Some things are just awesome

The shuttle, which returned last week from a 12-day mission, and the space station can be seen in orbit 250 miles above the earth while the sun is 93 million miles away.

Click on the picture to enlarge the image and see a closer look at the shuttle and space station.

Mark Your Calendar - InnoVenture 2007 - March 27 and 28, 2007

Mark your calendar and plan to attend InnoVenture 2007, to be held March 27 and 28, 2007 at the Palmetto Expo Center in Greenville, SC. InnoVenture has grown from 350 participants in 2004 to over 650 participants in 2006, and we anticipate a bigger crowd this spring.

Look forward to seeing you at InnoVenture 2007.

What causes academics to become entrepreneurial?

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has awarded its second Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship to Professor Toby Stuart of the Harvard Business School.

The State Science and Technology Institute created the following summaries of a selected set of Professor Stuart's most recent articles:

"When Do Scientists Become Entrepreneurs? The Social Structural Antecedents of Commercial Activity in the Academic Life Sciences"
Stuart and Waverly Ding of Berkeley's Haas School of Business take a randomly selected sample of 5,100 life science Ph.D.s in academia, and examine the link between participation in for-profit entrepreneurial ventures and the presence of an academic social network that supports faculty entrepreneurism. They find that university scientists are more likely to found or join the board of a new firm if other faculty members have already done so, particularly if more prestigious colleagues in their department have created their own start-ups. They also find evidence that more accomplished faculty members are more likely to help commercialize technologies and to lead the way in fostering an entrepreneurial climate within a university department.

"The Impact of Academic Patenting on the Rate, Quality and Direction of (Public) Research Output"
In this January 2006 paper, Stuart, Ding, and Pierre Azoulay of Columbia University's Graduate School of Business examine the patents and research output of 3,862 academic life scientists to determine if the increasing focus on commercialization at American universities is affecting the quantity and quality of published research. They conclude that patent activity has a positive effect on the rate of article publication, but no observable effect on the quality of those articles.

"Gender Differences in Patenting in the Academic Life Sciences"
In this Kauffman-sponsored study, Stuart, Ding, and Fiona Murray of MIT's Sloan School of Management reveal that male life scientists in academia secure patents at more than twice the rate of their female colleagues. The study suggests that women conduct equally significant research, but often find themselves left out of social networks that provide valuable access to the commercial sector. The authors conclude that additional networking groups could help foster greater connections between female researchers and the business community.

These articles and others by Toby Stuart are available through the TBED Resource Center at http://www.tbedresourcecenter.org.

What Big Companies Can Learn From Start-Ups

Duke University has recently released a report of what big companies can learn from start-ups.

Companies enjoy far greater success when they invest corporate venture capital in startup firms for strategic reasons rather than for narrow financial returns... This research clearly shows that often the greatest benefit of corporate venture capital investment is to provide a window into novel technologies that ultimately helps advance the corporation’s overall technology strategy

Net Neutrality Revisited

Earlier in the summer we had a discussion about net neutrality. Senator DeMint emerges as a leader in the future of telecommunications and the Internet and A letter to Senator Jim DeMint

This week a friend on the faculty at USC sent me a link to an article in the Chronical of Higher Education (subscription required).

The article reports that,

A dozen higher-education groups sent a letter on Wednesday to two key U.S. senators, reiterating their support for the principle of network neutrality...

The college groups worry that collaborative online research and distance education will suffer if telecommunications companies that own broadband infrastructure degrade or slow down the transmission of Web content offered by higher-education institutions in favor of content from commercial Web operators.

"Net neutrality is extremely important for colleges and universities as we develop new ways to deliver multimedia instructional materials to students, including students off campus and in rural areas," the letter reads. "Universities have long been drivers of Internet innovation."

Aren't students off campus and in rural areas more likely to get the telecommunications infrastructure they need to consume the innovative multimedia instructional materials that will be developed if they pay the market rate for the infrastructure rather than subsidizing them and shifting the cost to other users?

The elite of South Carolina do the most to drag down the average

The Greenville News reports the following (which you should already know because you read it here first).:

South Carolina students in households with annual incomes above $100,000 scored 68 points below the national average.

Those from families earning below $10,000 were 63 points below peers nationally, the College Board data show.

All other income groups trailed their peers by 21 to 41 points.

So, the Greenville News had a choice between two headlines.

Children from lower-income families gaining on SAT scores

or

The elite of South Carolina do the most to drag down the average

The fact that the story ran at all, though, is a sign of progress. Once we begin to accept reality we can then do something about it.

