A few days ago CB insights shared a link to their collection of quotes about disruption from big name corporate leaders; they called it Foot In Mouth.

I sent it to my “list” with the following comment.

Ignorance? Idiocy? Arrogance?
All of the above?

The replies I received, one from my sister, a retired IT head, and the other from KG, were far more insightful than the queries I sent.

I thought both were worth sharing, so here they are.

From my sister.

Do you know of Joel Barker, the futurist?  He’s been around since the mid-70s. I saw a video of his at a conference once, where he talked about paradigm shifts. His example then was Swiss watch makers. When two young kids brought the quartz watch to the Swiss watchmaking community for funding, the Swiss said, “No one will ever want a watch that doesn’t wind.” The kids went to the Japanese and the rest was history. Barker says that when humans have a paradigm, they automatically filter OUT anything that doesn’t support their paradigm. The Japanese had no watch paradigm and so could see the potential. I think those examples from CB are as much paradigm lock-in as stupidity. Or put another way, paradigms lead us to make dumb choices sometimes.

From KG

Upton Sinclair famously stated, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” We may call it stupidity, but it really is vested interests. That’s why innovation comes from those who have little to lose or have no other alternative. No one thinks of vested interests when they work in our favor, only when (usually in hindsight) they are show to have caused loss are they called stupid.

In a time of proven global warming, the US has chosen, as the only nation in the world, to reject the potentially cataclysmic consequences of a warmer globe and have invested $4 trillion to develop the domestic oil & gas industry rather than investing these monies in future technologies that can save the planet. These vested interests are causing an existential crisis, and all the systems we’ve built.

There are so many areas that we are struggling with as a species due to vested interests — things that threaten our survival. These range from the ones that are commonly spoken about, like global warming and environmental destruction. They also include synthetic chemicals and nano materials that are giving us cancer and making us sterile, an economic system that ignores externalities and the tragedy of the commons, and our challenges with making sustainable decisions in an increasingly complex World.

What are your thoughts?

Image credit: Gerd Leonhard

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Invent: Create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.

Inovate: Make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.

If you look carefully there is very little actual invention going on these days, it’s mostly innovation, based on previous products.

However, sometimes innovation is radical enough that it should count as invention.

Consider the lowly toilet.

The Gates Foundation has been funding the effort to reinvent the toilet.

In 2011, the Gates Foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to bring sustainable sanitation and hygiene solutions to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who do not have such access. The challenge, which is ongoing, is a global call to researchers around the world to develop innovative and financially profitable systems to manage human waste. The systems must operate off-grid, cost less than $.05 per day, and function in poor, urban settings.

Even corporate giants got into the effort.

Kohler—a leading U.S. manufacturer of toilets (…) received a Gates grant in 2014, describes these toilets as “stand-alone units that take in wastewater, then disinfect and purify it to be reused for toilet flushing.”

But water is also a scarce commodity, even when it’s reused.

Now, from a group of students at the University of British Columbia, comes the  MYCOmmunity Toilet.

The MYCOmmunity Toilet consists of a mycelium tank that is small enough to sit inside each individual dwelling. (…) when it’s full, the toilet is buried in the ground or left somewhere out of the way for another 30 days to allow the composting process–aided by the mushroom spores–to finish. Each toilet includes local seeds, which can be planted on top of the toilet, allowing plants or crops to grow from the human waste.

Although it was designed specifically with refugee camps in mind, it would seem to have far greater potential.

The MYCOmmunity Toilet qualifies as an invention — with the potential to truly change the world.

Image credit: 2018 Biodesign Challenge

Have you heard of/read Malcolm Berko? He writes a twice-a-week column answering financial/investment questions — just one answer in each column.

In addition to being broadly educated and financially knowledgeable, he is a superb and truly witty writer, doesn’t suffer fools at all, and, after reading him for decades, has no sacred cows. (I highly recommend him.)

I thought this recent question and his response would explain the coverage, and downright scare hype, surrounding AI, robots and the tech upheaval of many industries, such as retail.

Here is the salient part of the question.

