Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 12.

22 - November 2, 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.

a new approach to the question of life's origins... Craig Venter's biological teleportation device... five converging technologies that will interact to change our lives... a new MIT wristband could make air conditioning obsolete... ten ways purpose-driven brands can bring their values to life... bitcoin could have a mainstream future... hidden chips in electric irons from China have been used to launch spam attacks... we risk losing knowledge if we put it in the hands of machines... NSA surveillance could cause the breakup of the Internet... Turkey opens an undersea tunnel between Europe and Asia... Whole Foods Market launches a rating system for fresh produce and flowers... a quarter of the world's food crops are grown in water-stressed regions... global waste production will triple by 2100... Al Gore says the world is on the brink of a 'carbon bubble'...

More resources ...

a new book by Orly Lobel: Talent Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding... a link to the Open IDEO website... video of a TED talk by 18-year old Boyan Slat on his award-winning idea for cleaning plastic from the oceans... a blog post by Eric Drexler on big nanotechnology...

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David is the founder and president of Global Vision Consulting Ltd., a strategy advisory firm. He is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: Transition from Inorganic to Organic Life was Based on Information, Not Chemistry (Daily Galaxy) - In December of 2012, a radical new approach to the question of life's origin was proposed by two Arizona State University scientists that attempts to dramatically redefine the problem. The researchers -- Paul Davies, an ASU Regents' Professor and director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Sara Walker, a NASA post-doctoral fellow at the Beyond Center. "We propose that the transition from non-life to life is unique and definable," added Davies. "We suggest that life may be characterized by its distinctive and active use of information, thus providing a roadmap to identify rigorous criteria for the emergence of life. This is in sharp contrast to a century of thought in which the transition to life has been cast as a problem of chemistry, with the goal of identifying a plausible reaction pathway from chemical mixtures to a living entity." Craig Venter's 'Biological Teleportation' Device (Kurzweil AI) - Craig Venter has built a prototype of a "Digital Biological Converter" (DBC) that would allow what he calls "biological teleportation": receiving DNA sequences over the Internet to synthesize proteins, viruses and even living cells, The Guardian reports. It could, for example, fill a prescription for insulin, provide flu vaccine during a pandemic or even produce phage viruses targeted to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The current prototype, supported by DARPA, is intended to be miniaturized and sold by Synthetic Genomics for use in hospitals, workplaces and homes. More science trends...

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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories: The Five Technologies That Will Converge to Predict the Future (Wired UK) - A world of converging technologies will be able to predict what we want next, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel told the audience at Web Summit. Scoble and Israel are the authors behind the Age of Context, a new book that identifies those converging technologies (there are five) and outlines how they will interact to change our lives. MIT Wristband Could Make AC Obsolete (Wired) - At a point when humans need to take a sober look at our energy use, we're poised to use a devastating amount of it keeping our homes and offices at the right temperatures in years to come. A team of students at MIT, however, is busy working on a prototype device that could eliminate much of that demand, and they're doing it by asking one compelling question: Why not just heat and cool our bodies instead? More technology trends...

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BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: 10 Ways Today's Purpose-Driven Brands Can Bring Their Core Values to Life (Fast Company) - Today's brand must live and breathe through its core values in order to survive. Purpose is king, and theres no turning back. When 87% of global consumers believe business should place equal weight on societal issues and business issues, the better a brand brings its societal purpose to life in everyday operations, the more successful both business and social impact will be. Bitcoin Pursues the Mainstream (New York Times) - The currency known as bitcoin -- a much-hyped and much-doubted type of digital cash that can be bought with traditional money -has mostly attracted attention for its popularity in the black market, and for its wildly gyrating valuation. But some entrepreneurs, investors and even merchants are eyeing a far more mainstream use for it. They are convinced that bitcoin, though not widely understood, offers a path to lower payment processing and more secure transactions. Instead of using bitcoin to buy illegal guns in the recesses of the web, they say, ordinary consumers will use it to buy legal goods from legal retailers -- and as easily as they now swipe their credit cards or exchange paper

