Flying Cars Over Europe

Since I was a child, I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of having a flying car. In other words, one that can move in 3D as opposed to 2D (and more often) 1D.

There have been many previous attempts at this, it’s not a novel idea. Some are quite hard to believe – see here and the picture below.

So I was interested to read about a modern version of this idea in Der Spiegel recently. The project is in the research concept (flying robotic drone) stage at present but it sounds quite fascinating.

Here’s a photo and some extracts:

But now Europe wants to soar past the competition — with partially autonomous flying cars. The €4.3-million ($5.5-million) EU program called “myCopter” is designed to help develop the third dimension for personal travel as part of a so-called “personal air transport system” (PATS).

….

Of course, the dream is almost as old as the airplane itself. As long ago as 1917, a prototype made the first hops into the sky. In the United States, the Terrafugia project is on the verge of introducing its flying-car concept vehicle on the market.

Still, if large numbers of commuters are to fly through cities in the future, collisions and crashes are to be expected, unless the machines are largely self-guided.

….

In a sense, the drones learned their swarming behaviour from Batman. It is based on the so-called Reynolds algorithm developed by the American programmer Craig Reynolds in 1986. Reynolds later created digital swarms of bats for films, such as “Batman Returns.”

Reynolds recognized that the complex choreography of a flock of birds or a school of fish is surprisingly simple. It requires no more than a few simple commands, such as “maintain the same distance from all neighbors” and “fly with them in a single direction.”

Maybe Woody Allen’s look at the future might eventually come true?

Picture credits: top, middle two, bottom.

Collective Intelligence And The Internet

The Guardian has a list of the ‘top ten books on the internet’ selected by John Naughton (who is an Irish academic and journalist and well-known as a historian of the internet).

Doubtless all ten are extremely good but one in particular caught my attention to the extent that I’ve decided to actually read it:

Darwin Among the Machines: the evolution of global intelligence by George Dyson

One of the most original and intriguing books of the last two decades.  Dyson argues that intelligence is always an emergent phenomenon – that is, a property of whole systems that cannot be inferred from studying their components in isolation.  Thus human intelligence “emerges” from a collection of unintelligent neurons.  Dyson pushes this idea to what he sees as its logical conclusion: if the internet is (as indeed it is) a global system of densely interconnected computer networks – together with the intellects of their users – then this global system should exhibit a new kind of “collective intelligence” as an emergent property.  It’s a sobering – and exhilarating – thought.

I’ve heard of it before (it was first published in 1998) but I’d never got round to acquiring it. The synopsis above certainly whetted my appetite!

As an aside, at MIT they’ve set up a Center for Collective Intelligence:

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways.  The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

Our basic research question is:  How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’

The Role Of Attitude

Apart from skills that you can learn, such as creativity and strategy, there are also attitudes, such as determination and doggedness, that can be just as important in delivering business success.

I’ve written on this previously and consequently I was interested in this quote of Charles Swindoll (from Lifehacker):

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes.

Getting The Culture Right In Startups

A number of my colleagues are starting up businesses and are facing all the usual problems. Because of the stress and the need for tangible progress, it’s understandable that some of the intangible aspects can easily get second place.

However I came across this interesting insight which emphasizes that thinking about the culture from the very beginning can be crucial as well as the ability to adapt it in the light of formative experience.

Brendan: Start-ups are like running a gauntlet. The advice I say is to step back and think a little about the culture at the outset because it’s at the beginning that it gets formed. Plan for success but also plan for what the culture can be as well. If play is important to you, and I hope it is if you’re planning on being an innovative company, it will start with the founders. You can look at Google certainly as an example.

Joe: I guess I’d say, don’t hold on to any one idea too tightly. Be ready to adapt. When we design a product for the first time, we don’t know how people will really use it, and I think the same can be said of businesses.

Just what is your startup culture?

How could it change as you grow or partner with others?

Growth, Clusters And Networks

The two key themes for economic progress in the UK for the next few years are increasing growth and reducing debt (the latter being much easier than the former). Regarding growth, this also covers developing a better balanced economy.

I was curious to investigate the current Government ideas for stimulating business growth in areas that I have previously worked in.

A structural aspect is to refocus on local development and as part of this the Regional Development Agencies have been replaced with Local Enterprise Partnerships (see picture above). In principle this should be a better approach provided it’s supported by adequate resources and some creativity.

As Local Enterprise Partnerships are based on more meaningful economic areas, they will be better placed to determine the needs of the local economy along with a greater ability to identify barriers to local economic growth.

Another aspect is fostering and developing successful clusters

Clusters are geographic concentrations of inter-connected companies, specialised suppliers, service providers, firms in related industries, and associated institutions.

In other words, thriving business ecosystems. Clusters can provide high barriers to entry as competitors, as well as having to provide an equal or better product, also have to compete with all the players in the integrated and probably highly complex support network.

