Companies developing tech-based solutions for consumers in emerging markets see great opportunities in the Philippines today. A growing number of innovative visionaries view the country as a testing ground for products and services with potential for global scale. More are likely on their way. This may come as a surprise to those who think of the Philippines as a tech laggard. Although the country’s tech and startup ecosystems are growing, skeptics often point to the limited post-seed funding, unfavorable business regulations, and other challenges that await would-be innovators. More
Tag Index / Showing 21 - 40 of 40 results for “innovation”
Why Do People Still Come to Silicon Valley?
The traffic is terrible, the real-estate ridiculously expensive, the public schools aren’t that great and the gulf between rich and poor is increasingly pronounced. So why do people still come to Silicon Valley? That’s the question we asked participants at a recent Ericsson and AT&T Foundry hosted FutureCast event that focused on innovation in Silicon Valley. The answers from our international audience were varied, instructive and entertaining. More
Can Silicon Valley Survive?
Silicon Valley hasn’t had one of its best years. There are more and more complaints about inequality, discrimination against women and minorities, lack of innovation and a focus on short-term economic gain. The Valley, veterans say, isn’t what it used to be. And, they go on, if Silicon Valley is to survive, it has to reinvent itself in an increasingly competitive global economy where most of the rest of the world is trying to emulate the Valley. So, I asked David Kirkpatrick, when I interviewed him at an Ericsson and AT&T Foundry hosted FutureCast event that focused on the future of innovation, how exactly can Silicon Valley reinvent itself? More
Are the Best and Brightest Still Coming to Silicon Valley?
Are the smartest entrepreneurs and technologists still attracted to Silicon Valley? Does the Valley still pull in the best and brightest from around the world? According to David Kirkpatrick, who I interviewed at an Ericsson and AT&T Foundry hosted FutureCast event, the answer may well be no. Kirkpatrick tells the story of a remarkably talented Chinese guy he met in Beijing recently who had read his book, “The Facebook Effect,” five times. “I was just amazed I stumbled across that in Beijing,” he told me. This guy, Kirkpatrick explained, was running a 20-person Beijing startup just focused on making Facebook games. More
Energy & Green Tech Startup Culture
Microsoft’s Craig Mundie on Why He’s a Techno-Optimist
Take a monolithic problem like climate change and consider its solutions. Many would say the only answer is to get all of us to alter our lifestyles so we can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. But a "techno-optimist" like Microsoft's Craig Mundie would urge us to approach the problem from a different, more novel angle: Instead of hinging Earth's health on changing all of society, what about engineering a method of reflecting heat out of the atmosphere? At our Techonomy 2013 conference in November, Mundie spoke with us about how creative traits like "risk tolerance" and "novelty seeking" will help us confront big challenges like climate change. "If you give us a big problem, we'll invent a big answer," he says. "We're [not] bound to live within the constraints of the capabilities we only know today." More
A New Lab to Reinvent Mexico City
Five months ago, Gabriella Gomez-Mont launched Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad, or Laboratory for the City, under the auspices of recently elected mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera. The Laboratorio, as its name suggests, is an experimental program to foster civic innovation and urban creativity, which Gomez-Mont hopes can heal the social divisions in her city. Techonomy spoke (in English) with Gomez-Mont, who is speaking at Techonomy 2013 about her incipient efforts to harness Mexico City’s youth and energy to improve civic life. More
Venture for America’s Yang Calls Detroit an Innovation Hub
Winning innovators don’t depend on the market for opportunities; they innovate their way into them. So says Venture for America founder Andrew Yang, who talked with us at our Techonomy Detroit conference about the need for more innovation and why Detroit can help spark it. “We need to get more smart people building things. We need to get more of our talented working to solve the problems of the day,” he said, adding that Detroit's access to talent, resources, and customers to put it at the forefront of tech entrepreneurship in coming years. More
Quirky Brings Innovation Expert Doreen Lorenzo on as President
The Manhattan-based invention machine Quirky just became a little more inventive. Former frog design President Doreen Lorenzo joins the four-year-old product development company as president today. Lorenzo, known for transforming frog into a global innovation firm during her 7 years as president there, was a speaker at the Techonomy conferences in 2011 and 2012. More
Venture for America Cultivates Detroit’s Innovation Greenfield
