EDUCAUSE | innovation

Podcast: What Innovators Can Learn from Hollywood - Keynote by Scott Kirsner

gbayne — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:35:52 -0500

This 45 minute podcast features a keynote address by Scott Kirsner, Columnist for the Boston Globe, recorded at the NERCOMP 2008 Annual Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. The speech is entitled, "What Innovators Can Learn from Hollywood".

Technology innovators sometimes expect that users will embrace new ideas and new tools with open arms. In reality, most innovations are met with hostility and indifference, and it can take a lengthy campaign to persuade organizations to change the way they work. In an illustrated spin through Hollywood history, journalist and author Scott Kirsner will demonstrate how innovators like Pixar, George Lucas, and Bing Crosby (yes, "Mr. White Christmas") have changed the movie industry while facing enormous resistance. He'll also describe the three kinds of people that exist in every organization and some of the key reasons people tend to rebel (or go into a shell) when confronted with a new piece of technology.

What NERCOMP Innovators Can Learn from Hollywood. Keynote presentation by Scott Kirsner at NERCOMP 2008

llarsen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:04:58 -0500

Notes from: “What NERCOMP Innovators Can Learn from Hollywood”

A podcast of this general session is available at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcastwhatinnovatorscanl/46455.

Scott Kirsner, Columnist for the Boston Globe, The Future of Video, Tech and Innovation spoke on the topic of innovation.

Abstract: Technology innovators sometimes expect that users will embrace new ideas and new tools with open arms. In reality, most innovations are met with hostility and indifference, and it can take a lengthy campaign to persuade organizations to change the way they work. In an illustrated spin through Hollywood history, journalist and author Scott Kirsner will demonstrate how innovators like Pixar, George Lucas, and Bing Crosby (yes, "Mr. White Christmas") have changed the movie industry while facing enormous resistance. He'll also describe the three kinds of people that exist in every organization and some of the key reasons people tend to rebel (or go into a shell) when confronted with a new piece of technology.

Key message of this talk: Innovators always underestimate the importance of persistence and making the right connections. It’s not just about a better mousetrap. Innovators need to have advocates and early adopters.

Kisner referenced a recent CIO Magazine “The Year Ahead” conference where the focus was on 1) “users are adopting the new technologies and then we have to figure out how to respond and provide/manage it and 2) and, given all of the infrastructure we have to manage/maintain, how do we carve out money for innovation?

He did a quick audience survey with the following questions:

1) Is you’ve ever introduced a new technology or technology service, please clap. The room was noisy with clapping

2) If you’ve faced resistance introducing technology, please boo. The room was loud with boos.

3) If you’ve been to the movies, please clap. Nearly everyone had been to the movies.

Kirsner went to SkyWalker ranch for a conference on digital technology where there was lots of show and tell but most of the actual discussion was around the issue of wanting to use new technologies but getting resistance from studios and cinema professionals. He concludes that even if the technology is providing the “better mousetrap” and people should use it, there will always be resistance to it.

Film Industry and Technology Advances

In comparing IT to the movie industry he noted the tension between innovation and status quo. (preservationists) His accompanying story was about Eastman and Edison inventing movies together – with Eastman’s flexible film and Edison’s camera. He described Edison’s Kinescope with 30 seconds of “peep” film in B&W (1894) which was exciting, not because of the subjects of the films, but because of the new technology. When they moved to films for groups they didn’t think there would be a market so Edison originally opposed this move.

When sound was added, the “you ain’t heard nothing yet” line from Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer” proved that dialogue, as well as music, was powerful. He noted that Irving Thalberg, an MGM executive, said “sound is a passing fancy” after seeing the film.

Kirsner noted that all of these new film technologies were Rube Goldberg contraptions in the beginning. People were trying to innovate with what they had and could imagine. The first Vitaphone records for the sound were only good for 20 plays, then they got too scratched and had to be replaced. This was about the time that standards became important to the industry and the standards built around the technology that first added sound to film is essentially still being used today.

