How old is john seely brown

Changing the World from the Edge May Life on the Edge: Learning from Facebook April Learning from Tata's Nano February Catching the Innovation Wave January Phoning from the Edge : What companies can learn from Google's efforts to reshape the U. Embrace the Edge -- or Perish November Funding Invention Vs.

Seth Kahan: Storytelling and the Art of Science. Storytelling: The Scientist's Perspective John spoke on this topic at a symposium called "Storytelling: Passport to the 21st Century," arranged by the Smithsonian. Interview with Sandra Higgison. See my CV At the same time, however, it is dangerous to lose sight of the deep changes that will continue to unfold long after the current economic downturn is a memory. We face a long-term performance challenge that continues to intensify.

The steps we take now to address this challenge will not only help us to weather the current economic storms but will position us to create significant economic value in an increasingly challenging business landscape. The power of pull provides a roadmap for the practices and institutions required to harness knowledge flows and create significant economic value. More generally, the emphasis on the pivotal role of the individual in catalyzing the next wave of institutional changes helps to remind us that the difficult but rewarding journey ahead begins with each of us.

Rethinking Globalization The intensity of global competition calls for a review of your business strategy. Your company's sustainability depends on your ability to develop a constantly evergreen set of capabilities before anybody else does. How do you accelerate your firm's capability-building processes? Your talent development strategy? Is it possible to learn even faster?

Innovation Blowback Emerging markets such as China and India have become breeding grounds for new management processes and practices that help companies to maintain or even improve the quality of their products and services while simultaneously slashing prices.

The disruptive impact is now confined to developing countries, but "blowback" from this surge of innovation could quickly be unleashed on the rest of the world.

To meet the challenge, established businesses must learn new skills—not least important, an ability to orchestrate complex networks of specialized enterprises. What steps must you take to protect your company's future? Value Creation at the Edge It is not just corporate training that is important but rather rich participation with partners who are at the edge.

Ask: how do you learn as much from a partner as you learn from creating something yourself? How does distributed collaboration around the world become a critical strategy for survival? What are the most effective ways to convert your existing global supplier networks into new nodes of innovation? Learning in the Digital Age Rethinking how today's kids that grow up digital learn, think, work, communicate and socialize.

Perhaps our generation focused on information but these kids focus on meaning - how does information take on meaning Why IT Matters More Today than Ever Before To understand how to achieve a sustainable competitive edge from IT, we must understand how Web services or, more generally, service-oriented architectures, enable a new kind of corporate strategy to become enacted.

This confluence is unprecedented and opens up a host of strategic possibilities but this also requires new skills for the CIO and potentially a new positioning of CIOs before the full potential of this confluence can be realized Creating a Culture of Learning Organizational learning and knowledge sharing have held out great promises but have failed to deliver the goodies.

And what can be done about it? Managing Radical Innovation Let's be clear; you can't manage invention, just nurture it The Will to Innovate I am tired of everyone pointing their fingers at the other guys -- corporations at unions; universities at government; and so on. Start by looking at your organization. What has your organization undertaken to innovate your own innovation processes?

I am distressed at how bad most CEOs are today in thinking out of the box. Boards aren't much better. And, of course, most institutions and foundations tend to be hesitant to re-invent themselves It's time to be bold; it's time to innovate innovation. The 21st century demands it Design, Design, Design Why can't we keep things simple? Sure, we all complain, but why can't we design stuff that mere mortals like you and me can use?

Closing remarks: City Innovate Summit, June 17, Keynote address: Denmark's Internet Week - June 1, Santa Barbara, California, October 23, Denver, Colorado, October 14, Not grind them. Not grow crystals. Turns out, some kid walks in and says, "Heat the sucker. It melts; surface tension forms the lens we need.

Wonderfully simple. Read the forces of the world in a way that allows you to work with them while respecting the properties that work against you. We wanted to train field technicians with AI performance diagnostic tools to be better troubleshooters. Here's what happened: When the going gets rough, tech reps come together and spin a story about their experiments with a machine, remembering some fragment of a story one either has heard or has told himself, weaving together a narrative from these fragments of past stories.

The incredibly sophisticated AI technology we invented? Two-way radios that were always on. The reps became this community of practice, always hearing each other.

So we use it as a way to break in new technicians. They can lurk. Lurk is the cognitive apprenticeship term for legitimate peripheral participation.

The culture of the Internet allows you to link, lurk, and learn. Once you lurk you can pick up the genre of that community, and you can move from the periphery to the center safely asking a question - sometimes more safely virtually than physically - and then back out again. It has provided a platform for perhaps the most successful form of learning that civilization has ever seen.

We may now be in a position to really leverage the community mind. Open source is about creating "literacy. Open source may also give us a way to crack the robustness problems of really complex systems.

In Linux, for example, you write code to be read by others as well as executed by the computer. Writing code to be read is a great form of community hygiene.

And when code is meant to be read by others, it has its own social life - it gets picked up by the community and used in all kinds of new ways. Pretty soon the community mind becomes a new kind of platform for innovation. A typical example: How do we get the center of the corporation to appreciate an idea? If I go to one of our largest customers, sell them on this idea so they start calling up the head of the corporation saying, "This is what I want, why aren't you producing it for us?

That's how we've gotten some of our most successful innovations out. Bob Metcalfe has it all wrong: The power of a network isn't the square of the number of people - it's the number of communities it supports. You're going to find these communities of interest emerging worldwide for all kinds of reasons, the cross-fertilization of people in different types of research centers, universities, companies, factory floors - anywhere things are getting discovered, they get aggregated into communities of interest.

There's a fundamental change from finding ways to innovate inside a corporation to leveraging the knowledge ecologies of many little companies in places like Silicon Valley. Larger companies can buy the research they need and instantly acquire a diverse portfolio of research groups. To have lasting impact. If you want short-term impact, a startup may be better. But if you want to do something that transforms an awful lot about how the world gets seen, this place sets the stage.

Modern-day research traffics deeply in business dynamics and financial issues, in all the ideas of venture capital and ebusiness. No longer is this an ivory basement, let alone an ivory tower. People keep asking, Are we technology pushers or market pullers? That's a meaningless question today. Get deeply engaged with the shaping of corporate strategy and use it as a way to shape research strategy - that's how to get a high bandwidth of communication.

His personal research interests include digital youth culture, digital media, and the application of technology to fundamentally rethink the nature of work and institutional architectures in order to enable deep learning across organizational boundaries — in brief, to design for emergence in a constantly changing world.

He serves on numerous private and public boards of directors, including Amazon, and has been a trustee for nonprofits including the MacArthur Foundation and In-Q-tel. In addition to publishing over papers in scientific journals, JSB has authored numerous articles and reports spanning business strategy and management issues.

With John Hagel , he co-authored the books The Only Sustainable Edge about new forms of collaborative innovation and The Power of Pull: how small moves, smartly made can set big things in motion , published April