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Archive for the ‘economics’ category: Page 135

Apr 9, 2018

What 40 Years of Research Reveals About the Difference Between Disruptive and Radical Innovation

Posted by in categories: economics, finance, food, information science, robotics/AI

“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.” Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric

The second wave of digitization is set to disrupt all spheres of economic life. As venture capital investor Marc Andreesen pointed out, “software is eating the world.” Yet, despite the unprecedented scope and momentum of digitization, many decision makers remain unsure how to cope, and turn to scholars for guidance on how to approach disruption.

The first thing they should know is that not all technological change is “disruptive.” It’s important to distinguish between different types of innovation, and the responses they require by firms. In a recent publication in the Journal of Product Innovation, we undertook a systematic review of 40 years (1975 to 2016) of innovation research. Using a natural language processing approach, we analyzed and organized 1,078 articles published on the topics of disruptive, architectural, breakthrough, competence-destroying, discontinuous, and radical innovation. We used a topic-modeling algorithm that attempts to determine the topics in a set of text documents. We quantitatively compared different models, which led us to select the model that best described the underlying text data. This model clustered text into 84 distinct topics. It performs best at explaining the variability of the data in assigning words to topics and topics to documents, minimizing noise in the data.

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Apr 8, 2018

HSBC brings in AI to help spot money laundering

Posted by in categories: economics, robotics/AI

Bank is latest to harness tech as a cheaper and better way of tackling crime.

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Apr 4, 2018

Our legacy of liveable cities won’t last without a visionary response to growth

Posted by in categories: economics, health, policy

Australia’s major cities are growing more rapidly than ever before, gaining three million residents in a decade. Concerns about the risks to their long-term liveability and health are growing too. Is the consistent placing of Australian cities at the top of most liveable city rankings a reason for complacency?

The fastest-growing city, Melbourne, is experiencing unprecedented growth and yet has topped The Economist Intelligence Unit global liveability ranking for seven years running. However, much like Australia’s remarkable record of 26 years of continuous economic growth, many of the policy and institutional reforms that delivered this liveability legacy occurred decades ago.

Australia is now undergoing its third great wave of population growth, putting pressure on infrastructure, services and the environment. During the past two waves of growth, in the late-19th and mid-20th centuries, cities implemented visionary responses. It’s largely because of these past phases of planning and investment that our cities have until now been able to sustain their liveability and a reasonably healthy natural environment.

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Apr 4, 2018

Telematics technology steering toward smarter EU roads

Posted by in categories: climatology, economics, sustainability

If we are to have truly smart cities our transport systems will have to be more cost-effective, safer and sustainable. Perhaps most of all they will need to be more integrated, as the EU-funded project MFDS demonstrates.

The stated aim of the EU’s ‘smart, green and integrated transport’ initiative is to build a European transport that is ‘resilient, resource-efficient, climate- and environmentally friendly, safe and seamless for the benefit of all citizens, the economy and society.’

In contribution, the EU-funded MFDS project has developed a versatile and affordable ‘Intelligent Transport System’ offering several functions including wrong-way driver detection, traffic congestion detection, vehicle counting by vehicle classification and parking accounting. The core innovation of MFDS is the system’s ability to perform its functions simultaneously, while remaining low-cost to buy and install, as well as running on minimum power. The project’s feasibility study has demonstrated that the system will be of interest to multiple EU markets.

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Apr 4, 2018

Russian science chases escape from mediocrity

Posted by in categories: economics, government, science

For all its progress, Russia’s state-funded science still lags behind that of emerging science powers including China, India and South Korea, especially when it comes to translating discoveries into economic gains. Decades of underfunding, excessive state bureaucracy and entrenched opposition to reform within the country’s sputtering research institutions are hampering competitiveness, says Khokhlov. “What we need are new ideas, new labs, fresh talent and more freedom and competition.”


With Vladimir Putin set to earn another presidential term, researchers wonder whether his government will reverse decades of decline.

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Apr 3, 2018

From the quantum level to the car battery

Posted by in categories: economics, information science, quantum physics, robotics/AI, transportation

New developments require new materials. Until recently, these have been developed mostly by tedious experiments in the laboratory. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI in Sankt Augustin are now significantly shortening this time-consuming and cost-intensive process with their “Virtual Material Design” approach and the specially developed Tremolo-X software. By combining multi-scale models, data analysis and machine learning, it is possible to develop improved materials much more quickly. At the Hanover Trade Fair from April 23 to 27, 2018, Fraunhofer will be demonstrating how the virtual material design of the future looks.

In almost every industry, new materials are needed for new developments. Let’s take the automotive industry: while an automobile used to consist of just a handful of materials, modern cars are assembled from thousands of different materials – and demand is increasing. Whether it’s making a car lighter, getting better fuel economy or developing electric motor batteries, every new development requires finding or developing the material that has exactly the right properties. The search for the right material has often been like a guessing game, though. The candidates have usually been selected from huge material databases and then tested. Although these databases provide insight into specific performance characteristics, they usually do not go far enough into depth to allow meaningful judgments about whether a material has exactly the desired properties. To find that out, numerous laboratory tests have to be performed.

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Apr 1, 2018

One of Estonia’s first “e-residents” explains what it means to have digital citizenship

Posted by in categories: economics, internet

Three years in, what I find most incredible about e-Residency is that it actually works.

Estonia’s quest to become a “digital nation”

To better understand how e-Residency came about, let’s go back almost 30 years, to 1991. Estonia had just won independence from the Soviet Union and was in the early stages of building a market-oriented economy from scratch. At the time, leaders were quick to identify the potential of the internet and open source collaboration tools (interestingly this was less out of principle, and more for the simple reason that they had no money to pay for Microsoft Office). They decided to become the world’s premier “digital nation.” A favorite quote I’ve heard in Estonia: “What do you think of when you hear the word Slovenia? Nothing. Precisely! We don’t want to be Slovenia.”

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Mar 31, 2018

Bioquark Inc. — Hispanic MPR Podcast — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: aging, biotech/medical, disruptive technology, DNA, economics, finance, futurism, genetics, health

https://player.fm/series/hispanic-marketing-and-public-relations/hmpr-ira-pastor

Mar 31, 2018

The Paradox of Universal Basic Income

Posted by in categories: economics, mobile phones

I was on a panel at a recent conference when the moderator asked audience and panel members what they thought of UBI. The overwhelming consensus of the 500 or so people in the room appeared to be “we’re skeptical, but should experiment.” UBI sounds like a good or not-so-good idea to different constituents because we have so little understanding of either how we would do it, or how people would react. None of us really knows what we’re talking about when it comes to UBI, akin to being in a drunken bar argument before there were smartphones and Wikipedia. But there are a few basic principles and pieces of research that can help.


Liberals and conservatives alike love—and fear—the idea of giving free money to everyone. But we have to try it anyway.

Author: Joi Ito BY

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Mar 30, 2018

The Future of Universal Basic Income

Posted by in categories: economics, government, policy

My 17-min speech at the World Fair Nano is out. Give it a listen to learn all about my Federal Land Dividend, a #basicincome which doesn’t raise taxes and will actually shrink government while eliminating all poverty. This is a major policy of my #libertarian governor run and has possibility for bipartisan support.


Learn more about Zoltan’s work at http://www.zoltanistvan.com/

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