Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.

06 - March 23, 2013

ISSN: 1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

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.

Long Now Foundation funds efforts to bring back the extinct passenger pigeon... Japanese scientists clone 25 generations of mice from a single original donor... new gasoline engine could reduce automobile emissions by up to 90 percent... a new Internet allows robots to share learning... malls need to move beyond shopping to survive... the United States changes patent law to give rights to the first filer... twenty- and thirtysomethings may never be financially secure... companies are putting tracking devices on their employees... a Chinese shipping firm is planning the first commercial voyage across the Arctic this year... seven megatrends that will define China's next decade... the City of Phoenix faces a multitude of compounding vulnerabilities... everyone is a futurist now... George Dvorksy talks to three experts about the implications of a global human hive mind...

More resources ...

a new book by Brian Solis: What's the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences ... a link to the Detroit Urbain Innovation Exchange website showcasing Detroit's growing social innovation movement... a TED Talk by Stewart Brand on reviving extinct species... a blog post by Eric Garland on networked society in Estonia...

David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and other futures organizations. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: An Unlikely Plan to Revive the Passenger Pigeon (MIT Technology Review) - The passenger pigeon effort, known as Revive and Restore, is being paid for by the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit led by entrepreneur and author Stewart Brand, who has been stirring interest in the idea of de-extinction by organizing meeting of key researchers, including one last week at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Some scientists are convinced the technology is feasible. "Not only is sequencing of extinct genomes a reality, but revival of extinct species is within reach," said Hendrik Poinar, a researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. With 581 Copies So Far, Reclonable Mouse Will Live Forever (PopSci) - Biologists in Japan have cloned 581 mice from one original donor mouse, Livescience reported. The scientists made the mice over 25 generations of cloning; that is, from making clones from clones from clones, 25 times over. They could probably make animal clones indefinitely, the research team wrote in a paper published last week in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Really. Check out the last sentence of their abstract: "Our results show that repeated iterative recloning is possible and suggest that, with adequately efficient techniques, it may be possible to reclone animals indefinitely." The 581 cloned mice were made using an improved version of somatic cell nuclear transfer, the technique that created Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. More science trends...

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Previous issues

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

Top Stories: New Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry (NBC) - Researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines. Robots Can Now Collaborate Over Their Very Own Internet (IO9) - One of the more serious limitations facing the robotics industry today is that each bot it produces is an island unto itself. Worse, robots' primitive AI doesnt allow for intuitive thinking or problem solving -- what's known as artificial general intelligence. Looking to overcome this problem, researchers from several different European universities have developed a cloud-computing platform for robots that will allow them to collaborate -- and make each other smarter -- over the Internet. More technology trends...

BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Malls Must Move Beyond Shopping to Survive in Internet Era (Reuters) - As growing numbers of shoppers move online, European mall owners are looking to pull in customers by including services that cant be replicated on the Web like hospital care and government offices. Malls must become more like fullservice community centers to survive in the face of a growing list of failed retailers like HMV and Blockbuster, property experts at the annual MIPIM trade fair in Cannes, France, told Reuters. On the flip side of that retail revolution, the experts see big gains in warehousing as more goods are sent and returned via post. How the America Invents Act Will Change Patenting Forever (Wired) - Around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world. For product designers and makers and DIYers the proverbial monkey wrench is being thrown into the mechanism for filing a patent -- and the timing with which you do so. Today, if you file a patent, someone can come along and tell you they had that idea first, and with much documentation and legal wrangling, deny you the right to apply that invention. Tomorrow, nobody will care who came up with the idea first -only who filed it.

