Category Archives: Innovation

The Most Innovative Public University in the World

The University of Washington ran a press release a couple of days ago announcing that Thomson Reuters has named UW the “most innovative public university in the world.” A reader might think that the ranking methodology includes the number of startups, … Continue reading

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Embracing Bad Science in Technology Transfer

Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman at Vox have published a new account of how screwed up academic science is. Belluz and Hoffman report on a string of studies and exposed forgeries that suggest that the published scientific literature is anything … Continue reading

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Simplify University Patent Policies

Close Encounters of the Third Kind begins with reports of strange doings from all over the world. Let’s start in a similar mode. In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley makes the case that the inventions of the industrial revolution were not … Continue reading

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Teaching Innovators to Innovate

Taleb in Antifragile, having commented on the invention of rollers on suitcases: The simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by complicated methods. The key is that the significant can only be … Continue reading

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Students, creating the value-added for investors

University of Washington president Michael Young gave a ten-minute talk in February 2012 at the opening of a business incubator on the UW campus. The talk is fascinating as a rationalization for the $100M effort to flip faculty and student startups … Continue reading

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Who ya gonna call?

University of Washington president Michael Young gave a ten-minute talk in February 2012 at the opening of a business incubator on the UW campus. The talk is fascinating as a rationalization for the $100M effort to flip faculty and student startups … Continue reading

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Dystopia, Imagination, Innovation

Linda McGovern, in a web article from 1999, points out the following passage: Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination … Continue reading

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Seeking that "Oh, Ass" Moment

The Oh, Ass Moment In The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells, the narrator, Bedford, a would-be businessman partnered with Cavor, an inventive genius with no social aspirations, finds himself in a bit of a pickle on the moon, … Continue reading

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Radical Conceptual Innovation

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre points out an argument made by Karl Popper–that new technology cannot be predicted with any specificity: Some time in the Stone Age you and I are discussing the future and I predict that within the … Continue reading

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The Future is Uncertain, and the Exit is not Always Near

Pitchbook is out with figures for private equity exits in 2013. It is well worth the effort to download a copy of the report from Pitchbook. Highlights include–it’s taking longer to get to a private equity exit, but Q4 of … Continue reading

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