Japan & Innovations

The Economist: The future of Japanese business Competing through innovation

"Japan's style of innovation failed it in software and biotechnology in the 1990s. It might work better in robotics, aerospace and other burgeoning technologies."

Tech Innovatios and Company Co-operation in Research

NYT: Three Technology Companies Join to Finance Research

"With federal funds for basic computer science research at universities in decline, three of the industry's leading companies are joining to help fill the void. University of California computer scientists plan to announce on Thursday that the companies - Google, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems will underwrite a $7.5 million laboratory on the Berkeley campus. The new research center, called the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Laboratory, will focus on the design of more dependable computing systems. The Berkeley researchers say that under the terms of their agreement with the three companies, the fruits of the research will be nonproprietary and freely licensed. Each company has agreed to support the project with $500,000 annually for five years. Although the companies are frequently rivals and only occasionally allies, they have concluded that they can operate most effectively by bringing technology innovations to market quickly."

Science on Web/Awards

Journalism.co.uk: Newscientist.com scoops top editorial award

"Newscientist.com editor Damian Carrington has been awarded web editor of the year at the 2005 British Society of Magazine Editors awards. Mr Carrington, who previously worked at BBC News Online, was praised by judges for the speed and quality of Newscientist.com - now one of the most popular science websites in the world. Since Mr Carrington helped launch Newscientist.com in 2000, traffic has risen to more than 1.7 million unique users each month and the web team is about to recruit its eighth editorial team member."

New Dot-com Bubbles and Media

OJR: Is the bubble back in online media?

"Venture capitalists and Big Media are showing intense interest in blogs, social media and highly trafficked content sites. Are we reliving dot-com mania?"

Worth of Watching Columns/Tech/FT

FT

"The Worth watching column follows some of the most promising new developments in industry emerging from fields such as nanotechnology, chemistry, geology, physics, healthcare and information technology. Regular contributors to Worth watching include Jonathan Loades-Carter and Malini Guha."

A car that can make its own fuel

Music for the deaf

Virtual input pen

VTT, a Finnish research centre, has developed a technology that could take the pain out of keeping mobile accessories - such as phones and laptops - secure if they end up in the wrong hands.

China/Universities/Innovations

NY Times: China Luring Scholars to Make Universities Great

"China is focusing on science and technology, areas that reflect the country's development needs but also reflect the preferences of an authoritarian system that restricts speech. The liberal arts often involve critical thinking about politics, economics and history, and China's government, which strictly limits public debate, has placed relatively little emphasis on achieving international status in those subjects. In fact, Chinese say - most often euphemistically and indirectly - that those very restrictions on academic debate could hamper efforts to create world-class universities."

"Students here are not encouraged to challenge authority or received wisdom. For some, that helps explain why China has never won a Nobel Prize. What is needed most now, some of China's best scholars say, are bold, original thinkers."The greatest thing we've done in the last 20 years is lift 200 million people out of poverty," said Dr. Xu. "What China has not realized yet, though, if it truly wants to go to the next level, is to understand that numbers are not enough. We need a new revolution to get us away from a culture that prizes becoming government officials. We must learn to reward real innovation, independent thought and genuine scholarly work."

Technology & Fashion

MediaWeek: Future unveils Gadgetcandy.com

"Future Publishing has launched Gadgetcandy.com, a new website to target women with a mix of fashion and technology."

Science & Engineering/Radio & TV/EU

Information Week: Europe Willing To Pay To Get Science On Air

"In an effort to boost science and engineering the European Union has said it will directly fund the making of television and radio programs about science and research. No money has been set aside for print or online publishing but part of the cash is being targeted at science drama."

"According to the European Union people with science and engineering backgrounds rarely make programming decisions and the topics are frequently ignored by mainstream broadcasters. The European Union has set aside 1.6 million euro (about $1.9 million) to contribute to scientific programming with the aim of encouraging European television and radio producers and stations to increase their science output."

Technology Innovation Awards/WSJ

WSJ: The 2005 Innovation Awards show there's a lot of innovating going on out there.

Gold Winner: 454 Life Sciences, U.S. (Low-cost gene sequencing)
Silver Winner: Ecology Coatings, U.S. (Environmentally friendly coatings)
Bronze Winner: Alien Technology, U.S. (Manufacturing process that reduces cost of RFID tags)

Honorable Mention: MIT/Environment and Public Health Organization, U.S. (Inexpensive water-filtration system)

"Third-world challenges in water, food, shelter, and basic medical care are much more important than innovations in first-world entertainment." Robert Drost, a scientist at Sun Microsystems.

Podcast: How the judges chose.

Tech Innovations & Language

Information Week: Tech Innovations Changing Language

"The Eleventh Edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is available online and legitimizes technology-driven terms."

Internet Companies and Possibility of Bubbles

CNN Money: Internet deals: A tangled Web, Merger mania is alive and well online. But are niche Internet media stocks priced to perfection?

"Frenetic is the best way to describe the pace of consolidation in the online sector during the past few months. Media giant News Corp. (Research) has made three significant Web deals since July. Yahoo! (Research) acquired a significant stake in Chinese Net firm Alibaba.com last month. And eBay (Research) followed up its Shopping.com deal from June with last week's buyout of Internet phone service Skype."

"All this activity has led to increased speculation about who's next to join the mating dance. There are only a handful of appetizing public Internet companies left. So not surprisingly, shares of several of them have surged lately."