A friend on the faculty at Clemson sent me a link to an article about how

U.S. students [in the US] are falling behind in math and science, and competition from abroad is intensifying. Our students rank 24th in the world in math literacy by the time they get to high school.

So comparing SC to the US average is a far cry from comparing SC to the best in the world.

Here's what's wrong with the Monitor study of education

Well, you knew it was coming. It was really done quite intentionally.

The Monitor Group completed a study of public education concluding as the Greenville News put it that Contrary to some perceptions, state's students hold their own.

Now along comes The State newspaper opining that:

THE FICTION THAT South Carolina has the worst schools in the nation has become something akin to an urban legend, perpetuated by the same means: Tell a lie often enough, and eventually people will believe it.

The State reads into this report that:

But there is good reason to believe that the combination of [current] changes and the full 12-year implementation of the 1998 Education Accountability Act that is already producing such dramatic results in the lower grades will put our graduation rates on that same path to improvement.

So in other words, let's just stick with the status quo and everything will be all right.

But the reality is, as Swamp Fox showed a couple of weeks ago, that in the words of Andrew J. Coulson, who also studied SC public education and reached a fundamentally different conclusion,

The better educated a South Carolina student'’s parents happen to be, the further that student scores behind students in other states whose parents are similarly educated.

Arguing that we should maintain the status quo in public education and that everything will be alright is not going to help our children be the best in the world at what they do to compete in the global economy they will face over their careers.

How do you build communities?

How to you build communities of people collaborating together?

Big lessons can be learned from organizations that have been successful at that over the ages - churches. The lessons are both in time proven ways in how they organize to build community, as well as emerging ways in terms of how they use technology to build communities.

ACS Technologies in Florence recently introduced an enhanced product:

Small Groups Complete™, an easy choice for churches that wish to manage and organize small group ministries more efficiently and effectively.

The concept of small groups is an increasingly popular way for connecting people and encouraging involvement within churches by helping members build relationships and grow spiritually. With unique online interactivity, members and leaders can join groups and communicate with members within their groups while staff has total access.

Market for automotive telematics $38.3 billion in 2011

Telematics is "the use of Global Positioning System technology integrated with computers and mobile communications technology." The market for automotive telematics, just one segment of automotive IT, is anticipated to generate total revenues of $38.3 billion in 2011.

US Department of Transportation Strategic Plan 2006 to 2011

From fuel cells to automotive IT to out traditional automotive cluster, we have a lot riding on transportation. Here you can find a copy of the US Department of Transportation - Draft Strategic Plan - Fiscal Years 2006 – 2011. The priorities for how the Federal government spends transportation dollars will drive a lot of the development of our area.

A driver's dream: High-tech freeways

There's an interesting article in the San Jose Mercury News about A driver's dream: High-tech freeways. Why don't we build on here first?

Complementary innovation at Michelin

Michelin marketing of both tires and tourist guides was recently the feature of an interesting discussion of complementary innovation on Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog, found compliments of the Fortune Business Innovator Insider blog.

Carr asks five questions in assessing the potential of developing complementary products:

1. What complements are currently constraining demand in our markets?
2. What new product might boost demand for our core offerings?
3. Would our customers buy more if they had better information?
4. Would we learn valuable lessons by innovating in complements?
5. Do we have competitors whose fortunes are tightly tied to the price of complements?

Context, not content, is king in a world of infinite choice

The book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More discusses how we've been conditioned to focus on a few best selling items, the Top 40 playlist on the radio or the New York Times Bestsellers, because physical shelf space is scarce and physical retail business models are based on maximizing the value of that shelf space.

In a digitally connected world, it's no more expensive to display a product that rarely sells than it is to display a bestseller. Most of things in the world aren't valuable to us, but buried in the blizzard are a few diamonds. The trick is that what each of us defines as diamonds is different. Where there is an overabundance of choices, what's really valuable is a filter that helps us find what we want when we want it.

The author notes halfway through the book:

In a world of infinite choice, context--not content--is king.

Hmmm... Then he notes that

American Airlines made more money from its Sabre electronic reservation system than the entire airline industry made collectively charging people money to ride on planes.

Baby Bells were bringing in more profits from their yellow pages than from their inherited monopolies.

Hmmm... There's a business model for us here somewhere.

Data mining in a world of infinite choice

I spent some time recently with Ed Roehl and Ruby Daamen of Advanced Data Mining International. ADMi was a presenting company at InnoVenture 2006 and has won Innovision Awards in 2005 and 2003.

