Intellectual Capitalism ( as we know it ! )

The defect, diversity and inequality debate....

2011-07-14T01:22:00.000-07:00

Genetic defect? cultural diversity ? and social inequality ? arent they very mutually dissimilar concepts ? dont we usually prefer to have the 2nd one and

disdain on the other two? are defects and variance occuring out of random ness of events, the same thing? how do you compare a defective tool produced from

an assembly line factor and a new born with a rare genetic defect?now if u wud say a machine is different from a human, then i wud like to state the basic

rationalisim of science assumes humans are nothing but biological machines... then why are we so bogged down in detecting defects and reducing defects and

variance that exists around us or why do we get so perturbed when we see a genetically defective new born? cant we accept things as they are by default? why

are we so regimented in our thinking ?in other words who on earth needs six sigma ? can we notthink of factory defects as a random process of production of

new design variations, of some unintended or unknown input?

The fallacy of the human race and our western scientific civilization, is that on one hand we want to elminiate percieved defects from assembly line

manufacturing in our factories and also from the genes in our blood , and on the other hand we patronize biological, cultural and national diversity

apparently.

We dislike the concept of racisim and hate/crminilize Holocaust and Hitler ,
(who just wanted to normalize racial variance in Germany too quickly thru mass killing) on the other hand we still feel pity on poor people from the third
world and generally want them become affluent and fat like westerners? Why only the western world has defined the world poverty line benchmark? why dont any
one say hey may be hungry poors in Africa are not so poor, its just europeans, north americans and now some asians have gone too well nourished for too long?

does this sound too much like that of by gone socialism ? i dont think so....diseases like obesity and overnourshment being more prominent than those due to

undernourshment is a medically established fact now....so why dont the over developed world declare themselves "too much over the affluency line" than
labelling the majority of the world "below-the-povert-line" who are still way below them in terms of social and economical abundance. This philosophy is some what coming into existence in global carbon credit trading arrangements taking place at present.

to put forward my solution, the western world just needs to declare developed countries of asia, North America and europe as over some defined affluency line and
should bring down usage of critical resources like electricity, fuel and food. Now if there is no collective consensus soon , we should stop shouting about
all the farce of stopping global poverty and gender/social ineqality. simply , we will say there is no such thing like poverty or infant mortality that
exists!!

Western sensibilities have only taught us hyprocricy. Not clear?? I will tell you why....let us consider the case of democracy , which is so well celebrated over the last few centuries, but see this
concept is only limited to governance...where is democracy in the corporate world of big businesses? why in corporate management, daily operations are kept separate from ownership ?

why doesnt share holders of a company run all day to day work of a large multi national company???? Where is participatory governance of big businesses which now runs America and India alike????

Recession's latest victim: U.S. innovation

2009-12-20T07:26:00.000-08:00

Patent filings fell in 2009 for the first time in 13 years, worrying Silicon Valley that it is losing its place as the leader in global innovation.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- U.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years as the recession cut into budgets, and costs to protect inventions rose.

The number of patent filings in the United States fell 2.3% in 2009 to 485,500 from 496,886 last year, according to a preliminary estimate by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That makes 2009 the first year since 1996 in which businesses and inventors filed fewer patents year over year.

"That's unfortunate because [patent filings] are a reflection of innovation," said David Kappos, director of the Patent Office. "Innovation creates so many jobs and so much opportunity for our country. It is absolutely key to our long-term success in the global economy."

At the same time, U.S. patents issued to inventors and businesses in foreign nations jumped 6.3% for the year. That's a worry for Silicon Valley, which has been a global leader for decades.

Most blame the recession for the drop in U.S. filings. As a result, many companies are opting to hold off on bringing new ideas to market until the economy improves substantially.

"Our patent filings were down 25% this year, and it was a direct macroeconomic issue," said Joe FitzGerald, deputy general counsel for tech security firm Symantec. "The overall company reduced spending, and patent filings are a very controllable expense. We might have filed four patents, but we filed three and made sure they were strategically significant."

Cost constraints
The application, processing and legal fees average about $15,000 per patent, but the cost to defend those patents in court after they've been granted typically runs between $3 million to $6 million, according to Bijal Vakil, partner in White & Case's intellectual property team in Palo Alto, Calif.

"Once you have a patent, you also have to go out and defend your own turf," said Henry Nothhaft, chief executive of Tessera, a San Jose, Calif.-based company that licenses its electronic miniaturization technologies to consumer electronics companies. "That has become more expensive lately due to the complexity of technology and globalization of economy, and it has caused some products not to come to market."

It could also become disruptive to American businesses down the road as filings from abroad pick up.

"We are in a dire economic situation, so its not unreasonable for businesses to have to cut their budgets," said Vakil. "But this trend could spell financial ruin for some U.S. companies. We've lost our competitive edge, and other companies from other countries stand to benefit."