Following our first Techonomy Detroit conference last fall, we profiled Venture for America, a program that places young tech entrepreneurs at start-ups throughout the country, targeting cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and Las Vegas that are still grappling with economic recovery. We also profiled an innovative Detroit startup called Are You a Human, which offers a secure and entertaining alternative to CAPTCHA authentication technology, designed to verify that someone using a website is a real persona and not a robot with bad intentions. Max Nussenbaum, a Venture for America fellow who was placed by the program at Are You a Human, was among several VfA fellows who attended Techonomy Detroit. In his Huffington Post blog about his experiences in Detroit, Nussenbaum argues that the city is a greenfield for innovation and experimentation. More
What We’ve Learned at PARC About the Business of Innovation
The business of open innovation is something PARC has been continually refining since we incorporated in 2002. Mastering the process of innovation is about far more than developing new technology; it requires a deep understanding of human behavior and context, and the ability to invent new business models to take the resulting products and services to market. We've found common themes. Three of them illustrate how we’ve been innovating at PARC over the past decade. More
Working at Home: Mayer May Be Right
Does proximity matter for innovation? Marissa Mayer thinks it does, and has been getting chastised for it. The Yahoo CEO recently ordered her fellow Yahooligans to stop working from home and come into the office. She believes that proximity creates a better atmosphere for innovation. Yahoo’s human resources chief Jackie Reses explained in a memo: “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” But that’s not where we’re supposed to be heading in the age of the Internet. More
Abolish Patents to Spark Innovation, Fed Paper Urges
Researchers at the US Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis say that the patent system should be abolished, SmartPlanet reports. Innovation will come from a patentless, cooperative environment in which technologies and discoveries are shared. More
Business Startup Culture Techonomy Events
Steve Case on How to Stimulate Innovation
In this session from Techonomy 2011 in Tuscon, Ariz., Steve Case, CEO of Revolution LLC, discusses the current state of entrepreneurship in the US, and what needs to happen to encourage growth and innovation. He says that changes to immigration law, access to capital, and changes in regulation are necessary to fuel entrepreneurship. More
Jeffrey Katzenberg on How DreamWorks Keeps Tech Costs in Check
In this session from Techonomy 2011 in Tuscon, Ariz., Jeffery Katzenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, discusses how DreamWorks keeps the cost of its productions steady, despite changing technologies. More
Jim Breyer of Accel Partners on Tech Investment and Job Creation
In this session from Techonomy 2011 in Tuscon, Ariz., Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners, talks about how best to invest in innovative technology, assuming job creation as a primary consideration. By investing in a platform like Etsy, Breyer says, you help create jobs and a marketplace for people all over the world. More
Don’t Call It Crowdsourcing: Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman Brings Invention to the Masses
As he prepared for the 2007 Macworld Expo, 19-year-old inventor Ben Kaufman wondered how he could ever top the buzz his company, Mophie, had generated at the 2006 event. Instead of shooting for another iLounge Best of Show award with a clever new iPod case, he decided to invent a product on the spot—and enlisted total strangers to help him do it. Now 25, Kaufman is CEO of the consumer product company Quirky, which is transforming manufacturing by letting consumers decide what gets produced. More
Gary Hamel on How Big Companies Inhibit Employee Creativity
In this video from Techonomy 2011 in Tucson, Ariz., Gary Hamel, director of Management Lab, challenges companies to let employees have the same financial and creative flexibility on the job that that they have at home. Why, he asks, can a woman in Bangladesh get a micro-loan more readily than the average frontline employee at a global 1000 company can get a small amount of money for something experimental? More
Kevin Johnson of Juniper Networks on Disruptive Innovation
In this session from Techonomy 2011 in Tuscon, Ariz., Kevin Johnson, CEO of Juniper Networks, talks about how his company fosters 'disruptive innovation.' More
Scott Cook on Scientific Experimentation in Business
In this video from the "Revolutions in Progress" session at Techonomy 2011, in Tucson, Ariz., Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of Intuit, tells two stories about how scientific experimentation helped institutions find innovative solutions to complex problems. First, he describes how junior-level staff at his company created a text-message notification system for farmers in India to alert them about crop prices in nearby markets. Senior management initially doubted the tool's viability, but it went on to significantly improve the livelihood of over 400,000 Indian farmers. Second, he profiles the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where in the 1980s government officials allowed local markets, instead of communist government regulations, to dictate economic growth, providing a successful model for the rest of China. More
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