My professor believes that “its disruptive pricing power chokes employment, restrains wage growth and is bankrupting competitors.” He believes that Amazon is “too negatively impactive on our economy, especially wages, and must be restrained by government-decreed divestiture.”

Berko wasted few words on what he thought of the prof and went on to explain as follows:

Joseph Schumpeter, a brilliant economist and bald as an egg, who passed away in 1950, explained capitalism as a series 50- to 60-year waves of technological revolutions causing gales of creative destruction, or GCDs, in which old industries are swept away and replaced by new industries. These new industries generate new economic activity, employing more people, who buy more products, creating more demand and, resultantly, increased employment.

• First GCD, between the 1780s and 1840s, was fueled by steam power. During those years, the steam engine increased our gross domestic product fivefold, and employment grew fourfold.

• Second GCD, between the 1840s and 1890s, the railroads replaced wagon trains, stagecoaches and sailing ships. (…) Resultantly, our GDP exploded sixfold, and employment grew fivefold.

• Third GDC, between the 1890s and the 1940s, was charged by electricity. Inexpensive electrical power hugely improved industrial efficiency and labor productivity. This bred a sixfold growth in GDP and a fourfold rise in our working population.

• Fourth GDC between the 1940s and the 1990s was powered by oil and the automobile. People moved to the suburbs and families owned two cars as the GDP increased eightfold and the workforce grew fivefold.

• Fifth GDC is information technology and the microchip. It’s making other technologies obsolete and altering our social, cultural, political and economic futures in ways we never imagined possible. We’re on the cusp of that wave today.

Excellent for understanding what’s happening, but what neither Schumpeter nor Berko adress is the enormous upheaval, fear and human pain that comes with each wave.

It is terrifying to be told that skills you have worked to develop and hone for 5, 10 or 20 years, or longer, have no value.

But in today’s world, where what-you-do-is-who-you-are, that often means that you, the person, has no value.

While Berko is correct about the potential of an unimaginable future, which you may not even live to see, that future is of little solace and does nothing to mitigate the terror and economic woes facing you today or tomorrow.

Two parts of the solution is to put your energy into coping and immediately develop the most important skill/attitude they probably didn’t bother teaching you in school.

Learn to love learning.

PS I sincerely hope you take the time to read Berko’s full column. I guarantee it will be time well spent, as are all him writings.

Image credit: Creator’s.com

Food has become a major focus of innovation around the world.

Researchers, private, academic and public, are looking for better ways to feed a hungry planet.

Not just feed them, but feed them healthy food — sustainable, healthy food.

Local Roots is a startup that grows 65,000 pounds of lettuce a year in three small shipping containers inside their LA warehouse. Energy is the only large suck and the company is exploring green energy options, such as solar.

The startup uses vertical hydroponic farming, a method where plants grow year-round with LEDs rather than natural sunlight.  Instead of soil, the seeds lie on trays with nutrient-rich water, stacked from the floor to the ceilings inside the shipping containers. (…)  Each 320-square-foot shipping container produces the same amount of plants as four acres of traditional farmland — using 97% less water on average.

I’m a salad freak and that lettuce looks great.

In 1984 I spent 2 weeks traveling around China (yes, the Great Wall and Forbidden City are incredible, but the Terracotta Army was mind-boggling) and the food was out of this world — not at fancy restaurants, but at everyday places.

However, if I ever go back I think I’ll skip the salad.

Image credit: Local Roots
YouTube: Healthy Secret Worlds

Entrepreneurs love to talk about disrupting.

Most recently they have been disrupting finance.

Harvard’s Jim Heskett posits the idea that tech itself is ripe for disruption, especially if you agree with Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Tech is ungainly for many of us.

Too much of it is developed by the young for the young

Both hardware and software are built by techies in love with the bleeding edge for early adopters and people captivated by potential — whether they will ever have use for it is incidental.

We’re told that the typical user of information technology today utilizes less than 5 percent of the capability made available by today’s hardware and software. A small number of basic functions repeatedly are put to good use by the typical user. They are the need-to-have functions. The functions thought by designers to be nice to have may enhance marketing efforts and satisfy software engineers’ desires to make complex things, but they largely go unused. For some, they even make access to “need to have” functions more confusing.