If that trend continues, it could also spell trouble for the American worker, especially given the weak U.S. labor situation. The Obama administration has contended that the economic rebound will rely on innovative U.S. companies to hire workers to develop new technologies and ideas like clean energy and smart transit systems.

"Our top priority is to see jobs get created, and we need patents to get through the patent office to help create those jobs," Kappos said.

The system is broken
Pushing patents through the system is easier said than done: The decline in filings this year has brought to light a number of problems with the antiquated American patent system.

The Patent Office does not receive any taxpayer money. It is completely funded by fees levied on patent filing, processing and awarding. The Patent Office also hasn't changed its fee structure in decades, so it continues to charge a flat rate (roughly $1,000) for patent applications, regardless of the idea's complexity or the amount of work that needs to go into processing the patent.

As filings have dropped off, so too has the Patent Office's revenue, which sank by $200 million in 2009. As a result, the Patent Office has initiated a hiring freeze, stopped all overtime, cancelled a necessary IT upgrade and has lost between 40 and 50 patent examiners every month this year, said Kappos.

That means longer wait times for patent approvals and a growing backlog of filings. Currently, there are 740,000 patents pending, with an average wait time for approval of 40 months. The Patent Office isn't even able to look at applications for three years because of the backlog. That's an eternity for tech inventions, which tend to cycle through product generations in a year or so.

Ultimately, it creates a vicious cycle, since a large lag time only further discourages patent filers.

"People are looking at the system as it is now, and they're saying that waiting 40 months for a patent may not be worth it," said David DiMartino, spokesman for the Coalition for Patent Fairness, a group representing major Silicon Valley companies' desires for patent reform.

Another discouraging trend has been the rise in patent disputes. By June, there were already 15% more "post-grant" patent reviews filed by competitors to the filing company than there were in all of 2008.

Those cases are expensive to defend, and are sometimes used by large companies to delay smaller companies' technologies from coming to market or to prevent them from being released at all, according to Brian Pomper, executive director of the Innovation Alliance, a coalition of mostly small high tech companies in support of strong intellectual property rights.

As a result, the Patent Office, lawyers and companies alike are clamoring for patent reform. Bills in the House and Senate, which are on schedule to be passed in the spring, would give the Patent Office the authority to adjust its patent fee structure and give juries direction on setting awards for patent disputes, among other reforms.

Some advocates argue that the bills are far from perfect, particularly because they could make it easier for big companies to repeatedly bring smaller innovators to court. But for the most part, businesses and government officials are eager for Congress to act.

"The American innovative spirit is stronger than ever. If we're able to get patent reform through, we absolutely can take processing times way down and get innovations through to the marketplace," said Kappos, who estimates that legislation will help reduce the average wait time to as little as one year.

Innovation meets creativity - Beauties on wheel!

2009-11-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

Can university research catapult us to a new era of global prosperity?

2009-07-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

{Source: An excerpt of the discussions from the LinkedIn group Global Academic Innovation Network (GAIN) }

Richard Litman, Patent Attorney - The great thinkers of the world became the catalyst for technological enlightenment and economic growth in past centuries. Ingenuity catapulted the world’s economy to new horizons.

Electricity, oil, nuclear power and other sources of energy fueled the growth of the global economy in the last century. With electricity came lighting, electronics and the age of information technology. With oil came the proliferation of automobiles, jet airplanes and the use of plastics. The nuclear era brought even further discoveries in medicine, space exploration and energy.

Economic prosperity can return, and return quickly, through good old-fashioned ingenuity.

The stimulus for economic recovery and expansion in the 21st century will come from the world's most plentiful resource: the human capital of people. Innovation is the answer for this century just as it has been in the past.

Universities that have adopted this core philosophy have become catalysts for economic vitality. It is a proven formula for sustainable growth of the economy.

Our global economic woes can be cured by technological innovation and the growth of small and large businesses fueled by university research. It may take a cure for cancer or some new form of energy to catapult the economy back to an era of prosperity. It could be that incremental improvements on existing technologies are all that is needed for our return to prosperity. Universities need to embrace this spirit today. Those which foster an environment where creativity and out of the box thinking are part of the core culture will help the global economy thrive in the 21st century.

An investment in university based innovation is one of the best investments we can make to stimulute the economy for a new era of enlightenment and worldwide economic growth.

