innovation course

Here are the slides for week 1:

Networks and  Introduction to innovation.

Reading on Network effects if you are interested.

Two interesting articles from the NYT.  The first is about a technology skills shortage in Europe ... "By 2015, about 900,000 information and communications technology vacancies may go unfilled ...".  Tech companies in Ireland are hiring from abroad.  Yet both Europe and Ireland have not given up on the Tech panacea.  Europe has not learned from the failure of the Lisbon Agenda.  It has set itself some new audacious goals (see page 22 in the document below):

• Creating the world's largest and richest digital single market for content and services
• Creating the world's largest cloud enabled ICT market

I guess they figure Snowdon has pretty much killed the U.S. Tech industry.  The second article suggests that Ireland is also relying on Tech for growth.  I don't get it!  But I am more optimistic about the return of the Celtic Tiger ... If you want to drink whiskey you gotta work!

BTW ...

Here’s a quick way to remember how some of the world’s biggest producers spell their products:

• Countries that have E’s in their names (UnitEd StatEs and IrEland) tend to spell it whiskEy (plural whiskeys)
• Countries without E’s in their names (Canada, Scotland, and Japan) spell it whisky (plural whiskies)

more on that here ...

The usual prescription ...is it time to crank up public subsides otherwise the U.S. is going to lose the 'race' ... so innovation is a zero sum game and the?  ... read or download

An interesting article in Bloomberg Businessweek on use of computers and educational outcomes (outcomes being performance in standardized tests or 'knowing').  So the general conclusion appears to be that technology has no impact or a negative impact.  However a quick read indicates that the results of the some of the cited studies are more nuanced.

The important issue is how one defines learning outcomes - learning is about more than math and science scores, but even it we stick with these outcomes, it is not just introduction of technology that may lead to negative outcomes but also changes in the curriculum.

Here are some results from the Inter-American Development Bank Study on Costa Rica:

" ... the intervention generated a more active learning environment ... students in the treatment group report explaining concepts to the class more often, preparing more exercises for others to solve, and frequently discussing possible solutions or arguments with other students."

"... all treatment groups that changed pedagogy to a student-centered approach learned less geometry than the control group ... results form the computer lab are very similar to results of the new curriculum suggesting that it does not help much."

So forget about technology - a student centered approach also has a negative impact as does the introduction of a new curriculum (without adding in technology.  And as one would expect, outcomes also depend on teachers.

"The evidence also suggests that teachers went through the motions as prescribed but did not master the innovation in a way that would have allowed students to get the most of it."  This - after training teachers!

Now to the best students.  Classes became more participative in the treatment groups and this made some students "uncomfortable with their new roles".  The "most abled" students were most uncomfortable.  Students with "higher pre-treatment SAT were disproportionally disengaged from the class".  Perhaps because they were more comfortable with the lecture style of teaching and/or because they lacked other 'soft' skills which are more important in a student-centered environment.

Regardless, this is not just about technology, but about any changes in the way of doing things.  In the short-run (which is what randomized-trial based studies measure) there are likely to be adjustments costs and those most uncomfortable with the change are likely to be the 'best students' since they did so well under the old regime.  So it would be nice to get some longitudinal evidence before concluding that technology has no impact or a negative impact on educational outcomes.  There is also a need to move away from the technocratic bean-counting approach to measuring outcomes.

Where are the world's most innovative companies and what do they do?

Patents ... quality vs. quantitity

Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Wolfram Alpha, dissectsthe last two decades of his life using a carefully put together database. The whole post is worth checking out.

"INSIDE a remote mountain in Texas, a gargantuan clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a websiteset up to track the progress of this “10,000-year clock”, Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as “an icon for long-term thinking”.

That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors’ feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company’s shareholders in future. He laid out this philosophy in his first letter to shareholders, penned in 1997, which was entitled “It’s all about the long term”."

http://www.economist.com/node/21548487?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/takingthelongview

The Economist discusses a possible successor to what has become an everyday necessity.

"AMONG the many new gadgets unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a pair of smartphones able to exchange data using light. These phones, as yet only prototypes from Casio, a Japanese firm, transmit digital signals by varying the intensity of the light given off from their screens. The flickering is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye, but the camera on another phone can detect it at a distance of up to ten metres. In an age of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, flashing lights might seem like going back to sending messages with an Aldis lamp. In fact, they are the beginning of a fast and cheap wireless-communication system that some have labelled Li-Fi."