Designing Innovation Networks Modeled on Life's Origins & Evolution

Google Tech Talks
November 20, 2008

ABSTRACT

Highly innovative organizations face a constant challenge to process a flood of good ideas, both generated by employees and submitted from outside. In the wake of Google's Tenth Birthday Competition, this talk describes how innovation networks apply principles found in life's origins and evolution to "processing innovation." Debates about how novelty emerged in the origin of life and its evolution toward complexity demand revising assumptions that we've taken for granted. Steven Jay Gould said that "Darwinism" misrepresents Darwin.

A more complete interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution could inspire new problem-solving methods with a range of practical applications, from multi-agent systems able to learn and improve their performance to cross-disciplinary decision support systems designed to address environmental sustainability challenges. Objective. To discuss nine principles of innovation networks and the problem-solving method they support.

Speaker: Zann Gill
Zann Gill will describe ideas from her forthcoming books What Daedalus told Darwin (about Darwin's dilemma and designing intelligence) and If Microbes begat Mind (on origins of life and emergence of intelligence). With an M.Arch. from Harvard, her early experience as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller exposed her to Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science." Inspired by research into complex adaptive systems and multi-scale innovation networks, her entry to the international competition Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century, sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government, tied with Matsushita Corp. for first place and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki. She proposed an Innovation Network comprised of sixteen initiatives for urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. More recently at NASA she developed program plans for an Institute for Advances Space Concepts (IASC), a think tank called Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts (BEACON) and NASA University. She founded DESYN lab (http://desyn.com) to explore "raising collaborative IQ" (http://www.zanngill.com/3ciq.html).

This Google Tech Talk was hosted by Boris Debic.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• techtalks
• techtalk
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• talk
• talks
• googletechtalks
• education

[adelle0001]

thanks for uploading this vid

[metallica2k404]

Fancy language without a substance . Wasted 48 minutes on boring opinions of individuals with a degree.

Interesting how people without a clue are the only one liking this lecture.

[plmqas]

'global warming' = 'men-bear-pig'

[plmqas]

sorry but this is really terrible lecture, I don't see nothing new here, almost nothing about 'Innovation Networks'

[valken666]

So, basically, bacteria are intelligent? I have my doubts about this claim.

[charlyg120]

if " Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. "

then any telecommunication equipment , must be intelligent...

[boslucas]

intelligence is understood in many ways.

I like how Robert Anton Wilson put it:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point"

and subsequently:

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

[tiberux]

very interesting indeed...

I think intelligence occurs when an object becomes the inventor of its own communication system (e.g. language in humans, and communications standards in the human-driven internet (OSI, TCP/IP... etc.)), and for that to occur collaboration must be realized one or another.