Suddha Sattwa Basu, Analyst - Almost all of the large and medium scale leading universities of the world resembles any average small to medium sized company. And this large-to-medium scale which I am talking about is the scale of research output from these universities. The net volume and quality of the cumulated research output from a multi-faculty university is always the primary measure of the true quality of that particular university in consideration.Now this net resarch output is in a way the Intellectual Capital of the institution, which will include number of PhDs passing in one year, quality oftheir thesis work, number and quality of post-doctoral fellows, international accredition, number of patents - filed/granted, technology/patent license agreements, activity of the university technology transfer offices, software copyright enforcement practices followed, trade mark licensing of the valued university logo, start up companies formed as incubations on the university campus, charismatic nobel laureate teachers, iconic past students, great money funding from good relationships with government and large global corporations and above all a cross disciplinary peer culture of out-of-the-box thinking which is driven by an eccentric creative urge that runs equally through the veins of teachers and students alike. When we have all the above components in a perfect mix then we have the "ideal university innovation ecosystem". This in turn changes everything around us...people,patents,products,processes..everything.This will always be the way forward.

M. Karen Walker, Advisor at State Department Global Partnership Initiative We also must remember to consider the quality of the questions and rationale for lines of inquiry. Having worked in research in government laboratory and interagency settings, I can attest to the importance of requirements generation, involvement of end-users in the research program, and consistently reinforced yet flexible expectations. Hmmm ... perhaps there is a role here for the Humanities after all!

Phil Clare - Associate Director at Oxford University Research Services - I agree that Universities are central to our economy and society. If anyone doubts that, spend five minutes imagining how the world would develop if we suddesnly took them all away. My one note of caution is that we must remember the variability of timescales here. It takes at least three years to produce an undergraduate, six or seven for a PhD student, decades for GPS to use the mathematics developed to explore Einstein's work in satnavs. Investment in universities will drive the future knowledge economy, but it's no magic bulllet to drive up share prices next week... All of us in the great Universities of the world are deeply conscious of the need to maximise the impact of what we do on society. I worry that some expectations are a tad unrealistic though!

Erik Van Lennep, Strategy Consultant - "The great thinkers of the world became the catalyst for technological enlightenment and economic growth in past centuries. Ingenuity catapulted the world’s economy to new horizons......"

I do believe that academic institutions and public research, especially "action-research" have a great deal to offer in setting a new standard and opening innovative pathways, outside the box. But, and this is a serious BUT, it will not likely be something driven by the mega-universities, which are so cumbersome and politically hobbled that in many aspects internal communication is dysfunctional. I think the possibility of fresh directions and economic recovery are more to be found in smaller universities and colleges which can move more quickly and flexibly, whose need to compete successfully for students keeps them closer to the cutting edge. The other place I expect to see novel and appropriate solutions evolve is in collaborative work involving many stakeholders from academia to industry and community.

The true value in my mind, the acid test for universities' relevance, must always lie with the quality of education they offer, with the engagement and enlightenment and enthusiasm developed in their students and graduates. This is what universities are meant to be, and the justification for their founding. I agree with the list of outputs and values suggested by Suddha Sattwa Basu earlier, but I also want to note that these have evolved as a result of universities first and foremost creating environments for high quality learning, and most especially...questioning.

The fact that academia has historically sheltered and nurtured bright minds to stay on and deepen their research, ideally in an atmosphere which encourages a challenging depth of questioning is essential to what we now need them to provide in terms of innovation and socio-economic policy development. Yes it's a slow process, and in some cases unnecessarily so. An important direction to watch is "action-research", which like action-learning, values the information gathered in tandem with real-life project development.

To find ways in which universities, industry, policy makers and funders can work together to fulfill pressing human needs, from the economic to the inspirational, we will need to unhook university funding from big industry, and then renegotiate what that valuable connection is about. We need to return university research as much to real world and community solutions as we do to corporate IP arrangements and profit sharing. A fresh look, engaging more stakeholders would open some exciting and constructive new arrangements. Industry in the end will still benefit, probably even more than before, but so will community, researchers, and above all, the students

India’s Global Powerhouses - How they are taking on the world By Nirmalya Kumar, with Pradipta Mohapatra and Suj Chandrasekhar; Harvard Business Press

2009-06-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

According to James Lamont in his article "Passage from India" where he reviewed this new book authored by the acclaimed author, Professor Nirmalya Kumar, one particular value of the book lies in its concise case studies. Where the reader quickly gains a sense of how personality and circumstance combined to produce change and opportunity. Interviews with top executives extract a sense of business culture and vision beyond the company mission statement. A humorous appreciation of history and coincidence also helps illuminate the corporate histories that show how Indian ideas and management techniques have global application, and how Indian executives easily adapt to the wider business environment.

Professor Kumar’s insights in this book are captivating for the common reader of most busniess literature. This prowess was easily achieved by Prof. Kumar as he straddled both the academic and corporate worlds by sitting on boards of Indian companies, while enjoying a career that has taken him from the US to the UK, via Switzerland. Neither the seat in the boardroom, nor the distance of London, has blunted his wonderment.

