If you read only one article this week, read, “The Phone Is Smart, but Where’s the Big Idea?” Here’s just a taste:

I used a smartphone GPS to find my way through the cobblestoned maze of Geneva’s Old Town, in search of a handmade machine that changed the world more than any other invention. Near a 13th-century cathedral in this Swiss city on the shores of a lovely lake, I found what I was looking for: a Gutenberg printing press.

“This was the Internet of its day — at least as influential as the iPhone,” said Gabriel de Montmollin, the director of the Museum of the Reformation, toying with the replica of Johann Gutenberg’s great invention. It used to take four monks, laboring in a scriptorium with quills over calfskin, up to a year to produce a single book.

With the advance in movable type in 15th-century Europe, one press could crank out 3,000 pages a day. Before long, average people could travel to places that used to be unknown to them — with maps! Medical information passed more freely and quickly, diminishing the sway of quacks. And you could find your own way to God, or a way out of believing in God, with access to formerly forbidden thoughts.

The printing press offered the prospect that tyrants would never be able to kill a book or suppress an idea. Gutenberg’s brainchild broke the monopoly that clerics had on scripture. And later, stirred by pamphlets from a version of that same press, the American colonies rose up against a king and gave birth to a nation.

Intrigued? You can read the entire article here

I’m a non-tech guy now working in a high-tech organization. Often, my head spins when I see the kind of technologies that are now changing our lives.

That’s why I was so taken by and article entitled, “Disruption Is the New Normal.” Here’s part of what the writer said:

On a trip over the holidays, my wife rolled her eyes when I realized we’d left the Garmin at home and said we’d have to get a GPS for the rental car. She pointed to the Google Maps app on her mobile phone and said: “I bet this works even better.” It did. We benefited from the kind of technological disruption that is great for consumers, but brutal for businesses trying to survive rapid change and perhaps impossible for government regulators trying to keep up.

A generation ago, the Rand McNally atlas was the state of the art in navigation. Then Garmin, TomTom and other innovators developed satellite-based GPS devices. But barely a decade later, Google added constantly updated navigation to its maps and made them easily accessible as an app on mobile phones for the unbeatable price point of zero. The market value of stand-alone GPS makers fell as much as 85%.

This is the radical new normal for business, according to authors Larry Downes and Paul Nunes. “Before the information age, conventional wisdom held that new markets were created from the top down,” they write in their new book, “Big Bang Disruption.” Analog-era business strategies have been disrupted. Business guru Michael Porter once told companies they could get competitive advantage if they picked one strategy among premium pricing, cost savings or focusing on market niches. In the 1990s, Clayton Christensen urged executives to overcome what he called the innovator’s dilemma by moving fast once newcomers entered markets with lower-quality, lower-priced products.

But powerful new technologies like cloud computing and big data allow entrepreneurs to develop products and services that are “simultaneously better, cheaper, and more customized,” Messrs. Downes and Nunes write. “This isn’t disruptive innovation. It’s devastating innovation.”

Intrigued? You can read the entire article here.

Last week, I posted a technology blog post that talked about the grinding lifestyle in Silicon Valley. Frightening stuff.

Another thing that Silicon Valley brings to mind is the idea of the “Lone Genius.” Their names pop right to mind: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others.

However, the idea of the “lone genius” has become something of an urban legend especially as it involves innovation.

But Joshua Wolf Shenk challenges that in his new book, Powers of Two. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times review of his book:

The pair is a precious unit — private, generative, even holy. We can explore a couple’s inner workings if we have an invitation to do so. Otherwise, we must use any available external means: letters in archives, revealing anecdotes, loose-lipped quips in interviews. In order to understand creativity, we must learn from couples, Joshua Wolf Shenk argues in his new book, “Powers of Two.” Defying the myth of the lone genius, he makes the case that the chemistry of creative pairs — of people, of groups — forms the primary (albeit frequently hidden) structural basis of innovation.

Pairs don’t often let us pry them apart, looking to see who contributed what. John Lennon wrote what would become “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Paul McCartney came up with “Penny Lane” as a rejoinder, yet their music is credited to both of them, written “eyeball to eyeball,” as Lennon put it, or “like mirrors” in McCartney’s view. Neal Brennan and Dave Chappelle have long agreed to keep private who wrote what in their comic sketches.

