Category Archives: Innovation

Microsoft: We Didn't Build That

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In an op-ed about the importance of protecting federal research, Steve Lohr cites an interesting stat from a report this year by the National Research Council. The report

looked at eight computing technologies, including digital communications, databases, computer architectures and artificial intelligence, tracing government-financed research to commercialization. It calculated the portion of revenue at 30 well-known corporations that could be traced back to the seed research backed by government agencies. The total was nearly $500 billion a year.

According to the head of the committee that produced the report,

“If you take any major information technology company today, from Google to Intel to Qualcomm to Apple to Microsoft and beyond, you can trace the core technologies to the rich synergy between federally funded universities and industry research and development.”

Who’s the pinko socialist atheist behind that quote? Why that would be Peter Lee, a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research.

DIY Computerized Manufacturing: Getting a Little Closer to Becoming a Reality

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A great article in the New York Times about the burgeoning world of DIY manufacturing. Because prices of machines that let you build things have been dropping steadily, we’re getting to a point that feels a lot like the early days of PC hobbyists. And eventually it could have an equally powerful impact on the economy.

Makers, as they call themselves, can’t compete with the long, orderly rows of workers from the poorer provinces of China or India who cut, stitch and solder bras, shoes and cellphones for pennies — or even with the hundreds of billions of dollars a year worth of stuff that continues to pour out of large, old-fashioned American factories. Their method involves creating “hacker space” cooperatives, where a few dozen members share a 3-D printer, a laser cutter and an oscilloscope and engage in collaborative manufacturing projects. Makers have created companies like Shapeways and CloudFab, which for a fee will manufacture small runs of products that you design. They are becoming kit makers like Bdeir, manufacturing building blocks that allow others to create things.

Neil Gershenfeld, an M.I.T. physicist who is an intellectual godfather to the maker movement, suggested to me that the new tools would over time change global industry as we know it. He predicts a wave of new competitors for the megacorporation that designs, makes and sells products all under one brand. Instead, Gershenfeld imagines a consumer of the near future downloading a design for a mobile phone through an iTunes-like portal; buying an add-on from another firm that tweaks the design; and having it printed at a neighborhood shop in a plastic shell of your choice.

For now, the tech is still in the early stages – and there are still lots of obstacles to overcome and bugs to work out. The reporter asked one small shop if he could try building something using their “CupCake CNC, a so-called 3-D printer that spits out small plastic wares,” which costs only $699.

He guided me to the Web site Thingiverse.com, which abounds in digital models — three-dimensional files that the CupCake can print out. I browsed and chose an iPad stand …

The CupCake began to print. First the nozzle moved back and forth smoothly, dropping black plastic in neat rows. It was building a base for my object. Then it began to jitterbug, dashing unpredictably this way and that, depositing bits of the melting goo one layer at a time. Slowly it formed an iPad stand. But then, 19 minutes in, the machine lost the plot and began to squirt everywhere, and we had to start over.…

Andrew said that the design I picked might have been flawed.

In the long run, how will this tech shape the economy? For example, will it create lots of good jobs in the US? Or is that a fantasy? We are as likely to figure that out now as folks were when they first made predictions about the impact of computers on society. But definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Jonson: Market Competition only one source of innovation — and not the biggest one

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Now that it’s vacation time, I’m finally digging through piles of articles I saved to read later. Found a great tibit from Steven Johnson about innovation. He writes that on his recent book tour for his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, someone jokingly asked him, “Are you a Communist?” It’s because the findings of his book go so deeply against the convention wisdow that innovation mostly comes from free markets.