Technicolor came next. A group of MIT graduates created their headquarters and film processing lab in a railroad car that they then took to wherever a film was being made because there was so little interest. These founders of Technicolor got in touch with Douglas Fairbanks and convinced him to try it for “The Black Pirate” It was a terribly expensive process at the time and Fairbanks later said he wouldn’t make another because of the fragility of the process and the cost.

Walt Disney was very captivated however and had the animators change his “flowers and trees “ Silly Symphony to color in 1935 which led to Jock Whitney, a wealthy playboy, funding Technicolor and pushing for the novel “Gone with the Wind” to be filmed in their 3 color process. This was in 1939. It used very rich colors and this tipping point for color in the movies. It took time to find the right backers and advocates for the technology which is the standard today. “Color by Technicolor” improved box office receipts by 30-40% . Color films competed with color TV.

Other technologies were tried but not all stuck. Vincent Price made “The Tingler” the only horror movie to star a lobster as the beast. They put a vibrating buzzer under some of the seats in the audience. These went off when the beast was in shown on the film. It wasn’t high technology but it worked but not well enough that we still have buzzers on the seats. The mantra became that these needed to be fun and provide experiences we don’t have in our regular lives.

Home video had its original seed when Bing Crosby convinced NBC to move from live shows to taped shows. The first video process recorded only 16 minutes of bad video. Other companies began working in this arena and Jack Valenti argued against the new video technology and the Japanese companies that made VCRs by saying that the VCR was to the American film producer and the American public what the Boston strangler was to a woman at home alone. Eight years later video revenues surpassed ticket sales.

New filmmaking tools have also been resisted. Film editors like the personal Movieola editing machine esp. because of the physical experience of using it. The screen was only for the editor to look at and was his own private kingdom. When George Lucas and others moved to computer editing where lots of people could provide input and the editors felt they lost control. There were a number of seasoned editors who vowed that they were never going to use electronic editing. Users are ever resistant to change.

Kirsner said you need to find and work with the early adopters. Ed Catmull, a founder of Pixar wanted to use computers to make animated features. Lucas gave them a place to work for a few years and then sold Pixar to Jobs for $5 million. The early images were fairly crude, and they definitely weren’t up to the standards for Disney but Disney missed the speed of the progression of the new technology. Now everyone wants to work with Pixar.

Lucas was tricky. He wanted to do special effects and use digital cameras. There was some digital work in the Phantom Menace. When he wanted to go all digital and there was resistance, he asked them to identify the differences in the Phantom Menace but they could not and lost their arguments. There was the issue of making the Sony cameras “look” like the old film cameras in order to make the cinematographers happy. Lucas apparently said when confronted with something new, preservationists come up with all of these reasons why it can go wrong and they don’t come up with any reasons why it is the right thing to do.

The new technology now is, of course, YouTube.

Past the film industry history Kirsner offered the meat of his presentation.

Innovators, Sideline-sitters, and Preservationists

In Hollywood and every established industry, there are three kinds of people

Innovators
Sideline-sitters
Preservationists

In different situations the same person can act in different ways

Edison and projections
Spielberg and digital cinematography
Lucus uses legal pad to write screenplays not word processing

Kirsner says innovators typically don’t spend enough time understand and addressing the factors that cause folks to resist change

Too busy
Too expensive
Not reliable
Doesn’t integrate into work process
Concern about losing control/authority
Attaching to tradition and heritage
Fear and more

Innovators always underestimate the importance of persistence and making the right connections. It’s not just about a better mousetrap. Innovators need to have advocates and early adopters.

Closing quotes from the film industry

When I walk into a cutting room where there’s film hanging from the racks, it smells like victory. It’s also tactile. I can pick it up and look though it. I look at it as a talisman of my forefathers – Steven Spielberg

What haven’t you done yet? That’s the only interesting thing to be doing. That’s what gets me up in the morning – James Cameron

Kirsner will provide free ebooks of “Inventing the Movies” or “The Future of Web Video by writing Kirsner at kirsner@pobox.com. See http://cinematech.blogspot.com.

