Who are the enemies of innovation, and how do we get them on board? A Q&A with Calestous Juma

Why do some ideas stick, become successful technologies, make a lot of money and embed themselves into our daily lives… and others don’t? Okay, maybe people fear novelty; maybe there are institutions and groups threatened, and unwilling to overcome inertia and “how business is done”. But is there a more systematic way to understand this, and a way we can capture it in the service of technological development and ultimately human betterment?

Calestous Juma may have the answer in his latest book, “Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies“. He is a Professor of International Development and the Director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project at Harvard JFK School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. We chatted about this on my Ricochet podcast; read the transcript below, with some editing and condensing (mostly my questions).

 
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Who are the enemies of innovation, and how do we get them on board? A Q&A with Calestous Juma

 
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Are our merger analysis methods well suited to tackle AT&T / Time Warner?

AT&T’s weekend announcement of its $85.4 billion bid to purchase entertainment giant Time Warnerhas kept journalists and pundits busy the past few days. The scale of the merger is huge – nearly double the $45.2 billion price tag of the 2011 Comcast-NBC Universal deal, and, unsurprisingly, many commentators cast the proposal as heralding the end of the internet as we know it. A single, vertically-integrated firm owning both content distribution rights and the networks over which that content can be distributed to some (but not all) end users is seen to be a step too far. These commentators hark back to the perceived evils of the “walled gardens”– where consumers of Time Warner content would be unable to access it on internet connections supplied by any firm other than its own proprietary ISP –predicted when AOL purchased Time Warner in 2000.

Are our merger analysis methods well suited to tackle AT&T / Time Warner?

 
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Quotation of the Day, is from Bjorn Lomborg on the “free-trade miracle”

 
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Video of the Day/Markets in Everything (below). Moley Robotics is developing robotic arms that can cook recipes the way the chef intended. Using motion-capture technology, the Moley Kitchen can mimic the movements of famous chefs, allowing users to download recipes the same way you download music.

Πηγή:American Enterprise Institute