“People always ask Ulay and me the same questions,” the artist Marina Abramovic told Shenk about her former partner. “ ‘Whose idea was it?’ or ‘How was this done?’ . . . But we never specify. Everything was interrelated and interdependent.” The daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie said that her parents’ work was a fused endeavor. It’s nearly impossible to distinguish their contributions by looking at their laboratory notebooks, where handwriting by each covers the pages. Shenk’s “Powers of Two” is a rare glimpse into the private realms of such duos. He writes with his face “pressed up against the glass” of paired figures from the present and the past — adding the likes of Steve Jobs and Steve ­Wozniak, ­Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. ­Tolkien to the pairs mentioned above.

Intrigued? You can read the entire article here.

If you need more evidence regarding how much Silicon Valley has come to dominate our lives, you need only look at the statistics: In 2016, the five top U.S. companies based on market capitalization where all tech companies. That trend continues today.

Now this trend is moving into our kitchens. Amazon has bought Whole Foods. Some didn’t see this coming, but in a prescient article some years ago entitled, “Rethinking Eating,” here’s what the writer suggested:

Having radically changed the way we communicate, do research, buy books, listen to music, hire a car and get a date, Silicon Valley now aims to transform the way we eat. Just as text messages have replaced more lengthy discourse and digital vetting has diminished the slow and awkward evolution of intimacy, tech entrepreneurs hope to get us hooked on more efficient, algorithmically derived food.

Call it Food 2.0.

Following Steve Jobs’s credo that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” a handful of high-tech start-ups are out to revolutionize the food system by engineering “meat” and “eggs” from pulverized plant compounds or cultured snippets of animal tissue. One company imagines doing away with grocery shopping, cooking and even chewing, with a liquid meal made from algae byproducts.

You can read the entire article here.

Everyone agrees innovation is good…saying it’s not is like arguing against motherhood and apple pie. But what is innovation? How do you know if you “have it?” If you want more, how do you get it?

I always wondered about those questions, until John Michaelson’s article in the Wall Street Journal helped answer those questions. His thesis – that the financial crisis opened the economy to new forms of growth which are about to start pouring down – is compelling.

To no one’s surprise, much of it has to do with technology. Here is part of what he says:

Each decade for the past 60 years, we have seen a thousand-fold increase in world-wide processing power, bandwidth and storage. At the same time, costs have fallen by a factor of 10,000. Advances in these platforms, in themselves, do not produce innovation. But they facilitate the development and deployment of entirely new applications that take advantage of these advances. Amazing new applications are almost never predictable. They come from human creativity. That is one reason they almost never come from incumbent companies. But once barriers to innovation are lowered, new applications follow.
With that as a teaser, you can read the full article here.

Americans – like most people everywhere – have a conflicted relationship with artificial intelligence, autonomy, and robots. Popular culture has a great deal to do with this.

One of the most iconic films of the last century, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had as its central theme, the issue of autonomy of robots (the unmanned vehicles of the time). Few who saw the movie can forget the scene where astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole consider disconnecting HAL’s (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) cognitive circuits when he appears to be mistaken in reporting the presence of a fault in the spacecraft’s communications antenna. They attempt to conceal what they are saying, but are unaware that HAL can read their lips. Faced with the prospect of disconnection, HAL decides to kill the astronauts in order to protect and continue its programmed directives. While few today worry that a 21^st century HAL will turn on its masters, the issues involved with fielding increasingly-autonomous unmanned systems are complex, challenging and contentious.

At the next level down from the notion of robots becoming our masters is the issue of these robots taking our jobs. President Obama suggested as much in one of his last addresses as president.

There is vastly more heat than light on this issue. That’s why I found this article, “Learning to Love Our Robot Co-workers,” so revealing. Here is part of what it said:

“The most important frontier for robots is not the work they take from humans but the work they do with humans — which requires learning on both sides.”

Intrigued? You can read the full article here.

Does the government nurture innovation? Most people are polarized on this issue. But amid the noise, a thoughtful op-ed by Joe Nocera sheds some light where there is mostly heat. Here is part of what he said:

“Manzi’s essential point is that American innovation — the key to our prosperity — has always relied, to some extent, on government support. In the early days of the republic, he writes, Alexander Hamilton proposed government help for the developing manufacturing industries — “the high-tech sector of its day.” Hamilton’s basic insight, he adds, was “that the enormous economic value that innovative industries could offer the nation merited public efforts to enable their success.”

And for most of this country’s history, that premise was embraced. In the early 1800s, West Point was founded “in large part to develop a domestic engineering capability.” In 1843, “Congress allocated the money to build a revolutionary telegraph line from Washington D.C. to Baltimore.” In the late 19th century, the government made investments “in biology and health innovation.” Right up until the 1970s, Manzi writes, the free market was paved “with specific interventions to provide infrastructure and to promote incremental, innovation-led growth.” This was The American System.

