Economics/True Cost – Page 18 – Public Intelligence Blog

Open Innovation Creates New Opportunities in Food Manufacturing

Tue, 05/21/2013 – 11:16am

David Feitler, PhD, Senior Program Manager, NineSigma

As White Queen remarked in Lewis Carroll’s immortal story Through the Looking Glass, “…it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” We all run after innovation just as fast as we can and sometimes we feel that it’s all we can do just to stay even with the competition. Sometimes it is good to pause for a moment and reflect on the role of innovation, what we’re doing currently and what we might do differently. The State of Ohio did exactly that in creating the Ohio Third Frontier’s Open Innovation Incentive, which they launched last year.

Open innovation (OI) is the systematic inclusion of parties outside your four walls and outside your existing networks. Companies practice open innovation because they want to reduce the time it takes to get to market, avoid getting trapped by their own thinking, and pursue with agility new opportunities outside their core expertise. Frequently the examples given for open innovation success are things like the iPod™, which wasn’t invented internally at Apple, or the Swiffer™ cleaning system that P&G acquired in its original form from a Japanese company. Those examples can cause one to lose sight of the value OI brings to non-consumer goods companies and to organizations smaller than Apple and P&G.

That was the thinking of the Ohio Third Frontier team when they considered what they could do to support economic growth in the State of Ohio. They recognized that open innovation is an important tool and a way to accelerate economic development in Ohio. The state also recognized that very large companies (greater than $1 billion in annual revenues) were doing this already, while companies in the $10 million to $1 billion range likely needed additional direction and support. They surmised that the expertise needed to incorporate these external technology searches didn’t reside in firms this size and that reliable partners were needed in the form of intermediaries with proven open innovation methods and processes. Thus was born the Ohio Third Frontier Open Innovation Incentive.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Open Innovation in Food Manufacturing”

2013/05/122013/05/12

Neal Rauhauser: Professionalism & Propaganda

Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Sources (Info/Intel)

Professionalism & Propaganda

One of the things I have done over the last six months has involved identifying and observing hive mind constructs in the real world. This happened in the context of examining the publicly visible process of foreign policy making. I wrote thirty three posts that are at least tangentially related to this pursuit. Hive mind constructs will eventually win out over point source propaganda, but it won’t be pretty to watch.

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Links and short descriptions of various sequential endeavors and their findings

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CONCLUSION:

Monolithic corporate forces heavily invested in the status quo are wrestling with networked humans and finding they face a sort of memetic Devil’s Snare. Their struggles may seem to be momentarily successful, but they are only educating their opponent as to their strengths and weaknesses.

The concept of the corporation didn’t really take off until the Catholic church relaxed usury laws three centuries ago. Compound interest depends on exponential growth and humans have pretty much hit the wall in terms of what our environment will support. Any one of climate change or peak oil could undo the perception that we are all consumers living in a conglomeration of free markets. Those two have arrived pretty much simultaneous with a financial sector meltdown and we are entering a period where our society will wind down to the Earth’s solar maximum. A value system based on exponential growth will not survive a disproof by counter example, and Mother Nature responds to neither paper injunctions nor heartfelt supplications.

Some of those networked humans are starting to realize that they need not tear down the corporatocracy by hand and they are already thinking about how and what to preserve. What role does a hive mind play in this? What role can it play when electrical power is intermittent and the supply chains needed for electronic devices are interrupted?

Read full post, see all linked posts with graphics.

2013/05/12

Jean Lievens: 3D Printing Migrating Away from Plastic Toward Sustainable Materials Such as Wood, Salt, and Clay

Design, Economics/True Cost, Materials

The Green 3D Printing Materials We’ve Been Waiting For

by Beth Buczynski

Eerth Techling

There’s no denying that 3D printing has moved beyond the laboratory and into the mainstream. We’ve seen 3D printed body parts, electronics, and toys. Although the technology has quickly become quite sophisticated, the materials used in 3D printers have been slow to catch up.

Though the idea of print-you-own has big green implications, there’s nothing earth-friendly about an uptick in plastic junk floating around the planet. That’s why we’re so excited about the work of Emerging Objects, a two-architect outfit that teaches 3D printing in Berkeley. Founders Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello are working to move the trend away from plastic and toward far more sustainable materials like wood, salt, and clay.

