Nickname: FatDude

Review: Too many people would like to draw a bold line separating big corporations from startups. There is no such line. Startup companies are the new R&D labs of the big corporations. Why invest a lot of money on a lot of ideas that will not bear fruit when you can let the startups work out the kinks then swoop in and buy them up? Look at BusinessWeek's slide show on the new tech entreprenuers. The majority are in the process of being, or have already been, sold to big corporations. There has been a shift in the paradigm of R&D but it is not quite as Utopian a shift as those in academia would have you believe. Just capitalism evolving like it always has.

Date reviewed: Jul 17, 2006 12:14 PM

Nickname: pdmikk

Review: Mr. Silver's right. I see the co-opting of innovation by capital-rich corporations as a continuing detriment to the utopian fantasies of academia.

Date reviewed: Apr 25, 2006 6:06 PM

Nickname: Paul Silver

Review: I beg to differ. I worked at Xerox PARC when we were developing LiveBooard, a technology for collaborative brainstorming and problem solving across time and space. I also remember working at Oracle: Oracle would house all Knowledge and Wisdom. At Acta we developed e-commerce technologies and data warehousing application interfaces. All these and more were to "Change the World!" But look, capitalism still drives the world. And if your high tech cuts into profit-taking it gets canned. In San Francisco, there are physicians who want to prescribe an organic herb, canabis sativa, to stimulate appetite for AIDs victims and help them recover. But because it makes no money, this simple free "natural technology" is outlawed in most of the US. It just does not make anybody any money. The e-commerce technologies I helped develop are now used by ISPs and soon the government monitor and profile us. Every technology we develop eventually gets misused. No utopia here.

Date reviewed: Mar 21, 2006 6:26 PM

Nickname: BrandonCsSanders

Review: I agree with Moss that innovations will come more and more from the collaborations of ordinary folks, AND I agree with innovative's comment "... easier to find than ... bring to a mass market." So how do ordinary folks collaborate to innovate and bring ideas to market? We're trying to create a Freedom/Libre/Open platform for exactly this issue at http://ibesi.org If you find the idea exciting, we welcome collaborators :)

Date reviewed: Mar 16, 2006 12:58 AM

Nickname: valentino

Review: I see just a shift in innovation from unorganized to organized sector. With the advancement in communication, more people are being motivated to try out their new ideas.

Date reviewed: Mar 15, 2006 3:11 AM

Nickname: iknovate

Review: Disruptive can and often needs to be "low tech." It's all about the context (the means by which to optimize a design--i.e. solve the problem in the best way, considering the circumstances). Classic example: Self-adjusting eyeglasses for people living in remote areas who live thousands of miles from the nearest opthamologist (see http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/20/nextbig.html)

Date reviewed: Mar 14, 2006 2:12 AM

Nickname: Engineer

Review: Contrary to the comment by an earlier reader, the innovations have been concentrated within big corporations until recently. Think about Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, IBM Watson Labs, GE, etc. It is only with the recent Wall Street craze on "shareholder value" that big corporations started to cut R&D budgets.

Date reviewed: Mar 13, 2006 7:00 PM

Nickname: innovative

Review: Well, in my experience, brilliant, disruptive ideas are much easier to find than are ways to bring such ideas to a mass market.

Date reviewed: Mar 13, 2006 2:13 AM

Nickname: Renarac

Review: There is no shift from the corporations to the masses. It's always been there. Many more have done it before in the past 150 years, but this list is long enough for the point: Otto, Wrights, Einstein, Ford, Edison, Wozniak/Jobs, Allen/Gates, Omidyar, Fanning, Rutan. Only the people who will never have an original idea need to be told by an MIT PhD that they "are allowed" to come up with a disruptive idea and push it out into the world. This is fluff action for the committee members that appointed him.

Date reviewed: Mar 12, 2006 5:10 AM

Nickname: Etailer Man

Review: Although the interviewee makes many valid points, his business opinions are still rooted in the insular world of academia. The real world is run by people, not computers and a failure to understand this is what keeps these "futurists" from understanding reality.

Date reviewed: Mar 12, 2006 3:36 AM