Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.

13 - June 29, 2013

ISSN: 1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

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.

scientists build a desktop particle accelerator... online brain map shows details at a microscopic scale... future computer chips will function like the human brain... brain-machine interfacing is moving to the next level... Chinese brands are starting to go global... organizations that gain from randomness and uncertainty will dominate in the future... demographers discover the fundamental law governing the growth of cities... children not taught cursive writing can't sign their name... Chinese billionaire finds investors to fund an alternative to the Panama Canal... China plans to export higher education... Seattle is planting a seven-acre Food Forest to grow free fruits, vegetables, nuts and herbs... ocean warming and climate change will call for new insurance models... China plans to move 250 million people from rural areas to new towns and cities in the next dozen years... increasing crude oil prices explain most of the jump in food prices over the last decade...

More resources ...

a book by Dan Pontefract: Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization ... a link to the World Future Society website with ideas on the future... an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio show on imagining the future... a blog post by Jason Tester on the emerging coordination economy...

David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and other futures organizations. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: Physicists Build Super-Powerful Tabletop Particle Accelerator (PopSci) - The latest tabletop particle accelerator, built by physicists at The University of Texas at Austin, can generate energy and speeds hitherto reached only by major facilities hundreds of meters long. The results represent a huge step towards standardizing multi-gigaelectronvolt laser plasma accelerators in labs worldwide. "We have accelerated about half a billion electrons to 2 gigaelectronvolts over a distance of about 1 inch," Mike Downer, professor of physics says in a statement. "Until now that degree of energy and focus has required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of two football fields. It's a downsizing of a factor of approximately 10,000." 3D Brain Map: New 'BigBrain' Atlas Called Most Detailed Ever Created (Huffington Post) - The postmortem brain of a 65-year-old woman has been transformed into a new 3D map revealing the intricate architecture of the human noggin on a scale finer than a human hair. The map, known as "BigBrain," is freely available online, and has a resolution of 20 microns in each dimension, researchers report in a new study. More science trends...

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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories: Systems That Perceive, Think, and Act (Atlantic) - By bringing together the recent advances in neuroscience,
Previous issues

supercomputing, and nanotechnology, we're at the beginning stages of creating cognitive machines: inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the organic brain. The world needs these new approaches and needs them now. We're populating the Earth and Space with sensors, cameras, and microphones. But, the needle of information is lost in a haystack, nay, an ocean of data. Processing this tsunami of real-time, parallel, spatio-temporal, multi-modal data would be too expensive in power and too slow in speed of response for traditional machines, but would be ideal for a brain-like computer. Even more urgently, today's computers are hitting physical and architectural limits in their size and speed. Going Wireless and Restoring Memories: The Incredible Future of Brain Implants (Popular Mechanics) - Using electrode implants, deep-brain-stimulation therapies can zap neurons with tiny electrical pulses to treat Parkinson's, depression, and epilepsy. Cochlear implants restore hearing to the deaf, while artificial retinas can partially restore sight to the blind. Thoughtcontrolled robotic limbs have already enabled quadriplegics to feed themselves and reach out to touch a loved one, and may one day help people with paralysis to live independently. Yet technologies that interface between neurons and computers are still in their infancy. Here are four big improvements that will soon bring brain-machine interfacing to the next level. More technology trends...

BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Hare vs. Tortoise: How Chinese Brands Are Trying to Go Global (Wall Street Journal) - As China, Inc. looks to expand globally, it faces a hard reality: No matter how successful it's biggest brands are at home, few consumers abroad have any idea who they are. How to overcome that challenge is the hundred billion-yuan question. After attempting and largely failing to build their names by migrating to higher quality products -- what marketing professors Nirmalya Kumar and Jan Steenkamp call the "Asian tortoise" approach -- Chinese companies have recently decided play the hare instead. The hare approach -- attempting to leap ahead by acquiring established brands -- is tempting for Chinese companies, which are awash in cash and increasingly impatient to see results. Make Your Organization Anti-Fragile (Harvard Business Review) - In his book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes how some systems, such as biological ones, gain from disorder. Anti-fragile systems love randomness and uncertainty; going beyond resilience or robustness, they get stronger with stress and

volatility. Start-ups tend to be anti-fragile; large, successful organizations tend to be fragile. If lucky, a start-up grows and develops a success formula. With maturity, however, it can become rigid and fragile. Most successful organizations do not like volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, stressors, and chaos. Yet we are in a world where disruption and randomness are increasing. Organizations that gain from randomness will dominate, and organizations that are hurt by it will go away. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Demographers Discover the Fundamental Law Governing the Growth of Cities (MIT Technology Review) - When you live in a city, you can sense its pulse, experience its pace of life and get to know its unique character. It's almost as if a city is a living, breathing entity in its own right. That may be little more than the fantastical imaginings of city dwellers who tend to humanise all things inanimate. And yet, there is much demographic evidence to show that cities have their own unique identity, even though they are made up of millions of seemingly independent individuals. One test of the idea that cities are coherent entities is the ability to predict their future characteristics based on their past behaviour. Alberto Hernando at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and a couple of pals show that this is indeed the case. Cursive is Dying, Kids Can't Sign Their Own Names -- And That's a Huge Problem (Globe and Mail) - We live in a digital era. It can be argued everything is the exact same as it was 10, 15 years ago, that we've just added more screen-time to our daily lives. But there are some important -- and subtle -- changes that aren't all positive. There's now less of a focus on teaching children how to cursive write in schools, and while you might think, "So what? I learned how to cursive write and I don't do it on a regular basis," there are some stunning drawbacks to this. First and foremost: signatures. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Chinese Billionaire Says Nicaragua Canal Has Investors

