"If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?" -Robert J. Gordon Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the "innovation ain't what it used to be" bell. "Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century," he writes, summing up the argument, "the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live." Fox has a lot of company. He points to sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation "on hold for a generation." Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we're living in a time of innovation stagnation. He could also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we've entered a technological "desert." Thiel blames the hippies: Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost....

Marshall McLuhan very often provides an instructive reference point for how we understand our changing world. As I wrote in my Chapter 1 of Living Networks: The brilliant visionary Marshall McLuhan accurately described the media as an extension of our senses. Your eyes can see what’s happening in your immediate vicinity, your ears can hear

Continue reading Why crowds are an extension of our capabilities

  Il est frappant de constater l’absence des PME françaises dans les réseaux d’affaires internationaux qui leur sont tout à fait accessibles sur Internet et Usenet ! Vous voulez commercer avec le monde entier. N’essayez pas de voir cela avec un fonctionnaire des CCI. Bon nombre n’ont jamais demandé de passeport, ni voyagé dans le monde. [...]

Comme la France, l’Allemagne manque de compétences.  Ses solutions : attirer plus de jeunes, de femmes et de talents étrangers. L’Usine nouvelle consacrait cette semaine un article aux « recettes allemandes pour …
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This has been very much a leadership couple of months for me – with the World Economic Forum Council on the ‘Future of Leadership’ and indeed our own research on leadership at the Future of Work Consortium. So over the next couple of weeks I plan to talk about what we have found. Corporations have and continue to play a key role in the journeys of many leaders. For example, a glimpse at the emerging leadership cohort in India will show how many started their careers in talent rich companies such as Tata or Hindustan Unilever. The same is true...

Increasing productivity — making more with less — is at the core of any company or any economy's economic progress....