In my research, I analyzed 300 of the most influential innovations in science, commerce and technology — from the discovery of vacuums to the vacuum tube to the vacuum cleaner — and put the innovators of each breakthrough into one of four quadrants. First, there is the classic solo entrepreneur, protecting innovations in order to benefit from them financially; then the amateur individual, exploring and inventing for the love of it. Then there are the private corporations collaborating on ideas while simultaneously competing with one another. And then there is what I call the “fourth quadrant”: the space of collaborative, nonproprietary innovation, exemplified in recent years by the Internet and the Web, two groundbreaking innovations not owned by anyone.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that market forces drive innovation, with businesses propelled to new ideas by the promise of financial reward. And yet even in the heyday of industrial and consumer capitalism over the last two centuries, the fourth quadrant turns out to have generated more world-changing ideas than the competitive sphere of the marketplace. Batteries, bifocals, neonatal incubators, birth control pills — all originated either in amateur labs or in academic environments.

Now-ubiquitous technology like GPS was created by public-sector agencies for its original military use. And most of the building-block innovations that make GPS possible — satellites themselves, or the atomic clocks that let them coordinate their signals so precisely — were first conceived in nonmarket environments.

The fourth quadrant, however, is not locked in a zero-sum conflict with markets. As in the case of GPS, this fourth space creates new platforms, which then support commercial ventures.

Why has the fourth quadrant been so innovative, despite the lack of traditional economic rewards? The answer, I believe, has to do with the increased connectivity that comes from these open environments. Ideas are free to flow from mind to mind, and to be refined and modified without complex business development deals or patent lawyers. The incentives for innovation are lower, but so are the barriers.

When we champion fourth-quadrant innovation, we are not arguing for top-down bureaucracies and central planning. Stalin would have despised Wikipedia….

The choice shouldn’t be between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Over these last centuries, much of the history of innovation has lived in a less formal space between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist’s home lab and the digital bulletin board. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks.

Kentuckians Kick Ass – with People Power & A Positive Vision

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Some great news from one of my fav groups, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. After years of fighting, a victory:

We have some great news to announce: The coal-burning power plant proposed by the East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) has been canceled by the utility.

EKPC has entered into an agreement with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Kentucky Environmental Foundation, the Sierra Club, three individual co-op members, the Kentucky attorney general, and Gallatin Steel (EKPC’s biggest industrial customer). Under the agreement, EKPC will halt its plans for the proposed [nearly $1 billion] coal-burning power plant in Clark County by abandoning the permits it needed to proceed with construction. The cooperative also committed $125,000 toward a collaborative effort in which the public interest groups, EKPC and its member co-ops, and other parties will work together to evaluate and recommend new energy efficiency programs and renewable energy options.

To pull this off in coal country is pretty damn impressive – especially since they got the power company to agree to take a serious look at investing in renewable energy.

KFC won not only because they ran a great campaign against the plant but also because they have a vision of where they think Appalachian Kentucky could go. Their plan called Renew East Kentucky, is very sharp. It takes advantage of existing infrastructure:

EKPC and the local co-ops already have the infrastructure in place to ramp up EE/RE solutions to scale throughout the region—trucks, workers, power lines, contracts, customers, and brand. Most of the co-ops have more than 70 years of experience each, and with their proven capacity for billing and servicing more than half a million members, the electric co-ops are in the perfect position to provide an immediate shot in the arm that would kick off a wider Appalachian transition.

Because it’s being run through co-ops, more of the money is likely to stay within the community. And what they learn from their experience could be scaled up:

The co-ops here are similar to the more than 400 other rural electric co-ops across the nation… this plan can become a model, or template, that can be picked up and implemented by—and can become a vision for—hundreds of other co-ops and for the more than 40 million members those co-ops

More excerpts from Renew East Kentucky: Continue reading →

Turning Trash into Art

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San Francisco’s innovative project to radically reduce unrecycled waste hasn’t just figured out how to recycle 79% of the city’s garbage. Courtesy of Recology, their waste hauler, it’s also an innovative way of supporting the arts!

