Innovation is about finding a better way of doing something. Like many of the new development buzzwords (which many of them are over-used on many business documents), the concept of innovation originates from the world of business. It refers to the generation of new products through the process of creative entrepreneurship, putting it into production, and diffusing it more widely through increased sales. Innovation can be viewed as t he application of better solutions that meet new requirements, in-articulated needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and society. The term innovation can be defined as something original and, as a consequence, new, that “breaks into” the market or society.
Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation article points out that there is a form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term and the inability to discern the difference between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence the conditions that lead to economic growth. The definition of innovation is easy to find but it seems to be hard to understand. Here is a simple taxonomy of related activities that put innovation in context:
- Novelty: Something new
- Creation: Something new and valuable
- Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility
- Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful
The taxonomy is illustrated with the following diagram.
The differences are also evident in the mechanisms that exist to protect the works: Novelties are usually not protectable, Creations are protected by copyright or trademark, Inventions can be protected for a limited time through patents (or kept secret) and Innovations can be protected through market competition but are not defensible through legal means.
Innovation is a lot of talked about nowdays as essential to businesses to do. Is innovation essential for development work? article tells that innovation has become central to the way development organisations go about their work. In November 2011, Bill Gates told the G20 that innovation was the key to development. Donors increasingly stress innovation as a key condition for funding, and many civil society organisations emphasise that innovation is central to the work they do.
Some innovation ideas are pretty simple, and some are much more complicated and even sound crazy when heard first. The is place for crazy sounding ideas: venture capitalists are gravely concerned that the tech startups they’re investing in just aren’t crazy enough:
Not all development problems require new solutions, sometimes you just need to use old things in a slightly new way. Development innovations may involve devising technology (such as a nanotech water treatment kit), creating a new approach (such as microfinance), finding a better way of delivering public services (such as one-stop egovernment service centres), identifying ways of working with communities (such as participation), or generating a management technique (such as organisation learning).
Theorists of innovation identify innovation itself as a brief moment of creativity, to be followed by the main routine work of producing and selling the innovation. When it comes to development, things are more complicated. Innovation needs to be viewed as tool, not master. Innovation is a process, not a one time event. Genuine innovation is valuable but rare.
There are many views on the innovation and innvation process. I try to collect together there some views I have found on-line. Hopefully they help you more than confuze. Managing complexity and reducing risk article has this drawing which I think pretty well describes innovation as done in product development:
8 essential practices of successful innovation from The Innovator’s Way shows essential practices in innovation process. Those practices are all integrated into a non-sequential, coherent whole and style in the person of the innovator.
In the IT work there is lots of work where a little thinking can be a source of innovation. Automating IT processes can be a huge time saver or it can fail depending on situation. XKCD comic strip Automation as illustrates this:
System integration is a critical element in project design article has an interesting project cost influence graphic. The recommendation is to involve a system integrator early in project design to help ensure high-quality projects that satisfy project requirements. Of course this article tries to market system integration services, but has also valid points to consider.
Core Contributor Loop (CTTDC) from Art Journal blog posting Blog Is The New Black tries to link inventing an idea to theory of entrepreneurship. It is essential to tune the engine by making improvements in product, marketing, code, design and operations.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Kati Pohjanpalo / Bloomberg:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for “foundational discoveries” in machine learning
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-08/two-scientists-share-physics-nobel-for-machine-learning
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker for “computational protein design” and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper — – Demis Hassabis, John Jumper share half the $1.1 million award — Remainder goes to David Baker for building new proteins
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/three-scientists-share-2024-chemistry-nobel-for-proteins-research
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae087/7808595
How diversity is driving insights into the brain
Scientists in Japan say that diverse teams and approaches are helping to uncover the brain’s complexity, from memories hiding in the spinal cord to the processing of optical illusions.
Spinal neurons can retain memories without the brain, aiding motor function.
Tomi Engdahl says:
We’re Entering Uncharted Territory for Math
Terence Tao, the world’s greatest living mathematician, has a vision for AI.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/terence-tao-ai-interview/680153/
Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence. The “Mozart of Math,” as he is sometimes called, is widely considered the world’s greatest living mathematician. He has won numerous awards, including the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, for his advances and proofs. Right now, AI is nowhere close to his level.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why did the Nobel Prize in Physics go to AI researchers this year? Surprising the academic community, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to AI pioneers John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for work ultimately still grounded in physics.
Why the Nobel Prize in Physics Went to AI Research Nobel committee recognizes scientists for foundation research in neural networks
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nobel-prize-in-physics?share_id=8460382&socialux=facebook&utm_campaign=RebelMouse&utm_content=IEEE+Spectrum&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR12UtOhM46XVWkgsO_LuAD1Qpw24dY4gVKGY-YPBJIxOJHAG3_VWbYWFbg_aem_LHQMBWabkhYeCpI_iAc0gw
The Nobel Prize Committee for Physics caught the academic community off-guard by handing the 2024 award to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for their foundational work in neural networks.
