#open innovation

[openinnovationoilf]

What is Open Innovation and Open Innovation Lotus Foundation by Yashraj & Yuvraj Bharwaj twins

Open Innovation is a concept that encourages organizations to use outside resources, such as customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, to create innovative solutions and products. This concept allows companies to leverage external ideas and knowledge to enhance their internal innovation efforts. The concept of Open Innovation encourages companies to reach outside of their walls for ideas, rather than relying on internal resources alone. This approach can help companies access a wider array of expertise, resources, and solutions that may not have been available otherwise.

Open Innovation is not limited to product development and technology. It can also be applied to the business model and processes to find new ways of doing things. Companies can use the concept of Open Innovation to look for new ways of doing business and improving their operational efficiency. This is done by leveraging outside sources such as customers, partners, and suppliers to identify new opportunities and solutions.

Open Innovation is a great way for companies to tap into the collective wisdom of their stakeholders and use it to create innovative solutions and products. By embracing the concept of Open Innovation, companies can access a broader range of perspectives and ideas and use them to drive innovation. Visit http://www.oilf.in/ to know more about Open Innovation Lotus Foundation

[buzzesante]

Innovation : le Fonds Amgen France pour la science et l’humain lance son 4e appel à projets

Innovation : le Fonds Amgen France pour la science et l’humain lance son 4e appel à projets

Suite au succès des précédents appels à projets, le Fonds Amgen France pour la Science et l’Humain lance une quatrième édition, dotée de 600 000 € sur le thème « de la médecine de précision à l’optimisation du parcours de soins pour une expérience patient améliorée ». Présentation. Le Fonds Amgen France créé en 2019 dans le cadre du programme Amgen Innovations affiche son engagement à faire…

[montereybayaquarium]

Socks, food, and the ocean—they all have one thing in common: microplastics.

To tackle the microplastic pollution problem, researchers and policy experts from the Aquarium and @mbari-blog created an open-source library dedicated to helping researchers trace these tiny culprits back to their source. Check out the webcomic below to learn more!

You can read more about the library on our website. Together we can take down plastic pollution! 💙🌍

[asiadealhub]

Analysis India Market Research

Asia Deal Hub is a professional kind of marketing service including Indian Market Research, market research firms, Market Research Agencies, distributor research, South East Asia Market Research, etc.

[groupidea]

This was the original intro video on the Groupidea website from 2015, providing an overview of the vision to create a knowledge base on the web to identify or gather problems or goals, ways to address them, and effects or impact of doing so. It is a "throwback" post to complement the earlier post about the withdrawal of the Groupidea application from the web.

[pendolaredigitale]

10 cose che penso di aver capito dell’INNOVAZIONE… Ma di cui ogni tanto mi dimentico

Scrivo questa lista in primis per me stesso: una serie di principi che ho imparato (a mie spese) in circa 15 anni di progetti e attività sul campo. Un vademecum per districarsi nell’uso di una delle parole più abusate degli ultimi anni.

Non sono certo perle di rara saggezza, ma dato che poi talvolta io per primo me ne dimentico, meglio averle nero su bianco.

innovazióne s. f. [dal lat. tardo innovatio -onis]. — 1. a. L’atto, l’opera di innovare, cioè di introdurre nuovi sistemi, nuovi ordinamenti, nuovi metodi di produzione e sim. [TRECCANI]

Ti sei chiesto almeno una volta in cosa il progetto (che credi sia innovativo, o che definisci come tale) è realmente “nuovo”? Detto diversamente, che cosa stai innovando? Ben inteso, almeno una volta è d’obbligo, ma ripetere il processo periodicamente aiuta a tener dritto il timone.

Se vuoi fare innovazione non devi aver paura di sbagliare. Sì perché se non sbagli è probabile che non ti sei spinto abbastanza in là, e poi sbagliare è insito nel “fare” che è il presupposto per innovare. Solo che sbagliare non fa sempre piacere, diciamolo.

