It's here!

The first low cost 3D visual display.




Provision's display systems represent a revolutionary technology that provides the projection of high resolution holographic like 3D aerial images into space detached from any screen, without any glasses. The ‘HoloVision’ line of display systems are being used in many market channels including Electronic Transaction Terminals and Point of Sale Advertising Networks.

The Next Competitive Advantage: ‘Radical Belief!’

Your competitors are more than likely NOT to believe the radical breakthroughs in technological innovation I talk about. Especially the ones that will be here within 20 years.

Here’s a bunch:

Radical life extension technologies that rewire the human body’s metabolism will enable the average 50 year old today (2007) to have the physic and mental stamina of a 35 year old (of today) within 20 years.

The average individual will print-out/synthesize many kinds of consumer gadgets in the comfort of their own home. That’s mobile phones, TV remote controls, motor bike spare parts, and a new out fit for a Saturday night out: tie, shirt, jacket, kilt, sporran, jockstrap and shinny boots.

Most families will be putting their name down for a second Skycar. It will be customisable, most parts will also be instantly produced at home.

Domestic robots will go on strike, as a result of their civil liberties being undermined. The word ‘Slave’ rears its ugly head again. ‘Oh dear’ we shout, as our gardens, houses and washing-up piles up.

DO YOU BELIEVE ANY OF THIS?

But that’s the point. Most of your competitors don’t or wont either!

So it comes down to belief - ‘RADICAL BELIEF.’

If you are ready to both embrace and make these radical ideas work (and zillions of others) then you have one hell of a competitive advantage.

Q.E.D: Radical Belief is the new form of competitive advantage.

‘Sir, stop making those preposterous and fraudulent claims at your investors… If you continue I’ll throw you in Jail.’

Supreme Court Judge, 1913, when Lee D Forest told his shareholders that his company (RCA) would soon be able to transmit voice across the Atlantic.

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‘Bollocks! It’s not even science fiction. It’s fucking madness.’

The UK’s Chief Scientist retort when I told him that an average US Marine core will be able to swarm and run at Olympic sprint speeds for 15 minutes at a time by 2025.

Is Right First Time Innovation a False Economy?

Think about it?

You put all that effort rooting through a design with a fine toothed and conscientious comb (weeks, even months on end), then you make the physical prototype and find a dozen errors: five tolerance clashes, the embeded code makes the LCD flicker, a PCB lug doesn’t align, a catastrophe component failure, and so on.

And don’t any of you seasoned engineers (manager and non-manger) tell me this hasn’t happened to you.

But this is a mere surface issue, underneath belies much deeper consequences.

Right first time enforces an anti-risk culture. If the edict is right first time and you get something wrong, you are going get beaten up not only by the boss, but by your peers as well (it reflects on them, you are now the risk).

So what happens?

You make sure you get it right first time.

And how do you do that?

You don’t take any risks, don’t try anything new, don’t push the envelop.

And what does that mean?

It means nothing new, zero innovation, zero learning, and zero competitive advantage.

And what does that mean?

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'The gulf between what engineers are actually creating today and what ordinary people will believe is significant.'

Joel Gerreau, in Radical Evolution.

‘The Origins of Hyper.’

The original ancient Greek definition of Hyper is a prefix meaning ‘above and beyond.’ However, things have evolved (above and beyond). In physics it can now stand for many (multiple) dimensions. The Internet has also moved the idea on, meaning many interconnections. Some examples:

Hypercube is a cube with more than three planar. It’s possible to catch a glimpse of a hypercube’s geometry in a computer simulation showing its four-dimensional rotating shadow. The shadow is 3D - weird!.

Hyperinnovation in the business context means the multidimensional interconnection and successful introduction of novel ideas (my definition).

Hyperlearning refers not merely to the extraordinary speed, scope and magnitude of learning, but the unprecedented degree of interconnectivity across minds, knowledge, media, experience and technology (you are engaged in n-learning right now!).

Hyperlink is a reference/navigation element in HTML documents that takes the user to another section in the document, or another document on the WWW.

