IT growth and global change: Ray Kurzweil interview - McKinsey Quarterly - Business Technology - Strategy

The inventor, businessman, and author Ray Kurzweil explains how the exponential growth of technologies will transform industries and pose new opportunities—and hurdles—for business and society. Every executive recognizes the fast pace of technological development but grapples with the billion-dollar question: what happens next, and when? Ray Kurzweil has precise answers based on his thesis that information technology will continue to develop exponentially, leading to a not-so-distant future when artificial intelligence dominates our daily lives, genes can be reprogrammed away from cancer, and solar power can provide the world with all the energy it needs.

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The Top Six Innovation Ideas of 2011 - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

That's right. 2011. These six ideas emerged in 2010 as powerful "innovation invitations" and seem sure to intensify in power and influence. They'll increasingly be a source of, and resource for, innovation differentiation in 2011, if not for your organization, then for the firm you most dread competing against. 1. Contestification Whether Google Demo Slam or Sprint's App Competition, digital media has become an innovation battleground for customers, clients, prospective partners, and young talent. Frito-Lay has already made competition the cornerstone of its Super Bowl advertising, and Toyota, desperate to remind people what a wonderful corporate citizen it can be, invites aspiring innovators to suggest how the firm's technology can be used for good in unexpected ways. Crowdsourced contestification is becoming institutionalized as a way firms can grow their own innovation nations. If you're not running an innovative innovation contest to invite participation and build brand, then you're reacting to your competitor's competition. Will your contest be competitive with their contest? Who's running it? Who's judging it? Who's winning it?

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The Big Question for 2011 - Will Gamification Change Social Media - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

It doesn't matter whether I'm talking to an investor, C-suiter, or an entrepreneur. Most of them — like most of the general public — answer the question, "What does social media mean to you?" with "It's stuff that helps you make 'friends, digitally!! Do you want to be my friend?" "Sure" I usually reply. And then I say: "But thinking of social tools that way is a little bit like using a positronic brain multiplier from the 25th century to tie your shoelaces faster. Here's a more powerful, resonant — and disruptive — way to think about social media.

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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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Contemporary Creativity - The Social System of People, Technology, Media - Goonth's Blog

Early in my career as a creator of film and television content, I quickly found myself confined by what media allowed me, or didn’t allow me, to do. My transition into the interactive space alleviated some of these hurdles, but I soon realized that there was a much bigger issue at play, one that called to the reality that media ecosystems were becoming exponentially more complex, and that no one medium could replace or define our roles as marketers. I tell this story often because it is important that we understand the meaning and value of what creativity is, as well as what it can do for us when we look at it from a more holistic perspective. To me, creativity is the process by which intent and action passionately align

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