The ADMi website says:

People are awash in rivers of data, flowing from many sources. Without automation, leveraging this information is beyond human abilities.

Advanced Data Mining provides data visualization and analysis software, and services that extract knowledge from large databases. We help people decipher the relationships between hundreds of variables. Our highly experienced staff has unsurpassed expertise in data mining, ultra high quality multi-dimensional computer graphics, and web-based data communications. We not only give you knowledge that is unobtainable by other means, we can also embed this knowledge in your operations to give you real-time understanding that adapts to a world that is constantly changing.

Hmmm... In a world of The Long Tail, there's a business model in there somewhere.

The dark side of a world of infinite choice

Recently Evan Tishuk of OrangeCoat sent me a link to DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. He criticizes Wikipedia as

part of... a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force.

He comments that:

A variety of "Consensus Web filters" such as "Digg" and "Reddit"... assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.

His coup de grâce is:

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?... The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place. In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior.

Hmmm...

A Fascinating Discussion With Virginia Uldrick About Unleashing Creative Potential

I am producing a documentary on entrepreneurship, and recently had an interview with Virginia Uldrick, the founder of the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. Below is a snippet about how Virginia recruited out of the box thinkers, who are among the best in the world at what they do, and molded them into one of best high schools in the world.

There is a powerful lesson here for how to create highly innovative communities. Surround yourself with incredibly talented people. Give them rules of the organization must live by. Then make it possible for talented people to do what they do at the best level possible.

Uldrick: The vision of the school was to create the best arts high school in America, maybe in the world, to become the best in the world. We were successful. We are the number one school in music theory of a school for its size; we are one of sixteen schools in America doing service learning, the right way. We are one of two of the finest dance training programs in the world of a school of its size and the number of students served. Our teacher is one of three people winning the Nijinsky prize, the head of the dance department. How do you get people like this?

Warner: How do you get teachers to do this?

Uldrick: You do that very carefully by advertising in lots of places nationally. You do a lot of research.

Warner: What are you looking for?

Uldrick: Well we wrote the specs on that. We wrote what we wanted in a teacher. First of all, they have to be outside the box. They have to be an artist. The arts teachers have to be an artist. They have to be a distinguished artist. They have to have made some record in being a master teacher, either privately in the colleges or universities or in the public schools.

What do you write? You write the loftiest ideal’s that you can think about. But they are not lofty, just not done in the norm. You have to reach as high as your brain can take you, as your vision can take you. What is it that children need to know and be able to do? Not just this, but this.

Warner: So you've got a vision of the school, you've got wonderful people, how do you make it sure it operates right?

Uldrick: Well you have a plan of action; you know what the rules and regulations are. You have a set of procedures and guidelines to work through. When you are a state agency and you are also a public school you have two agencies you are working for and it’s tough. You have to satisfy both.

Warner: So you have a talented team of people, how do you make sure that the school runs the way you want it to run? You just told me you had a bunch of people thinking outside of the box.

Uldrick: Absolutely.

Warner: Somehow you've got make sure this works.

Uldrick: But you take what they think out of the box and make it fit into what is required.

Warner: How do you do that?

Uldrick: Not easily. But you trust, there has to be major trust between the president, the dean, the faculty, the staff, and the board, major trust.

Warner: How do you get that trust? You have hired a dance teacher who one of few people who won an award that Baryshnikov won. You going to tell that person how to teach dance?

Uldrick: Absolutely not! He is going to tell me how to teach it.

Warner: So how do you do that?

Uldrick: I am going to give him the rules of the agency and the state, and we have to live within those rules. Now, I will make it possible for you to do what you do, and want to do, at the best level possible. You tell me what you want, and I will tell you what you can have. Then we will try to get the wants, but we have to have what we have to have first.

So you build, its building blocks and you school those people into becoming [what they must be]. Yes its frustrating for people who aren’t accustomed to that. Because when you are in a public arena generally you go by these rules and you never step outside the box. As long as you satisfy these rules, it’s okay.

I think we have gone beyond that. I think that both governor’s schools have set a tone to go beyond that but you learn from those people what that have to have to be successful, to give these children the best that is possible and then you work hard with the private sector and the state to say this is what we need. This is not what we want, this is what we need. Now when we get what we need, we will tell you what we need on the next step, which is a want right now.

So you build your program that way. You build trust with your legislature and you build trust with your donors. You also can not build a donor unless you sit with that donor and you tell them what your vision is. You tell them how they can help satisfy that vision.