(Bloomberg) - Wang Jing, the Chinese billionaire behind a $40 billion plan to cut a canal through Nicaragua, said he's successfully attracted global investors for a project that has been on the drawing board for more than 150 years. Work on the waterway should start by the end of 2014 and be completed within six years, Wang, chairman of Hong Kong-based HKND Group, a privately-held infrastructure development company he wholly owns, said at a press briefing in Beijing yesterday. He didn't identify any of the investors. The Next Phase of China's Global Soft Power Push is Exporting Higher Education (Quartz) - China's next major export might just be universities. China's Soochow University, based in the eastern city of Suzhou, is raising money to build a satellite campus in Laos where it will enroll around 5,000 students. Other Chinese universities have announced plans for campuses in Malaysia and in the UK. The push is the next step in China's billion-dollar charm offensive, also known as "soft power" diplomacy. The government has long tried to raise China's international appeal by funding and setting up hundreds of culture and language schools, Confucius Institutes, around the world. Now, education officials are encouraging Chinese universities to expand abroad -- much in the same way that Chinese manufacturers have been told to expand into other markets. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Food Forest Takes Shape in Seattle (Globe and Mail) Around noon on a hot Seattle day, Jeff Wright pauses shortly before lunch to survey the team's progress. In a garden plot, developing before him, dozens of volunteers shuffle about, pushing wheelbarrows of mulch, prepping planter beds and chiselling away at cement blocks to make retaining walls. At completion, the seven-acre Beacon Food Forest site -- the largest of its kind in North America -- is expected to produce a bounty of fruits, vegetables, nuts and herbs, entirely free for the taking. Rising Sea Temperatures Call for New Insurance Models (Continuity Insurance and Risk) - In some high-risk areas, ocean warming and climate change threaten the insurability of catastrophe risk. This is one of the conclusions of a research report issued today by the climate risks and insurance working group of international insurance think-tank, The Geneva Association. "There is new, robust evidence that the global oceans have warmed significantly," said John Fitzpatrick, secretarygeneral of The Geneva Association. "Given that energy from the ocean is a key driver of extreme events, ocean warming has

effectively caused a shift towards a 'new normal' for a number of insurance relevant hazards. This shift is quasi irreversible -- even if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions completely stop tomorrow, oceanic temperatures will continue to rise." More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories: China's Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million into Cities (New York Times) - China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years -- a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come. The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United States -- in a country already bursting with megacities. This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers. As the Cost of Energy Goes Up, Food Prices Follow (World Bank) - A large increase in crude oil prices stands out among numerous factors to explain most of the jump in food prices over the last decade. Indeed, as we found in a recent World Bank study, oil prices were more important to food prices than several other long-term price drivers, including exchange rates, interest rates and income. This finding has important implications for policy and for governments hoping to mitigate the negative effects of food price swings. More future trends...

From the publisher...

Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization

By Dan Pontefract

Read more...

Trends and Futures... New Books - New and not-yet-published books on trends and futures. A Web Resource... World Future Society -The World Future Society is an organization of people dedicated to exploring the future. Since its establishment more than 40 years ago, the Society and The Futurist magazine have endeavored to serve as a neutral clearinghouse of ideas on the future. Its mission is to enable thinkers, political personalities, scientists and lay-people to share an informed, serious dialogue on what the future will be like. Multimedia... Imagining the Future (Future Tense) - You could argue that imagining the future involves one part research, one part speculation and one part fanciful thinking. Alex McDowell, the film designer behind the cult sci-fi hit Minority Report, worries that sometimes we're too practical in our conjecturing about what lies before us. He argues that an embrace of narrative storytelling can help us understand the possibilities ahead. Dr. Maurie Cohen makes a contentious argument that the United States -- the world's great innovator -- has lost its ability to look forward. Professor Jerry Lockenour at the University of Southern California explains why he uses an old LA Times article to help his students understand the concept of the future. And Professor Naomi Oreskes talks about blending sci-fi and history to craft an academic journal paper that deals with future worries about climate change. The Blogosphere... Prepare Yourself for the Coordination Economy, Where Your House Builds Itself (Fast Company Co.EXIST) - Jason Tester "Looking at the history of networked technologies, there is an important underlying shift in the center-of-gravity, from communication, to commerce, to coordination. First, the early Internet dramatically changed the scope and speed of our communications with one another. Then, as it continued to mature, it disrupted commerce, (and our models for buying and selling are still in transition). At the Institute for the Future, my colleague Devin Fidler and I have been exploring the next story of network technology evolution that will unfold in the next decade, what we're calling the new coordination economy."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com