Can modern society evolve and see poop as a natural, fully renewable, and sustainable resource? Lina Zeldovich explores the ancient societies that understood and saw the potential in human excrement, and the forward-thinking ways we can use our own dark matter for good. With so much smart tech, why haven’t we closed our metabolic rift? […]
innovation
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Where the Bats Hung Out’: How a Basement Hideaway at UC Berkeley Nurtured a Generation of Blind Innovators
For decades, an underground hideaway at UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library — better known as “The Cave” — gave rise to a generation of blind leaders, including Joshua Miele, a MacArthur genius grant winner who now builds adaptive technologies at Amazon. The Cave was where iron sharpened iron, academically — tricks for surviving Berkeley were as […]
Posted inBusiness & Tech, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
How Southern Cities Are Joining the Knowledge Economy
Greenville, South Carolina has revitalized its city center by incubating start-ups. Can other Southern cities do the same?
Posted inBlog Post
In Silicon Valley, Transportation Innovation Is a Flat Circle
Tech wizards may say they want driverless cars or the hyperloop, but what they really, really want is a bus.
Posted inBusiness & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes
When Innovation Fails: Doing Hard Time in the Offender-Monitoring Business
When 3M, the Post-It Note manufacturer, began making electronic ankle monitors for corrections, it challenged the company’s long-heald philosophy about design and innovation.
Posted inBusiness & Tech, Food, Nonfiction, Quotes
Who Says Healthy Food Can’t Be Accessible and Affordable?
Daniel Patterson, and the challenges of bringing fast healthy food to the impoverished neighborhoods trapped in food deserts.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Battery Breakthrough That Could Juice U.S. Manufacturing
In a new report, McKinsey describes a broad new age of manufacturing that it calls Industry 4.0. The consulting firm says the changes under way are affecting most businesses. They are probably not “another industrial revolution,” it says, but together, there is “strong potential to change the way factories work.” For decades, the US has watched […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Which Kind of Failure Are You?
Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Before Google: Larry Page’s Early Ideas for Changing the World
Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Can a Company Keep Innovating After the Founder Is Gone?
Marc Andreessen is obsessed with the idea that tech companies need to focus on innovation above all else. He believes that the “output” of technology companies isn’t products — at least not the way the “output” of Ford is cars. The “output” of tech companies, he says, is innovation. Andreessen’s second theory of innovation is […]