Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 13.

03 - February 8, 2014

ISSN:
1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

genetically-modified humans with three parents could be created later this year... monkeys have been genetically modified using a new DNA editing technique... Danish man is able to feel objects with an artificial hand, restoring his sense of touch... IBM says practical quantum computers could be in homes and businesses within the next 10 years... Amazon finds objects in a smartphone photo and puts them in its shopping cart for purchase... a third of Americans are abandoning shopping cards and using cash to avoid security breaches... nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in a decade or two... US military plans autonomous weapons that can select and engage targets without a human operator... Siberian city hopes to cash in on a new Arctic sea route to China... in a new film, New York City filmmaker Matthew Niederhauser explores urbanization and change in Beijing... Hamburg plans to phase out automobiles in the center of the city over the next two decades... flooding experts say Britain will have to retreat from a rising sea... international businesses worry about economic pressures on the middle class... Brin's Law of Cameras says cameras will get smaller, cheaper, more numerous and more mobile every year with profound implications for our future...

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.

More resources ...

a new book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies on the rise of machines and the loss of jobs... a link to Andrew McAfee's blog on how computerization affects

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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.

competition, society, the economy, and the workforce... a video conversation with David Kelley, creator of the Stanford d.school, and Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation -- founders of the global design consultancy IDEO -- about a way to tap the creative in us all... a blog post by John Edson on the future of the car...
David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: The Era of Genetically-Altered Humans Could Begin This Year (Forbes) - By the middle of 2014, the prospect of altering DNA to produce a genetically-modified human could move from science fiction to science reality. At some point between now and July, the UK parliament is likely to vote on whether a new form of in vitro fertilization (IVF) -- involving DNA from three parents -becomes legally available to couples. If it passes, the law would be the first to allow pre-birth human-DNA modification, and another door to the future will open. The procedure involves replacing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to avoid destructive cell mutations. Genetically Modified Monkeys Created With Cut-and-Paste DNA (Guardian) - Researchers have created genetically modified monkeys with a revolutionary new procedure that enables scientists to cut and paste DNA in living organisms. The macaques are the first primates to have their genetic makeup altered with the powerful technology which many scientists believe will lead to a new era of genetic medicine. The feat was applauded by some researchers who said it would help them to recreate devastating human diseases in monkeys, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The ability to alter DNA with such precision is already being investigated as a way to make people resistant to HIV. More science trends...

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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Top Stories:
Previous issues

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Man Hails Bionic Hand Breakthrough (Belfast Telegraph) - A revolutionary bionic hand with a sense of touch has been tested on a patient for the first time, raising the prospect of artificial "feeling" limbs. Dennis Sorensen, from Denmark, was able to feel the shape and texture of objects using the robot left hand connected by ultra-fine electrodes to nerves in his upper left arm. "The sensory feedback was incredible," said the 36-year-old, who spent a month trying out the hand. "I could feel things that I hadn't been able to feel in over nine years. When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square." IBM Shows Off Quantum Computing Advances, Says Practical Qubit Computers are Close (Extreme Tech) Quantum scientists at IBM Research have announced major advances in quantum computing that could place real, practical quantum computers in businesses and homes within the next 10 years. The main breakthrough revolves around the long-term integrity of qubits. To perform quantum computing, you need to be able to reliably store and interrogate qubits -- but qubits are incredibly flighty creatures that readily change their state through decoherence. IBM has created a high-coherence 3D qubit that retains its state for up to 100 microseconds, or 0.1 milliseconds. This is stable enough that engineers can now shift their focus to scaling up the number of qubits to create a quantum logic computer. More technology trends...

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BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Point Your iPhone at Something You Like, and Amazon's New App Buys It (Wired) - Amazon just keeps making it easier for you to buy everything on the web. If the company continues to have its way, you'll never need to go to the store again. Today, Amazon is announcing a new feature inside its mobile shopping app that lets you scan items in your home using your smartphone's camera and quickly order all of your packaged goods online. The new feature, called Flow, will be available inside Amazon's shopping app for iOS. It's iPhone-only for now, and the company isn't saying when it will arrive on other smartphone platforms, or on the Kindle Fire. Instead of taking a photo of an item or scanning a barcode, Flow recognizes items via their shape, size, color, box text, and general appearance. Hold your iPhone up to a row of items on your shelf or counter, and within seconds of "seeing" it with the iPhone's camera, every recognizable item is placed in queue that can be added to your Amazon cart. Concerned About Security Breaches, Many Americans are

