And cities will overtake nations on the innovation road

As megacities take a lead role amongst the proactive doers in COP21 Climate Conference in Paris, the latest edition (nb 77) of Institut Choiseul’s Géoéconomie publishes my article (in French) on cities reasserting themselves as the ideal spot for technological and societal innovation.

Abstract

Ever since they appeared about ten thousand years ago, urban centres have served the dual purpose of bringing together talent from various disciplines, and facilitating trade. By fostering both the production of novel ideas, and their access to markets, cities have offered an ideal space for innovation to blossom. Eclipsed for a while by all-powerful Nation-States, cities are back on the innovation stage, as three factors conspire to bring them to the fore:

“The world is moving from car ownership to car usership”

InnovToday

A BBC News article provides a great insight into the revolution in the making that the car industry is about to go through. KPMG sums it up in their annual survey of the auomotive industry: “The world is moving from car ownership to car usership.” Arguably it will take longer than headline-grabbing statements suggest, not least because a large section of the consumer base still feels a strong emotional connection to the car they own or that they wish to own, but it is undeniably underway.

View original post 262 more words

Innovating for the post-crisis rebound

InnovToday

Schumpeter defines innovation as a process of creative destruction. The point is not merely that innovation can still happen in times of crisis; it is that crisis are the best time for era-defining innovations to emerge. In yesterday’s session of the Mardis de l’Innovation cycle (in French), Marc Gigethighlighted a few powerful examples of companies, which emerged or re-emerged stronger out of the Great Depression of the 30s with winning products, such as GE and its refrigerators and washing machines, Converse and its emblematic (and ugly) shoes, or the entire machine-tool sector. As it turned out, the Great Depression became one of the most innovative periods in American history.

Today, some post-crisis winners are already emerging, though others may still be in the making. Examples include:

View original post 532 more words

Beyond 3D printing – it’s more than a Game of Drones: Smarter is Coming

3D/4D printing and self-assembly materials trigger at the same time fear and skepticism: fear that masses of workers in the manufacturing industries will find themselves structurally redundant, skepticism that complex systems can ever be manufactured using these emerging technologies. Both this fear and this skepticism are misplaced, because they are based on the faulty assumption that new manufacturing/assembly technologies will replace old ones like-for-like.

Cities to rise above Nations as the building block of innovation

More than half of humanity now lives in cities, a proportion that is expected to rise to three-quarters within the next 30 years. Squeezed between the critical mass of cities and the realities of the global economy, the traditional power of Nation-States is waning. Nationalists and protectionists of all kinds may not like it, but there is no way back. Nations are becoming ineffective at driving change, as politicians on any national stage are increasingly perceived as out-of-touch and their now structural inability to mobilize capital makes them irrelevant. Conversely, cities are rapidly appearing as the right perimeter to implement change. This is why this year’s MIT Europe conference “a blueprint to the future” is so heavily focused on urbanism.

Pokiwa creates the buzz with insect power

I recently participated in the selection for the ArtScience Prize Paris, an educational program in which 10 groups of students from engineering schools and schools of design work on new ideas around a given theme. On the 2013-2014 theme “Energy of the future” two groups have emerged as the winners: Pokiwa and InnerG.

InnerG developed a connected wrist band that enables the user to manage electric power for surrounding devices by simply waving at them, thereby creating a cool way to drive energy efficiency up.

Pokiwa came up with a radical idea: to harness the movement and acoustic vibrations of zillions of insects in their natural habitat to generate enough electricity to provide clean and safe lighting in deprived areas. A short animation illustrates the concept beautifully (a few words in French, but very visual and easy to understand).

Pokiwa and InnerG will develop their idea further for presentation at the international workshop in June 2014 at Le Laboratoire in Paris, and will display their prototypes at Harvard University in late 2014. I can’t wait to see them!

Reports of a post-growth era have been vastly exagerated

In Mark Twain style we could claim that reports of the advent of a post-growth world have been vastly exagerated. In fact while we almost certainly find ourselves at the end of the long economic cycle that started with the industrial revolution, we might well be on the eve of a new century long growth cycle.

The industrial revolution harnessed mechanical power to free-up or leverage human physical power. In production or transport, tasks that would have otherwise taken muscle and time could be done with increasing effectiveness through people operating machines. The lever of mechanical power enabled economies to tap into a massive productivity reservoir, unleashing two centuries of phenomenal growth. Today,

Byebye Microsoft

This is the end of an era. Bill Gates’ momentous decision, a few decades ago, to focus on software rather than hardware and turn the Windows / Office combination into a universal platform propelled Microsoft to the top of the charts. Recently, a series of decisions have gravely undermined Gates’ legacy: