Knowledge and the economy

Any endeavour that exceeds the skills and resources of an individual or that entails significant uncertainty and risk benefits from collaboration. At the same time, we have a very human inclination to share only the risk, while retaining the benefits for ourselves. This desire for selective sharing defines a love-hate relationship that applies to innovation as well.

Innovation & Science

Intuitively we know that science is somehow related to innovation. It is somewhere at the origin of innovation, isn’t it? Science underpins innovation, doesn’t it? But this relation is not as simple as we might like; there’s no self-evident direct connection. It's a dilemma that I’ll try to shed some light on today.

Pushing a rope … ??

While we can recount the history of past technological progress, we cannot anticipate is future trajectory. And still we keep making futile attempts at predicting what is un-predeterminable. We have to come to terms with the onway nature of path-dependence.

Wall Street

Describing the impact of innovation is a challenging task. Searching for a reasonably current example, I turned to the movies. And I found a compelling story in Oliver Stone's two Wall Street movies. Or rather, between the two.

Society’s ambiguity

In the preceding two posts, I missed an important aspect of our unrealistic expectations: the ambiguous attitude towards technology that runs through today's western societies. So here's part 3 of 2.