Category Archives for Business

Summertime and new responsibilities

The summer is always crazy busy here and this summer is no exception. This year, a confluence of a project at work reaching a critical point, some added job responsibilities, and the usual summer craziness have conspired to keep me from blogging as much as I would have liked.

Recently, I’ve taken on the role of intellectual property champion for the central research division. This means that I’ll be keeping track of trends in what areas we’re inventing, what we’re filing on, and how well we’re doing in generating useful IP for the company. What’s most exciting is that I will be working to devise new, more useful metrics and measurements for the company’s IP performance. This has proved to be an interesting exercise thus far.

What strikes me most is how very little anyone understands about best practices in this area, despite the fact that IP has become central to most of the American economy. I’ve been perusing a report from the General Counsel Roundtable of the Corporate Executive Board that outlines what that group considers to be best practices and they are certainly good, but the implementation is very vague. I’m left with an outstanding question of whether the vagueness is due to the differences in best implementations that arise from legitimate differences between companies or due mainly to the inertia of corporate culture. I expect that I’m going to learn a lot from this.

Geotagging and Google Maps

This is way cool: Google Maps API now supports a wide array of geotagged sites. In the example given in the link, a properly geotagged Wikipedia article will display a link on Google Maps at that site. Very nice! I expect to see a lot of organizations tagging projects or sites of interest in this fashion. Think about the Nature Conservancy tagging potential new acquisitions or a local chamber of commerce highlighting attractions in their town this way.

Designing for a Green Society

I just read this piece by Alex Steffen on the WorldChanging blog and highly recommend it. The key quote from the piece, in my opinion, is this one:

[I]f we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to to not only do things differently, we need to do different things.

What he’s saying here is something that I’ve pointed out to my colleagues in the innovation community: sustainability is not about making things with less stuff, or that last longer, or that aren’t toxic, or even that can be infinitely cradle-to-cradle recycled. Sustainability requires us to invent things that make it possible to live more sustainably. If the things, the stuff, that we have and use make it easier to live sustainable lives than to not do so, then we will live sustainably.

Its not an easy problem to solve, for the same reason that truly groundbreaking innovation is not easy. It is pretty straightforward to imagine a novel solution for a market that already exists. It is much harder to invent a new market. I think that the kinds of products that will help people live sustainably are products for a market that doesn’t exist yet. Our business strategists don’t know how to value them, so our market analysts can’t compute a return on investment, so no investment is made. And truthfully, our scientists and engineers don’t always have the global perspective necessary to understand what types of solutions are necessary.

The point of Steffen’s article was to underline the importance of community in making these changes in our systems. I think that it is also important to understand the systems themselves. As we grow in our understanding the network of interactions and dependencies in our economy and our society, this understanding will allow us to break out of unsustainable patterns and replace them with ones that are equally understood, but are sustainable to the best of our knowledge. And because we’ll be building from a base of understanding, we’ll be able to look at them in a rational fashion 40 years from now when we understand the ways in which the new patterns are not sustainable.

It may be that at first, these more-sustainable patterns will be obvious. Things that folks like Steffen have been telling us for years, like community gardening, reducing sprawl, and increasing bike transport. But as with everything else, the low-hanging fruits will be quickly exhausted. At that point, progress will only be made by deeper understanding. It will be interesting to see how the tools for gaining that understanding develop.

Google Spreadsheets and the Long Tail

I’ve been using Google Spreadsheets more recently to all the little one-pager list type spreadsheets that I make. When I noticed that they had added a notifications system, so that you can get an email when a collaborator updates a spreadsheet, or even a particular cell in the sheet, it sparked an idea. What if a cell could contain a short script, or a URL that points to a script on another server, that returned a number. The sheet could the update dynamically based on the result of the script.

This could be integrated with AdWords or Google Analytics, to return data from there that could feed custom analysis spreadsheets or could point to an internal database to use proprietary business data. I could also see data providers, e.g. the National Weather Service or Digg, providing statistics feeds that folks could slice and dice for their own purposes.

In a sense, this could be part of the long tail of the “super-cruncher”” phenomenon. Its hard to get good data to play with right now. A standard platform, or at least a standard access protocol, for raw numbers would open up opportunities to crowdsource data analysis.