The pair won the prize for their seminal papers, both published in the 1980s, that described rudimentary neural networks. Though much simpler than the networks used for modern generative AI like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, their ideas laid the foundations on which later research built.
Even Hopfield and Hinton didn’t believe they’d win, with the latter telling The Associated Press he was “flabbergasted.” After all, AI isn’t what comes to mind when most people think of physics. However, the committee took a broader view, in part because the researchers based their neural networks on “fundamental concepts and methods from physics.”
“Initially, I was surprised, given it’s the Nobel Prize in Physics, and their work was in AI and machine learning,” says Padhraic Smyth, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine. “But thinking about it a bit more, it was clearer to me why [the Nobel Prize Committee] did this.” He added that physicists in statistical mechanics have “long thought” about systems that display emergent behavior.
And the connection between neural networks and physics isn’t a one-way street. Machine learning was crucial to the discovery of the Higgs boson, where it sorted the data generated by billions of proton collisions. This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry further underscored machine learning’s importance in research, as the award went to a trio of scientists who built an AI model to predict the structures of proteins.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brain imaging technologies like fMRI and electrophysiological recordings offer insights into neural pathways associated with pain, highlighting new therapeutic targets.
How a ‘pain-o-meter’ could improve treatments
Pain is defined subjectively, but an objective measure of the experience promises to transform its management
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03003-2?utm_medium=paid_social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=null&utm_term=null&utm_campaign=MLSR_OUTLK_ATT1_GL_PCFU_04EX9_PAIN-924&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMAABHdFHFVShqzBv_iKrjZyzxg17DrEvQRvqcoe71y-39pFTrz6hXVrNNXlZHw_aem_q1zmqeOMsKOvbZlTc5iSwA
The graduate student bears down on my arm with a force akin to a firm handshake. This pressure might not seem like much, but when concentrated on a patch of skin roughly the size of a small coin, the sensation gradually starts to hurt.
As discomfort escalates to pain, a sensor strapped to my chest detects changes in my heart rate, breathing pattern, skin conductance and other bodily responses. These physiological signals are processed through advanced algorithms to generate a pain score. Displayed on a smartphone app, my pain level is 4.
Had you asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten, I would have had no idea how to convey my impressions accurately. Yet, this kind of deeply personal, highly variable and imprecise self-reporting is exactly what most clinicians rely on.
many researchers now aim to bring a level of objectivity to the diagnosis of pain, through devices designed to eliminate the social and individual variables that contribute to the current inaccuracies. “People have been interested — desperate, really — for an objective measure of pain in humans for a long time,”
So far, no method for quantifying pain is definitive, and the diagnostic technologies under consideration vary. Some rely on brain imaging. Others involve measurements of bodily signals, such as pupil dilation, facial expressions or levels of certain biomarkers in the blood.
As well as information of the kind presented by the sensor that I wore, they are gathering eye-tracking and electrical-brain-activity measurements to identify a reliable signature of pain. The task is to extract meaningful patterns from this jumble of biological outputs, each of which is indicative, in its own way, of the pain experience. “It’s a lot of data,” Lin says. “It’s a challenging problem.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/12/remembering-john-wheeler-youve-definitely-heard-of-his-work/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/lagrange-points-and-why-you-want-to-get-stuck-at-them/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/14/the-biological-motors-that-power-our-bodies/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Organisms Created in Laboratory Are “Third State” Beyond Life and Death, Scientists Say
“The third state challenges how scientists typically understand cell behavior.”
https://futurism.com/neoscope/organisms-beyond-life-death
Tomi Engdahl says:
I’m a doctor and I threw away all my black cooking utensils. Here’s why I’m urging you to do it too
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/health/article-13960005/doctor-threw-away-black-cooking-utensils.html
The health professional revealed that black plastic cooking utensils contain toxic chemicals that can cause cancer.
‘They also increase the risk of hormone disruption, neurotoxicity, and reproductive and developmental toxicity,’ she said in a video.
Dr Desai only uses wooden or stainless steel utensils now.
Plastics from electronics are often recycled and incorporated into common household items, such as cooking utensils and children’s toys.
Black colored plastic has been found to potentially contain ‘alarming’ levels of toxic flame retardants from recycling processes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13957519/Scientists-urgent-warning-phone-bed.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
A study found 98% of participants used the Third Thumb successfully; 13% struggled initially. https://link.ie.social/C97jEf
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Would It Take To Recreate Bell Labs?
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/17/what-would-it-take-to-recreate-bell-labs/
t’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bell Labs, originally founded as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in January 1925. As an integral part of AT&T and Western Electric, it enjoyed immense funding and owing to the stable financial situation of AT&T very little pressure to produce results. This led to the development of a wide range of technologies like the transistor, laser, photovoltaic cell, charge-coupled cell (CCD), Unix operating system and so on. After the break-up of AT&T, however, funding dried up and with it the discoveries that had once made Bell Labs such a famous entity. Which raises the question of what it would take to create a new Bell Labs?
What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to-recreate-bell
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical equipment, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call anyone else.