Q&A

Q How do we decide which technology is important?

A Think about what speaks to you. Think about how it really might be a solution. For example: when you have that gut feeling that it will work to do something.

Q Purists/perfectionists - do we need to think about this fourth set of folks?

A They are always looking for absolutely the best that matches the “original” but not actually helpful in getting the technology moving forward. More important is the role of the experimenters. Things won’t get better without them.

Q Are there technology dead ends that didn’t pan out?

A “The Tingler” buzzer technology didn’t last. 3D didn’t at first but may be back. Cinerama - 180 degree panoramic was hard to shoot to make it look good. It was interesting but killed by expense and complexity.

ELI In Conversation: Innovation and The Digitally Fluent University - An Administrative Perspective

gbayne — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:32:04 -0600

In this 16 minute podcast we feature a conversation from the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. The topic is digital fluency and innovation at the academy from an administrative perspective. Our conversation participants are Louise Thorpe, Head of Academic Innovation at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK; and Holly Morris-Kuentz, Director of Instructional and Research Technology for Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Both of the them also co-presented sessions at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. Holly Morris-Kuentz co-presented a session entitled, "Prioritizing Technology-Rich Classroom Space: Strategies for Success". Louise Thorpe co-presented a session entitled, "The Digitally Fluent University: A Recipe for Success?".

ELI In Conversation: Gardner Campbell on Innovation and New Media at the Academy

gbayne — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:36:38 -0600

In this 17 minute podcast we feature a conversation with Gardner Campbell, Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. He is joined later in the conversation by one of his students, Serena Epstein. They co-presented a session at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting entitled, "Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education". Our conversation addresses questions about institutional change in the new media environment and how instructors and administrators might innovate within the traditional university system.

W. Gardner Campbell is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, where from 2003-2006 he also served as Assistant Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Technologies. He has been involved in teaching and learning technologies for nearly two decades, including work at the University and San Diego and the University of Richmond, where in the fall of 2006 he was Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Gardner received his B.A. in English from Wake Forest University; and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Frye Leadership Institute (2005), was chair of the Electronic Campus of Virginia from 2006 to 2008, and has served on program committees for both EDUCAUSE and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. He currently serves on the ELI Advisory Board (2007-2010).

Looking Back on the 2007 Horizon Report

nordengren — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:42:55 -0600

Educause and the New Media Consortium released The Horizon Report 2007 Edition back in Spring. The 2007 report included six “key trends”, seven “critical challenges” and six “technologies to watch” and their projected adoption periods.

As I looked back through this report what jumps at me are these items and how they potentially impact us at Des Moines University.

Two of the reports “Key Trends” include:

Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college.

In my review of student writing, I see regular evidence of this lack of critical thinking. This affirms the need for more research like that led by Ann York and Teri Stumbo that blends the evidence based practice ideas with critical thinking skills. I think their work is on the cusp of creating a new Evidence Based Information Literacy curriculum that will be a cornerstone of new education models. The acronyms EBP and EBM may very well morph to become EBPIL as we work more in this cross disciplinary learning environment. Librarians are going to become even more central to our education pedagogy.

The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Amateur scholars are weighing in on scholarly debates with reasoned if not always expert opinions, and Web sites like Wikipedia have caused the very notion of what an expert is to be reconsidered.

There is a time and place for group think, and there are times when a group can be more intelligent than any of it’s independent members (see some of Francis Galton’s work in Nature from the early 1900’s). It’s also interesting to note that the Horizon report lacks traditional citations to studies and instead relies more on the group approach to it’s findings. The links considered and resources are shared both through del.icio.us and the Horizon Report Wiki . The report is a demonstration of both of these key trends in both it’s context and delivery format.

NMC and Educause highlight this as a “Critical Challenge”

There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression and learning and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.

The report goes on to suggest that

needed changes in faculty reward, promotion and tenure processes will almost certainly not occur without visionary leadership.