While many companies add (expensive) bells and whistles to drive growth, others work to provide a more minimalist approach that crushes competitors.

Heskett uses Intuit as an example of a company that focuses on consistently making its software simpler.

It did it by providing simple and inexpensive solutions to everyday problems. Scott [Cook, Intuit co-founder] likes to say that Intuit had 47th mover advantage, in part because it adopted a strategy that identified the pencil as the company’s most important competitor.

Does Heskett’s idea have legs? Is tech, in fact, ripe for Intuit-quality disruption?

If you have strong feelings or thoughts on the subject be sure to add your thoughts to the open forum; Even if you don’t comment it’s worth following; Heskett’s ideas always draw eclectic, well thought-through responses from his audience.

Image credit: Harvard Business School

If any consumer industry is ripe for disruption it’s healthcare—not just its recordkeeping.

Yet it would be hard to find any industry in which the established players are more resistant or just plain obstructive.

But thanks to people such as Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, and Dr. Isaac Yonemoto, founder of open-source IndySci, real disruption is happening.

Eleven years ago at 19 Holmes decided that she would spend her Stanford tuition on changing the healthcare status quo, which she did by upending one of the oldest, most expensive, completely ubiquitous, and least changed diagnostic tools—blood testing.

The new tests can be done without going to the doctor, which saves both money and time. Most results are available in about four hours, which means that you could swing by a pharmacy and have a test done the day before a doctor’s visit, and then the results would be available for the physician.

Each test costs less than 50% of standard Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. If those two programs were to perform all tests at those prices, they’d save $202 billion over the next decade.

As an example of how helpful that can be, Holmes told Wired that Theranos charges $35 for a fertility test, which is usually paid for out-of-pocket and costs up to $2,000.

Those who aren’t partial to needles and vials of blood (most of us) should note that the Theranos test requires only one drop of blood from a prick of the finger.

Last year the company cut a deal with Walgreens to roll out Theranos Wellness Centers inside each of its 8000-plus pharmacies.

Dr. Isaac Yonemoto is used crowdfunding (campaign ended October 28) to finance Project Marilyn to create open sourced, patent-free cancer drugs.

The global market for these drugs surpassed $1 trillion this year. The average monthly cost of a brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. is about $10,000, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. (…) “The big picture is we’ll be trying to solve the problem of expensive pharmaceuticals by releasing drug candidates that put downward pressure on price through competition.”

Elizabeth Holmes’ one-drop blood test is the start of true disruption and if Dr. Isaac Yonemoto’s Project Marilyn is even half as successful as Linus Torvalds’ Linux they will change the face of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry forever.

Cerviscope

Not all entrepreneurs start companies and develop apps, just as most world-changing breakthroughs are not software-based.

Many of the most inventive idea that will affect millions of people around the world are being done in giant corporations, academia and non-profits.

This is especially true when it comes to medical breakthroughs that are truly the stuff of humanity’s dreams.

20 years ago Dr. David Walmer went to Haiti to help paint a church. What he saw was so appalling he spent the next twenty years developing the CerviScope, an affordable tool to diagnose cervical cancer.

In the United States, cervical cancer is considered a preventable disease. “You have 10 years to detect this disease before it becomes untreatable,” Walmer says. “And it’s easy to detect. It develops on the outside of the cervix, which you can see.”

For those who watch Gray’s Anatomy this story about using modified HIV may seem a bit familiar.

There was nothing else to try. Nothing except a crazy experimental treatment never before given to a child: Blood was taken out of 6-year-old Emily’s body, passed through a machine to remove her white cells and put back in. Then scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used a modified HIV virus to genetically reprogram those white cells so that they would attack her cancer, and reinjected them. (…) [When the reaction almost killed her] Doctors gave Emily a rheumatoid arthritis drug that stopped the immune system storm–without protecting the cancer. Emily awoke on her 7th birthday and slowly recovered. A week later her bone marrow was checked. Emily’s father, an electrical lineman named Tom Whitehead, remembers getting the call from her doctor, Stephan Grupp: “It worked. She’s cancer free.”