And then came the age of computers, which, writes Manzi, caused “the center of gravity” for innovation to shift from large institutions — not just the government, but research-centric firms like Bell Labs — toward “newer, more nimble competitors.” Even here, though, government never completely went away. Much of the early Internet, after all, was either funded or developed by a government agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

Read more about nurturing innovation.

When most people think about innovation they think thing of things, of widgets. But widgets don’t innovate, people do.

Two Stanford professors teach a course that has a unique twist. It’s called “Designing Your Life,” and it’s the most popular course on campus. Why? People want to live more creatively.

Here’s how the New Times article that provides a window on the course, and on their book, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life”

You’re going to learn how to find a fulfilling career. You’re going to learn how to better navigate life’s big-moment decisions and kill your “wicked problems” dead. How? By training yourself to think like a designer.

After nine years of teaching their secrets to future Google product managers and start-up wunderkinds, Mr. Burnett and Mr. Evans are opening up the curriculum to everyone. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and “Am I living a meaningful life?” aren’t only subjects for late-night pot-fueled dorm hangouts, the men said.

“The question of ‘What do I do with the rest of my one wild and wonderful life?’ is on everyone’s mind,” Mr. Evans said.

Mr. Burnett recalled a conversation with Stanford’s dean of the engineering department, who was about to retire. “He said: ‘Can I take your class? Because I don’t know what I’m going to be now that I’m not the dean anymore.’”

Mr. Burnett added: “One of the meta-narratives out there is that you should figure it out by 25, or maybe it’s 27 now. Then there’s the other thing of failure to launch, that millennials are slackers. Part of the permission we give people is: Reframe this. You’re not supposed to have it figured out.”

Read more about how to think like a designer.

Can you be an engine of innovation where you work. If you DON’T work in Silicon Valley, you may think that innovation is something only done there. But wait, read more.

No doubt, Silicon Valley has changed how we work, for better or worse. Our smartphones keep us connected to the office all the time while internet searches bring the world’s information to our fingertips. But people may not realize that it is the subtler aspects of how tech companies operate that often have a more lasting effect on other industries.

The “agile” part of this increasingly popular management concept is simple: Rather than try to do giant projects that take months or even years, create small teams that do a bit at a time. This way, small problems don’t balloon into enormous ones hidden inside a huge bureaucracy. And progress can be measured in small steps — one little project at a time.

Read more about “You, the innovator”

If there is one “entity” that has fascinated America – and likely the world – it’s Silicon Valley. It’s where we look for innovation, for cutting-edge ideas, and for the products and services that influence our lives. While Silicon Valley is a catch-all phrase for both a region and an industry, to paraphrase the Willie Nelson song, “It is always on our mind.”

But what do we really know about Silicon Valley? The answer is: Not much. Now, Antonio Garcia Martinez has written and insider’s account: Chaos Monkeys. Here is part of what David Streitfeld offers in his review of Martinez’s book that really does take you deep inside Silicon Valley:

“The literature of Silicon Valley is exceedingly thin. The tech overlords keep clear of writers who are not on their payrolls or at least in their thrall. Many in the valley feel that bringing the digital future to the masses is God’s work. Question this, and they tend to get touchy. Anger them, and they might seek revenge. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel, outed by the local arm of the Gawker media empire, secretly financed a lawsuit to destroy it. Silicon Valley did not rise en masse and say this was seriously beyond the pale. No surprise, then, that there are so few books investigating what it really takes to succeed in tech (duplicity often trumps innovation) or that critically examine such omnipresent, comforting fables as “We’re not in it for the money.””

“Antonio García Martínez’s Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, a book whose bland all-purpose title belies the fact that this is a valley account like no other. The first hint that something is different here comes with the dedication: “To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.” This is autobiography as revenge, naming names and sparing few, certainly not the author. “I was wholly devoid of most human boundaries or morality,” he notes in passing. In other words, he was a start-up chief executive.”

“The heart of the book is the period García Martínez spent at his start-up, which was intended to allow small businesses to efficiently advertise on Google. It was an auspicious moment. While the rest of the world was struggling to recover from the recession, the office parks of the valley were full of aggressive young men who had made pots of money by being early employees of Google. To prove they were not merely lucky, they needed to score again. Everyone was terrified of missing the next Facebook or, a little later, the next Airbnb or Uber. Smart entrepreneurs capitalized on these fears.”

A thought provoking insider’s view? You can read the full article here