This one is not only critical, but self evident. If you review the curriculum offerings at the Doctorate level, the education technology and leadership programs are aimed at k-12 leadership. There are minimal programs designed to build a new base of technology grounded, higher education leaders who are prepared to lead graduate study in the next 20 years . This is not a criticism of the current leadership, but a vacuum for the future. There is no one doing what Scott McLeod is doing at CASTLE (now located at Iowa State) for the 12- 20 years. The focus remains k-12. There is the beginning of a new focus in education based on a K-20 model. But for those of us in higher ed, we’re the weak link in the chain and don’t have a strategy to develop our next generation of leaders who are prepared to address the significant changes in scholarship identified in the report.

Finally the report suggests “Adoption Windows” for new technology.

I find the suggested adoption windows offered in the report interesting, but not meaningful. Having the ‘diffusion of innovation’ and adoption theory of Iowa State’s Everett Rogers beat into me all through under grad, the idea that some campuses will be on these tools earlier than others is not surprise and some campuses will never adopt some of the tools.

What is interesting is the report considered “100 technologies” and then boiled their findings down to 12 and then 6.

In the next learning partner update I want to focus on the most overlooked aspect of this report. A skills gap that combined with a lack of information literacy, creates a dangerous zone of mis information.

Building Innovative Teams: A Manifesto

khascall — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:26:35 -0500

Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says "I need your group to be more innovative." Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go "be innovative"? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?

Right after I was made a supervisor, I attended an on-campus seminar on management. The instructor described analyzing staffing in terms of two components: Willingness and Ability. Staff might be Willing, Able, both, or neither, and the course included practical suggestions about how supervisors could address each case. This is a reasonable way to begin, but once you add innovation to the list of departmental goals, these two components are too simple a criteria. Innovation requires a third component. We call it "Spark".

Willingness

In the innovation context, the crucial question is: are your staff willing to get involved with new ideas and to question old assumptions? If so, great -- you can get started, and your task will be to work with them to maintain willingness. If not, willingness will be your first and primary challenge.

It's important to distinguish between staff cynicism and staff unwillingness. You need your cynics to point out the weakness and risks of a new idea, and to provide you with a way to measure how the group is doing in the process of analyzing a problem or idea. Refusing to allow negative opinions to enter the debate is a great way to shut down the flow of positive ideas as well. And besides, it's fabulously useful to have a cynic in the room when you talk to vendors.

But some staff may approach new ideas and strategies with an adamant, thoughtless refusal -- a frustrating visceral reaction that may or may not be in your power to address, but which can thoroughly poison the group.

Willingness to innovate is all about building and maintaining motivation. Motivation is different for everyone, and also varies by context. I've divided motivation into three categories: Passion, Purpose, and Profit.

Passion -- motivated by personal areas of interest or identity: a love of the subject area, a joy in the beauty of a well-crafted algorithm, the thrill of success, a drive to be the absolute best, the fun of playing with something new and interesting. Passion can be tricky to deal with, but it's a powerful force.

Purpose --motivated by a sense of the meaningful nature of the work to be done, an understanding of the value of IT projects within the university and the university's role in the world, an acknowledgement of the significance and the usefulness of an idea or strategy, an abiding satisfaction in a job well-done. Purpose is a little harder to build, but might out-last passion in the end.

Profit -- motivated by more immediate rewards, although not strictly or necessarily monetary. The profit motive is primarily focused on short-term gains -- do this, and you'll get this other thing. I would also categorize negative motivation as appealing to the profit motive -- do this, and you won't get fired. While immediate rewards are important, if profit rewards are the only kind of reward you have to offer, I contend that the innovation you get will be of lower quality and not as sustainable. That said, it's pretty easy to build -- you just make a promise or a threat, and then follow through. Ugh. In general, people are going to have a profit motive somewhere in them -- we all have bills to pay, and work can't be joyful or deeply meaningful all the time. But if immediate gains or punishment are the only thing that motivate your staff, I have to wonder what they're doing in higher-ed IT, where purpose and passion are supposed to compensate for the size of the paycheck! Understanding what kinds of projects have what kind of appeal to staff can help you to match them up, and also give you a sense of how to scope, describe, and design the project to get the most out of people's abilities.