The book is really a superb anthology of business successes in India written with a narrative which is elegant and pacy both. I finished reading the book in one shot.

The authors have used their unmatched research wisdom in analyzing the dawn of new and old Indian businesses alike. Extensive discussions on questions like "When can a company call itself "global" ? " What should be the ideal organizational culture of a truly global company?" " How is an Indian Multinational different from a "born - global" Indian multinational ? - Are all well sequenced to stimulate a distinct thought process in the mind of most readers of the book. The book also succesfully brings in sociological and political insights from the dynamic co-existence of the myriad of Indian demographies. However, a more detail oriented treatment on the life and work of some of the great contemporary Indian business leaders leading their comapnies to unforeseen global heights, could have been a welcome addition. Moreover, a few instances where promising Indian companies failed in their global expansion strategies ( Eg: - where big trans-boder M&A deals turned out to be disastrous) and the new pricing models which are emerging within the new breed of Indian outsourcing industry (Eg:- Legal Process Outsourcing & Knowledge Process Outsourcing [LPO & KPO] ) could have also been added for more depth to the scope of this excellent book.

Building a Culture of Innovation

2008-08-29T03:22:00.000-07:00

(An Excerpt from “Marketing Innovation” by Nirmalya Kumar)

Ideo is a design firm based in Palo Alto. They hire people who don’t listen to you. They hire experts from whom one can learn. People are experts from the fields of social science and anthropology and many other diverse areas. They encourage people to go out onto the streets and meet the customer. That is where the real work gets done and not sitting down at the desk. There is a process which they follow called the Deep Dive process. The key elements of a Deep Dive process are the following:

a. Have a clear goal.
b. Articulate the constraints. For instance if one is building an alternative to a cart which is used in supermarkets then one can say that if the prototype does not ‘nest’ it is not a solution. This becomes a constraint.
c. Share expert knowledge. How would an anthropologist see it ! How would a mother with children view a cart which is used in the super market !
d. Brainstorm.
e. Narrow down the ideas to a few which are related to need areas like if its a cart in the supermarket, then the need areas could be convenience, safety, flexibility etc. Each team now concentrates on one need area and comes up with a prototype.
f. These prototypes are now looked at independently and the best features of them are combined to come up with the one prototype which is presented.
g. The key is trial and error and rapid prototyping to meet predetermined deadlines.

In Ideo the above tenets of culture are manifested. In the process they follow to come up with design ideas where there is no criticizing of ideas which takes place. Wild ideas are built upon. The whole process is not organized but focused chaos. The team judges the best and not a single individual. Enlightened trial and error succeeds over lone ranger genius. Being playful is encouraged. Don’t ask for permission. Go ahead and do it. If it infringes on someone else’s space or idea of propriety then ask for forgiveness. Be weird and be proud of it. There is no hierarchy. There is a lot of teamwork and time deadlines are respected. There needs to be an Ideo in every company.

Innovation : Rural or Urban?

2008-07-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

true innovation thrived in India for centuries, because our resources were always less and so were the pressure of all the basic necessities, posh technology labs of western corporations having tons of money are wrongly denoted as the sole place of innovation, only invention is not innovation. Problems, poverty and necessity are the mother of all innovations and it is independent of the money spend behind it.

Very soon India will again prove this to the world!

But before this, one needs to understand India or any country having "India Like Conditions" (thirld world country with rapidly growing economy) has got many faces
, various sections of societies like the urban elite, the sub-urban middle class and the rural poor, along with endless variants with mix charecters of all the above three main sections. So which section is likely to innovate more? the traditionally affluent and highly educated few or the "novoeau riche" rural/sub-urban/new-migrant-to-the-city people? The answer is unknown so far. But let me remind you, for me innovation is not filing patents, it is just a way to look at old things in a new way...

Experts believe that inadequate infrastructure and that in-turn with the rural-migration problem, is linked with the lack of enterpreneurial innovation. But
lack of Infrastructure alone can not solely be held responsible for
the reason behind the rural-urban migration problem. The root of the
problem, I feel is way much deeper. Rural-urban migration of people
and resources is occurring from millennia, but has become a "problem"
only in the last century, just due to fact of a highly increased
world-population. Industrial civilization has an unified character of
its own, own identity, own culture and its own psyche. Its not
entirely correct that given all amenities of a modern city life like
air-conditioned/heated apartments / hygienic toilets/t.v, theatre and
entertainment facilities and health care amenities,to a common
urbanite from Mumbai, Rio-De-Janeiro or Beijing, would agree to
relocate of to a rural/lesser know work-life habitat, given that
his/her job/work still remains the same as before. Actually, the rural
urban problem is more of an cultural problem, which largely persists
in middle and lower-middle class families of developing economies of
Asia, Latin America and Africa. Only enlightened few people from
well-off families would understand the negatives like pollution,high
crime rates and population pressures of a city life and would migrate
to a non-urban place to live and work. This would be natural for such
people as they must have seen their previous generations who were also
born,raised and educated to work in a city for their living. The mind
set of people from non-urban areas who seeks western life styles like
fast food and credit cards needs to be first changed, if the root
cause of rural-urban migration problem is to be seriously addressed.
Basic infrastructure in rural areas in India would be much improved
within 2020, but would the mindset of an well educated and
sophisticated engineer from Bangalore change by 2020 for relocation to
a rural place for a good paying job? I am doubtful about that. The
solution for this problem might exist in reviving primary and middle
school level western educational systems to an upgraded variety of a
more holistic and spiritual vessel of imparting knowledge . Probably
a only a child can be sensitized about a contemporary global culture
of humane values.