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Using Cash Instead of Cards (Business Insider) - Nearly onethird of Americans are trading in plastic for paper. In the wake of the massive security breach at Target, 37% of Americans say they are making an effort to use cash instead of credit or debit cards when paying for purchases, according to a recent survey conducted by GFK Public Affairs & Corporate Communications and the AP. The move to cash is part of a larger trend of people worrying that their payments will compromise their valuable personal data. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding Just Ask the Business World (New York Times) - It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyones favorite, ROBOTS. Whatever name you prefer, some form of it has been stoking progress and killing jobs -- from seamstresses to paralegals -- for centuries. But this time is different: Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in "a decade or two," according to a new paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, discussed recently in The Economist. The question is: Which half? Should a Robot Decide When to Kill? (Verge) - As the US military pours billions of dollars into increasingly sophisticated robots, people inside and outside the Pentagon have raised concerns about the possibility that machine decision will replace human judgment in war. Around a year ago, the Department of Defense released directive 3000.09: "Autonomy in Weapons Systems." The 15-page document defines an autonomous weapon -- what Gubrud would call a killer robot -- as a weapon that "once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator." The directive, which expires in 2022, establishes guidelines for how the military will pursue such weapons. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Arctic City Hopes to Cash In as Melting Ice Opens New Sea Route to China (Guardian) - The city of Nadym, in the extreme
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north of Siberia, is one of the Earth's least hospitable places, shrouded in darkness for half of the year, with temperatures plunging below -30C and the nearby Kara Sea semi-permanently frozen. But things are looking up for this Arctic conurbation halfway between Europe and China. Over the next 30 years climate change is likely to open up a polar shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, cutting travel time to Asia by 40% and allowing Russia's vast oil and gas resources to be exported to China, Japan and south Asia much faster. Kapital Creation: A Beijing State of Mind (Cool Hunting) Urbanization is a major global issue, but nowhere more pressing and extreme than in China. The country's urban population is expected to hit one billion over the next decade, according to the World Bank. Alongside unprecedented economic development and resource consumption, China has come under fire for its treatment of individuals in light of purported gains for the collective good -including issues around equity and its treatment of dissidents, most notably those in the creative class. NYC-based filmmaker Matthew Niederhauser's upcoming film "Kapital Creation: A Beijing State of Mind" explores this development in Beijing in juxtaposition with the flourishing (if, at times, stifled) creative class in the cosmopolitan city. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: A Ban on Autos? Major Cities Consider Going Carless (CNBC) - Germany, home of the high-speed autobahn, is perhaps one of the few countries that has had as intense a love affair with the automobile as the U.S. But in an effort to go green, the country's second-largest city is studying ways to eliminate cars by 2034. The northern city of Hamburg has laid out an initial concept, named the Green Network Plan, that would expand public transportation and add more routes for pedestrians and bicyclists. The most controversial aspect of the plan calls for a steady phaseout of automobiles in the center of the city over the next two decades. Flooding Experts Say Britain Will Have to Adapt to Climate Change And Fast (Guardian) - "You are looking at retreat," says Prof Colin Thorne, a flooding expert at the University of Nottingham. "It is the only sensible policy -- it makes no sense to defend the indefensible." This assessment of how the UK will have to adapt to its increasing flood risk is stark, but is shared by virtually all those who work on the issue. Centuries of draining wetlands, reclaiming salt marshes and walling in rivers is being put into reverse by climate change, which is bringing fiercer

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storms, more intense downpours and is pushing up sea levels. Sea walls are now being deliberately allowed to be breached, with new defences built further back, and fields turned into lakes to slow the rush of the water, as flood management turns back towards natural methods. More environmental trends...

FUTURE
TRENDS
Top Stories: Is Capitalism in Trouble? (Atlantic) - The B Corp community is genuinely ambitious. And it is part of a wider international movement of CEOs, investors, and business-school professors who hope to transform the way business is done, creating a more "sustainable" system of capitalism. Parts of the movement are familiar. Environmentally friendly business practices have long been mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with organic foods. Humane treatment of the developing-world workers who sew our clothes or build our iPads isn't quite as popular a brand promise, but it is hardly novel. What is newer is the worry about the Western middle class and the fear that capitalism as it currently operates isn't delivering for that broad swath of society. Brin's Corollary to Moore's Law (Contrary Brin) - We are in for a time of major decision as the Moore's Law of Cameras -sometimes called "Brin's Corollary to Moore's Law" -- takes hold and elites of all kinds are tempted to utilize surveillance in Orwellian/controlling ways often with rationalized good intentions. More future trends...

From the
publisher...

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Read more...

A Web Resource... Andrew McAfee's Blog -Andrew McAfee studies the ways information technology affects business -- how IT changes the way companies perform, organize

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themselves, and compete. At a higher level, he also investigates how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce. He and Erik Brynjolfsson are co-authors of the book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. Multimedia... Unleash Your Inner Innovator (Financial Times) - David Kelley, creator of the Stanford d.school, and Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation, run global design consultancy IDEO. In the final part of the FTs Thinking Big series, they talk to Ravi Mattu about a way to tap the creative in us all. (10m 32s) The Blogosphere... The Car As You Know It Is Dead (Fast Company Co.DESIGN) John Edson "From where I sit, three major shifts will move the car from a depreciating asset that every family owns to a mesh of hardware, software, and services that meet our transportation needs in a multidimensional way that destroys our assumptions of what a car is."

Email:
future@innovationwatch.com

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