More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Why Twenty-Somethings Aren't Doomed to Be Poor (but Thirty-Somethings Might Be) (Atlantic) - The job market still has a giant, recession-shaped crater in it. A college degree is more expensive yet more essential than ever. Wages are stagnant. All of this adds up to a single sad possibility, according to the New York Times' Annie Lowrey: Today's twenty- and thirtysomethings may never end up as rich and financially secure as their parents. Lowrey's story points to a recent study by the Urban institute, which suggests that Americans under forty, financially wracked by student debt and the housing bust, have saved up much less wealth than the generations before them. Because wealth compounds over time, theres a strong chance they won't ever catch up. Companies are Putting Sensors on Employees to Track Their Every Move (Business Insider) - The idea of having employees walk around with electronic sensors to track their every move is unsettling. There are privacy and legal issues, and who wants to feel like they are just a cog in a system? But data companies say that the resulting reams of information will improve life for companies and employees. Sociometric Solutions has created tracking devices for Bank of America, Steelcase, and Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc., and is in talks with General Motors. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: China Plans First Commercial Trip Through Arctic Shortcut in 2013 (AlertNet) - A Chinese shipping firm is planning the country's first commercial voyage through a shortcut across the Arctic Ocean to the United States and Europe in 2013, a leading Chinese scientist said. Huigen Yang, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, told Reuters that the trip he led last year on the icebreaker Xuelong, or Snowdragon, to explore the route had "greatly encouraged" Chinese shipping companies. For China, the world's No. 2 economy after the United States, the route would save time and money. The distance from Shanghai to Hamburg is 2,800 nautical miles (5,185 kms) shorter via the

Arctic than via the Suez Canal, Yang said. The China Seven: The Huge Megatrends That Will Define Chinas Next Decade (Business Insider) - For nearly two decades, we've counted on China to be the perpetual growth machine that would power the world's economy. But as many have observed, that era is slowly coming to an end. Jefferies recently published a massive 426-page report that boils down what we can expect in this next phase of Chinas development. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: The Least Sustainable City: Phoenix as a Harbinger for Our Hot Future (Grist) - Phoenix's multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it's a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time -- New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy -- may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures -grids going down, levees failing, backup systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. Obama Will Use Nixon-Era Law to Fight Climate Change (Bloomberg) - While some U.S. agencies already take climate change into account when assessing projects, the new guidelines would apply across-the-board to all federal reviews. For example, Ambre Energy Ltd. is seeking a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build a coal-export facility at the Port of Morrow in Oregon. Under existing rules, officials weighing approval would consider whether ships in the port would foul the water or generate air pollution locally. The Environmental Protection Agency and activist groups say that review should be broadened to account for the greenhouse gases emitted when exported coal is burned in power plants in Asia. More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories:

From Ray Kurzweil to Kanye West, Everyone's a Futurist Now (Quartz) - In 1963, in the depths of the Cold War, all of the futurists in the world could probably assemble in a largish conference room and still have space for an overhead projector. Half a century later, it would take a small stadium to hold all of the people who use the title in some form. The world of futures is a broad church today populated by everyone from author and inventor Ray Kurzweil and his obsessive focus on the singularity to Kanye West with his future-esque fashion fetishes. While it's been a relatively quiet profession for a long time, suddenly it seems like futurists are all around, feeding a growing appetite for all things strange, metallic, and digital. Why, and why now? How Much Longer Until Humanity Becomes A Hive Mind? (IO9) - George Dvorsky "Last month, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve into a fully-fledged hive mind? I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford." More future trends...

From the publisher...

Whats the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences
By Brian Solis Read more...

Trends and Futures... New Books - New and not-yet-published books on trends and futures. A Web Resource... Detroit Urban Innovation Exchange - The Urban Innovation Exchange is an initiative to showcase and advance Detroit's growing social innovation movement. Led by Issue Media Group with Data Driven Detroit, The Civic Commons and a coalition of media and community partners, UIX is made possible thanks to funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Multimedia... Stewart Brand: The Dawn of De-Extinction. Are You Ready? (TED) -

Throughout humankind's history, we've driven species after species extinct: the passenger pigeon, the Eastern mountain lion, the dodo . But now, says Stewart Brand, we have the technology (and the biology) to bring back species that humanity wiped out. So -- should we? Which ones? He asks a big question whose answer is closer than you may think. (18m 25s) The Blogosphere... Estonia: Life in a Networked Society (Transitionistas) - Eric Garland "Given the overwhelming response to our article on the coolest heads of state on Twitter, we are developing quite an Estonia obsession over here at Transitionistas. Well, it's getting even deeper after we found this quite awesome video from Ericsson about how networks pervade every part of modern Estonian society. It's an hour long, but this profile really shows what can be accomplished with the right design and investment."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com