Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 11.

02 - January 28, 2012

ISSN: 1712-9834

How do you use Innovation Watch?

What is your interest in the future? Send us a short note (future@innovationwatch.com) by February 18, 2012, and let us know how you use our website. We'll post up to 10 replies. If we post yours we'll send you a $50 gift card redeemable on Amazon.com.

Selected news items from postings to Innovation Watch in the last two weeks... DNA traces Native American origins to central Russia... scientists halt bird flu research due to bioterror fears... edible microchips transmit real-time data on patient health... computer software improvises like a human artist... behavioral pricing could charge more for products people have 'liked' online... new smartphone app provides navigation directions in stores... online companies win online privacy fight... study shows that the digital divide is widening in the US... China looks for cheap investments in the US and Europe... China is filling a lending vacuum in Asia... Panama Canal widening offers an opportunity to redesign ships to reduce their environmental impact... declining biodiversity may have a greater environmental impact than climate change... Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler say the future will offer abundance for all... BBC readers make 100-year predictions... More great resources ... a new book by Scott D. Anthony - The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It... a link to Alchemy of Change website, on using the awesome power of technology responsibly... an @Google talk by Michael Nielsen on how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world... a blog post by Robert Safian on the Age of Flux, a time continually characterized by the dizzying pace of change caused by the global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies... David Forrest Innovation Watch

David Forrest advises organizations on emerging trends, and helps to develop strategies for a radically different future

SCIENCE
Top Stories: Native Americans Actually Came from a Tiny Mountain Region in Siberia, DNA Research Reveals (Daily Mail) - Altai in southern Siberia sits right at the centre of Russia. But the tiny, mountainous republic has a claim to fame unknown until now -- Native Americans can trace their origins to the remote region. DNA research revealed that genetic markers linking people living in the Russian republic of Altai, southern Siberia, with indigenous populations in North America. A study of the mutations indicated a lineage shift between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago -- when people are thought to have walked across the ice from Russia to America. Bioterror Fears Halt Research on Mutant Bird Flu (BBC) Scientists who created a potentially more deadly bird flu strain have temporarily stopped their research amid fears it could be used by terrorists. In a letter published in Science and Nature, the teams call for an "international forum" to debate the risks and value of the studies. US authorities last month asked the authors of the research to redact key details in forthcoming publications. A government advisory panel suggested the data could be used by terrorists. Forward Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Forward it Unsubscribe Don't want to receive the newsletter? Unsubscribe

Newsletter Archive

TECHNOLOGY
Top Stories: Medicine of the Future Arrives on High Street as Pharmacy Offers Pills With Edible Microchips to Help Doctors Monitor Patients' Health (Daily Mail) - Smart pills that tell patients and their doctors if medication is being taken properly are to go on sale in Britain. Patients take their drugs along with an extra tablet embedded with a tiny edible sensor which sends back information to a receiver in the form of a patch worn on the shoulder or arm. This tracks when the drugs were taken and the dose, as well as monitoring heart rate and body temperature. It also alerts a patient to when the next dose is due and records whether the patient is sleeping well or taking enough exercise. The Monet Machine? 'Art-ificial' Painter Improvises All Its Works And Often Surprises Its Creator (Daily Mail) - Simon Colton's 'Painting Fool' is computer painting software with a difference -- it improvises its work itself, like a human artist. To begin with, it was 'fed' with images to inspire it, but now it can simply be told themes -- or fed a news story -- and it Previous issues

will improvise. The idea of the Painting Fool -- an evolving software package which has won artificial intelligence prizes - is to come up with art in a similar way to a human. The software has been in development since 2001, and has evolved hugely during that time. It won an artificial intelligence prize in 2007.

BUSINESS
Top Stories: Could Shops Charge You MORE for Products You've 'Liked' Online? 'Behavioural Pricing' Might Let Them Do Just That (Daily Mail) Online shops already have a frightening amount of information at their fingertips -- from whether you've purchased from them before, to what sites you've visited before you arrive at their shop, accessible via browsing history. But new start-ups could move the idea to a new level -- harvesting information from sources such as Facebook and Twitter to 'tweak' prices to what customers are willing to pay. In other words, if you've 'Liked' something, prepare to pay for it. One web entrepreneur, Alex Gannett, founder of CampusSplash says that 2012 will be 'the year of behavioural pricing' -- a new type of e-commerce, where prices will be tweaked to include what customers are willing to pay. Map Apps: The Race to Fill in the Blanks (Businessweek) Visitors to the sprawling Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., often grab one of the fold-up maps available at the entrances to the four-story, city-block-size store. Without one, locating a particular genre can be "daunting," says Darin Sennett, the store's director of strategic projects. Since April, tech-savvy customers can download a smartphone app instead. Type in the title youre looking for and check a box to indicate your starting point, and the app displays the quickest route along with turn-by-turn directions. Just as MapQuest kicked off a rush to provide street-by-street navigation for Web surfers a decade ago, the race is now on to map the Great Indoors.

