at the intersection of technology, business, and society
In the previous post I’ve investigate the antagonistic relation between efficiency on one side and resilience on the other. As that is a pretty abstract subject, I tried to draw up a few simple charts to underpin the story of how efficiency, when taken to extremes, depletes resilience and ultimately promotes system failure. First, let’s think of a simple task, the […]
Our western societies are obsessed with efficiency. Just think about topics like lean production, just-in-time logistics, energy consumption, time management: we are always trying to make things cheaper, to use less resources, to pack more action in less time, you name it. While these considerations are usually driven by good intent, I’d argue that they can pave the path to desaster […]
No matter how hard we try to keep things simple and under control, many man-made systems turn out to be – or to become over time – quite complex and unpredictable. Despite our effort. Against our intentions. In stark contrast to our preference for simple, linear, static, controllable, predictable systems. Computer software, stock markets and tax codes are […]
My appreciation for Ian Morris and his big thinking has been woven into this blog already at a very early stage, as his writing provides a long-range historic context for social development in general, and I believe for innovation in particular. He has his finger on the pulse of society’s fundamental challenges, with his paradox of development eloquently paraphrasing society’s eternal […]
Innovation policy is a complex composition of policies that influence the innovation capacity and success of a society, that shape a society’s innovation fitness. This set of policies usually does not cover the entire innovation landscape, but leaves the fringes of the landscape unattended. In a subsequent post, I’ll take a look at the area of known […]
understanding innovation 