Another approach is to tweak the body’s own immune system to stop cancer.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute sequenced the genome of her cancer and identified cells from her immune system that attacked a specific mutation in the malignant cells. Then they grew those immune cells in the laboratory and infused billions of them back into her bloodstream.

Yet another effort uses genetically modified bacteria to target a specific protein found in most brain cancers.

The vaccine, known as ADU-623, uses a genetically modified version of the bacterium listeria monocytogenes — the bacterium that in its native form causes the listeria infection — and a specific mutated protein found only in cancer cells, said Keith Bahjat, a researcher at Providence Cancer Center in Portland. The protein used is found in more than half of brain cancers (…) The idea is to provoke an immune response to the bacterium, assuming the immune system will then also target the proteins found in the cancer cells. The goal is to wipe out the pieces of tumor that are so intertwined with brain tissue they cannot be completely removed by surgery.

Also to be noted, cancer diagnostics are going to the dogs.

Tsunami, a regal-looking dog with attentive eyes and an enthusiastic tail wag for her trainer friends. University of Pennsylvania researchers say she is more than 90 percent successful in identifying the scent of ovarian cancer in tissue samples, (…)  The largest study ever done on cancer-sniffing dogs found they can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy. At least one application is in the works seeking U.S. approval of a kit using breath samples to find breast cancer.

Pretty cool, and a friend/researcher in the industry tells me that rats are used to do diagnostic testing of sickle cell anemia.

On another front,  paralysis isn’t being ignored, either, leading to an amazing discovery.

But now, scientists are developing technology that can read signals directly from the brain and restore motion to a paralyzed hand — no healthy spine required.

Last, but not least, a look at how dentistry has seen the light in a way that could change a lot more than tooth replacement.

A Harvard-led team just successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. (…)  The ability to naturally regrow dental tissue could transform dentistry, making it possible to regrow teeth instead of replacing them with a substitute like porcelain. But even more amazingly, once it’s better understood, this same technique could potentially be used to heal wounds and regenerate bone, skin, and muscle.

Truly amazing, life-changing innovation happening in our lifetime.

Flickr image credit: Family HM

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

“It’s shocking we don’t see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise. (…) In the last 10 years, there have been 56 IPOs in the enterprise space that have gotten north of a billion [dollars in market capitalization] and just 23 in consumer.” —Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital

I cited Goetz’s comment in a post last fall chiding entrepreneurs for trying to be the next Facebook instead of solving enterprise problems.

Six weeks later I asked Walter Paliska, marketing VP at long-time client EMANIO, to attend a Big Data conference and write about it. I turned to EMANIO because 1) I no longer live in the Bay Area and 2) EMANIO recently pivoted and is building a truly disruptive big data product.

Mobile is considered the hottest field, but many of its most innovative apps are a result of the explosion of big data; on the flip side mobile is feeding big data inspiring yet more innovation in that area.

When the Data 2.0 Summit came along I turned again to EMANIO and asked Randy Hyshiver, Director of Delivery and Services to give us an update on the effect of big data on innovation.

Big Data: Inspiring Innovation by Randy Hyshiver

It’s clear to me that the Big Data movement is inspiring a new wave of Innovation and the birth of a new set of entrepreneurs.  The pace of growth of ideas and the proliferation of new companies dedicated to solving big data problems is amazing.

The massive growth in data that is spurring the big data movement is leading to an increasing degree of interest not just from technologists, but also from investors looking to capitalize on the technological breakthroughs.

Big Data touches our lives in numerous ways in an effort to help improve how we work, how we live, travel and just about every other aspect of our daily existence.

The massive adoption of mobile devices has also been a huge driver in big data interest.  As mobile devices generate massive amount of data, a whole new set of applications has emerged in just about all business sectors, to take advantage of the data generated.

