Tag: innovation

Change Antibodies

In his book, Leading Change: The Argument for Values-Based Leadership, James O’Toole, an expert in management and leadership, observes that great thinkers throughout the world agree that “groups resist change with all the vigor of antibodies attacking an intruding virus.” O’Toole examines a number of cases in which a potentially beneficial institutional change was resisted and finds that the resistance occurs when a group perceives that a change in question will challenge its “power, prestige, and satisfaction with who they are, what they believe, and what they cherish.” He asserts: “The major factor in our resistance to change is the desire not to have the will of others forced on us.”

If ideas are to take root and spread, therefore, they need champions — obsessive people who have the skill, motivation, energy, and bullheadedness to do whatever is necessary to move them forward: to persuade, inspire, seduce, cajole, enlighten, touch hearts, alleviate fears, shift perceptions, articulate meanings, and artfully maneuver them through systems.

I have a hunch that I will be doing a lot of the battling Jon is talking about in 2005.

Steve Jurvetson on investment strategy

steve jurvetson, managing partner at draper fisher jurvetson, talks about some of the strategies they employ to invest their venture capital.
if too many partners at DFJ think an investment is a good idea, they get worried. they are receiving 30k business plans per year and prune it down to ~12 investments per year. they only invest in unique ideas, to diversify risk. “not what everyone else does”. there were many more points he made, but he was accelerating while he was talking 🙂 i really hope they put the slides online.

Uptake

The classic adoption theory segments us like this:

  • Innovators account for 2.5% of individuals in a system.
  • Early Adopters account for 13.5%.
  • The Early Majority account for 34%.
  • The Late Majority also accounts for 34%.
  • Laggards make up the remaining 16%.

via rob paterson

Backward or forward?

joel spolsky wrote an excellent article how microsoft shifted from making sure all applications continue to run on new os releases to rewriting everything.

Raymond Chen writes, “I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.”

Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle. The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product.

he goes on to suggest that microsoft is trying to save the rich client by all means necessary:

There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” You’ll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn.

Energy intensity

Worldchanging on a Moore’s law of efficiency. I wonder how much this is due to improvements in processes and how much due to shifts in value generation from the physical to the virtual.

From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of 1% / year. 1% / year yields a factor of 2.7 when compounded over 100 years.

2006-10-24: Rosenfeld’s Law

the energy required to produce 1$ of GDP has decreased by ~1% per year since 1845.

2008-02-19: Really puzzling how people can make dumb investments in “real estate” when energy efficiency has an IRR that beats most sectors.

McKinsey Global has an energy productivity plan. An additional $170b per year invested in energy efficiency can provide 17% internal rate of return and cut projected energy demand growth by 50% by 2020. We could use existing technologies to pay for themselves. It would provide up to 50% of the global greenhouse gas avoidance to get to a long term 550 ppm level of GHG in the atmosphere. This would reduce the energy demand in 2020 by 135 quadrillion BTU or the equivalent of 64m barrels of oil per day. Instead of needing 613 quadrillion btu in 2020, there would be a need for 478 quadrillion btu. (In 2003, the world used 422 quadrillion btu).

2008-05-10: Energy intensity

America’s energy intensity was falling by a 0.4% until the oil shock of 1973. It is now falling by 2% a year.

2019-10-04: Andrew McAfee is offering to take a number of bets centered around predictions and implication from his new book More From Less.

In 2029, the US will consume less total energy than it did in 2019. In 2029, the US will produce less total CO2 emissions than it did in 2019, even after taking offshoring into account. Over the 5 years leading up to 2029, the US will use less paper in total than it did over the 5 years leading up to 2019.

2020-04-24: Building energy efficiency

in the past 5 years, the efficiency of the best new and retrofit buildings improved by 2-10x, with terrific economic returns, simply because we became smarter about how to choose and combine the technologies. That can be done in vehicles and industry too: for example, 2x or 3x car efficiency at comparable cost.

Fusing math and art

A 22-year-old MIT professor whose work fuses art, science, work and play is the recipient of a $500K MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the genius grant. Assistant Professor Erik Demaine of electrical engineering and computer science – who last month was called one of the most brilliant scientists in America by Popular Science magazine – is one of the youngest people ever selected for the fellowship and the youngest of the 24 named this year.

interesting combination of approaches. there is so much to explore here.

Tesla Magnifying Transmitter

The Magnifying Transmitter produced thunder which was heard from his lab as far away as Cripple Creek. He becomes the first man to create electrical effects on the scale of lightning by creating bolts 42 meters in length. People near the lab would observe sparks emitting from the ground to their feet and through their shoes. Some people observed electrical spark from the fire hydrants. The area around the laboratory would glow with a plasmic blue corona. One of Tesla’s experiment with the Magnifying Transmitter destroyed Colorado Springs Electric Company’s generator, by back feeding the city’s power generators, and blacked out the city.

very nice account of the life of “the inventor of the 20th century”, nikola tesla.

Tale of 2 cities

There’s a new partnership between the greater area Zurich (Switzerland) and the San Francisco Bay Area. Founding members of the “San Francisco – Zurich Initiative” are so far Richards Fredericks (former US ambassador in Switzerland), Universities of Berkeley and Stanford, University and ETH of Zurich, Swiss Re and ZKB, Opera of Zurich and the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce. The governments of the 2 cities already indicated interest in supporting the initiative.

very cool, to see 2 of my favorite cities working together like this. whether this will have any discernible impact remains to be seen, but still. also, tobias seems to have moved from postnuke to typepad. i guess he would have made a good beta tester for KAYWA.