Since 1990, Recology has its own artist in residence program, where artists receive a monthly stipend, a studio, and access to as much recycled materials as they can drag away. At the end of the artist’s residency, Recology holds a public showing for them. Recology also has a large sculpture garden that acts as

a reclamation site, a visually pleasing buffer for the families that live next to Recology San Francisco, a place of community involvement and educational potential, a model drought-tolerant garden, and a home for the growing sculpture collection of Recology San Francisco.

How cool is that?

SF Innovative Plans to Push the Waste Needle To Zero

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San Francisco has a plan to try to get the amount of unrecycled garbage the city has to haul off down to zero. That sounds crazy, but they are already impressively close:

In 2008, the last year for which the city has data, the diversion rate was 72 percent, up from 69 percent in 2007 and 67 percent in 2006.

How has San Francisco pulled off this remarkable innovation? According to Grist, it all started because in 1989, California passed a law requiring that towns

divert 50 percent of their trash away from landfills. Inspired, San Francisco decided it could do even better.

They began by running a bunch of little experiments to figure out what actually worked for residents and businesses, then followed up with mandates:

The city worked with its exclusive waste hauler, Norcal Waste Systems (since rebranded as Recology) to run a dozen experimental pilot programs, augmented by community outreach meetings and teams dispatched to train businesses and residents. In 2000, a three-stream system was established: blue bins for recycling, green for compost, and black for landfill.

Collecting data about the city’s refuse was key. “We do a lot of analysis of what San Francisco sends to the landfill,” says Recology spokesman Robert Reed. “We look closely at the garbage … and we saw a lot of food, so we designed this urban food scrap collection program.” Following successful tests, home composting was made mandatory in 2009.

And years before they made composting mandatory, they gave folks serious financial incentives to do it:

Customers who reduce their landfill-bound garbage get deductions on their hauling bills, and there’s no fee for additional recycling and compositing bins. By sorting waste, businesses can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars, said Jack Macy.

The city and its enthusiastic residents weren’t the only key. The other critical piece was a crucial business partner: their waste hauler, which saw a chance to do well by doing good.

The city’s success might not have been possible without Recology President Mike Sangiacomo, who was among the first in the hauling industry to push for new recycling and composting technology. At Sangiacomo’s behest, Recology recently joined The Product Stewardship Council to push for packaging reform….

Diverting waste from landfills required new technology and equipment, the cost of which was borne by Recology. The company spends “millions” to provide San Francisco residents with all those bins, and spent $38 million, to build a new recycling plant on Pier 96 in the early 2000s. Recology also spent $2.5 million in 2009-10 to upgrade technology at Jepson Prairie Organics, where they compost food scraps.

Most customers only see the three bins, but behind the scenes, Recology has developed 18 separate recycling programs — more than any city in the country — to maximize diversion.

The payoff for Recology: a ton of free publicity that opens up new markets for their innovative work:

Top city officials from around the world have toured Recology’s state-of-the-art facilities.

In short, a combination of long-term state mandates, the strategy of starting with pilot projects and incentives following up with mandates, and a fired up business partner has created an astonishing amount of innovation and progress.

An Innovative, Just Economy: What Parklets Can Teach Us about Innovation and Government

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As we saw Monday, parklets could be an interesting model for thinking about encouraging innovation even in areas where we have lots of government rules. Not even rabid anti-”big government” types want to go back to the days of virtually no rules, when anyone was free to dump whatever they wanted into city streets. But creating some flexibility, some room for experimentation and innovation within the system of rules makes a lot of sense.

Parklets are also an interesting way of thinking about how we can allow for different levels of input or say. Democracy is a good thing, but sometimes it can be a bit… frustrating. Andres Power of San Francisco’s Planning Department, this looser structure made it possible to make progress where they hadn’t been able to before.

Cities like New York have a strong hierarchical structure. We don’t have that in San Francisco. And so when there are differences in opinion between groups or agencies, it can be almost impossible to get things done. The first plaza that went in, at 17th and Castro, had a history going back almost ten years of the community talking about using that space. But making it temporary made it happen.

