Despite declining ratings for Battlestar Galactica on SciFi Channel, nearly universal critical acclaim along with robust DVD sales have led Universal Home Video to consider greenlighting a Battlestar Galactica direct-to-video telefilm. This is yet another example of how much innovation opportunity exists in television and film. Collapsing distribution windows, alternative distribution channels and enhanced opportunities for audience engagement are among the variables available for innovative content producers. read more | digg story

A report by the General Accounting Office concludes that current patent law discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by allowing them to make excessive profits through minor changes to existing pharmaceuticals. Pharma R&D spending has increased 147% since '93, but applications for "new molecular entity" drugs, have only increased 7%

read more | digg story

I toil away in what is at times a lonely wonkosphere. At the end of my first year as a blogger (ok, 10 months, with an extended absence in July and August), I reflect on what I wrote. Was I full of crap or did I come up with one or two remarkable ideas, something worthy of notice? What follows is a list of what I feel are my most significant posts, either for content, style or the quality of the conversations they triggered. Conclusions:

• I doubt I'm going to be nominated for a blog award anytime soon
• I like to pose a lot of questions and clearly don't have all the answers
• Finding one's voice as a writer and as a blog persona takes time
• I feel like I'm on a roll, but just getting warmed up

Upon reflection, these posts still resonate for me, in chronological order:

1. [mesh]: The Economics of Ideas
2. VC 2.0 & Social Microfinance
3. Ontario Budget: Cities, Creativity & Innovation
4. A Creative Renaissance?
5. ICT Toronto: Getting It Yet?
6. Future-Proofing Our Communities
7. Gender Bias in Nerdville...er...DemoCamp?
8. Open Source Innovation Models
9. A Social Mission for a Blogging Consultant?
10. Richard Florida on Public Intellectuals

Technorati Tags: bestoflist 2006, citizen wonk, wonkosphere

I recently was browsing Richard Florida's blog and found this provocative post about the decline of the public intellectual:

...just when we need scholars and the academy to generate the large scale ideas and public debate to facilitate and accelerate this "matching" of institutional arrangements to economic, technological and social trends, academe is focusing far too [few] resources on these issues and problems.

More after the jump...

Technorati Tags: public+intellectuals, commercialization, socialmedia, open+innovation

The Academia-Public Engagement Gap Much attention has been paid to the importance of university research, venture capital and entrepreneurship and the linkages between them, which together drive commercialization success in successful innovation clusters. At the recent Global Connect, there was much discussion about these interfaces and where there appear to be serious institutional and market failures. Tech transfer policies were highlighted by the VC community as a serious problem. And in the hurried chase for large-scale tech commercialization, institutional and social innovations are neglected altogether as not relevant to the global science-based innovation race. However, as Florida recalls for us:

Stanford University's Paul Romer, one of our leading students of economic growth, paraphrasing Keynes a great public intellectual himself, always says that what really powers economic and social advance are meta-ideas. If academe is not producing enough public intellectuals: where will these meta-ideas come from?

Florida states that the vacuum is being filled by journalists in the non-fiction aisle, but is worried about their limitations. He offers some interesting possible solutions within academia, including rewarding public engagement, create nimble institutes that cross disciplines and funding meta-ideas. I offer what follows as a method to get from here to there: Scholars, Social Media and Transformers What is the role of the culture and social structures of academia? The proprietary, closed and competitive culture of academe appears well entrenched. Meanwhile, a new innovation mode is evolving outside the ivory tower, a culture that is open, participatory and collaborative, enabled by social media and collaboration technologies. I applaud Florida and other public intellectuals who embrace the blogging ethos of transparency, authenticity and conversation. Academics have a public role, and by embracing that role, they create opportunities for entrepreneurial transformers to engage with them and find applications for their discoveries. Social media tools provide new, easy and cheap methods for engagement, given the appropriate incentives to do so. I would love to see academic researchers and scholars blogging incessantly, seeding the public domain with rich artifacts and clues to be mined by the social and economic transformers out in the wider community. Who are these scholars? What are their passions? Tell us what you're working on, and how it might change the world. We'd love to know more. And you should hear from us, about how your passions connect with ours. Such a rich discourse in the public domain would provide the social and economic transformers of ideas with raw material. These social and economic entrepreneurs employ that raw material of ideas to find solutions to real-world problems. A way forward, perhaps, but with major barriers to adoption. Competitiveness among academic peers is notorious, and disclosure is risky. Learning how to communicate in a social media space is a skill that may not come easily to most academics. Or I could be proven wrong. It would be an interesting experiment.

An experiment in social giving where you can leave a wish as a comment and a sponsor will donate a dollar to charity. Go leave your comment, blog about it, share it. Good luck to Austin Hill and crew on their experiment. read more | digg story

I love big ideas, remarkable ideas, ideas that can change the world.

In this post, I share a short list of big ideas that I'd like to research and perhaps pursue this year in partnership with like-minded individuals and organizations. (Is this Consulting 2.0?) These aren't problems I'll solve in 2007 (or even a lifetime), but are fascinating puzzles worth pursuing right now in theory and in practice. These are the big ideas worth watching, with big implications.

What's on your list?

Technorati Tags: economics+abundance, consulting+2.0, opensource, open+source+economics, emergence, creativity

Economics of Abundance

As the cost of broadband connectivity and processing power tend towards free, and as economic value is increasingly exchanged in digital form, a new and little understood interplay between the economics of scarcity and the economics of abundance is unfolding. How do we start to think about a world of abundance and how does it relate to the still very real physical world of scarcity?

Consilience and the Medici Effect

Eminent scientist Edward O. Wilson, a 2007 TED Prize Winner for ideas with the potential to change the world, describes consilience as "the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavour". The work Wilson describes is that of reaching across domains of knowledge and expertise to stitch together a more robust and innovative body of human knowledge. It closely parallels Frans Johansson's "intersections" from his Medici Effect, and points to a path of huge innovation potential.

Open Source, Open Innovation and Regional Innovation Systems:

Open source software provides a fascinating model that points to an alternative understanding of the economics of innovation. Open source inspired innovation models offer the opportunity to explore strategic options that include alternative conceptions of intellectual property, innovation and commercialization practices and economic development strategies. My operating thesis:

The global megalopolis that can integrate open innovation models into its economic structure and culture will, in aggregate, innovate faster and over time become more competitive in a post-industrial, post-information age global economy.

Emergence, Self-Organization and Networked Organizations

Emergence describes the development of complex systems from chaos. The laws of emergence as applied to evolutionary biology may have intriguing parallels in the social sciences, where economies, civil society movements and technology-driven social networks demonstrate emergent behaviour that mimics some of the characteristics of biological life.

How can human society reconfigure itself and its institutional and organizational structures to take advantage of the power of emergent behaviour? What basic social rules allow self-organization to thrive? How do organizations reconfigure themselves to understand and utilize these powerful natural forces?

Creativity and Place-making:

What makes for a creative place, what are its components and characteristics? How is creativity nurtured by and attracted to a sense of place? What makes creative industries thrive in particular places? How does culture and creativity offer a lever to transform communities and economies and sustain our quality of life? (My friends at Artscape have a lot of ideas.)