Nel fare innovazione, non puoi conoscere a priori tutte le fonti di rischio. È la cosa che più mi turba quando, in un bando o in una call per finanziare progetti di presunta innovazione, ti chiedono di elencare le principiali fonti di rischio, potenziali barriere e strumenti di mitigazione: eh grazie, a conoscerli tutti, magari si sbaglierebbe meno (vedi sopra). Ed invece poi a fregarti è sempre qualcosa che avevi sottostimato.

Un progetto o un’iniziativa non è innovativo/a solo perché nella descrizione si usano termini “trendy”. Blockchain, AI, crypto, impact, data-driven e tutti i vari hype del momento non sono affatto garanzia di innovazione! Se pensi di incorrere in questo rischio, torna al punto (1) e prova a spiegarlo a qualcuno che non è del settore.

Per fare un progetto innovativo devono esserne tutti convinti. O per lo meno chi paga, chi progetta, chi esegue e chi si aspetta dei risultati (che spesso, ma non sempre, coincide con chi paga).

Oggi l’innovazione non può essere che aperta. È una conseguenza della società iper-connessa, accelerata e fast-consuming in cui viviamo, ma spesso è più facile professarla (l’Open Innovation) che metterla in pratica. Il retaggio di secoli di ricerca chiusa, elitaria, paziente (lenta) e concentrata in mano a pochi, pesa come un macigno.

L’innovazione è una velocista, non una maratoneta. Detto diversamente, un progetto non può essere innovativo per sempre.

Per innovare bisogna costruire su basi solide. È insito nella stessa etimologia. Innovare non è costruire ex-novo bensì rimestare, ri-assemblare asset, concetti, conoscenze solide e saperi acquisiti. Siamo pur sempre “Nani sulle spalle dei giganti”.

Un progetto innovativo non è necessariamente un bel progetto (e viceversa). Cosa super importante da tenere a mente onde evitare la sensazione di disillusione e mitigare, almeno parzialmente, la frustrazione che di tanto in tanto assale i pionieri dell’innovazione.

Innovazione non vuol dire “missione impossibile”, saper guardare oltre non vuol dire schiantarsi a 200 chilometri all’ora contro un muro e confidare di uscirne illeso.

Epilogo: dieci è un buon numero quando si scrive una lista (altri prima di me hanno fatto scuola 🤗) ma c’è sempre da imparare e quindi non escludo ci siano in futuro delle aggiunte. Per esempio il passaggio da un progetto “innovativo” ad un progetto “produttivo” ha per me ancora molti lati oscuri che spero di aver tempo e modo di carpire.

P.S. Trovi questo post anche qui

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cleantech has an enshittification problem

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit – lots of it.

But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there's going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these should be electric.

Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there's the fact that individuals can't install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.

In policy circles, EV adoption is treated as a logistical and financial issue, so governments have focused on making EVs affordable and increasing the density of charging stations. As an EV owner, I can affirm that affordability and logistics were important concerns when we were shopping for a car.

But there's a third EV problem that is almost entirely off policy radar: enshittification.

An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company's tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.

That's just for starters, but there's so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.

The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation ("IP" in this case is "any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors"):

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

EVs are also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Manufacturers can reach into your car and change how much of your battery you can access:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

They can lock your car and have it send its location to a repo man, then greet him by blinking its lights, honking its horn, and pulling out of its parking space:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

And of course, they can detect when you've asked independent mechanic to service your car and then punish you by degrading its functionality:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2024/06/26/two-of-eight-claims-in-tesla-anti-trust-lawsuit-will-move-forward/

This is "twiddling" – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The thing is, for an EV, twiddling is the best case scenario. As bad as it is for the company that made your EV to change how it works whenever they feel like picking your pocket, that's infinitely preferable to the manufacturer going bankrupt and bricking your car.