That doesn’t mean we want to get rid of democracy. Sometimes long, hard deliberations are necessary. And we don’t want the kind of openness we saw in Chula Vista. Letting an oil plant owner ignore regulations and spew toxins into neighborhoods and onto school grounds is not the kind of innovation we are looking for. But we need some balance – some lightness, some airiness, some room for a handful of individuals to just try something out and see what happens.

In fact, parklets worked because they gave people around them other forms of having a say aside from voting (or attending endless meetings). They were done in a way that treated other folks’ needs with respect. And, like markets, they allowed individuals and businesses to essentially vote on whether to keep these projects going via pitching in with their labor or money.

And parklets acted as feedback loops. People got to see the results in action, on a small scale. There was less risk than with the big rule change – if important issues were missed, odds were decent that someone would catch it. I think that’s why Rebar’s latest experiments with walklets have smart touches like leaving the rain gutters unimpeded or being designed so that street sweeping machines can easily maneuver around them. These are the kind of issues that are easy to miss and that feedback in the real world are likely to help you with.

The other smart thing about parklets as a model is that it starts very small and then scales up. In San Francisco, it started with just one group creating a parklet. Then other groups did another cities. Then the city of San Francisco tried creating parklets. And now they are attempting to enshrine the process of experimenting with parklets by providing permits year-round for these experiments.

Obviously, this model won’t work for every project. You probably don’t want to use it to design something as massive and vulnerable to collapse as a bridge. But I think that with experience, we might find there are a lot more types of projects where this approach might work very well.

In short, the experience with parklets is a very different way of thinking about how to encourage innovation and creativity within the rules that we all agree we need to provide security.

Up next week: parklets, race, and inequality.

An Innovative, Just Economy: Parklets, Walklets, and Government

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Once upon a time, people living in cities had a remarkable amount of freedom to do what they wanted. If they wanted to butcher pigs in your apartment and drop the unused remains out the window onto the sidewalk, they could. If they owned a horse they used to get around, the horse could poop in the streets with nary a pooper scooper in sight.

The result was streets and sidewalks that were often smelly and disgusting – and plenty of freedom for other actors, like Mr. Cholera, to breed to their hearts content and kill tens of thousands of people.

Eventually, city governments began to put limits on people’s freedom to do whatever they wanted. Cities became less smelly and more safe.

Over the years, these restrictions got tighter and tighter — sometimes for good reasons that benefited everyone, and sometimes because of games played by powerful interests.

In 2005, a design studio called Rebar decided it was time to test these restrictions. They temporarily turned one metered parking space into a public park — a quick and dirty guerrilla art project to raise questions about how we use our city space. The project was a success, partly because they did in San Francisco and not, say, Dallas, partly because they showed respect for other uses of the street by cleaning up after they were done — no pig remains or horse poop were left behind — and partly because they did it with style.

Over the next few years, citizens, artists, and activists around the globe joined in for what became an annual PARK(ing) Day event. Their mission:

to call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat … at least until the meter runs out!

Eventually this innovation inspired officials in cities around the globe to act. For example, New York City closed parts of Broadway and created “pedestrian plazas in Times Square and Herald Square.” The result was a smashing success. Tourists and New Yorkers loved it, and it had other benefits as well:

Advocates for the project said it had vastly improved safety in the area, pointing to a 35 percent decline in pedestrian injuries and a 63 percent reduction in injuries to drivers and passengers, according to city data. Foot traffic grew by 11 percent in Times Square and by 6 percent in Herald Square, and a survey of local businesses found that more than two-thirds of the area’s retailers wanted the project to become permanent…. The Times Square Alliance, a business group, surveyed residents and office workers and found that about 75 percent were “satisfied with their experience” in the area, up from less than half in 2007….

“It’s shifted the paradigm for what a street and sidewalk experience is supposed to be like in New York City,” said Tim Tompkins, the president of the alliance.