This huge network required billions of dollars worth of equipment: telephones, switches, cables, amplifiers, repeaters, and so on. All this equipment was built by AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric. But it was designed and developed by AT&T’s research arm, Bell Telephone Laboratories, better known as Bell Labs.
To students of technological progress, Bell Labs is a giant. For decades, Bell Labs was considered not only the best industrial research lab in the world, but arguably the best research lab in the world, period.
One Bell Lab alumnus described it as “a parallel organization to almost all the academic institutions put together.”
Bell Labs is most famous for being the birthplace of the transistor, but that’s just one of dozens of major inventions and discoveries that originated there. Bell Labs also spawned: the silicon solar PV cell, the first active and passive communications satellites, the first videophone, the first cellular telephone system, the first fiber optic telephone cable, the quartz clock, Information Theory, Statistical Process Control, the UNIX computer operating system, and the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
Many of Bell Labs’ less famous inventions were among its most important: the discovery of compounds that could protect polyethylene from decomposing in sunlight isn’t typically mentioned on lists of Bell Labs’ most impressive achievements, but the patents for them were the most valuable that AT&T ever produced.
Among Bell Labs’ awards are 10 Nobel Prizes, 5 Turing Awards (the highest honor in computing), and 5 Draper Prizes (the highest honor in engineering). 36 Bell Labs staff members have been inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame (though not all for work they did at Bell Labs).
Bell Labs still exists today, as a subsidiary of Nokia, but outside the name it has little relationship to the industrial research powerhouse of the 20th century. Following the breakup of AT&T, Bell Labs was gradually carved apart through constant mergers and spinoffs to different organizations, and it has never achieved the heights it did in the 1950s through the 1980s.
Unsurprisingly, there’s perennial interest in recreating a Bell Labs-style research lab that steadily churns out world-changing inventions and discoveries. In a recent newsletter post, Noah Smith argues that we need an “energy Bell Labs” that can push U.S. energy technology forward, and he’s far from the only one to dream of recreating a Bell Labs-style organization. The idea pops up repeatedly.
Unfortunately, the conditions that made Bell Labs so successful were highly historically contingent and not the sort of thing that could be deliberately recreated. Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most other industrial labs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EPFL researchers develop the e-Flower device, unlocking insights into brain activity. https://link.ie.social/Kvmf07
Tomi Engdahl says:
CERN Confirms Ultra-Rare Particle Transformation, Hints at New Physics
https://sciencealert.com/cern-confirms-ultra-rare-particle-transformation-hints-at-new-physics
Tomi Engdahl says:
Expert reveals ‘frightening’ effect a can of Red Bull has on your body within minutes
It’s no secret that energy drinks are not good for you, but what is the impact they have on your body?
https://www.unilad.com/news/food-and-drink/energy-drink-red-bull-health-effects-312204-20241003
Tomi Engdahl says:
Two people ‘communicate in dreams’: Inception movie-styled sci-fi turned into reality
Participants were sleeping at their homes when their brain waves and other polysomnographic data were tracked remotely by a specially developed apparatus.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/two-humans-communicate-in-dreams-remspace
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ilmalämpöpumppuun kehitettiin merkittävä uutuus: energiankulutus putoaa jopa 75 %
Aleksi Kolehmainen13.10.202409:03|päivitetty14.10.202409:16EnergiaLämpöDigitalous
Nykyiset jäähdyttävät ilmalämpöpumput eivät aina hallitse kosteutta tehokkaasti, mikä voi lisätä energiankulutusta.
https://www.tivi.fi/uutiset/ilmalampopumppuun-kehitettiin-merkittava-uutuus-energiankulutus-putoaa-jopa-75-/cc6eb1a8-53d5-4f4a-8679-681e8d06ca54
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tällaista on olla kyborgi: Neil Harbisson kertoo, miksi hänen päähänsä on asennettu antenni
Neil Harbisson on maailman ensimmäinen virallisesti tunnustettu kyborgi.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20116641
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uudentyyppinen aivorappeumasairaus on iäkkäillä erittäin yleinen – vaikuttaa dementian taustalla
Helsingin yliopiston tutkimuksessa joka toiselta yli 85-vuotiaalta löytyi dementiaa aiheuttavan, uudenlaisen aivorappeumasairauden tautimuutoksia aivoista.
https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/uutiset/aivot/uudentyyppinen-aivorappeumasairaus-iakkailla-erittain-yleinen-vaikuttaa-dementian-taustalla
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://interestingengineering.com/health/nanoplastics-found-in-developing-chicken-heart?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=article_post&fbclid=IwY2xjawF-rldleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZilO0r5uzwaP6FGSw-DJFYBqNBCOdkQg51nvhnd4rqcz5NMvNBwgo2ctA_aem_rwi28ajz9ybzE7veb1kWQQ
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ancient DNA may be reason you love bread and chips
Your love for carbs could date back 800,000 years
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/carbohydrates-dna-diet-bread-pasta-b2631193.html#Echobox=1729209460