Not for the president, not for the dean, not for the teachers, but for that child. That child does not know what his vision is yet, fully, but he knows, "I want to be a dancer; I want to be a dancer."

Truth and Beauty: Part Deux

J. David Woodard, who teaches political science at Clemson and holds the Strom Thurmond Chair of Government, entered the fray over the book assigned to Clemson freshmen to read this summer, Truth and Beauty.

In the book, a woman makes bad choices in her life and pays the consequences. Sounds like a good book for college freshmen with a new burst of freedom to read. But Dr. Woodard doesn't think the book was appropriate because the author didn't spoon feed the freshmen readers a sermon with the proper moral lesson.

In the words of a local pastor in his letter to President James Barker, 'Lucy eventually pays the price ... not for these mistakes, but for her false sense of invincibility. Little is done to dissipate the moral fog, even by the book's end.'

Woodward quotes John Gardner that

Art is essentially and primarily moral -- that is, life-giving -- in its process of creation and moral in what it says.

Beyond the fact that many would argue with that definition of art, Wikiepida notes that:

[Gardner's] direct and often unflattering (perhaps courageous) judgments of contemporary authors harmed his relationships with many in the publishing industry...

Gardner published "The Life and Times of Chaucer"... [with] several passages in the text that either in whole or in part were lifted directly from works by other authors... [which] Newsweek magazine and other mainstream media outlets were quick to simply label it plagiarism...

John Gardner was married twice... [and] died in a motorcycle accident just days before a scheduled third wedding.

Evidently, Garner never absorbed the lessons of his own uplifting moral fiction. Perhaps Dr. Woordward thinks it would have been more appropriate for Clemson freshmen to have read a biography of the man he holds up as a moral beacon. Gardner clearly seems to have made bad choices and paid a price. Let's make sure, though, in this book that we don't challenge young minds to examine and debate the moral choices that Gardner made, but rather by the end of the book let's make sure we lift the moral fog they surely will be in.

My daughter is a Clemson freshman. She and I attended a reception at Clemson this week, where a top academic official told her that for eighteen years her parents had taught her a value structure and now she was independent and would have to test and build on that value structure herself. An image came to my mind of a National Geographic film where a newly born giraffe struggles and wobbles to get to its feet, teeters a few times, and then runs off into the savannah to make a new life for itself. If all the parts are there properly, the young giraffe will be just fine. It they're not, the youngster is not long for this world.

I'm confident, yet still pray, that my daughter has a strong foundation and will thrive in the intellectual milieu that is Clemson.

Startup Success 2006

This is a video of “Startup Success,” the Churchill Club’s annual look at what it takes to build a successful startup. This panel of five Silicon Valley entrepreneurs discussed the challenges and critical success factors necessary to reach the promised land. August 17, 2006.

 

Moderator: Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

Speakers:

• Lauren Elliott, Founder, Personal News Network


• Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn


• Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot


• Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah


• Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket

Global Cooling in 6-9 Years?

We're all familiar with the forecast of global warming due to the increase of man made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So, now along comes a Russian scientist that studies solar activity who predicts the beginning of a regular 200 year cycle of global cooling, not global warming.

On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth’s climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate’s global warming at the start of the 22nd century...He and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century — when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland — could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060... The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times.

Weather is such a complex phenomena that we can't reliably predict it a few days out. Can we really predict it several decades out? Perhaps the increased greenhouse gases will provide a blanket to protect us from the deep freeze to come.

Probably the scariest thing is that, as it has been for millennia, civilizations come and go based on the fickleness of the weather, we are at its mercy, we can’t predict it, and, at the end of the day, there is nothing we can do about it.

On Building a Civil Community

There are lots of experiments going on in creating online communities. One problem with communities is that there are always a few people that get obnoxious and drive off other more productive people. Think about the neighbors that insist on partying loud at 2:00 am. We've commented before that the example of Wikipedia demonstrates the need for an authority to make a community work.

Brad Warthen, The State's Editorial Page Editor, has written a blog for some time now. While most of the comments by others are good and constructive, a few people are shrill and insulting to others. To combat this, Brad has instituted some rules: Civility III (draft): Here's what I'm gonna do, for now.

From now on, Brad will let commenters say pretty much what they want if they put their name to it. Since there are legitimate times things must be said anonymously, he will allow anonymous commenters, but they will be subject to censuring to keep down the anonymous flame throwing. That makes sense, but some people will chafe at any authority, whether it's the referee of a basketball game, the administrators at Wikipedia, or the editor of a blog.