Lastly, mass psychology and cultural preferences of common people are
more important than governmental policies and trade activities for a
"true" peaceful and sustainable development.

Happiness (as in Marriage) leads to Intellectual Capital!

2008-05-12T01:51:00.000-07:00

Happiness leads to intellectuality or the pursuit of happiness leads to intellctual activities, thereby in a way, creating an unit of Intellectual Capitalism. The converse of this which is pursuit of Intellectual activities, on the other hand also, creates happiness, but this happiness could be existing within the concerned intellectual or otherwise it could be residing else where as well. Anyway, recently I got married and I became very happy along with getting exposed to a whole lot of new feelings, which included the feeling of being more knowledgable and being more wise. To get a person in your life is the greatest gift of your life and so knowing him or her is the greatest knowledge of your life.

Intellectual Capitalism & We as "Prosumers" of the Future Societies!

2007-09-21T04:44:00.000-07:00

Why do we care about the Future ?

Because life around us today is hard. Each day the pace of life and the demands placed on our time continues to escalate. The news we see on TV paints a very grim picture of who we are and what we’ve become. At every turn we face new challenges - too many people, incurable diseases, famines, droughts, poverty, shortages, and new disasters waiting to happen. But the one place we can escape and feel hope for a better life is in the future. The future is a special place in our dreams. The future is filled with ideas and energy. But most importantly the future is where our children live.

How do we create visions of the future ? What are the driving forces ? What things are changing ?

The year is 2057 and you are standing in front of a vending machine. What form of payment will you put into it ? The future vending machines will be mobile, perhaps flying…will come to you…will know what you want.
The year is 2107. What music that we listen to today, will people still be listening to 100 years from now ? More importantly than what we will be listening to is how we will be listening to it ? Will music still come from speakers ? Will it just appear in our heads ? Will we even have music ? The ultimate music player will have the ability to assess our reaction to the music and will only serve up music that we react positively to.
The ultimate drink dispenser will have the ability to assess what kind of liquids our body needs and will only serve up a liquid that we react positively to.
The Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras and Archimedes laid the foundation so to speak of mathematics. But we do not find any Roman mathematicians. The Roman numerical system prevented people from doing higher maths.

What systems today like the Roman numerical system are preventing us from doing great things ?

It’s not just systems but also technologies that prevent us from doing great things.
The slide rule was replaced by the calculator but one was still expected to use the slide rule if you were doing your engineering. The end of the Slide rule and the beginning of the Calculator - where the intersection takes place is termed as ‘Maximum Freud’. It represents a time of major chaos and tremendous opportunity where we will spend most of the time on a couch talking to a shrink. A time of Crucial Conversations.
We would not have the Internet if Judge Hal Green had not broken the monopoly of AT & T. AT & T is the equivalent of the Roman Numerals system.
We are approaching Maximum Freud in the area of wires. We are seeing the end of Wires. The end of Home Telephone Lines. Cable Television lines. Power lines.
Just now in an MIT project wireless power is trying to be produced which will sound the death knell of power supply as we traditionally have experienced it. ‘Powercast’ attempts to draw RF signals from the air and convert them into power.
Intel is conducting WiMax trials in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune. If the whole of India is to be made WiMax then only 1300 WiMax units or towers would be needed.
In a WiMax environment one could possibly have an “always on” car which is “aware”. The car now becomes a competitor to the cell phone. The car has more real estate and therefore possibly more hyperinteractive capabilities.
The WiMax car could also become a self-navigating car which the old wouldn’t mind buying and using.

The history of Global systems is as follows :

Trade 1266
Sea Transport 1492
Metric 1670
News Service 1850
Time Zones 1884
Air Transport 1927
Stock Trading 1965
GPS 1978
Internet 1991

Which are the global systems being built now ?

- Global Search ( Google Earth, Wikipedia, ….)
- Global Info Portals
- Social Networking
- Video Archives

What global systems need to be built now ?