That's what just happened to owners of Fisker EVs, cars that cost $40-70k. Cars are long-term purchases. An EV should last 12-20 years, or even longer if you pay to swap the battery pack. Fisker was founded in 2016 and shipped its first Ocean SUV in 2023. The company is now bankrupt:

https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/

Fisker called its vehicles "software-based cars" and they weren't kidding. Without continuous software updates and server access, those Fisker Ocean SUVs are turning into bricks. What's more, the company designed the car from the ground up to make any kind of independent service and support into a felony, by wrapping the whole thing in overlapping layers of IP. That means that no one can step in with a module that jailbreaks the Fisker and drops in an alternative firmware that will keep the fleet rolling.

This is the third EV risk – not just finance, not just charger infrastructure, but the possibility that any whizzy, cool new EV company will go bust and brick your $70k cleantech investment, irreversibly transforming your car into 5,500 lb worth of e-waste.

This confers a huge advantage onto the big automakers like VW, Kia, Ford, etc. Tesla gets a pass, too, because it achieved critical mass before people started to wise up to the risk of twiddling and bricking. If you're making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months' capital in the bank?

The incumbency advantage here means that the big automakers won't have any reason to sink a lot of money into R&D, because they won't have to worry about hungry startups with cool new ideas eating their lunches. They can maintain the cozy cartel that has seen cars stagnate for decades, with the majority of "innovation" taking the form of shitty, extractive and ill-starred ideas like touchscreen controls and an accelerator pedal that you have to rent by the month:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

Put that way, it's clear that this isn't an EV problem, it's a cleantech problem. Cleantech has all the problems of EVs: it requires a large capital expenditure, it will be "smart," and it is expected to last for decades. That's rooftop solar, heat-pumps, smart thermostat sensor arrays, and home storage batteries.

And just as with EVs, policymakers have focused on infrastructure and affordability without paying any attention to the enshittification risks. Your rooftop solar will likely be controlled via a Solaredge box – a terrible technology that stops working if it can't reach the internet for a protracted period (that's right, your home solar stops working if the grid fails!).

I found this out the hard way during the covid lockdowns, when Solaredge terminated its 3G cellular contract and notified me that I would have to replace the modem in my system or it would stop working. This was at the height of the supply-chain crisis and there was a long waiting list for any replacement modems, with wifi cards (that used your home internet rather than a cellular connection) completely sold out for most of a year.

There are good reasons to connect rooftop solar arrays to the internet – it's not just so that Solaredge can enshittify my service. Solar arrays that coordinate with the grid can make it much easier and safer to manage a grid that was designed for centralized power production and is being retrofitted for distributed generation, one roof at a time.

But when the imperatives of extraction and efficiency go to war, extraction always wins. After all, the Solaredge system is already in place and solar installers are largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the reasons that a homeowner might want to directly control and monitor their system via local controls that don't roundtrip through the cloud.

Somewhere in the hindbrain of any prospective solar purchaser is the experience with bricked and enshittified "smart" gadgets, and the knowledge that anything they buy from a cool startup with lots of great ideas for improving production, monitoring, and/or costs poses the risk of having your 20 year investment bricked after just a few years – and, thanks to the extractive imperative, no one will be able to step in and restore your ex-solar array to good working order.

I make the majority of my living from books, which means that my pay is very "lumpy" – I get large sums when I publish a book and very little in between. For many years, I've used these payments to make big purchases, rather than financing them over long periods where I can't predict my income. We've used my book payments to put in solar, then an induction stove, then a battery. We used one to buy out the lease on our EV. And just a month ago, we used the money from my upcoming Enshittification book to put in a heat pump (with enough left over to pay for a pair of long-overdue cataract surgeries, scheduled for the fall).

When we started shopping for heat pumps, it was clear that this was a very exciting sector. First of all, heat pumps are kind of magic, so efficient and effective it's almost surreal. But beyond the basic tech – which has been around since the late 1940s – there is a vast ferment of cool digital features coming from exciting and innovative startups.

By nature, I'm the kid of person who likes these digital features. I started out as a computer programmer, and while I haven't written production code since the previous millennium, I've been in and around the tech industry for my whole adult life. But when it came time to buy a heat-pump – an investment that I expected to last for 20 years or more – there was no way I was going to buy one of these cool new digitally enhanced pumps, no matter how much the reviewers loved them. Sure, they'd work well, but it's precisely because I'm so knowledgeable about high tech that I could see that they would fail very, very badly.