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bills. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Russia: Hidden Chips 'Launch Spam Attacks from Irons' (BBC) - Cyber criminals are planting chips in electric irons and kettles to launch spam attacks, reports in Russia suggest. Stateowned channel Rossiya 24 even showed footage of a technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a "spy chip" with what he called "a little microphone." Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks. Other products found to have rogue components reportedly included mobile phones and car dashboard cameras. All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines (Atlantic) - Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes. What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They've become, it's not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators. And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots' expertise and dulls their reflexes, leading to what Jan Noyes, an ergonomics expert at Britain's University of Bristol, terms "a de-skilling of the crew." More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: NSA Surveillance May Cause Breakup of Internet, Warn Experts (Guardian) - The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is leading to the breakup of the internet as countries scramble to protect private or commercially sensitive emails and phone records from UK and US security services, according to experts and academics. They say moves by countries, such as Brazil and Germany, to encourage regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US are likely to be the first steps in a fundamental shift in the way the internet works. The change could potentially hinder economic
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growth. The Most Complicated Tunnel in the World Finally Opens (Atlantic) - After nine years work and $4 billion spent, Turkey's largest city opened its first tunnel underneath the Bosphorus Strait, a body of water that separates its European and Asian sections. The 8.75-mile rail tunnel is destined to be part of a new commuter network called Marmaray, capable of transporting 75,000 passengers per hour when at full capacity. The link will not just ease commutes and get people off congested roads and bridges, says Turkey's government, but also ultimately form a key link between continents, an "iron Silk Road" that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has grandly promised will "link London with Beijing." More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Whole Foods' New Produce Ratings: Transparency Bears Fruit (Civil Eats) - Whole Foods Market (WFM) is again at the forefront of the movement for greater transparency in food production and processing. The supermarket chain recently announced a comprehensive ratings system for fresh produce and flowers, which parallels the color-coded animal welfare standards for meat and the sustainability standards for seafood that Whole Foods earlier pioneered. The produce ratings are another big step forward for the good food movement and its efforts to encourage responsible production, quantified by third-party certification. As Climate Change Intensifies, the World Faces an Unpalatable Choice: Eat or Drink (Quartz) - A quarter of the world's food crops are now being grown in regions that are highly water-stressed, according to a report released yesterday by the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI). It gets worse: Half the planet's irrigated cropland, which produce 40% of the global food supply, is located in areas facing severe water shortages as climate change exacerbates drought. Tapping data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and academic studies, WRI researchers overlaid food production with water resources to create an online interactive map that shows where the most water-stressed crops are grown. The WRI defines high water stress as areas where 40% of the renewable water supply is withdrawn annually. In extremely high water stress regions, 80% of the water supply is tapped each year. More environmental trends...

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FUTURE
TRENDS
Top Stories: Global Waste Production to Triple by 2100, Led by SubSaharan Africa (Ars Technica) - One of the unfortunate but inescapable consequences of population and economic growth has been the unabated proliferation of trash. The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has become as emblematic of our soaring waste output as have the millions of cheap, disposable goods that we've come to rely on. Every day, we generate over 3.5 million tons of solid waste -- a tenfold increase over the past century. That figure will likely double again by 2025. On our current path, it could balloon to over 11 million tons per day by 2100, a tripling of today's rate, with sub-Saharan Africa fueling most of the growth. Al Gore: World is on Brink of 'Carbon Bubble' (Guardian)
The world is on the brink of the "largest bubble ever" in finance, because of the undisclosed value of high-carbon assets on companies' balance sheets, and investment managers who fail to take account of the risks are failing in their fiduciary duty to shareholders and investors, Al Gore and his investment partner, David Blood, have said. "Stranded carbon assets" such as coal mines, fossil fuel power stations and petrol-fuelled vehicle plants represent at least $7tn on the books of publicly listed companies, and about twice as much again is owned by private companies, state governments and sovereign wealth funds. More future trends...

From the
publisher...

Talent Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding
By Orly Lobel Read more...

A Web Resource... Open IDEO - OpenIDEO is an open innovation platform. Join a global community to solve big challenges for social good. Multimedia... Boyan Slat: How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves (TED Delft) - 18year-old Boyan Slat combines environmentalism, entrepreneurism and technology to tackle global issues of sustainability. After diving in Greece, and coming across more plastic bags than fish, he wondered; "why cant we clean this up?" While still being on secondary school, he then decided to dedicate half a year of research to understand plastic pollution and the

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problems associated with cleaning it up. This ultimately led to his passive clean-up concept, which he presented at TEDxDelft 2012. Working to prove the feasibility of his concept, Boyan Slat currently leads a team of approximately 50 people, and temporarily quit his Aerospace Engineering study to completely focus his efforts on The Ocean Cleanup. (11m 22s) The Blogosphere... Big Nanotech: An Unexpected Future (Guardian) - Eric Drexler "In my initial post in this series, I asked, 'What if nanotechnology could deliver on its original promise, not only new, useful, nanoscale products, but a new, transformative production technology able to displace industrial production technologies and bring radical improvements in production cost, scope, and resource efficiency?' The potential implications are immense, not just for computer chips and other nanotechnologies, but for issues on the scale of global development and climate change."

Email:
future@innovationwatch.com

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