The New York Times has written several great pieces on incentives state and local governments use to attract companies. Their goal: to bring new jobs. The outcome: as game theory would predict, a classic race to the bottom where everyone who plays loses. Except, of course, the corporations. The reason: you don’t want the kind of corporate love money can buy.
WSJ had a nice section recently on understanding entrepreneurs, Why Washington Has It Wrong on Small Business. In it, Professor Aaron Chatterji from Duke talks about how job growth comes from high-growth, not low-growth startups (companies younger than 5 years old). This insight mistakes hindsight for foresight but, more importantly, it puts the entrepreneurial cart before the horse.
Proposition 37, the Mandatory Labeling of Genetically Engineered Food Initiative, was on the November ballot here in California. It lost narrowly in the election. The outcome will shape the path of innovation in food and agriculture for decades to come. I wrote it about how in this post, Innovation, Information Assymetry, and GMO Lemons, shortly before the election. I think the dynamics descibed are still important to keep in the public dialog about our food system and the relative value of transparency...at least important enough to link to here.
I've talked earlier about something called the "Think/Do" cycle — the process of moving between thinking about what you should do and doing it. Most of the innovation literature has, to date, been focused on coming up with new ideas (thinking a lot; thinking better; thinking out of the box, etc...). Recently, thanks to design thinking, lean startups, lean launchpad, and other emerging conversations around innovation, popular advice is starting to emphasize words like doing, testing, experimentation, prototyping, and iterating. The challenge is finding the balance.
When new technologies compete, what tips the scale toward one or the other? Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote a terrific article in the New York Times, Why Your Car Isn't Electric, which captures some of the social dimensions of technological innovation by looking at the dominance and demise of the electric vehicle in the first decade of the 20th century. If only inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy makers could spare the time to consider these dimensions before rushing off to change the world.
When the last tech blogger in the land has weighed in on the Apple iOS6 Maps debacle — which at this rate should be within the week — perhaps we can have a more interesting conversation about the tectonic shifts shaping the mobile market (and our driving experience). Here's my take on those shifts and how they explain the sorry state of Apple Maps.
The catch phrase of the Republican National Convention, “We Built It,” was a staged response to a strategically clipped quote from a speech by President Obama. As part of the government versus business debate, it has hopefully run its course. But as a lesson on innovation, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Efforts to bring electric vehicles to market are stumbling—electric car maker Fisker Automotive just recalled all 2,400 of its plug-in hybrid cars; Electric Vehicle battery maker A123 is being acquired by Chinese parts supplier Wanxiang Group; Tesla's CEO says the next six months will decide their fate. It's a good time to point out that not all disruptive innovation is good, and not all good innovation is disruptive.
What a great diagnosis. As soon as a read the term, I knew I'd suffered from it. Have you? Looking back, I can now see it in the would-be entrepreneurs and innovators I've worked with who, despite promising ideas and heroic efforts, never made much progress.