The city of San Francisco also finally got in the game, creating official “parklets” last year: Continue reading →

An Innovative, Just Economy: Innovative like iPhones vs Innovative like Viruses

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Before we dive in, I think there’s one thing we ought to be clear about: not all innovation is good.

You wouldn’t know that from reading the lit on innovation and the economy. As far as they’re concerned, innovation is like chocolate — more is better.

But sometimes, innovation isn’t like chocolate. Take the flu. We keep coming up with vaccines to get our defenses on high alert. And viruses keep innovating ways around our defenses.

The same is true for Wall Street. Give those clever Boys and Girls half a chance, and they’ll come up with new ways to make gobs of money by screwing over their customers or blowing things up. It’s so bad that last year former Fed reserve chair Paul Volcker Street told a meeting of finance bigwigs:

“I wish somebody would give me some shred of evidence linking financial innovation with a benefit to the economy.”

Mr. Volcker’s favorite financial innovation of the past 25 years? The ATM. “It really helps people, it’s useful.”

Now I’m not talking about all innovations that I personally think are bad. Like, say, 80s hair. Or the Mountaingoat, the furry, horned mountain bike by Sogreni, which describes it as “a unique bicycle where only the imagination sets the boundaries.” I think that’s a little insane, but hey, to each to their own.

(Incidentally, Sogreeni’s website says they are “currently developing a kitchen and bathroom design series,” so if you’ve ever wanted to have a furry horned kitchen, stay tuned)

What I’m talking about are the innovations that actively cause harm to people. Who gets to decide what counts as causing harm? I think that’s a critical conversation that has to take place when citizens in a democracy want a dynamic, innovative economy – more on that later in the series.

Up next: Parklets, walklets, and a different way of thinking about setting rules.

Creating An Innovative, Just Economy

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Commenting on a dustup between conservatives over AEI president Arthur Brooks book, The Battle, Economist correspondent W. W. writes:

I strongly favour the culture of dynamism and innovation that thrives when markets are left relatively unfettered, but it is a straightforward mistake to confuse questions of economic freedom and entrepreneurial dynamism with questions about the size of the redistributive state.

I find it hard to believe that W. W., a conservative whose writings I enjoy and respect, really believes that “innovation… thrives when markets are left relatively unfettered.” Dynamism I could see an argument for, even if I don’t buy it. But innovation?

Take the biggest innovation of the last 20 years: the Internet. It’s hard to argue the Net was a result of unfettered markets when Uncle Sam funded and nurtured it. And we don’t have to wonder if a “relatively unfettered” market also could have created the Net. All you need to do is look at the track record of CompuServe, AOL, and other competitors to the Net — they did everything they could to create closed systems whose spirit was contrary to the essence of the Net.

Or what about finance? It’s a moot point; no way could you call the world of finance “relatively unfettered.” If it was — if we got rid of deposit insurance, the Federal Reserve, and any implicit agreement that we would bail out big banks and Wall Street when they threatened to push the economy off a cliff — it would certainly produce innovation. But would anyone want to live with the innovation it created?

Or how about healthcare? Again, it’s hard to make an argument about innovation based on a market that’s “relatively unfettered” given how amazingly fettered the healthcare market is. Of course, if you think our current drug patent monopolies are part of a relatively unfettered market, you could argue that the truly ingenious ways drug companies manage to bribe doctors, pollute medical information, sucker consumers, and otherwise jack up the cost of healthcare while producing new drugs which usually aren’t better than anything on the market is very innovative. But this isn’t the kind of innovation I’m rooting for.

This isn’t to say that markets don’t create innovation — they do. But it’s hard to see how you can argue that relatively unfettered markets are the main source of it.

So if a “relatively unfettered” market isn’t the way to nurture a pro-innovation economy, what is? In the next few posts, I’m going to sketch out a draft of my answer.