We can learn as much from Brad's attempt to build a civil community, as we can from the community’s comments themselves.

The real impact of open source

The open source movement will change the world - well at least part of the world. The challenge is figuring out which part.

Evan Tishuk at OrangeCoat forwarded a link to an interesting article, The real impact of open source.

The punch line is:

The real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money.

I think that's right. Open source software is changing the world. SwampFox.ws is built on the open source package, WordPress.

But open source has its limitations too. Having a dedicated group of volunteers writing software collaboratively is definitely not a way to do innovative, mission critical applications.

The Brouhaha About Truth and Beauty

My daughter started as a freshman at Clemson today. I've been amazed by the brouhaha over the book freshman were assigned to read this summer, Truth and Beauty.

I recently received an email looking for parents who were alarmed. Actually the email was from an organization run by a friend of mine who was a student with me at Clemson too many years ago. The email noted:

Amazon.com reviewer Ruth Steinberg (Atlanta) had a good grasp of its content when she wrote that it was reminiscent of a "1950s lesbian pulp novel." Allyson Hamilton (Los Angeles) called it "a memoir of a disturbed woman and her girlfriend." While only suggestive of a homosexual relationship, it is full of gratuitous heterosexual sex on the part of Lucy.

When I moved my daughter into her dorm on Saturday, she had a cable connection for her television. And I'm supposed to be concerned about the gratuitous sex she'll read in a book. Come on. Who are we kidding? There's almost nothing she or her peers are going to learn about sex from a novel.

She complained the book wasn't good literature. "Fine," I told her. "Clemson's not asking you to agree with the lifestyle in the book or even like the book. What they are requiring is that you think and then articulately explain your position."

My friend was concerned that we are "subsidizing more and more things [faithful people will] find repulsive with their tax dollars." But an intellectual discussion on a college campus is not morally repulsive, even if the subject is. If some folks think this author is morally warped, wait until these kids get to Emerson or Thoreau. I remember being the only person in my English class at Clemson writing that Thoreau was in la la land on Walden Pond and defending the Puritan authors we read. My professor was very liberal and was having none of it from me. But I did get an A in the class, and I remember that as one of the most enjoyable, and in retrospect one of the most educational, classes that I had at Clemson.

My daughter's about to get exposed to a bunch of diverse lifestyles, some of which she will find morally repugnant. I appreciate that Clemson is willing to begin her intellectual exploration in a structured setting where first she has to listen to others in the room before she opines. I am proud that she's is willing to express her opinions in a setting where there are likely to be others who strongly disagree with her. I hope the discussion gets frothy. But I also hope that they can go get a pizza together when it is over.

Regardless of what else she has learned, if at the end of four years she has learned to think, her undergraduate experience will have been successful. She's off to a good start.

One shot at websites that changed the world - and the commercial that made Super Bowl commercials Super Bowl commercials

It's almost hard to believe that all of this happened in the past ten years.

I was in a meeting yesterday of Next, a group of emerging technology companies in Greenville SC, and whispered to the guy next to me about the famous challege twenty years ago, "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?" We recognized that most of the people in the room were too young to have any idea what we were talking about.

Heck, most of the people in the room never saw the Super Bowl commercial that made Super Bowl commercials Super Bowl commercials.



I'm feeling old.

Eli Whitney's patent gets ripped off

Last week Adam Gautsch stirred the muck with his post, "The Problem with Patents."

Coincidentally, this week American Heritage featured an article about how Eli Whitney got ripped off by Southern cotton farmers who stole his intellectual property, the cotton gin, which made cotton king. If Southerners had had more respect for the need to incentivized innovation, rather than building an economy on human chattel, Southern history could have had a more positive outcome.

Expanding the Innovation Horizon: Global CEO Study 2006

It's IBM's turn to release a survey of CEO's perspectives on innovation - Expanding the Innovation Horizon: Global CEO Study 2006

A key conclusion is:

Business model innovation is becoming the new strategic differentiator. "The business model we choose will determine the success or failure of our strategy," one study participant said. In contrast to the findings of the 2004 survey, innovation in the enterprise's business model garnered nearly as much attention as innovation in a company's core processes and functions.

In Clayton Christensen's parlance, it's discontinuous innovations that need to be commercialized in new business models in order to address the needs of new markets of customers.

After a couple decades of programs like Six Sigma to drive down costs and improve quality, which primarily improved existing products sold to existing customers, American companies are finding they've squeezed most of the juice from that fruit. Now it's time to tackle the really difficult job of creating new markets.

Innovation management is where quality management was about twenty years ago.