By examining the existing successful clusters in the UK, some key characteristics appeared. Some factors were deemed essential whilst others desirable (my interpretation: ‘would/should’ = essential, ‘may’ = desirable):

Essential:

• well-functioning networks and partnerships – informal and/or formal
• engaged in innovation – no standard profile but inter-company linkages are often key
• entrepreneurial dynamism – this seems a bit vague!
• capacity to change and adapt – for internal or external reasons

Desirable:

• easy access to a skilled workforce
• strong educational base – high quality training available, universities for advanced topics etc
• exhibit expansion – businesses joining the cluster, new startups etc
• internationalisation – increasing exports or inward investment from overseas

It’s interesting how these factors are so variable. This means that spotting and developing near-critical clusters is not easy, at least until well after the fact. So understanding successful (and unsuccessful) cluster formation better could be an incisive step forward.

Taken at face value, it’s revealing how the role of networks, linkages and the ability to change is so crucial – maybe just considering these aspects alone might be extremely illuminating?

I’ll do a bit of research on this and give it a bit more thought…

See also Knowledge Hotspots and Visualising Innovation Clusters.

Picture credit: see second link above.

A Thought For The New Year

Assuming it’s even only roughly true, it’s still worth thinking about, at least in a business context!

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” – Jim Rohn

In particular, if you want to get to a new place, spending more time with some different people may make that journey possible or easier although initially it’ll be more difficult or inconvenient.

The Power Of Yes And No Journals

An interesting idea from MacSparky:

The No Journal is not to be confused with a task list. (It isn’t a someday-maybe list either. In most cases, no means no, forever.) This isn’t a list I read to figure out what to do next. Instead, the No Journal is how I keep myself honest. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to write two books and keep a full time day job in the last few years without first getting better at saying no. My only regret is not getting serious about this earlier.

I’m doing some planning for next year and the conventional thing to is to develop some main directions. I don’t use too many formal goals as such as I’ve found they often become self-defeating (unless the work is very clearcut).

However looking back over the past year it’s interesting to see how much time I spent on things that didn’t really fit in anywhere but were done just to see where they lead or through procrastination. So, in this sense, it would have been very helpful to have decided what I best ‘not do’ and then at least I’d know if I was digressing!

So, for 2012, as well as having a one-pager on what I hope to explore and accomplish, I also have another page on what I won’t do – I actually found this harder to write, which is interesting! I’ll log my results as I go along (I record most daily activities in a digital notebook) and it’ll be illuminating to see if I end up more creative and productive this way!

On a related theme, see also this recent post by Seth Godin on ‘doing more or less’.

Picture credit here.

Thinking About Tipping Points

Late last Sunday night I put the radio on to hear the news and was fascinated to hear that the following programme was on Tipping Points, something I’m looking into as part of developing some new ideas for understanding growth in small businesses. A nice example of serendipity!

In particular the conversation focused on a new research project:

Laurie Taylor explores the idea of the Tipping Point using a multidisciplinary project at Durham University as a springboard to examine what tipping points are, how they happen and what effect they have. Professor Tim Clark and Professor Pat Waugh from Durham University and Professor Alex Bentley from Bristol University are all involved in the Durham Tipping Points project and they are joined by Dr Shahidha Bari from Queen Mary, London to discuss the idea of the tipping point and what it might tell us about ourselves and our environment – and how, perhaps, we can use our understanding of it to prevent significant problems in areas as diverse as banking and sociology.

The fact that different subject areas were interacting together seems quite fascinating to me, especially as it’s often said that innovation arises at the border of disciplines (see also here).

The programme started with the academic motivation for the project and some interesting questions that were discussed included:

• Is the idea of a tipping point universal, leading to previously unrecognised connections, or specific to each particular discipline?
• Are tipping points irreversible?
• What can we learn from human and non-human tipping points? For example, the contrast of the mechanistic viewpoint with the human notions of spontaneity and serendipity.

It’ll be interesting to see what the outcomes of the Durham Tipping Points Project are and how the results may help in encouraging opportunities as well as preventing problems.

The 30 minute programme is currently still available via iPlayer.

Picture credit: here.

The Delusion Of Tangible Goals

Perceptive and interesting quote from the poet Stephen Spender:

“The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.”

Source: The Happiness Project.

Learning From Apple

I’m developing a new offering for my customers and was looking for some fresh and invigorating guidelines. There’s loads of advice out there of course and this can also be combined with my over 25 years of personal experience.

The best approach I came across, totally accidentally, was from Greg Joswiak of Apple, taken from a presentation at the recent ‘Silicon Valley Comes To Cambridge 2011′ event (see here and here).

Summarised, it’s:

• Focus: It means saying no, not saying yes.
• Simplicity: Make complex things simple.
• Courage: Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you.
• Best: If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it.

This helped me alot – very clean and neat, just like Apple products…

I particularly liked the third point: not being constrained by what’s worked in the (recent) past. This also means a constant search for new ways of doing things even if the consequences are not always totally clear at the outset. Anyway, it’s summarised in that one word ‘courage’!

As an aside, here’s some interesting information on learning at Apple.

Picture credit: here.