Lifeboat Foundation

“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.

Continue reading “What 40 Years of Research Reveals About the Difference Between Disruptive and Radical Innovation” »

Researchers have made a potentially vital breakthrough in the search for renewable energy storage.

Seek will also tell you which species you are most likely to see in your area, based on wildlife observations recorded and uploaded to iNaturalist. You will be given maps and charts to help you track down nearby flora and fauna — but if you prefer to explore on your own, Seek is happy to tell you about any random plant or insect that catches your eye.

INaturalist encourages all users to take photos of everything they see – even if it’s not on the list – to develop the AI’s ability to recognize wildlife. As co-founder Scott Loarie told My Modern Met, “The only way we can improve our modeling of species is to get more data, and to do that we need more people outside taking pictures.”

Seek is currently available on the App Store and is in beta testing for Android.

Continue reading “This new app will help you identify the plants and animals you see in nature” »

S cientists have claimed an important breakthrough in the battle against Alzheimer’s after neutralising the most significant gene responsible for the disease for the first time.

A team in California successfully identified the protein associated with the high-risk apoE4 gene and then manage to prevent it damaging human neuron cells.

The study could open the door to a potential new drug capable of halting the disease, however the researchers have urged caution because so far their compound has only been tried on collections of cells in a laboratory.

Continue reading “Alzheimer’s gene neutralised in human brain cells for the first time” »

Investors are sounding the alarm after a little-known U.S. government agency green lit what could be the next trillion-dollar technology.

This tight-lipped agency, known as DARPA, has a history of developing some of the most transformative technologies known to man. But what many don’t realize is that it can PAY to follow DARPA’s biggest projects.

In fact, one DARPA-funded venture was a computer network designed to provide interconnectivity among users – we now call this network the internet.

Continue reading “The U.S. government’s ‘high tech Holy Grail’” »

SpaceX’s CEO feeds the hype for a new rocket with a photo showing a gigantic tool that will be used as a mold to create the spaceship’s body.

Nobody knows when “The Big One” is going to hit California, but here’s how experts think it will play out when it does.

Scientists tested a brain implant that replicates short-term recall in patients with memory loss. It may have actually worked.

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