Identity economics

I keep encountering ideas and stubs related to our fall chapter and thought this would be the best place to post them.

A recent piece in the Financial Times about the central idea in a new book entitled 'Identity Economics'.

Suggestion for the title

How about adapting the "Guns, Germs and Steel" title.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, famously wrote about the differences across civilizations from the point of view of their different access to technologies.

A brief slice of the book, Guns (weapons), Germs (resistance) and Steel (industrial era tools), were the three key technologies that enabled the European conquistadores to defeat the native Americans.

What I'm getting at is something similar. Take a brief slice of our chapter, and use 3 key ingredients for an innovation climate as our title. So, something like "intrinsic motivation, openness and diversity" but more sticky and sexy. Any ideas?!

More content needed for the physical infrastructure and dynamics sections

We need more content for these sections. Currently, we don't seem to be saying anything original or interesting :(

The physical infrastructure section is conceptually easy, but I don't have time to read Santamaki's thesis or any new material at this point. Someone please improvise!

The dynamics section right now is very general and unless we find some concrete examples to make interesting/new points, I would suggest skipping it for next week's presentation. We could work on this for the chapter to be delivered in Jan 2010. Would you agree?

Suggested revisions for the Case Studies section

I feel that for the case studies we have to distinguish between (1) umbrella organizations such as the DF and (2) their success stories.

Since our major contribution concerns an innovation climate, I propose that we have three subsections discussion initiatives to create innovation climates in three countries.

1. In Finland we can discuss (1) DF, citing SEOS and Powerkiss success stories. (2) For MIDE we have a background and a list of projects but we don't know how successful any of them are. Olli, could you please comment on some of them: what has been accomplished? We still need to get a clear idea of how, as an innovation climate, MIDE is different from a typical academic granting agency. Yrjo said they have been very risk-taking with the MIDE funds and have weighted vision and ideas more than credentials. But that's what every granting agency says such as EU's FP7 :) So, the idea of ambitious/visionary alone makes me a bit skeptical ;)
   Also, I feel we could leave out EIT. It's a hot topic on one hand but on the other it's too early to tell.
   
   
2. I have an excellent example for US. I found this independent non-profit called Business Innovation Factory which is in the Boston area. Their philosophy ties in with 2 important issues we are discussing (1) open innovation concepts/ living labs and (2) a systems theoretic approach. They have two interesting 'customer centric' living labs which they call experience labs. One is an elder care experience project, for old-age homes, assisted living etc. The second is a student experience project. Do see their website! If you have time, you could also see a nice TED talk by their excutive director Mellisa Withers.
   
   
3. For India, I have a very good example as well. I thought of writing about grassroot innovations. One of the great post-colonial examples of 'user-driven innovation' is in the form of innovation taking place at the grassroots. These innovations are largely need-based and developed by people with no formal education. (A famous example from the TED era is a secondary school student William Kamkwamba who built a windmill from cycle parts to power his entire household). In the late 1980's, Anil Gupta, a professor working with sustainable energy resources in India got an idea to tap into these innovations, scale them up to reach the formal world of technology (grassroots -> global), and reward the innovators fairly. The result is the Honeybee Network which has identified and rewarded more than 10,000 grassroots innovations since 1989! Here's a 2006 BBC piece on this network.

So, now to allocate tasks! Could somebody volunteer to restructure the Finland cases in about 500 words in our google doc? I can write the BIF and the Honeybee cases.

Meeting notes from Thu 26 Nov 2009

Finalize your subsections ASAP so that Pavan can start editing!

Pauli starts a Google presentation, everyone contributes with their own slides!

Presentation rehersal on Tue 8 Dec 9:00-11:00 at DF

Notes from 19th of November

Hello!
After lectures we had a discussion with our group. Some notes I made:

-Text should be ready 24.11.2009 (tomorrow!!), so everyone could read it before 26.11.2009.

-Thursday 26.11.2009 at 10:00 we will meet at DF to check our text for book.

-Thursday 26.11.2009 book presentation. Pauli makes slides with google docs, everyone can partisipate, and Marja will present these.

-Seminar is 10.12.2009 10:00-14:30 at TU3-hall (Time changed!!) and Pavan is responsible for presentation. Time 25 min+discussion (60 min maximum)

-Ali leaves 27.11.09 for trip to home.

Anything else?

Tue Nov. 10 Notes from DF: Some brainstorming

Next meeting: Tue next week Tue 9:00-11:00 17 Nov 2009

We talked about the future of the innovation climate from various angles. Ideas from today's meeting:

• Before, artists went to Paris. Where do the innovative people go in the future?
• Examples of systems theoretical approach for an innovation climate (New York in 1940's and '50s, Boulder colorado, examples from India and China)
• Physical infrsatructure influences in two ways: direct and indirect (self-esteem issues)
• Opening statement: First, second and third industrial revolution
• How does the process of innovatin change -- main focus of the 'vision 2030'?
• Distributed innovation into networks, hubs, open spaces (open living labs, http://owela.vtt.fi)
• Sustainability movements and its relationship to division of labour
• Decreasing of the scale, increasing of involvement, micro democracies
• IPR issues (who hold IPR in open spaces? open scientific publishing), changing of the business logic
• Lifecycle of innovations, different logics in business, science
• Need for attitute that accepts rapid processing of ideas (open living lab?)

Sorry if you can't follow these notes, you just had to be there :)