012

ISSN: 1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

reverse engineering the human brain... Britain contemplates allowing babies with three-parent DNA... new MakerBot replicator brings personal 3D printing to the desktop... driverless cars are getting closer... social-media gamification will be widely used to encourage innovation by 2015... print-on-demand books will soon be available in 105,000 locations... more than one in seven young Americans are disconnected from work and school... cities are becoming the laboratory for innovation and change... DARPA envisages sensors on icebergs to help track ships and submarines in the melting Arctic... Singapore, one of the world's most innovation-friendly countries, still lacks a breakthrough of its own... drought constrains electricity generation in the United States... scientist predicts the final collapse of Arctic sea ice within four years... complex systems scientists predict that global food riots are near... novelist Neal Stephenson teams up with a structural engineer to design and build a 20-kilometer space tower...

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. David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and other futures organizations.

More resources ...

a book by David Weinberger -- Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room... a link to the TV 2011 - The Future Channel website, a rich and wide-ranging collection of strategic foresight videos in the French language... a video presentation of the new MakerBot Replicator, launching a revolution in personal 3D desktop printing... a blog post by Brad Stone on the online distributed workforce ... David Forrest Innovation Watch

He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: Inside Paul Allen's Quest to Reverse Engineer the Brain (Forbes) - Paul Allen, the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder, has plowed $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a medical Manhattan Project that he hopes will dwarf his contribution as one of the founding fathers of software. The institute, scattered through three buildings in Seattle's hip Fremont neighborhood, is primarily focused on creating tools, such as the mouse laser, which is technically a new type of microscope, that will allow scientists to understand how the soft, fleshy matter inside the human skull can give rise to the wondrous, mysterious creative power of the human mind. Three-Parent IVF is a Chance to Create a Generation Free from Mitochondrial Diseases (Telegraph) - Science has taken human reproduction some way from its natural roots. Since the birth of the first "test tube" baby, Louise Brown, in 1978, we have seen babies created from donated eggs or donated sperm, and babies gestated in donated wombs. But one constant has not been overturned to date, the one which says children must be the genetic offspring of just two adults. For all the recent advances in Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART), the notion that a child could be born containing DNA from three people seems to move the game on to a whole new level of complexity and controversy. For this marks a profound, philosophical step change from what has come before, raising questions not only of safety but deeper issues of identity and parenthood. More science trends...

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Newsletter Archive

Previous issues

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories: The New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World (Wired) - Take the subway to an otherwise undistinguished part of Third Avenue in Brooklyn. Knock on the

door. Wait for some stylishly disheveled young man to open it and let you in. You've arrived at the BotCave -- the place where 125 factory workers are creating the future of manufacturing. The BotCave is home to MakerBot, a company that for nearly four years has been bringing affordable 3-D printers to the masses. But nothing MakerBot has ever built looks like the new printer these workers are currently constructing. The Replicator 2 isn't a kit; it doesn't require a weekend of wrestling with software that makes Linux look easy. Instead, it's driven by a simple desktop application, and it will allow you to turn CAD files into physical things as easily as printing a photo. Driverless Cars Mean No More Driver's Licences by 2040 (Wired UK) - The timeline for autonomous cars hitting the road en masse keeps getting closer. General Motor's Cadillac division expects to produce partially autonomous cars on a large scale by 2015, and the car manufacturer also predicts it will have fully autonomous cars available by the end of the decade. Audi and BMW have also shown self-driving car concepts, with the former working with Stanford University to pilot a modified TT up Pikes Peak. Meanwhile, Google is ripping along at its own rapid pace with a fleet of fully autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids that have logged over 482,800km. And the company has pushed through legislation that legalises self-driving cars in Nevada. California is close behind, and Google has also been busy lobbying joyriding lawmakers in Washington, DC. More technology trends...

BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Better Ideas Through Gamification (Innovation Excellence) - Gamification is the technical term for applying game-design characteristics to content and applications that aren't games. Typical gamification elements include such things as achievement badges, achievement levels, leader boards, virtual currency, points that can be traded or cashed in and progress bars or other visual meters to encourage people to complete a task. Stefan Lindegaard cites research by Gartner, which predicts that more than half of all companies which manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by 2015. "Some companies will want to test gamification with employees before taking it to a broader ecosystem," he writes. Lindegaard describes how The Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research group, uses social-media gamification for generating ideas about possible future scenarios: Participants tweet their messages and are rewarded with points and badges. Print On Demand: Major Announcement Could Change How

You Buy Books (Huffington Post) - Print-on-demand (POD) books could soon be everywhere, according to a major announcement. On Demand, the makers of the POD Espresso Book Machine currently installed in fewer than a hundred bookstores nationwide, have announced new partnerships with Eastman Kodak and ReaderLink Distribution Services. Under the arrangement, the company's POD technology will be made available to retailers who have Kodak Picture Kiosks, currently installed in 105,000 locations according to Publishers Weekly, including drugstores and supermarkets. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: The Tragic Geography of Disconnected Youth (Atlantic Cities) - More than one in seven young Americans are "disconnected" from work and from school, according to a report released Thursday by the Social Science Research Councils Measure of America project. Nationally, over 5.8 million young people (almost 15 percent) are disconnected -- a figure that grew by 800,000 as a result of the economic crisis, according to the report. Globally, the U.S. has a higher rate of youth disconnection than many advanced nations, including the United Kingdom (13.4 percent), Austria (11.4 percent), Canada (10.5 percent), Germany (9.5 percent), Norway (9.2 percent), Finland (8.6 percent), Switzerland (6.8 percent), Denmark (5.7 percent), and the Netherlands (4.1 percent). Cities as Labs for Change (Metropolis Mag) - Cities everywhere are entering a new era of unprecedented collaboration as well as competition. If they are to thrive, they need to be great places. Knowing this, local governments are working with architects, urban thinkers, technology mavens, and other key players in the private sector to design and construct sustainable buildings and districts as platforms for the future. A synergistic symphony of urban design and development is commencing, harnessing creativity, lowering economic barriers, and generating productive energy with healthy, inspiring environments. Cities, much like states in the past, are now becoming the laboratory for innovation and change. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS

Top Stories: To See in the Arctic, Darpa Might Stick Sensors on Icebergs (Wired) - Hyped-up fears of a coming Arctic war have, appropriately, cooled down recently. But Arctic ice is melting faster than ever, which could mean more activity -- military and commercial -- in an environment notoriously unforgiving to sensors and other location tools. Leave it to the Pentagon's far-out researchers at Darpa to work on a solution: an all-seeing network of sensors to track whats going on in the Arctic all year round -including, it seems, sensors placed on icebergs. According to a Darpa briefing, the agency wants to leverage "mobile floating-ice" for electromagnetic and acoustic sensors, and to help track ships and submarines. Singapore Seeks a Breakthrough to Call Its Own (Technology Review) - Singapore is ranked as one of the most innovation-friendly countries in the world. But underneath the success lurks an identity crisis: Singapore has never had a blockbuster invention or technology it can call its own. That's a stain on what's otherwise a Cinderella story of how a small island -- less than half the size of London -- transformed itself from a colonial backwater into the one of the world's most affluent, most fully wired cities in a single generation. That rise is attributed to luck and smart planning by a government that has plowed billions into infrastructure, R&D subsidies, and tax breaks to lure multinational corporations. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Electric Grid Operators Monitoring Drought Conditions (EIA) - Prolonged drought can affect power plants that rely on large volumes of fresh water for a variety of reasons. Though there have been few reported problems this year, lower water levels are a potential concern for grid operators and system planners during periods of extended drought. The map shows the relative size of electric power plants, expressed in megawatts, for the subset of power plants that reported operating cooling systems, by type, that withdrew water for cooling during 2011 (the latest full summer season of data available). Arctic Expert Predicts Final Collapse of Sea Ice Within Four Years (Guardian) - One of the world's leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years. In what he calls a "global disaster" now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof

Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for "urgent" consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures. Wadhams has spent many years collecting ice thickness data from submarines passing below the arctic ocean. He predicted the imminent break-up of sea ice in summer months in 2007, when the previous lowest extent of 4.17 million square kilometres was set. This year, it has unexpectedly plunged a further 500,000 sq km to less than 3.5m sq km. More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories: We are Now One Year Away from Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say (Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence) - What's the number one reason we riot? Hunger -- food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense, Motherboard reports. In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest. How Neal Stephenson's 20-Kilometer Space Tower Could Change Everything (IO9) - Novelist Neal Stephenson wants to create a 20-kilometer space tower, which could inspire people to believe in innovation again -- but also transform the way we travel in the air and into space. To this end, Stephenson has teamed up with structural engineer Keith Hjelmstad of Arizona State University in an effort to design and build the incredible space tower. The project is an extension of Stephenson's Hieroglyph story, and the Center for Science and the Imagination - an initiative that's working to bring artists and technologists together and "turn science fiction into reality." Stephenson, like so many others these days, is frustrated with modern society's lack of ambition when it comes to embarking upon really big projects. More future trends...

Just in from the publisher...

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest

Person in the Room Is the Room

By David Weinberger Read more... A Web Resource... TV 2100 - The Future Channel - A very rich and wide-ranging collection of strategic foresight videos in the French language. Multimedia... The MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer - MakerBot Industries introduces the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer, the companys easiest, fastest, and most affordable tool yet for making professional-quality models. Designed for the desktop of an engineer, researcher, creative professional, or anyone who loves to make things, the MakerBot Replicator 2 features 100-micron layer resolution, setting a new standard in professional looking models and true-to-life replicas. In addition, the MakerBot Replicator 2 enables users to make big objects, up to 410 cubic inches in volume. (4m 4s) The Blogosphere... My Life as a TaskRabbit (Businessweek) - Brad Stone "Standing in the living room of his luxurious two-bedroom apartment, which has sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, Curtis Jackson informs me that I am a terrible housecleaner. The apartment is one stop in the middle of my short, backbreaking, soul-draining journey into what Silicon Valley venture capitalists often call the distributed workforce. This is the fancy term for the marketplace for odd jobs hosted by the site TaskRabbit, the get-me-a-soy-latte errands offered by the courier service Postmates, and the car washing assignments aggregated by yet another venture, called Cherry. These companies and several others are in the business of organizing and auctioning tedious and time-consuming chores. Rob Coneybeer, managing director of the investment firm Shasta Ventures, which has backed several of these new companies, says the goal is to build a new kind of labor market 'where people end up getting paid more per hour than they would have otherwise and find it easier to do jobs they are good at.' "

Email: future@innovationwatch.com