Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 13.

07 - April 5, 2014

ISSN:
1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

new study suggests the brains of children with autism contain disorganized patches... bioengineers are creating a four-organ human replica for experimentation... the UAE government plans to deliver official packages using drones... ten emerging technologies that will reshape the future... Facebook team will develop drones and satellites to expand Internet access across the world... Google and Facebook in a battle for the future... fewer millennials are affiliated with traditional banks... Europe's smaller languages fight to survive... Huawei products in the internet backbone are triggering U.S. security concerns... India is one of the fastest-growing markets for eCommerce... 2,600-page United Nations report catalogues the risks from climate change... Australia wins an international lawsuit against Japan's whaling program... algorithms will do more and more of the thinking in the world... 100 cities will soon have their first-ever Chief Resilience Officers...

David Forrest is a Canadian writer and strategy consultant. His Integral Strategy process has been widely used to increase collaboration in communities, build social capital, deepen commitment to action, and develop creative strategies to deal with complex challenges. David advises organizations on emerging trends. He uses the term Enterprise Ecology to describe how ecological principles can be applied to competition, innovation, and strategy in business.

More resources ...

a new book by Patricia Nolan-Brown, Idea to Invention: What You Need to Know to Cash in on Your Inspiration.... a link to the website for The Good Judgment Project, where thousands of people around the world predict global events... video of a discussion at the Harvard Bookstore, where Erik Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfeed discuss their book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant

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David is the founder and president of Global Vision Consulting Ltd., a strategy advisory firm. He is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

Technologies... a blog post by David Meyer on surveillance fears and the growing caution about using the internet...
David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: An Unexpected Discovery in the Brains of Autistic Children (Wired) - Nobody knows what causes autism, a condition that varies so widely in severity that some people on the spectrum achieve enviable fame and success while others require lifelong assistance due to severe problems with communication, cognition, and behavior. Scientists have found countless clues, but so far they don't quite add up. The genetics is complicated. The neuroscience is conflicted. Now, a new study adds an intriguing, unexpected, and sure-to-be controversial finding to the mix: It suggests the brains of children with autism contain small patches where the normally ordered arrangement of neurons in the cerebral cortex is disrupted. Liver Replica is First Step to Creating a Lab 'Microhuman' (Wired UK) - A team of bioengineers has announced it's one step closer to creating a four-organ human replica for experimentation. Much of the work currently being done to engineer human organs through 3D printing and various other techniques is not carried out with the aim of delivering a fully-fledged implantable transplant candidate. Of course that's the ultimate aim, but for now these tiny replicas -- sometimes only half a millimetre in size for the sake of cost -- are being developed to test drugs. "We have picked a scale that is between microhuman and millihuman." A multi-institutional team is attempting to engineer a connected human liver, heart, lung and kidney for this purpose through a five-year $19 million (11 million) project known as Advanced Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyser. More science trends...

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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories: Fingerprint and Eye-Scanning Drones to Make Deliveries in UAE (Mashable) - Amazon drones may make quick deliveries to your house in the future, but the United Arab Emirates government is looking to add similar technology to its skies much sooner -- within a year. The UAE government detailed a prototype of a drone that would deliver official packages and personal documents such as driver's licenses and ID cards right to citizen doorsteps, per a Reuters report. To keep the cargo secure, the drones would be equipped with fingerprint and retina scanners to make sure they are delivering to the correct recipients. Top Ten Emerging Technologies Which Will Change Your Life (Telegraph) - Computers operated by the power of thought, wearable technology and advanced cancer treatments are among the top ten emerging technologies which will reshape the future, a new report claims. The World Economic Forum has compiled a list of the most potentially influential technologies currently being developed which also includes mining metals from the desalination of sea water and super-light cars made using carbon-fibre elements. Each innovation was selected for its capacity to have a real and positive impact on the world, according to the WEF's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies which made its selections with the help of leading figures from industry and academia. More technology trends...

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BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Facebook's Connectivity Lab Will Develop Advanced Technology to Provide Internet Across the World (GigaOM) - The Internet.org initiative will rely on a new team at Facebook called the Connectivity Lab, based at the company's Menlo Park campus, to develop technology on the ground, in the air and in space, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. The team will develop technology like drones and satellites to expand access to the internet across the world. "The team's approach is based on the principle that different sized communities need different solutions and they are already working on new delivery platforms -including planes and satellites -- to provide connectivity for communities with different population densities," a post on Internet.org says.