Hyperspace is ten-dimensional space-time based on superstring theory.

Hypertext overcomes some of the limitations of written text, making possible a dynamic organization of information through multiple links and multiple interconnections via hyperlinks.

Five Things You Didn't Know I'm Bad At:

1. Remembering names and long numbers.
2. Singing.
3. Getting up really early.
4. Hiting the target when I pee.
5. Telling jokes.

Five Things You Didn't Know I'm Good At:

1. Dancing, bodypoping and spinning on my head.
2. Cookery.
3. My take on painting modern art.
4. Off the cuff funny quips.
5. Carpentry.

Now don't you o'l feel better for knowing all this!

Churn, baby, churn.

Lower cost Rapid Prototyping (RP) kit is enablng a new design strategy of high-frequency testing and redesign.

Rather than wasting time trying to perfect a design and produce a single prototype to show customers, product designers are using rapid prototyping technology to create simple 'first-concept' models of their ideas.

If the customer wants to change something, they can easily go back to churn out a new one without having lost much time or money in the process.

While this cycle of repetitive failure may be both tiring and demoralizing for both the customer and product designers, it certainly now seems necessary to embrace it and very helpful to be successful in either field.

Beam me up Scotty!

Desktop Factory Price-Performance Breakthrough.

IdeaLab's Desktop Factory (DF) Inc. is launching a 3D Printer at a breakthrough price point of £2,500.

Cathy Lewis, CEO of DF, told me that by 2012 the 3D printer will be in the shops at a price point of £495.

The 3D printer will produce low cost, non-toxic, composite nylon prototypes the size of today' mobile cellphones in just under an hour.

Testimonials for: Hyperinnovation.

Rudi Ruggles, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young: ‘Wonderful… combining cutting edge science and management practices to produce a new management model, one that not only take advantage of, but celebrates the richness of connectivity.’

John Mans, Fellow, Chartered Management Institute: 'Organisational structures developed to meet the stable environmental conditions of the past may well not be able to cope fully with the demands now being made....a clear warning to both individuals and organisations to the complexities of the moder business world....the mix of approaches is well tailored to today’s new circumstances and provide an excellent starting point for managers needing to develop strategies in an interconnected world.’

Imagination is not only more powerful than knowledge, it cannot be measured by the yard.

'In a prosperous long boom, anything is possible, but nothing is certain!'

Kevin Kelly (see blog friends).

What is Hyperinnovation (example 1)?

Think of the latest Nokia cellphone, the N95 (See picture). Is it a video camera or personal assistant; a music centre or communications tool; a games consol or dictaphone; a book or television; a musical instrument or credit card; a remote controller or word processor; a front door key or portal to the world?

Ask Nokia....In fact ask Sony… Ask Apple... Ask Virgin. And they will give you the a similar muse:
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'As bandwidth grows and technology shrinks toward the invisible, both concept and functionality increasingly interconnects and expands toward the multidimensional.'

Boeing's Collaborative Dreamliner.

Boeing Corporation is working with 60 partners at a total of 72 sites around the world to design and build its new '787 Dreamliner.' Boeing’s partners are scattered in what Boeing calls a 'global virtual collaborative environment.'

The Dreamliner is an ultracomplex Hyperinnovation which promises 20 percent better fuel efficiency, 40 percent more cargo capacity, a fuselage with a composite structure, and advanced flight deck and better performance engines. There will be innovative systems technologies, with an open systems approach, a new passenger cabin, advanced wing design, and an enhanced passenger and crew experience.

However, collaborative innovation has a legacy of failure. Complex systems innovation and integration projects are fraught with politcs, miscommunication, and lost information that gets lost in the sheer complexity of the project.

By putting the issue of ‘collaboration’ at the heart of the project, and by supporting this effort with new project protocols, supporting infrastructures, and collaborative communication/information technologies, Boeing are achieving a step change in project performance.

This is driving Boeing towards a new kind of project management model that will enable the design and delivery of evermore adventurous, innovative and super performance airliners... Go Boeing!