• The fitness industry is marrying concepts from the gaming industry and bringing portable sensors into the mobile space creating a dynamic data collection model that can be leveraged to help users accomplish fitness goals through competition with friends.
• The automotive industry is using sensor data to understand driving behaviors and to create better driving environments in new generations of vehicles.
• Big data is also helping the environment as ecological companies use massive amounts of sensor-generated data to help farmers, travelers and ultimately to help us understand how our actions impact our World every day.

The growth and rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms during the past decade has also helped drive demand for the usage of evermore readily available data in new ways.

Concepts like Data as a Service (DaaS) are beginning to drive a democratization of data to help build radical new consumer and business applications using now widely available resources.

The World of technology and innovation has found a new impetus by the growth of data.

The collection of vast amounts of data is driving the adoption of new technologies and is inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Mobile devices, cloud services and the widespread adoption of sensor-based applications are all just the tip of the iceberg in the drive to generate more data – data that can be analyzed and leveraged to improve our lives.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Wednesday I showcased tech careers that have nothing to do with startups, consumers, or social media.

If you plan to spend the sweat, blood and tears it takes to start a company isn’t it best to start one with the greatest chance of succeeding?

Then why not follow in the market steps of Palo Alto Networks, Jive, and Splunk, instead of Facebook and Groupon?

According to Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz, the $500 Billion market for enterprise software is ripe for disruption; doing so makes you far more likely to succeed.

“At Sequoia, upwards of a hundred entrepreneurs a week present and if we’re lucky, maybe a dozen of them are focusing on the enterprise. In the last 10 years, there have been 56 IPOs in the enterprise space that have gotten north of a billion [dollars in market capitalization] and just 23 in consumer.”

I have a somewhat cynical take on why there’s a shortage of enterprise startups.

• Enterprise solutions rarely start in a dorm room.
• You need to have some familarity with a market to disrupt it.
• It’s difficult to create a solution to problems of which you are unaware, haven’t experienced and wouldn’t know how to solve if you had.
• It’s easier to create something jazzy and fun and give it away than it is to solve a real problem that must be bought (with real money).

Appearances can be deceiving, but looking at the management of Palo Alto Networks, Jive Software and Splunk it seems that only one founder (Jive) was actually “young” when the company started.

Another thing is that they didn’t fast-track to their IPO based on hope and hype; instead they IPOed on revenues and real growth.

These are the kind of companies that grow, add value and help create a new middle-class.

Be sure to join me next Wednesday for a look at founder Henry Ford’s thoughts on that subject and why you should care.

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Have you ever wondered what was said at the time about the game-changing inventions we take for granted?

Wonder no more; here is a selection for your amusement and erudition. Some are funny, some are true, all are interesting.

In 1878 and internal memo at Western Union described the future of the telephone—or not.

“This `telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

This next one proves that even those whose careers are tightly bound with the course of innovation can be short-sighted, if not totally blind. In 1899 Charles H. Duell, US Commissioner of Patents, proclaimed for all to hear that the Patent Office was out of a job.

“Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”

Obviously, Duell was a tad off-base in his prediction, but then so were our next three experts.

In 1913 the American Railroad Congress pronounced the fate of the automobile.

“It is an idle dream to imagine that automobiles will take the place of railways in the long distance movement of passengers.”

Everyone knows, or should know, who Thomas J. Watson Sr. was, but in case you aren’t aware he was Chairman of IBM.  In 1943 he shared his view on the size of the market for computers.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Television was amazing technology when it first appeared, but not everybody was impressed. In 1946 Darryl Zanuck, Head of 20th Century-Fox, predicted a short life-span for the new technology.

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

My last two offerings not only bring things up to date, but are also the only two that are accurate.

The first is from the mid-nineties. I can’t find attribution for, but, anonymous or not, it hits the nail on the head and people would be wise to take it to heart.

“You can’t take something off the Internet – it’s like taking pee out of a pool.”

Finally, what would comments about inventions be without something on Twitter? In 2007 Bruce Sterling offered a definitive comment on the possibility of quality tweets.

“Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite ‘The Iliad.’”

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spullara/1926198/