Ability

In the innovation context, the crucial question is: are your staff able to do new and innovative work? Do they have the background and training? Do you? Do they have the time?

I characterize ability of a group to innovate, or of an individual within a group to innovate, as a matter of culture. In particular, the overall work culture that surrounds the individuals and is generated by them. My experience has led me to identify a group of cultural keys -- elements or values that must be reflected in the way that people interact with ideas and with each other, and the expectations that they have.

Be Flexible -- If you're doing something new, you're not going to know the full picture up front. Demands and conditions shift and will continue to shift. New products and technologies will come out. You just don't know what all the unknowns are, and the first way you choose to attack the problem will probably end up being a throwaway. There won't be a linear progress bar from 0% to 100% complete. There's no project plan for innovation. Embrace Failure -- A work culture that drives people to defend or hide their mistakes instead of owning up to them and sharing what they've learned is dangerous -- for innovation, it can be poisonous. Think like a faculty member doing research. If every one of your experiments succeeded, it would mean you're not trying hard enough. Learn, laugh, drink a toast to the foolish error of your ways, and move on.
Make Time -- You have to allocate a chunk of time during which these experiments and failures can occur.

This doesn't mean you have to throw all accountability to the wind. But you have to leave time for fits and starts and new beginnings. My group talks about whether a problem seems to be "responding to
pressure" -- if you're pounding away on something, and it's just not budging, we set a time limit on the approach, and agree to give up and try another strategy.

Another strategy for dealing with time is the dedicated block. I've made (and kept) promises like "I'll give you six weeks to bury yourself in this project, and I'll do what I can to keep all the other activities, distractions, and new projects at bay so that you can focus." Some of my staff have morning work-at-home time or designated work-at-home days so that they can avoid the inevitable interruptions of being at the office.

But what if you have so many things going on that you don't have time to allocate for innovation and experiments? The first place to look is for tasks that can be automated. Taking the time, or making the time, to automate, may mean you have to say "no" to new requests or turn them around more slowly. But it can also be the only way to make progress. I'd rather see staff spend time on the more interesting task of automating routine work than spend even a tenth of that time doing routine work that could be automated.

All of our investments in automation have already paid back the time spent on them. We construct quarterly lab builds in three weeks and push them in one week, rather than seven and three weeks, respectively. We use configuration management, so we can build new custom servers in forty-five minutes or less and manage all of them with a few scripts. We use a virtual machine infrastructure so that we don't have to spend time worrying about hardware. We created a self-service environment for smart web forms, integrated with campus LDAP for logins and pre-populated with directory data, stored in a dynamically self-generating database and exportable via CSV or SOAP.

Trust -- All of the above factors hinge on trust. You're asking staff to take risks, to share their ideas, to turn over more of their creative energy to work-related tasks. If they're going to be castigated, blindsided, demanded, and rushed, why bother? A manager has to keep her promises, be honest about motives, risks, and politics, and communicate expectations, goals, and timeframes. Staff have to be able to trust each other to work hard, to give graciously of their time and expertise, to share credit, and to forgive and forget instead of blame.

Spark

Willingness is your oxygen and Ability is your fuel, but it takes Spark to get flame. This is a slippery concept, the kind that makes its way into job postings in the form of phrases like "fast-paced work environment", "able to learn new things quickly", "self-starter", and "self-motivated".

Ask yourself:

If you gave this person an open-ended project with a murky scope and priorities, how would he handle it?

Does she suggest "crazy" ideas? Bemoan the "crazy" way that things work now?

Is he over-solving and over-analyzing problems? Does she seem to attach critical importance to minor requests and work on them until the wee hours?

