Category: New Technology Podcasts

I finally managed to publish the third lecture video form my New Technology course. Here the topic is about innovations. The question is how does innovation happen? How do people get ideas and how do they solve problems. How do ideas happen?

We have the believe that new ideas come from brilliant inventors that have light bulb moments or an epiphany. Greek scholar Archimedes had a Eureka moment, Newton discovered the theory of gravity when the apple fell on his head, and so on. This idea has been popularized, but the truth is quite different. Most discoveries are based on long evaluation – slow hunches, and collaboration.

In this lecture we look at the complicated web of technology and look at concepts like adjacent possible and serendipity.

The original video that was uploaded to YouTube got blocked within seconds. The reason is that I embedded a short clip from the Movie Apollo 13. The point I was making came from an article in Wall Street Journal, The Genius of the Tinkerer where author Steven Johnson mentions a scene in the movie to emphasize his point.

The clip can be found on YouTube: Apollo 13 (7/11) Movie CLIP – Square Peg in a Round Hole (1995) HD. Copyright works in a mysterious ways.

The slides are here. Check out the YouTube video after slide 9.

At any given time it is easy to look back to see how technology has changed over time. At the same time it is difficult to see what transformations are taking place in current times, and even more difficult to see where things are going.

In the late 19th century a revolution in science took off. It was easy to see the vast number of inventions and entrepreneurial sprit of the time. At the turn of the century it seems that everything had been invented. But with the rate of invention at the time, it was difficult to image what more could be invented. Yet, in the 20th century we saw more innovations and more technological advanced than in all history of mankind before that. Never in history have we seen such dramatic changes in the way people live and work.

How can we understand what is happening? What is technology anyways? In this lecture we explore what to make of technology. We define the term we will use in the course. Terms defined are technology, product performance, and innovation to name few. These will be used in the context of the next chapters. Several examples are provided.