I’ve been watching the US Open today, and I saw the first ad for nanotechnology. Hewlett Packard has a 60-second ad talking about things 1,000th of a human hair wide and the things they may do. I put this on a par with the first time I saw a PC commercial about 25 [...]

The report on the dysfunctional management culture at NASA that contributed to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia shows that corporate culture can be a killer, literally.

This isn’t the sort of thing that grabs headlines, but I think this is really important news. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore Lab (about 20 miles east of here) and from other countries have developed techniques to look at single molecules of protein folding up. This is a breakthrough in being able to get [...]

Wired 11.09: View
There seems to be a way to glimpse the future for the US when it adopts broadband by looking at Korea. What strikes me is that broadband is as transformative socially as the slowpoke modem Net has been. When broadband dominates it’s going to be necessary to re-think online communication with [...]

USATODAY.com – The search engine that could
This article about Google evokes deja vu. Sounds like 1999. This company–whose name is now a verb as well–seems to have succeeded in the freewheeling dot-com style that is anathema in business circles now. But it still suggests that a highly innovative environment and success can go [...]

In the latest issue of Nature there is an article about a class of molecules that seems to extend the lifespan of yeast by down-regulating the p53 gene (a tumor suppressor) and blunting the trigger of apoptosis. (Whoopie for yeast!) It’s action mimics the life extending process that occurs with caloric restriction. The [...]

You might have heard of Voice Over IP (VoIP), the ability to make telephone calls over the Internet, or in other words using the same pathway and protocol that your computer uses. Currently, the quality is not conistent enough to warrant wholesale migration – but that will change soon; the costs are significantly lower, [...]

At the Innovation Conference I attended, Hallmark Cards, Inc., presented their Keepsake Ornaments case study on Idea Management. They worked with Imaginatik and their online Idea Central product. Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, also spoke.
Some initial steps Hallmark took at the outset of their Innovation project:
* Obtained Senior Management approval.
* Set a clear goal [...]

I.B.M. Looks to Genetics to Map a New Business
IBM now has 150 PhDs on their life sciences division staff, and they’re not computer jocks. Big Blue jumped into life science about 5 or 6 years ago. They know that life science–from research to medicine to perhaps personal health care–will be one of biggest [...]

“Leading-edge innovators have learned that, rather than generating lots of ideas, they can derive more benefit from a targeted event driven process that will enable them to capture the best ideas related to an specific issue”
“Targeted and bounded programs produce better results than open-ended idea collection systems”
“A seeming paradox of innovation is that most useful [...]