- Whole Earth History from thousands of different perspectives
- Global accounting standards
- Global currency
- Intellectual Property Systems
- Official Earth measurement systems

Alvin Toffler has very insightfully said that if a speed gun is pointed to various constituencies to find out the rate at which they are speeding ahead then we would possibly arrive at the following rates at which they are traveling :

Business & Indus 100 km/hr
NGO 90 km/hr
Family Life 60 km/hr
Labour Unions 30 km/hr
Government 25 km/hr
Education 10 km/hr
InterGovmntl.Orgnst. (UN etc) 5 km/hr
Political Institutns 3 km/hr
Law 1 km/hr

According to Toffler today we are experiencing the dysfunctionality of desynchronized institutions.Rick Wakeman plays the piano with 1/128th and 1/64th notes. The normal piano is not capable of playing these notes. One needs a specialized electronic piano.
In 2007 for the first time in human history, more people will live in urban areas than rural areas. Every day in the world 200,000 people migrate to cities.
Half the new buildings in the world in the next 10 years will be built in China.
We are becoming a very mobile generation. In 1950, 50 million people a year crossed national borders – last year it was 840 million.105,000 new food and drink products were launched in 2006 - 300 per day .In 2007 over, 550,000 new businesses will be launched every month.

We are living in an age of 100 mn. Products

In 2006 there were 44000 patents in the US. The average wait is 27 months.
Leading edge/Bleeding edge tech breakthroughs

i. Email - 1965
ii. Cell Phone - 1973

Technology Breakthroughs take a generation to get a foothold
There has been in US a 50% increase in the number of people living alone in the last 20 years. Globally 2005 was the first year when over 50% of women reported being single.
Liquids make up 22% of calories in the average American’s diet. 87% of consumers research products online before buying them in a store. Where Global wealth is concerned the richest 1% of adults own 40% of global assets. And of the wealthiest 10%, 25% are in the US. And of the wealthiest 1%, 37% are in the US.

By 2050 India, Brazil, Russia, China, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey will overtake the G8 countries in terms of GDP. Countries with the most population will create the most wealth.

In the 1970s over 30% of all college graduates lived in the US. Today that number is 14%. To transfer Mental concepts and Images, Reading is an outdated model. Vast majority of people in the future will not be literate.

Socrates who laid down the foundation for Western Philosophy did not write anything. Plato captured Socrates’s thoughts and put them down in writing.

To assume that one is intelligent because one can read may be wrong. Reading is the technical equivalent of the Roman numerals system. If one wants an interface with a format/medium to seamlessly and invisibly transfer to the brain images and ideas then reading is totally out of whack.

Between 1982 and 2002 young adults (age18-24) went from being one of the most - likely groups to read literature to one of the least likely. 35 mn Americans have difficulty with literacy. 21% of the adult population read at the lowest literacy level.

The number of books published in 2004 were 190,078 while in 2005 it was 172,000.
In 2005 approximately 11% of incoming college freshmen in the US required a remedial course and 14% required remedial writing. The need for remedial reading is the leading predictor of student dropouts. Remediation costs the US $ 3.7 bn per year.
Is reading the ultimate learning experience ? Is there something better ? Communication systems are continually changing the way people access information.

The question to ask is not where are we heading in the area of communication but what is the ultimate form of communication.

Teaching will get transformed into Learning. The future of education will impact business and every aspect of life. Teaching requires experts. As information expands exponentially one loses the ability to train experts fast enough. Teachers become a choking point.
In comparison to Myspace.com, Wikipedia.com and Youtube, the number of visitors searching for education Courses on the Net are fewer.

Information has grown exponentially but the courseware has not kept pace. This has given rise to the open education movement. The MIT open courseware initiative as well as the Wikiversity division of Wikipedia are examples of this.

The distance between the functional literate and the super functional literate is growing. For example people knowing the basics of the computer and those who are able to write complex software code.

The touchpoints for interfacing with society are changing. In the industrial era ‘things’ were important. Therefore one walked in shoes and sat in chairs and slept in beds. The tangible and functional were important. Today in the Information and Knowledge era ‘experience’ becomes important. The ‘mind connects’ are changing rapidly.
The question ‘What’s the most important thing one should be learning today?’ brings into focus the chasm which exists between what the authorities believe is the right thing to teach and what the student feels is important to learn.The Learning system will gradually become hyper individualistic. One is no longer keeping up with the neighbours.
Removing the classroom constraints is similar to removing the shelf space from the market store. The big gap today is a lack of specially architected rapid courseware architecture for learning.

