Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly on Building Off Others’ Ideas and The Adjacent Possibility - MIT Sloan Management Review

“Adjacent Possible” and other ways of thinking about collaboration Here’s how an October 2010 interview in Wired begins: “Say the word ‘inventor’ and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation — by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime Wired contributors — argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. “In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity.

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What Is This Thing Called the Attention Economy - Tim Kastelle, Innovation Leadership Network

Most of the economy now is based on information. Even physical things are embodied information. Consequently, the scarce resource that is being competed for now is our time. Here is how Richard Lanham talks about it in an interview discussing his book The Economics of Attention: The basic argument is simple enough. We’re told that we live in an information economy. We remember from Econ.1 that economics studies “the allocation of scarce commodities that have alternative uses.” But information is not a scarce commodity; we’re drowning in it. What is scarce is the human attention needed to make sense of it. We really live in an attention economy. What does such an economy look like? What are we to make of it?That attention is in short supply seems to be born in upon us from all sides. From frantic multi-tasking two-career parents to soldiers in computerized fox holes or pilots inundated by cockpit information, we’re all drowning in a sea of information.

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Digital Accounting : Business Model Changing innovation - David Birch, Digital Money Blog

[Dave Birch] One thing that struck me about PayPal's "Innovate 2010" conference in San Francisco, in (I have to say) fairly stark contrast to many of the events I attend in the more traditional banking world is just how much innovation was actually going on. Too often I'm tempted into a presentation on radical innovation in international payments only to find that the radical innovation being discussed is changing field 27 of message type 94 from two bits to three bits. At Innovate, though, the innovation was real: entirely new products and services that depend on the existence of the new payment platform underneath them.

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What is The Role of the Chief Innovation Officer - Mark W.Johnson, Innosight - BusinessWeek

Innovation isn't new, but appointing a C-suite member to oversee it is. Mark Johnson looks at how the CIO's role should be executed Ten years ago, you'd have been hard-pressed to find a chief innovation officer on any company's leadership team. Today such leading companies as AMD (AMD), Citigroup (C), Coca Cola (KO), DuPont (DD), Humana (HUM), and Owens Corning (OC) each have one. Many others, including Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), have senior leaders who are tasked with heading innovation in effect, if not in name. Not that innovation is new: Organizations have been innovating as long as companies have existed. Why the new role now? There are many reasons. Three stand out.

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MicroPayments - Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky

With continued turmoil in the advertising market, people who work at newspapers and magazines are wondering if micropayments will save them, with recent speculation in this direction by David Sarno of the LA Times, David Carr of the NY Times, and Walter Isaacson in Time magazine. Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. To understand why not, there are two key pieces of background.

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