Understanding the new realities of economic development
The USPTO is hiring. In fact they are doing a lot of hiring, over 1,200 new examiners every year, and they still can’t keep up with the deluge of new patent filings.
But while the number of patent filings has grown from 90,544 in 1967 to 484,955 in 2007, a 535% workload increase in 40 years plus an equally growing backlog of patent applications waiting for examiner attention, and no more room to expand in their current offices, the agency is now looking at a different approach to solving their growing pains.
First, some personal background in this matter. In 2004 I began researching the workload problems at the USPTO and wrote a paper about what I saw as an impending crisis, predicting that they would quickly run out of office space in DC, ending the article by asking the simple question, “Why not come to Colorado?” The article ended up being printed in a local magazine, but I largely viewed this as the end of the matter.
Last week my wife Deb and I were relaxing at a new shopping center in the Denver area. Along the sidewalks a series of speakers cast a rather pleasant musical backdrop to the shopping experience.
At one point an interesting song began playing. I reached for my iPhone, and used a program called Shazam to “listen” to the music, revealing the name of the song and the artist. I was then able to purchase the song on my iPhone and download it directly to the phone for later use.
The nature of this transaction is quite revealing in that it gives us clues as to what our shopping experiences will be like in the future.
Although Growing in Numbers, Today’s Female Inventors Still Only
Account for Around 10% of the US Inventor Population
What name springs to mind when you say the phrase “famous female inventor?” If you’re having a tough time answering this, you are not alone.
I became interested in this topic when I ran across a very curious statistic. In 1980 only 1.7% of all the patent filings were filed by women. After doing some research I found that the problem started long before that.
When the going gets tough, the tough go bootstrapping
Walk a Mile in These Bootstrapped Shoes.
Much the way nature has evolved, the world of business operates in fluid balance with money serving as its breathable oxygen. And in much the same manner as nature, businesses feed off the less fortunate, using their superior strength to suffocate and feed off of the revenue streams of their daily prey, walking casually away to find their next meal.
Welcome to the startup business playground, where some of the best and brightest talent in this country has been burned at the stake.
Future games will become the ultimate playground for our minds
In 1977 when famed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot uttered the phrase, “as a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also to seduce,” little did he know that his brainchild, fractal geometry, would become seductive to the point of being addictive.
Over the past decade, fractal geometry, the science that reduces the patterns found in nature to mathematical formulas and also enables us to create artificial forms of nature using the same math, has become the numerical engine driving much of the gaming industry, and more specifically, the hottest technique in gaming - procedural generation. Placing key creative elements in the hands of the player, procedural generation means the game doesn’t store millions of characters and background images, just the methods by which they can be built, leaving the gamers free to focus on creating the worlds in which their next adventures occur.
Where brilliant thinkers like da Vinci, H. G. Wells, and Mandelbrot inspired much of the world around us today, the world of tomorrow, the very world where we will be spending the later years of our lives, is now being imagined inside the young minds of today’s gamers as they learn to harness the awesome power hiding in each gamer’s toolbox.
Nanotechnology is a science riddled with paradoxes
Over the past year I have been eating, sleeping, and breathing nanotechnology, but feel like I have only scratched a little behind the ears of this enormous science.I had been following the industry, keeping up on the science for some time, but writing a book required total immersion.
The terminology is the toughest part.As I listen to the scientists talk, they seem very conversant with the difficult to pronounce “ology” and “ecular” words and the even more difficult concepts behind the words.But this is not the language of “average” people, or for that matter, the language of most of the “far above average” people that I know.
Every industry has its own “favorite son”, but for many areas of new technology there are no real household names associated with them.There are no people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, or Chuck Norris rising to the forefront of these technologies.Put another way, these technologies represent industries without their own rock stars.
“The fundamental unit of the new economy
is not the corporation, but the individual.”
- Thomas Malone & Robert Laubacher
Running a solo business in the past meant that you had a one-person practice, most often offering a professional service, well suited for lawyers, accountants, and doctors. However, a new breed of solo business has emerged that allows people to leverage the power of the Internet and control a vast empire from their home office or wherever they happen to be. Across the world thousands of people are giving birth to what is being called an “Empire of One”.
Complexity is a Very-Real, Very-Destructive Disease
that Destroys Human-Based Systems
By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
Often time we hear about some new disease that sounds kind of phony and quickly discard it because it sounds like some made-up name for a common personality quirk. So, when I talk about the “complexity disease”, your first inclination will probably be to say “yeah right!”
But here’s the difference. Complexity is not a disease that affects humans. Complexity is a disease that affects systems. And even though it has never been labeled as such before now, it becomes a very useful frame of reference for people involved in building, operating, or managing a system. Complexity is a very-real, very-destructive disease.
This is a blog produced by Thomas Frey, Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, and Google's top rated futurist speaker. Unlike most speakers, Tom works closely with his Board of Visionaries to develop original research studies, which enables him to speak on unusual topics, translating trends into unique opportunities.