The 12 dimensions of Future courseware architecture are the following :
· Create an international standard learning unit.
· 60 minutes long learning experience.
· Modality agnostic experience unit. For example, spend time with dolphins and see how and what one has learnt from this experience. Validate how much learning has taken place.
· Confidence based learning. Testing how confident you are when answering. Not only is one 100% correct but 100% confident that one is correct.
· Smart profiler. This tells you what you are most interested in.
· Multi dimensional tagging engine. High percentage of what is taught in classes today is theoretical. Every aspect of society has its own version of truth. There is religious truth and scientific truth and legal truth. Any governing truth authority will become political. So individual groups can create their own central truth authority and place tags of approval or disapproval for whatever is learnt.
· Personal recommendation engine. This will recommend areas based on one’s profiler, mood, what one has learnt in the past etc.
· Certification inputs
· New achievement standards
· Official record keeping system
· Participative wealth pricing.
· Global distribution system.

The Participative Wealth model as applied to the Courseware can be broken down in the following manner :

35% - Courseware creator
30% - Courseware Builder
3% - Smart Profiler and so on

The Future of Education will be :
· Hyper individualistic
· Self-paced
· Modality diverse
· Organically generated.
· More personal contribution involved.
· Language agnostic

In an age when students will be 10 times more smarter than today teachers will become coaches. Learning will become lifelong. And libraries will become working laboratories.
Gatekeepers are chokepoints of society. Editor is an example of this kind of choke point. People in this empowered age are trying to find ways to circumvent them. We are moving to a ‘no gatekeeper lifestyle’ where the market will decide. More democratic and fair.
Ebay. 75000 people living off online auction. Google Adsense – 8% of those who own a blog have carved out a living. Youtube and Revver have a video revenue sharing model. Craiglist which is the best known Classified site has a zero cost of ad space. In Second Life people buy and sell virtual real estate. One woman has sold 8000 islands in Second Life for varying amounts of money. But the interesting part is she charges $ 300 per month for their upkeep.
The average time a person will spend in a job in 2007 in USA will be 4 years. In 2010 this will come down to 3.5 years. 7% of those who are fired from their jobs are predicted to start their own businesses. We will soon see the growth of the ‘Empire of One’ where one person is running the whole business with everything being outsourced. ‘Cuff Daddy’ is a company started by a person who wanted to start something which did not take up too much space. He sells cuff links online. ‘Monkey Toes’ is another company where ordinary plain sneakers are bought and characters are painted on them and sold. Around 100,000 pairs are sold per month.45mn people are doing all or part of their jobs from home.
There have been 550000 new business launches in 2007 per month. Everybody has got something on the side. We have moved from a product based economy to an experienced based economy. Reputations are based on experiences not on what one owns. Baby boomers are shedding their belongings. For example coffee can be seen at 3 levels viz. at the Commodity level one buys coffee and makes it at home. At the Product level one orders coffee at the restaurant. At the experience level say in a Starbucks outlet, coffee is just the by-product of an overall experience created by Starbucks.
How does one create the ultimate experience ?
Gradually one is combining the buying moment with the marketing moment with the fulfillment moment.

There will be Fractal transactions. Before one would send goods to the vendor via a middleman whom one would call a wholesale dealer. If one removes the middleman then one gets an automated distribution system of an author sending the manuscript to the publisher online and the book getting sold online through Amazon.com. This is a Fractal transaction insofar as each entity in the value chain automatically gets some payment.
Our accounting systems are not yet in place to do fractal micropayments. For instance ‘Universal Commerce’ could be a brand name which has a button say ‘UC’ on every device. Say the device is a hair dryer. Then every time the dryer is used one would have to press the Universal Commerce button and that would register how much one would have to pay depending on how long one would use the dryer in that session. The payment immediately gets recorded. In this way one would pay the bare minimum for the dryer or even get it free because one would be paying for its service and experience. Every device thus gets converted into a payment device. This principle can be applied to a camera. A camera could be bought for free but the moment you click, it would start charging you. This in a way would encourage the manufacturers to make cameras more durable and with a lot of features. There could be a free store where one could pick up anything for free but one would have to pay as one uses. This will reduce the risk of fraud because the amounts paid on use are very small.

While attempting to control the future one needs to see a combination of high certainty events combined with low certainty events. There are different types of predictable futures :
Planned Futures.
Reoccurring Futures
Cyclical Futures
Natural Futures
Survival Futures
Evolutionary Futures
Systemic Futures.
Attractionary Futures

An Attractor is an event in the future that we are somehow drawn towards. Examples of attractors are Humanoid Robots, Putting a person on Mars, cure for Cancer or a Flying Car. We are drawn towards these Attractors like a force of nature. Our efforts and focus determine how fast it will happen.

There are 8 types of Attractors :

Inventions
Cures
Discoveries
Firsts
Challenges
Systems
Solutions
Standards

In every industry one will have Attractors. To make the Attractor a reality will require milestones. What will it take to accomplish these milestones ? For instance creating a solution for living in space. If a prize is announced then this not only starts a buzz but also a global conversation and makes it happen faster.