There’s plenty of value at the bottom.

Molecular manufacturing (MM) will account for much of the world’s economy by 2025. But an economy like none we have experienced before.

When full blown MM arrives the marginal cost of creating any possible physical product would be on the order of pennies per kilo: basically the cost of the raw material. Eric Drexler (see side bar) estimates total manufacturing cost for MM process in the range of 2 pence and 10 pence per kilogram, regardless of whether the products are clothing, massively parallel supercomputers, tomato soup, or additional MM systems (or Nanofactory).

The value-added, however, will be in the information expressing each product. That is, the software that selects the atomic weight, and defines the geometry and molecular assembly process. In other words, the market value of all manufactured material objects will be based on information content.

As this happens the ratio of value added per bit will rise significantly. This is obviously a trajectory we have today. More value-added comes from information-added products and services, because the order of information embedded within a new product or service is increasing over time. Thus the technological innovations of the future will (1) mostly be information added, (2) exceedingly more complex than today. These will be key economic metrics of the future.

Hyperinnovation Quotation.

'Breakthrough innovations rarely occur within a technical discipline, or within a market, but almost always where you create a novel intersections.'

Prof. Clayton Christensen, Harvard University.

Concurrent Engineering and Hyperinnovation.

Concurrent Engineering (CE) has moved on leaps and bounds since my first CE project back in 1984. Some of the most progressive stances today are looking at the Complexity Sciences and how thay can be applied to help understand the dynamics and improve the control of CE projects.

Hyperinnovation does just this: it moves on from multifunctional team based CE, to self-organising swarm systems based on the dynamics of complex adaptive systems.

The First Principle of Hyperinnovation.

Many moons ago, a tutor of mine gave up the fact that a student studying science at high school has the opportunity to learn more about the laws of physics than Sir Isaac Newton ever did, or could have known in his time.

Since that day, I’ve long wondered how knowledge develops, how ignorance can blossom to enlightenment, how seemingly mystical breakthroughs in understanding come from simpler, less structured understandings; but more, how complex innovations, such as the SpaceLab, originate from much lesser innovations?

After much thought and deliberation over the years, it became clear that the answer may lay in the ‘synergy’ that emerges from the many interconnections amongst ideas. In fact, we find that the output or whole activity is greater than the sum of individual agents: 1+1+1+1=6?

The secret: 4 agents in a network have 6 possible interconnections.

In math terms, for every agent that joins a network, so the number of new interconnection possibilities, and thus innovations, goes up geometrically. There is in fact a principle of innovation at work here. I call it the First Principle Of Hyperinnovation:

The potential for Hyperinnovation is proportional to the number of meaningful interconnections between agents. Meaningful as in those interconnections that hold a level of perceived or authentic value.

As an indication of the potential for Hyperinnovation, the number of possible (meaningful or otherwise) interconnections, is toward one half the square of the sum of agents in a network.

Thus, 10 agents in a network would have 45 possible interconnections. 100 would have 4,950 possible interconnections. 1000 would have 499,500 possible interconnections. 1,000,000 agents would have over 499 billion possible interconnections.

The payoff: for every new scientific discovery, consequent technology, every new idea, every piece of knowledge coupled to a network, so the number of innovation possibilities increase dramatically, so driving the synergy among ideas further and faster up-hill.

Hyperinnovation (Example 6): Multidimensional Learning:

In this rapidly interconnecting world, more and different problems need a network-knowledge approach. As processes and outcome become more interrelated with other processes and outcome, we need people that can break down the lines and borders of knowledge into broad interconnected wholes.

Thus the coalescing a variety of knowledge-bases and concepts from narrow subjects and disciplines, into synthesised arenas and cross-interrelated pools becomes preminant.

Core-subject are still abound, but they are evolving at warp speed. The goal is to become Hyperskilled, Hyperknowledged: So an Engineer need not only be studious in electronics, software and mechanics, but also become a Businessman, an Ecologist, a Behavioural Psychologist, a Biologist, a Chemist and Physicist, all at once. A Nurse, a competent Medical Technician, a Counsellor, a Social Worker, a Communication Specialist, a Computer Technician, at one and the same time.