SOCIETY
Top Stories: Online Companies Win US Piracy Fight (New Zealand Herald) - Outspent but hardly outgunned, online and high-tech companies triggered an avalanche of internet clicks to force Congress to shelve legislation that would curb online piracy. They outmanoeuvred the entertainment industry and other old guard business interests, leaving them bitter and befuddled. Before Senate and House leaders set aside the legislation, the movie and music lobbies and other Washington fixtures, including the US Chamber of Commerce, had put in play their usually reliable tactics to rally support

for the bills. Digital Divide Widens, Research Finds (PhysOrg) Debabrata (Debu) Talukdar, associate professor of marketing in the University at Buffalo School of Management, and Dinesh K. Gauri, PhD '07, assistant professor of marketing in Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, compared survey data from the past decade and found that, while Internet access in the U.S. has increased significantly, the digital divide has actually widened in several key dimensions, including income and urban-rural separation. By late 2009, about 75 percent of U.S. adults were using the Internet, compared to about 48 percent in 2000. Despite this increase, there has been no significant change in access and usage based on age, gender and education.

GLOBAL POLITICS
Top Stories: Why China wants a piece of the U.S. (Fortune) - China's outward direct investment (ODI) is growing fast, despite an overall decline in the developed world. In 2010, China ranked fifth in outward investment with $68 billion, surpassing traditional investment giants such as Japan ($56 billion) and the United Kingdom ($11 billion). Chen Deming, China's Minister of Commerce, predicts that China's ODI will grow by 30% annually and outpace its inward investments from other countries within three years. The cash-rich Chinese businesses expect 2012, the year of the dragon, to be another big year and they are eyeing cheap targets in the U.S. and the European Union. China as Lender of Last ResortMore Than Just a Loan (Reuters) - China is filling a lending vacuum in Asia as European banks limp home to preserve capital, and is making sure loans have spin-off benefits for Chinese manufacturers and exporters, even at the expense of the rates they offer. Cash-strapped businesses looking to Chinese banks for loans would do well to have something to offer China in return -for big loans come with strings attached. Lending to foreign firms in need not only boosts Chinese banks' loan portfolios, but helps develop export markets for Chinese goods. "If it helps China, the banks will lend," said Vidhan Goyal, a professor of finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

ENVIRONMENT
Top Stories: Expansion of the Panama Canal Has Knock-On Effect for the Environment (PhysOrg) - Expanded sections of the Panama

Canal are due to open in 2014 following an eight-year programme to widen and deepen the waterway in order to increase capacity for liner shipping. This will remove the breadth restriction of 32.2m (known as 'panamax' in the shipping industry) that has constrained ships using the canal since it opened in 1914. In a paper published this month in the International Journal of Maritime Engineering, Paul Stott and Dr Peter Wright of Newcastle University, UK, argue this $6 billion programme offers the industry as a whole an opportunity to reduce its environmental impact. The Biodiversity Crisis: Worse Than Climate Change (PhysOrg) - Biodiversity is declining rapidly throughout the world. The challenges of conserving the world's species are perhaps even larger than mitigating the negative effects of global climate change. Dealing with the biodiversity crisis requires political will and needs to be based on a solid scientific knowledge if we are to ensure a safe future for the planet. This is the main conclusion from scientists from University of Copenhagen, after 100 researchers and policy experts from EU countries were gathered at the University of Copenhagen to discuss how to organise the future UN Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES - an equivalent to the UN panel on climate change (IPCC).

THE FUTURE
Top Stories: Why The Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think (Forbes) - A quick glance at the headlines lets us know the score: dark days ahead. With growing concerns about population size, economic meltdowns, energy shortages, water and food shortages -- this list goes on -- alarmists are having a field day. For the first time in a long time parents are predicting a worse life for their children than their own. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. We are now entering a period of radical transformation. Twenty Top Predictions for Life 100 Years From Now (BBC) The BBC asked readers for their predictions of life in 100 years time. Inspired by ten 100-year predictions made by American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins in 1900, many of you wrote in with your vision of the world in 2112. Many of the "strange, almost impossible" predictions made by Watkins came true. Here is what futurologists Ian Pearson (IP) and Patrick Tucker (PT) think of your ideas.

Just in from the publisher...

The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works,

How to Do It
By Scott D. Anthony
Read more...

A Web Resource... Alchemy of Change - Technology is today's alchemy. As its stewards, we have a solemn duty to use this awesome power responsibly. Alchemists of old were purported to be able to transform lead into gold: a metaphor for fully tapping that greater something that resides deep inside each and every one of us -- whatever we may choose to call it. How do we use technology in ways that best honor the "gold" that shines deep within us, our organizations, our communities and the other stuff we build?

Multimedia... Michael Nielsen: Reinventing Discovery (@Google) - In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book -- the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. (43m 24s)

The Blogosphere... Generation Flux (Huffington Post) - Robert Safian "DJ Patil, 37, is an expert in chaos theory who in a very short time has worked for the Defense Department, eBay, LinkedIn, Silicon Valley venture firm Greylock Partners, and a few other high-impact organizations. He first made a name for himself, however, at the University of Maryland, where he was a researcher on weather patterns. 'There are some times,' he explains, 'when you can predict weather well for the next 15 days. Other times, you can only really forecast a couple of days. Sometimes you can't predict the next two hours.' The business climate has entered a next-two-hours era, which I call the Age of Flux. This time, which will certainly last another decade if not more, will be continually characterized by the dizzying pace of change caused by the global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies. This is a moment when we most want a road map, and yet our visibility about the future is declining."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com