Creation through recombination In one sense, there are no new inventions. All technological creations are simply combinations of existing physical elements. What makes something new and remarkable isn’t its pieces; it’s how they fit together. Human ideas fit things together, and human perceptions value the new whole. Those new wholes, in turn, become pieces for future inventions. One of the greatest, most definitive assertions that a “whole” innovation is greater than the sum of its parts is in the movie Flash of Genius. People constantly create by recycling. The 21st century will see more recipes than any other so far. I don’t think we can quite yet grasp the power of information sharing over the internet. Before the web, we only had books and hearsay. As broadband-powered networks penetrate more and more vacuums, the winds of information and innovation will blow harder. Every bit of information you share online is like a little karmic breeze that could turn into anything from a draft to a gale.
What’s 20 percent of your time worth? Photo via floridahistory.org At this point, Google’s “20 percent time” system is pretty well known and actually pretty old in internet time. In the words of a Google engineer in 2006: The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy [at Google], enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that’s broken, you can use the time to fix it. It’s also been hotly debated on various blogs and web forums the last few years. Recently, Chris Trimble at the Harvard Business Review blog voiced his opinion and stirred things up a bit again. It’s probably best to view Google’s stated policy with at least some mild skepticism. The main part of Chris’s argument is based on his belief that free time might generate a lot of ideas, but few, if any, of them will likely see production. If you know me, you’ll probably guess correctly that I don’t accept this view.
Empowered by Josh Bernoff Yeah, right. Innovate like Apple. You can do it. One of the smartest guys I know is James McQuivey, who works with me at Forrester Research. It's very human to think about the linear evolution that created a product like the iPad. It's also wrong. In fact, breakthrough new products come about from a combination of forces. You can do this too. Exploit the adjacent possible. It's not that easy, you say. Photo by Grant Robertson via Flickr. Keep Up With The Pace Of Change By Innovating The Adjacent Possible We live in a world punctuated by big innovations. From fire and the wheel down to the light bulb and the iPad, we mark the march of history by the steady beat of transformative innovations. Except that steady beat is no longer so steady. The rate at which these life-altering innovations are coming to market is accelerating so quickly that it's no longer sufficient to invoke even Moore's Law to explain them. Not only are new things being introduced more swiftly than before but consumers are adopting them more rapidly than before. This is both exciting and maddening. Our approach is called "innovating the adjacent possible" and it's fast, messy, and for long-timers it will be counterintuitive. Under the heading of “put up or shut up,” we can’t propose an approach for generating the next big product if we’re not willing to prove that it works.
THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE (STUART KAUFFMAN): In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. Definitions are neither true nor false; they're useful or useless. Once I had this definition, my next step was to create and write about a hypothetical chemical autonomous agent. Imagine that inside the cell are two kinds of molecules—A and B—that can undergo three different reactions.
fipC0320A3 - Just another WordPress site Au sein de l’Internet, différentes communautés connectées sont présentes. Elles se retrouvent autour d’un « logiciel social », permettant aux différentes personnes de se donner des rendez-vous, de discuter ou de collaborer sur un projet commun. Dans ces communautés, nous pouvons voir différentes sortes de relations : One to one, correspondant à une communication mail, ou par messagerie instantanée ; One to many, correspondant à une communication via pages web ou blogs ; Many to many, correspondant à une communication via des forums ou des wikis. Grâce aux différents sites communautaires, des sources d’informations précieuses riches d’informations sont disponibles. C’est ici qu’intervient SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities). De plus, afin de mieux structurer les données, un vocabulaire spécifique a été mis en place. Community : c’est le concept de plus haut niveau, qui permet de regrouper d’autres objets ; Space : un espace générique de stockage de données ; Sources :