Internet & Innovations

Cnet: Intelligence in the Internet age

"It's a question older than the Parthenon: Do innovations and new technologies make us more intelligent? A few thousand years ago, a Greek philosopher, as he snacked on dates on a bench in downtown Athens, may have wondered if the written language folks were starting to use was allowing them to avoid thinking for themselves."

"Today, terabytes of easily accessed data, always-on Internet connectivity, and lightning-fast search engines are profoundly changing the way people gather information. But the age-old question remains: Is technology making us smarter? Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?"

Technology & Branded Blogging Platform

Journalism.co.uk: VNU launches blog platform

"Tech news network VNU has introduced a branded blogging platform for UK readers in an attempt to build loyalty among its tech-savvy and literate audience. The initiative offers readers a free blog tool so they can contribute their own stories and comments to the VNU community. Journalists at VNU have been using blog formats since mid 2004. Silicon Valley Sleuth and IT Sneak typically generate between 8-10,000 page impressions each week and also help feed new ideas and leads to VNU's journalists."

Selling Access to Ideas

The International Herald Tribune: A new battlefield: Ownership of ideas

"In another era, a nation's most valuable assets were its natural resources - coal, say, or amber waves of grain. But in the information economy of the 21st century, the most priceless resource is often an idea, along with the right to profit from it."

"This reality is transforming business and creating new diplomatic fault lines between continents. Some companies - Thomson of France, in consumer electronics, and BTG of Britain, in technology, for example - can make more money selling access to their ideas than from building anything themselves. The right to profit from a breakthrough idea can be so valuable that the contest over the concept can be more decisive than the competition for consumers, as Sony and Toshiba demonstrate in their tug of war over whose next-generation DVD patents will win out, long before the discs come to market."

"From the United States to Europe and Japan, more patents were sought in the past 20 years than in the previous 100, evidence that protecting the rights to an idea is itself growing in importance. Patents "are becoming the highest-value assets in any economy," said Jerry Sheehan, an economist with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop- ment in Paris."

Scientific Publishing and internet

The Economist: Free access to scientific results is changing research practices

"The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion."

"The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specialising in these subjects. They publish more than 1.2m articles each year in some 16,000 journals.This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly journals are now online."

Universities/U.S. vs. Others

The Economist: The brains business


The Economist: How Europe fails its young

U.S./Business Publications/Awards

Business Wire: IDG Publications and Web Sites Win an Impressive 123 Awards in 2005

USA/Innovation/Journalism/Education

Pressthink / Jay Rosen:

"It took us three years of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, discussion and drafting documents to come up with the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. It consists of three main elements:"

1. A “research and policy” piece that will be run out of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s JFK School. Here, we have in mind a vehicle through which schools can collectively speak out on critical media issues of the day. That means journalism educators can have more voice. For example, as Judy Miller from the New York Times goes to jail over refusing to release anonymous sources and Matt Cooper from Time Magazine does not, or the case of “60 Minutes and Dan Rather’s coverage of Bush’s National Guard service. These would be examples where journalism schools and universities might want to weigh in on the discussion and debate.

2. An experimental curriculum reform element that encourages journalism programs to match-up reporters with scientists, urban planners, economists, historians, social scientists, legal scholars, foreign policy experts or public policy specialist to co-teach courses.

3. News 21 laboratories, or “incubators” at UC Berkeley, USC, Northwestern and Columbia, which will hire our best recent graduates to experiment with new kinds of multi-media reporting that combine television, radio and the web in new and innovative forms of interactive journalism. (Berkeley will begin by coordinating News 21.)

Some wonder if this “initiative” is not just a caucus of self-righteous and self-designated elitist deans forming itself into a priesthood to get some grants to the exclusion of other university programs. I hope that is not the case.

Orville Schell
Dean, Graduate School of Journalism
University of California-Berkeley

Innovations/Finland

BizReport: Innovation Gives Finland A Firm Grasp on Its Future

"The political and economic malaise that afflicts so much of Europe this summer has not infected this northernmost outpost of the European Union. The contrast between Finland's optimism about the future and Old Europe's gloom is striking."

"While France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and others are stumbling, Finland prospers, both economically and psychologically. The recent "no" votes in France and the Netherlands that undermined, perhaps fatally, the E.U.'s proposed constitution have produced a pervasive despair in much of Europe that did not turn up in recent interviews with scores of Finns."

I&J (1)

Innovation journalism

Definition

Innovation journalism is journalism dedicated to the coverage of innovation. Innovation is a main driving force for economic growth, and is the core activity of many leading industries. (Wikipedia)

History

* June 2003. VINNOVA, the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems, launches Innovation Journalism Fellowships.

* October 2003. VINNOVA publishes the first paper using the expression "Innovation Journalism": The Concept of Innovation Journalism and a Programme for Developing It, by David Nordfors.

* In April 2004 the First Conference on Innovation Journalism was held at Stanford University, organized by The Swedish Innovation Journalism Initiative run by VINNOVA in co-operation with the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning.

* In June 2004 VINNOVA launches second round of Swedish IJ Fellowships.

* The Swedish-US initiative was followed in November 2004 by a Finnish Innovation Journalism research and education initiative at the University of Tampere.

* In January 2005, an Innovation Journalism initiative was created at the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University in the United States, in co-operation with the Swedish program.

* In April 2005, The Second Conference on Innovation Journalism is held at Stanford, organized by the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning and The Swedish Innovation Journalism Initiative run by VINNOVA, the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems. The conference is co-sponsored by The Finnish Innovation Journalism Initiative and The Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism. (Wikipedia)