One organisation enabling the emergence of Hyperleanng is Rice University's 'Connexions' (see Blog Friends Sidebar) an open source environment for rapid collaborative development, free sharing, and rapid publishing of scholarly content on the Web.

Most textbooks are a mass of information in linear format: one topic follows after another. However, our brains are not linear - we learn by making connections between new concepts and things we already know.

Connexions mimics this by breaking down content into smaller chunks, called modules, that can be linked together and arranged in different ways. This lets students see the relationships both within and between topics and helps demonstrate that knowledge is naturally interconnected, not isolated into separate classes or books.

One consequnce here? We will see the narrow specialist begin to disapear, and the rise of the multidimensionalist rapidly emerge.... Go figure! Go Hyperinnovation!!

Understanding the question gives the answer!

I have a friend that keeps asking ME the same question over and over.

'Chris,' he says 'how do you do it. How do you know all this stuff. How comes you know what I know, even though it's not your field?'

Well, I'm - ME - fed up with him asking this question (which has been going on for 15 years and more now!).

The answer is this:

If you keep asking the same question over and over, you simply don't understand the question in the first place.

Learning and innovation are two sides of the same coin:

A really acute definition of innovation is learning beyond knowledge, learning beyond what we currently know or understand. Thus, without rapid and continuous learning, we'll never achieve any breakthroughs in ideas.

Further, successful innovation requires learning before output. That is, understanding the behaviors of a particular innovation in all its dimensions before its launched into market. If we don't learn before output, then there may be trouble ahead.

To accelerate learning before output, one must accelerate feedback from both tests in the lab and trials in the market. To do that, one must accelerate the design-prototype-test (DPT) feedback-cycle by investing in DPT productivity tools and processes.

As the DPT productivity increases and the cycle-time shrinks, so feedback is amplified and learning before output accelerated. Thus innovation cannot exist without learning, and learning cannot exist without eventually yielding innovation. In other words, innovation and learning are two sides of the same coin.

What is Hyperinnovation
(example 5)?

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Now, what about hybrid fruit?

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The ‘Grapple’ (grape+apple).

The ‘Peacotum’ (peach+apricot+plum).

The ‘Necaplum’ (nectarine+plum).

And such Hyperfood is in the laboratories of C&O Nursery and Monsanto right now. Fruit and vegetables with surprising, but pleasing shapes and colour, which incorporate all manner of health enhancing vitamins and minerals
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The message here: as genetic engineering and information technology continue to combine with agriculture and pharmaceuticals, n-food production will be the most multidimensional of all.

What is Hyperinnovation (example 4)?

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Hyperinnovation refers not merely to the incredible speed and magnitude of innovation, but the enormous interconnectivity of new ideas, technology, markets, even whole industries.

What is Hyperinnovation (example 3)?

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‘Hyper’ in the context of innovation, means 'many interconnected dimensions (not unlike Hypertext or Hyperlinks).' One good definition of 'Innovation' is 'The successful introduction of novel ideas.' So 'Hyperinnovation' means the 'Multidimensional interconnection and successful introduction of novel ideas.'

What is Hyperinnovation (example 2)?

Worldwide sales of so-called 'Hyperphones' accounted for 48 percent of total worldwide mobile phone sales in 2006, growing to 81 percent by 2010, according to new forecasts from Gartner Inc. This trend is set to continue, leading to sales of one billion Hyperphones by 2010.

What is Hyperinnovation (example 1)?

Think of the latest Nokia cellphone, the N95 (See picture). Is it a video camera or personal assistant; a music centre or communications tool; a games consol or dictaphone; a book or television; a musical instrument or credit card; a remote controller or word processor; a front door key or portal to the world?

Ask Nokia....In fact ask Sony… Ask Apple... Ask Virgin. And they will give you the a similar muse:

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'As bandwidth grows and technology shrinks toward the invisible, both concept and functionality increasingly interconnects and expands toward the multidimensional.