Category: Innovation

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A question I have is whether the pandemic will mean a slow-down or pause in tech-innovation?
Innovation in part is based on serendipity, on the pseudo-random meeting and interaction of people, ideas, skills, capital etc. Those meetings take place in cities for instance, as they are serendipity hubs.
Yet this year I noticed how online interaction tends to stick just to the topic and agenda at hand, and there’s much less place for riffing off eachother’s ideas and suggestions for instance.

Apart from innovation driven by necessity (e.g. vaccin development), would a slow-down be visible in tech start-up founding, start-up funding (maybe not yet, as funding emerges some time after founding so it might be a delayed effect)?

Would there be a discernable impact on a city level?

Are there compensating effects? I’ve noticed that the pandemic in our company and for me personnaly led to more introspection, and meant more focus on developing things, also because there was less activity around us. A reduction of movement, a reduction of social dynamics, but the stillness enabling more action as a consequence.

How would one go about trying to see such effects, and in which data?

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The key insight I find I gained in the past months is that SDGs can be used to add a macroscope to most issues and challenges. So I think Peter Bihr definitely is on a useful track:

Peter Bihr posts about using the UN Human Right Charter, and more specifically the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as a framing for responsible IoT and Smart Cities.

Image Peter Bihr, license CC BY NC SA

I find using the SDGs a valuable notion to help balance any of your activities. A while ago I listened to a conversation with Taiwanese Minister Audrey Tang (唐凤), who explicitly formulates her entire job description in terms of SDGs, and that was a very useful nudge for me. I know my friend Henriette also formulates her activities in a similar way.

I currently work quite a bit with one client on policy monitoring, indicators and measurements. One of the elements I stress is that you need to be aware how indicators can create perverse impulses if used singularly, and that you need to look at any proposed set of measurements to see what they overlook and ignore. Unexpected consequences if they impact visible stakeholders probably will get incorporated over time, but externalised costs and effects (impacting people, places and systems outside your view) usually won’t. SDGs, because they cover a wide range of topics, and acknowledge the deep interconnectness and interdependencies between those varied topics, are a helpful starting point to find a balanced and nuanced approach. So that (taking a randomly imagined example) climate, poverty and equality related elements can be meaningfully incorporated into a mobility dashboard that would otherwise maybe just stick to zoomed in things like traffic density and average speed on a highway. It’s the type of zooming in and out, around a specific challenge, out to the surrounding system(s), and in to the constituent building blocks, that is a common approach in TRIZ innovation efforts, with in this case the SDGs providing a macroscope for the zooming out while maintaining local / zoomed in context.

Good catching up with you after too long Boris. Excited to hear about Fission. Later on was wondering how IPFS as starting point plays out with highly dynamic material (e.g. real time data sets), versus dat for such data sets. Pleasing to note our thinking since our joined session at BarCamp Brussels in 2006 has evolved along similar lines in the current timeframe, except you more on the tech side of things, and me on the change management side of it.

We had a very pleasant day at Dutch Design Week today. Some interesting things, but it did seem less inspiring than other editions. Maybe because we could roam and linger less this year. Our 3 yr old shared the experience with us, and that means my attention was with her a lot of the time. But some exhibits simply weren’t all that. Like reinventing the cellar to store fresh produce?

Read Disruption Theory is Real, but Wrong
Disruption is happening, and the tech industry is having a dynamic and revolutionary impact on industries around the world for precisely the reasons that Christensen articulates in his work. But the units of resolution aren’t right; maybe not everywhere, but that certainly feels to be the case in today’s tech world.

This, it seems to me, is why looking at a system, sub-system and supra-system is a key dimension of TRIZ innovation methods. And it takes having an overview of all three, regardless of where you will apply yourself. (ht Alper)

Read Forget erasure: why blockchain is really incompatible with GDPR by Elizabeth RenierisElizabeth Renieris
The [post] is not meant as a commentary on the suitability of blockchain or GDPR, taking either in isolation. Rather, it is meant as an assessment of blockchain against the GDPR’s core principles. In this way, it is intended to provide a higher-level entry point into the conversation about the compatibility (or incompatibility) of blockchain and the GDPR, as well as a tool for reconsidering bold, an often unfounded, compliance claims.

Elizabeth Renieris’ Hackylawyer blog is a very read worthy blog I’ve recently come across and added to my feedreader. This article takes the core principles of the EU GDPR and compares them to how this might play out in blockchain usage, or not. A good reference list for conversations I am bound to end up in with clients.