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5.03.07
HBR’s list of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007
HBR’s annual survey of ideas and trends that might make an impact on business. A good reading, the following ideas/trends I will certainly follow.
Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds recommend to spend marketing dollars helping large numbers of ordinary people to reach and influence others.
… my colleague Peter Odds and I have found out that influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don’t seem to be required at all.
I already posted several times on this subject (recently, the Mass Customization Tagung in Salzburg). In this article, Eric von Hippel addresses the role of governments fostering innovation. He mentions Denmark, since in 2005 the Danish government became the first in the world to establish as a national priority, namely strengthening user-centered innovation..
See also this link.
The president of the Santa Fe Institute explains their findings on social organisations (including cities).
Although we can’t yet predict how specific cities or companies will evolve, we’ve found general mathematical relationships between population size, innovation, and wealth creations that may have important implications for growth strategy in organizations. We did indeed find that cities manifest power-law scaling similar to the economy-of-scale relationships observed in biology: a doubling of population requires less than a doubling of certain resources.
However interesting, this scaling did not apply to innovation and wealth creation (measured in this experiment with patent activity, number of supercreative people, wages, GDP). The exponent was around 1.2, meaning that a doubling of population is accompanied by more than a doubling of creative and economic output. Basically, this growth is unbound if the social system innovates at a continually accelerating rate. Is this also true for organisations? The social and structural similarities between cities and firms suggests this (most probably with the limiting factor of accelerating innovation cycles, as this is often a major advantage of small companies).
Dirk Helbing at TU Dresden is involved in this research.
Clay Shirky shortly analysis the open source software movement in order to argue about open innovation systems.
In systems where anyone can try anything, the good has to be filtered from the bad after the fact. The cost of trying to prevent bloggers from saying stupid or silly things, for example, would be high, whereas the cost of allowing anyone to publish anything is low. … The middle way - publish and then filter - keeps the enterprise aloft.
David Weinberger created the term accountabalism: the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil. In his essay, he writes about the beliefs and practices of accountabalims (it assumes perfection, is blind to human nature and more).
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