“Emerging Objects is interested in the creation of 3D printed buildings, building components and interior accessories that can be seen as sustainable, inexpensive, stronger, smarter, recyclable, customizable and perhaps even reparable to the environment,” write the architects. “We want to 3D print long-lasting performance-based designs for the built environment using raw materials that have strength, tactility, cultural associations, relevance and beauty.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: 3D Printing Migrating Away from Plastic Toward Sustainable Materials Such as Wood, Salt, and Clay”

2013/05/102013/05/10

Jean Lievens: Home Swaps and Other Sharing Value Networks

Culture, Economics/True Cost, Money, P2P / Panarchy

The Sharing Economy is Exploding: Knok’s 7 Key Factors Why Home Swap is the Perfect Example of a Sharing Service

Knok, the fastest growing home exchange community, shows that house swapping is the perfect example of collaborative consumption.

(PRWEB) May 08, 2013

This year has seen the consolidation of the sharing economy and several conferences around this theme confirm it. In April, 150 sharing economy leaders joined author and organizer Lisa Gansky in San Francisco for Let's Mesh. In May, the OuiShareFest in Paris brought together over 500 people from all over Europe, and in June, the sharing economy is Le Web’s theme for its London event.

After the output of these events and the discussions on the future of the sharing economy with practitioners around the world, Knok has created a list of the 7 most relevant reasons why home exchange is a great example of a collaborative consumption business:

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Home Swaps and Other Sharing Value Networks”

2013/05/07

Graphic: Open Hardware Innovation Ecology

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Hardware

Source

2013/05/072013/05/07

Jean Lievens: Open Tech Challenges Proprietary, Relocalizes Manufacturing, Addresses Poverty

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Hardware

Open Tech Forever Challenges Proprietary Innovation

Open source hardware could be a revolutionary tool for unlocking our shackles to profit motivated, proprietary innovation. It has a vision to alleviate poverty through empowering decentralized and affordable, small scale production. Participants anywhere in the world can use the internet to access, improve, or adapt designs for local manufacturing and drastically increase the rate of innovation.

Open Tech Forever (OTF) is emerging to become a new force in open source hardware development by building an open source factory where it will produce open technology. OTF recently launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise $50,000 to build the facility, and they need your support. As a cooperatively-owned social enterprise, all of its innovation will be transparently documented in writing, graphics and video, and released under a Creative Commons license.

OTF’s mission is to “facilitate cooperation among the communities that live on the frontlines of suffering throughout the world, so that we can build enduring solutions to poverty and the destruction of the environment.” OTF co-founder, Aaron Makaruk explains, “An entirely new economic frontier stands before us, a world where innovation and wealth are mass produced as easily as a file is downloaded to a computer. Our goal is to use local, open source factories to outcompete companies that import unsustainable products manufactured in inhuman conditions and put them out of business – one locally-owned, open source company at a time.”

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Relocalizing manufacturing is one of the most significant steps we can take to prepare for the destabilizing effects of climate change and to empower local communities to build resilient, self-sustaining economies. OTF, with its passionate team of skilled engineers and radical mission, will be an exciting project to watch as it grows over the next couple years and a great cause to support through its first phase of development.

Read dull article.

2013/04/152013/04/15

Anthony Judge: Dynamic Transformation of Static Reporting of Global Processes

Architecture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Knowledge, Resilience

Dynamic Transformation of Static Reporting of Global Processes

Suggestions for process-oriented titles of global issue reports

EXTRACT

Given the increasingly disastrous “state of the world”, and that foreseen for the future, it is appropriate to ask whether another language might enable meaning to be carried otherwise — and potentially more imaginatively and fruitfully. There is clearly a fundamental problem with respect to the relationship between states of any kind — one which obscures consideration of the dynamics which may be vital to the essence of meaning. This is only too evident in the case of Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, North Korea-South Korea, and the like — as with the “two-state solutions” proposed in the first case.

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With respect to enhancing insight into the dynamic, a striking innovation in “turning statistics into knowledge” — with the slogan “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world” — has been offered by the Gapminder initiative, within the context of the OECD Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. A provocatve case might however be made for re-imaging “statistics” — as exemplifying state language – with something akin to “dynastics”.

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It can be readily argued that this collection of “states” offers no indication of how they are interrelated systemically between the domains so thematically bounded. This systemic connectivity has been the primary preoccupation of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential now accessible online.

See table of recommended changes and rest of article.