All of these are signs of spark -- a desire for challenge and a willingness to contribute one's own ideas and energy above the ordinary demands of the job. If your staff have spark, you're lucky -- now your task is to keep it going and build a proper fire. If you don't have spark, it's time to figure out how to get it. You can coach staff on willingness, and train them for ability. But you have to engage and inspire and protect people to get spark.

I don't have a spark formula, and I can't break it down into bullet points,not yet anyway! But my main observation about spark is that it's highly individual, and doesn't respond to top-down managerial pressure. People have to spark on their own, but good management can help.

Think about your own moments of inspiration, your own spark -- the idea you have in the shower, the sudden enlightenment when pieces of a puzzle come together and you see connections that were less visible or less real to you before. Now tell your idea to someone who won't listen, won't see it, won't give you time to pursue it, won't buy in, won't help you learn how to make it happen, and won't spark back. And don't take the time to write it down, or sketch it out, and certainly don't start on making it a reality.

Pretty soon, that idea starts to die, and to slip beneath the waves of everyday life.

And maybe the next one doesn't flash quite as brightly. It would take a pretty amazing spark to sustain itself against all odds, without a supportive environment, surrounded by distractions and demotivations and demands. There's a reason brainstorming includes a "no bad ideas" rule. Sparks die out quickly if you let them.

So if you want your group to be able to do something new, something that's better, easier, cheaper, smarter, and more fun than what's been done before, if you want to innovate, then don't let your sparks die. Value them. Build up people's willingness to have new ideas and share them, and give them a culture where they can grow in all of their abilities. When the sparks come, be ready.

An Interview with Jenn Stringer, Stanford School of Medicine

gbayne — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:24:00 -0500

This is a 6 minute interview with Jenn Stringer, Director of Educational Technology at Stanford School of Medicine. It was recorded at the 2007 Educause Western Regional Conference in San Francisco, California. Jenn Stringer was part of a panel for a session entitled, Campus Learning Spaces: Two Innovation Design Approaches.

As educators emphasize learning over teaching, campus facilities are redesigned and repurposed. The decentralized Stanford University academic culture informs a "test kitchen" approach for piloting and disseminating instructional technology innovations.

Visit to China: Innovation

dianao — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 23:08:09 -0500

Many times we tell ourselves that the key to US competitiveness is innovation. Visiting China makes one realize that we aren’t the only society focused on innovation.

For example, at a session held at Tsinghua Science Park we learned that China has 42.8 million people involved in science and technology with R&D expenditures approaching $200 billion RMB; 2.5% of GNP is invested in science and technology. As they explained their science and technology approach we learned that their goal is to create an innovative nation and increase proprietary innovations, leapfrogging developments in key fields. To do that they are investing in both basic and applied research and facilitating business-university partnerships.

In China there massive programs for high technology research and basic research. In addition to research and development they are creating the capacity for science and technology commercialization, including the promotion of small and medium sized businesses. In addition, multinational corporations had over 750 R&D units in China in 2005, 90% of which are in either Beijing or Shanghai.

The goal is to reduce dependence on foreign science and technology by 30% and to make China first in the world in science and technology innovation. To achieve that goal they are developing a national innovation system involving the development of science parks, for example. The Ministry of Science and Technology has invested in the creation of science and technology innovation programs (STIPs) or high-tech industry development zones and technology-business incubators. Forty-three percent of national R&D investment goes into the 54 STIPs. The current estimate is that 10% of industrial growth is due to STIPs.

Another tool for stimulating innovation and economic development are Technology Business Incubators (TBIs). Their mission is to nurture “technopreneurs” and technology-based startups. There are over 500 TBIs that employ over 700,000 employees. An incubation service system is provided to support the success of the incubators (e.g., infrastructure, planning, consulting services, etc.). There are 58 university related incubators, 9 international business incubators to accommodate foreign start-ups and over 100 incubators for returned overseas scholars. The investments target specific industrial clusters, such as IT, biotechnology, medicine, material science, energy and others.