The history of Attractors is given below :
1919 : Orteig Prize - $ 25000 - Charles Lindbergh
1959 : Kremer Prize - $ 95000 – Paul MacCready
1980 : Fredkin Prize - $ 100,000 – IBM’s Deep Blue
1995 : Feynman Grand Prize - $ 250,000 – No winner
1996 : Ansari X Prize - $ 10 mn – Paul Allen, Burt Rutan won in 2004
2003 : Methuselah Mouse Prize - $ 3.4 mn - No winner
2003 : DARPA Grand Challenge - $2 mn.–Stanford Team won in 2005.
2005 : America’s Space Prize - $ 50 mn. – No Winner

Most of us are very good at competing. But in the technology world there are no finishing lines. We haven’t yet finished inventing the ultimate small particle for storage. So there are no standards at present. We are still making transitions.

If we look at just the circumnavigation of the Globe the following are the milestones :

1519 - Magellan - 3 years
1764 - John Byron – 2 years
1924 - US Air Service – 175 days
1929 - Hugo Eckener – 21 days
1931 - Wiley Post - 8 days, 16 hours
1933 - Wiley Post – 7 days, 19 hours
1949 - USAF B-50 Lucky Lady II – 94 hours
1961 - Yuri Gagarin – 1 hour, 48 minutes
1969 - Apollo 10 – 24,790 mph – Thomas Stafford, John Young, Gene Cernan.

Where do we go from here ? What is the future of transportation ? Will there be a new and different standard ?

Suppose there were an Archaelogist who 50 years from now were to dig up remains which would give him disks. He would probably look at them and try to figure out whether they were Windows 95 or 97 or 2000 and so on and finally come to the conclusion that they are possibly of no use. Whereas if he found a paper he would probably keep it. Paper is a more stable technology. New technologies are not that stable. In future we will have electronic paper.

Our computers need to be of a different shape say a spherical computer instead of a flat screen computer. Within 10 years we will be talking to our computers. Dr. William Crossman is of the view that within 50 years we will be a verbal society. Voice – in, Voice-out. Computers will have a package of personalities which will be on offer depending on our need and mood.

We are also experiencing a transition from being consumers to becoming producers (Prosumers). Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine has said “When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer”. People are no longer satisfied with just receiving information, they want to help create it.

The value of Proximity is key to our lives. We choose where to live based on our proximity to our assets viz. Income earning streams, Schools, Friends etc. We will in the future live in a hyper local future. Hyper as in linked and local as in location. It’s a new kind of city where one is never out of touch and never out of options. We will be Hyper local, Hyper aware, Hyper sensitive, and Hyper Interactive. We will build ‘Hyper ware’. There will be different software like Bodyware, Roomware, Buildingware, Cityware, Nationware, Globalware. We will have hyperlocal journalism focusing on building communities. We will develop a Museum of future inventions. What still needs to be done in the future. In the Future of food we will have underground farming which will increase food thousand fold. Freedom and Control are the 2 things that drive human beings. We can never have total freedom nor total control. Ultimately it is desire that drives the economy. The most famous non-religious person may not after all be Einstein or Bill Gates, or Newton or Faraday. He or she may not have been born yet. And we do not yet know what accomplishment will make that person famous.

The Last days of Intellectual Capitalism....

2007-08-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

Everything is going to change now! And the "changebringer" is going to be "doable knowhow", Yes, I am using this phrase instead of using the cliched word "technology" just because to point out that technology as we know it today might itself change in a big way!. Future technologies might not be something which we would use daily for our common needs but instead can cater to meet only our entertainment/pleasure requirements. Gone are the days when easily distinguishable seminal inventions like the the automobile, petroleum, telephone or the airplane created new capitalists like Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Graham Bell, who started shaping the industrial history of almost the entire 20th Century by creating knowledge which they got legally protected in their proprietary intellectual properties. Moreover, they also succeeded in keeping large sections of common people away from gaining access to those proprietary knowledege. This lineage of intellectual capitalism continued from Standard Oil Corporation to Microsoft Corporation. But, lately things have started changing. And this changing process is here to stay. For example look at Google, Linux and Wikipedia. They all started as small endeavours by their respective creators but slowly moved on to become huge business successes based on their high user centredness. The way Google targets internet users to introduce its new web based software services, clearly shows its reluctance in traditional ways of proprietary software usage. Linux, the open source opearting system which is threatening all major corporations who develop and market software products with protected source code, also
relies on user/developer contribution for its functional growth. Lastly, what Wikipedia is doing is providing user created/edited content back to the users themselves. Therefore, the shift from protectionism to a more liberalized way conducting intellctual businesses is clearly evident.