Monica Anderson is CEO of Syntience Inc. and originator of a theory for learning called “Artificial Intuition” that may allow us to create computer based systems that can understand the meaning of language in the form of text. Here she discusses the ongoing paradigm shift – the “Holistic Shift” – which started in the life sciences and is spreading to the remaining disciplines. Model Free Methods (also known as Holistic Methods) are an increasingly common approach used on “the remaining hard problems”, including problems in the domain of “AI” – Problems that require intelligence. She illustrates this using a Model Free approach to the NetFlix Challenge. Her website provides some background information.
Ecovative’s environmentally responsible products can replace materials ranging from petroleum based expanded plastics (like Styrofoam™) to particle board made using carcinogenic formaldehyde. Our materials are 100% renewable, and primarily made from agricultural byproducts. These low-embodied energy materials can be home composted when they’re no longer needed.
Many of the materials and chemicals that are commonly used come from non-renewable fossil fuel resources. However, cheaply extracted petroleum and gas supplies are a thing of the past. Our landfills are filling up, and even when we recycle things properly, it requires a lot of energy only to yield a lower grade material. The future lies in using rapid renewables that can also be returned to the earth at the end of their use.
In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads.
Those ideas cannot be forcibly extracted.
All one can do is mobilize collective intelligence and knowledge. If knowing how to produce and sell has become a basic necessity, it no longer constitutes a sufficiently differentiating factor in international competition. In the past, enterprises were industrial and commercial; in the future, they will increasingly have to be intelligent.
The intelligent enterprise stands on three pillars: collective intelligence, knowledge management and information and collaboration technologies and needs the vital energy of intellectual cooperation.
Managing collective intelligence implies a radical change that will naturally elicit a lot of resistance. But we’re talking about a social innovation. Once it is in place, once the resistance has subsided, no one will want to go back to the way it was! As always, the problem lies “not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.” Keynes.
“A few words about a French project named Open Source Energy.This project is intended to enable the design of open hardware solutions to capture the different kinds of energies available all around us (from the environment or from human activities). A first module to transform and to store electricity from renewable sources is being designed: the ENERCAN (opensourceenergy.wordpress.com/lenercan-v1). This first brick is the starting point of a large scale design process toward the creation of new solutions inspired by old or forgotten ones and improved by the use of high-tech devices. The project is not about large and costly devices but about simple, open and cheap modules that can be replicated to capture every stream of available and lost energies, even the smallest one.
Besides designing the modules, the team took part in several events related to design or DIY in order to promote the project and to share with others.
Local Motors shares its innovations and lets customers be part of the car-building process, while keeping it local.
Last year, I spoke at Shanghai's Radical Design Week about the transformational design of business. I talked about car manufacturing and how, with state of the art 3D fabrication tools, a networked participatory culture and rapid innovation, the car company Local Motors claims to build cars five times faster at one hundred times less the capital cost of conventional manufacturers.
Local Motors is perhaps one of the most comprehensive examples of a revolutionary approach to the design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing of cars. But don't worry if you are not in the automotive industry, the Local Motors story is one about the firms of the future.
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Designing high performance organisations
Companies today can change their shape, capability and performance by rethinking and redesigning core processes. In the case of Local Motors, its factories (the Local Motors micro-factory was rated by Jalopnik as one of the world's top 10 most impressive car factories), R&D, sales, marketing and production represents a design system that is an industrial ecology, rather than a series of boxes and silos. Moreover it is much less costly to set up, run and maintain, which enables the company to invest its energies into high quality design and production.
An open networked innovation platform
Local Motors runs competitions to find innovations. For its first vehicle competition, 44,000 designs were submitted and 3,600 innovators shared their knowledge and insights. No one company can hire that many people and there was no cash prize. So, what inspired so many people to participate?
Through its open participatory platform called The Forge, Local Motors has collaborated in automotive innovation with DARPA, the US military research agency, co-designing and building a fully functional prototype of a combat support vehicle in three and a half months. Even large car manufacturers have turned to Local Motors, such as BMW, which is currently running an urban driving experience challenge.
So Local Motors becomes more than just a car manufacturing company – it's an automotive innovation platform and a true community. Local Motors attracts innovators because it is creating and releasing social and intellectual capital into a common pool. This open innovation platform is counter intuitive to many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.
Ecovative’s environmentally responsible products can replace materials ranging from petroleum based expanded plastics (like Styrofoam™) to particle board made using carcinogenic formaldehyde. Our materials are 100% renewable, and primarily made from agricultural byproducts. These low-embodied energy materials can be home composted when they’re no longer needed.