Their strategies appear to be working. We were told that it took China 50 years to receive 1 million patents, 4 years to reach 2 million and only two more to reach 3 million patents.

One additional factor having an impact on China’s development is the return of the “sea turtles,” the phrase used to describe returning Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs. With their experience in countries like the US, the “sea turtles” are able to quickly start up research labs and businesses, making a rapid impact. In addition, the number of returning Chinese students has increased. In 204, 247,000 overseas Chinese students returned, influencing the science and technology workforce.

My Top 4 Favorite "Management" Podcasts

khascall — Wed, 02 May 2007 18:38:23 -0500

These podcasts are my favorite sources of audio content related directly or semi-directly to what I do every day in the office -- innovation, ideas, management, perspective, etc.

The HBR IdeaCast
This is from the Harvard Business Review -- each episode is generally composed of an interview with an author or researcher about a particular set of ideas or advice about management and business, as well as a short "tips" segment toward the end.

Escape From Cubicle Nation
Pamela Slim focuses on creating a work life that you're passionate about -- for many, this may mean starting your own business or otherwise leaving corporate culture. For me, however, the focus is on creating a work environment that is appealing to people and gives them space to grow inside a larger organization. In addition, I find her reflections on marketing, discovering your own strengths, and developing services to be extremely relevant in an academic IT environment. She has a great blog, too.

Startup Nation
The Sloan Brothers cover topics relating to entrepreneurship, including pitching new ideas, forming business plans, and securing funding. I'm finding many parallels between this process and our research & development work. I tend to skip over the "community" podcasts that come out via their feed and just listen to the ones put out by the Startup Nation guys themselves. Elevator pitch, anyone?

Middle Management Lobotomy
This podcast comes from the personal perspective of a corporate middle manager, including his experiences managing people, setting goals, dealing with setbacks, making reports, etc. Apparently, I'm not alone. This podcast is also a peek inside the "Corporate World" -- whether or not I decide to join this work culture in the future, I certainly need to interact productively with those who live inside of it.

ETech 2007: Silicon Valley (Re)Discovers the Humanities

khascall — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:23:08 -0500

I just finished up a week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, CA. I came here hoping for a repeat of the rewards of ETech 2006 -- access to the pulse of the emerging tech sector, a six- to nine-month head start thinking about and planning for the technologies that will start to break into widespread public consciousness, an opportunity to talk to people who think deeply about innovation and the future, a refreshment of my own energy for the creation of the better. On these fronts, ETech 2007 delivered -- I'm going back to campus with a number of new technologies in hand, and I'm ready to engage and create and work to shape the emerging world.

Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas -- Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing, Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs, Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic, Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology.

But the primary theme that I extracted from all the talks and keynotes and presentations was this: Silicon Valley has (re)discovered the relevance of the humanities to everything they do.

I saw more references to books than to websites, more attempts to contextualize a topic through history and psychology and sociology and cognitive neuroscience than boosterism, more discussion of what might be and what should be than what is and what must be. I listened to tremendously intellectual, often academic presentations from danah boyd, Scott Berkun, Matt Webb, Adam Greenfield, Jane McGonigal, Jeff Hawkins, all of them engaging with technology as a social-intellectual construct: technology is directly colliding with humanity and society -- tech is so much more than code and gadgets!

This re-awakened understanding of technology presents higher education with an incredible opportunity. We have the chance to meet the boundless creative energy of Silicon Valley with our own unbounded analytical energy to create intensive intellectual discourse. The contexts are new, but the dialogues are classically old -- the role of the individual and the group, the source of authority and ownership, the way that human bonds are formed, the nature of intelligence and knowledge, the development of ethics, and the battle against boredom and suffering and isolation and powerlessness and disease.

Who are we and where are we going? Can either world, Valley or Academy, hope to answer this question alone? Like high-octane gasoline supplied to a beautifully engineered engine, we have the opportunity to run far and fast and hot, intermingling two worlds of intoxicated engagement, devoted together to discovery and delight.