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Globalization, Complexity, & Change

July 3, 2007

The San Francisco Bay Area is, of course, a magnet for immigrants from all over the world. This showed itself in an interesting way this week, when my local water company (East Bay MUD, Oakland, California) sent me its annual water quality report, and included some of the information in 23 different languages, including 8 [...]

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The Open Sourced Car

May 30, 2007

Here’s a very interesting application of opensource technology – the open sourced car. Here’s a brief description from an eNewsletter I get called Innovation: OPEN SOURCE CAR Automobile enthusiast Markus Merz is on a mission — to design and produce a car based on the anarchic principles of open source. Merz is relying on a [...]

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Large Scale Innovation: Grove’s Dilemma

May 4, 2007

Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO and Chairman has taken an interest in the US health care crisis, and has developed a number of proposals to address the issues. Although he’s been able to present his ideas to many leaders in Washington DC, he says he is not optimistic about having any of them enacted. [...]

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It’s Good to Be the King

April 18, 2007

Wal-Mart’s 1 billion of sales in 2006 put it at the top of the Fortune 500 list again, just ahead of Exxon’s 7 billion. The profit picture is somewhat different, however. Wal-Mart earned .3 billion, while Exxon showed a whopping .5 billion, 3.5 x greater. At 3.2%, Wal-Mart is doing great for a retailer – [...]

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Innovation at Play

April 15, 2007

Looks like a picture of some kids playing on a merry-go-round, right? That’s what it is. And it’s also kids pumping water from the ground into that tank, providing clean water for their community. Yes, innovation shows up in the most amazing ways. This is the mission of the non-profit called Play Pumps – to [...]

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When Things Get Chaotic

March 5, 2007

I’m reading a good book called “Beyond Oil” by Kenneth Deffeyes, which explores what happens when we start running out of oil. It’s not an alarmist book, but rather a detailed discussion by an oil company veteran of what’s likely to happen, and when. An interesting comment in the book comes from Suzy Sachs, a [...]

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