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Move Over, Glass: With Oculus Acquisition, Facebook OutGoogles Google (Forbes) - There's not much the founders of Google disdain more than timid thinking. "Companies are doing the same incremental things they were doing 50 years ago," CEO Larry Page said at the TED conference just last week. "That's not what we need. Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change." Today, for once, Google looks pretty darn incremental, thanks to Facebook and its $2 billion purchase of Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Millennial Generation Less Likely to Make Use of Traditional Banks (Los Angeles Times) - Money habits are setting the millennial generation apart from older Americans, including the fact that fewer of them are affiliated with traditional banks. The findings come from a survey of more than 25,000 adults aged 18 and older by the Washington-based FINRA Financial Investor Education Foundation. The survey has an estimated margin of error of 0.5%. "Making up nearly a third of the population, millennials are a significant force in the U.S. economy," the survey said. At Risk of Digital Extinction: Europe's Smaller Languages Fight to Survive (Guardian) - Smaller languages are not being given a chance to evolve and keep up to speed in the digital age, because larger languages -- particularly English, with between 3050% of online content, and increasingly Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic -- have become the dominant languages of the digital universe, squeezing out smaller languages along the way. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: How Huawei Became the NSA's Worst Nightmare (Wired UK) - An unfamiliar name to American consumers, Huawei produces products that are swiftly being installed in the internet backbone in many regions of the world, displacing some of the western-built equipment that the NSA knows -- and presumably knows how to exploit -- so well. That obstacle is growing bigger each year as routers and other networking equipment made by
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Huawei Technologies and its offshoot, Huawei Marine Networks, become more ubiquitous. The NSA and other US agencies have long been concerned that the Chinese government or military -Huawei's founder is a former officer in the People's Liberation Army -- may have installed backdoors in Huawei equipment, enabling it for surveillance. But an even bigger concern is that with the growing ubiquity of Huawei products, the NSA's own surveillance network could grow dark in areas where the equipment is used. The Great Indian Startup Movement (IEET) - When Social Media Marketing company, ViralMint, launched in 2011 the initial plan was to move out of India within seven months. Instead, the market acted like a funnel; eCommerce companies sprung up left right and centre and a constant stream of new customers flowed in. "There is a lot happening in this space and there is a lot of innovation that goes on," says CEO & Founder Rohan Dighe. "It is a great market at least at this point in time." Indian eCommerce is now causing serious interest from wealthy bodies around the world. In February the Economic Times of India wrote: "For nearly a year now, some of the world's most renowned investors have poured in big money to get a slice of the action in India, one of the fastest-growing markets for eCommerce." More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Climate Change Report 'Should Jolt People into Action' Says IPCC Chief (Guardian) - The head of the United Nations climate panel said he hoped its report on the rising threat of climate change would "jolt people into action." The report is a 2,600-page catalogue of the risks to life and livelihood from climate change -now and in the future. Rajendra Pachauri, who has headed the IPCC for 12 years, said he hoped it would push government leaders to deal with climate change before it is too late. "I hope these facts will -- for want of a better word -- jolt people into action," he said. Australia Wins Whaling Case Against Japan in The Hague (The Australian) - Australia has won an international lawsuit against Japan's whaling program in the Southern Ocean, but Tokyo appears set to continue with its hunt in the North Pacific. The International Court of Justice has backed Australia's landmark case and demanded Japan stop its whaling program in the Antarctic "with immediate effect." But the country's hunt in the North Pacific wasn't part of the case, meaning it will be allowed to continue. And Nori Shikata, a spokesman for the Japanese Delegation at The Hague, has suggested it will.

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More environmental trends...

FUTURE
TRENDS
Top Stories: Algorithms Will Do More and More of the Thinking in the World (GigaOM) - At the New York Stock Exchange, machines make decisions in as short as 740 nanoseconds -- faster than any human can think. "This is a world where the speed of light has to be factored into the equations for buying and selling," Quid founder and CTO Sean Gourley said at the Structure Data conference. Like trading, which Gourley noted is mostly done by machines, bots now make up most of our web traffic. Within the time it takes to load a page, algorithms determine where a user is located, what they like and what types of ads to serve. More and more, algorithms are ruling our world. And as they continue to get smarter, our relationship with them will evolve. 100 Cities Will Soon Have Their First-Ever Chief Resilience Officers (Fast Company Co.EXIST) - Over a year and a half after Hurricane Sandy hit New York, thousands of people still aren't back in their homes. Months after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, the city of Tacloban still doesnt have electricity. What does it take for cities to have the capacity to bounce back quickly after disasters, especially at a time when climate change is making major disasters much more likely? Part of the answer, perhaps, is a job that's never existed before: Cities are beginning to hire chief resilience officers. The role comes as part of the Rockefeller Foundations 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge, which is putting $100 million into helping build future-proof cities; for the selected cities, a salary for a chief resilience officer is part of the prize. More future trends...

From the
publisher...

Idea to Invention: What You Need to Know to Cash in on Your Inspiration

By Patricia Nolan-Brown Read more...

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A Web Resource... The Good Judgment Project - The Good Judgment Project is a fouryear research study organized as part of a government-sponsored forecasting tournament. Thousands of people around the world predict global events. Their collective forecasts are surprisingly accurate. Multimedia... Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age (Forum Network) - Harvard Book Store welcomes the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfee, one of the principal research scientists at the Center, for a discussion of their book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The authors were joined in conversation by Meghna Chakrabarti, co-host of WBUR's Radio Boston.In The Second Machine Age MITs Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee -- two thinkers at the forefront of their field -- reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. (50m 17s) The Blogosphere... Surveillance Fears are Causing People to Be More Cautious Online And Thats Good (GigaOM) - David Meyer Two in five Americans are increasingly cautious about their use of the internet following the NSA surveillance leaks, according to a Harris poll commissioned by security outfit ESET. This is pretty much what I and many others predicted when the agencys data snooping scandal broke last year -- an outbreak of self-censorship. According to the poll, 85 percent of the 2,034 people surveyed were at least somewhat aware of the scandal. Of those, 47 percent (so 40 percent of the total) now "think more carefully about where they go, what they say, and what they do online." Over a quarter of the 85 percent are now doing less online banking and shopping, and just under a quarter are "less inclined to use email."

Email:
future@innovationwatch.com

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