You may think EVs are bullshit, and they are – though there will always be room for some personal vehicles, and it's better for people in transit deserts to drive EVs than gas-guzzlers. You may think rooftop solar is a dead-end and be all-in on utility scale solar (I think we need both, especially given the grid-disrupting extreme climate events on our horizon). But there's still a wide range of cleantech – induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats – that are capital intensive, have a long duty cycle, and have good reasons to be digitized and networked.

Take home storage batteries: your utility can push its rate card to your battery every time they change their prices, and your battery can use that information to decide when to let your house tap into the grid, and when to switch over to powering your home with the solar you've stored up during the day. This is a very old and proven pattern in tech: the old Fidonet BBS network used a version of this, with each BBS timing its calls to other nodes to coincide with the cheapest long-distance rates, so that messages for distant systems could be passed on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

Ideally, every cleantech device would be designed so that it was impossible to enshittify – which would also make it impossible to brick:

Based on free software (best), or with source code escrowed with a trustee who must release the code if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

All patents in a royalty-free patent-pool (best); or in a trust that will release them into a royalty-free pool if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

No parts-pairing or other DRM permitted (best); or with parts-pairing utilities available to all parties on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best);

All diagnostic and error codes in the public domain, with all codes in the clear within the device (best); or with decoding utilities available on demand to all comers on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best).

There's an obvious business objection to this: it will reduce investment in innovative cleantech because investors will perceive these restrictions as limits on the expected profits of their portfolio companies. It's true: these measures are designed to prevent rent-extraction and other enshittificatory practices by cleantech companies, and to the extent that investors are counting on enshittification rents, this might prevent them from investing.

But that has to be balanced against the way that a general prohibition on enshittificatory practices will inspire consumer confidence in innovative and novel cleantech products, because buyers will know that their investments will be protected over the whole expected lifespan of the product, even if the startup goes bust (nearly every startup goes bust). These measures mean that a company with a cool product will have a much larger customer-base to sell to. Those additional sales more than offset the loss of expected revenue from cheating and screwing your customers by twiddling them to death.

There's also an obvious legal objection to this: creating these policies will require a huge amount of action from Congress and the executive branch, a whole whack of new rules and laws to make them happen, and each will attract court-challenges.

That's also true, though it shouldn't stop us from trying to get legal reforms. As a matter of public policy, it's terrible and fucked up that companies can enshittify the things we buy and leave us with no remedy.

However, we don't have to wait for legal reform to make this work. We can take a shortcut with procurement – the things governments buy with public money. The feds, the states and localities buy a lot of cleantech: for public facilities, for public housing, for public use. Prudent public policy dictates that governments should refuse to buy any tech unless it is designed to be enshittification-resistant.

This is an old and honorable tradition in policymaking. Lincoln insisted that the rifles he bought for the Union Army come with interoperable tooling and ammo, for obvious reasons. No one wants to be the Commander in Chief who shows up on the battlefield and says, "Sorry, boys, war's postponed, our sole supplier decided to stop making ammunition."

By creating a market for enshittification-proof cleantech, governments can ensure that the public always has the option of buying an EV that can't be bricked even if the maker goes bust, a heat-pump whose digital features can be replaced or maintained by a third party of your choosing, a solar controller that coordinates with the grid in ways that serve their owners – not the manufacturers' shareholders.

We're going to have to change a lot to survive the coming years. Sure, there's a lot of scary ways that things can go wrong, but there's plenty about our world that should change, and plenty of ways those changes could be for the better. It's not enough for policymakers to focus on ensuring that we can afford to buy whatever badly thought-through, extractive tech the biggest companies want to foist on us – we also need a focus on making cleantech fit for purpose, truly smart, reliable and resilient.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Image: 臺灣古寫真上色 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raid_on_Kagi_City_1945.jpg

Grendelkhan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_mounted_solar_panels.gk.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[dangerclaw]

I was not expecting Odysseus to make a friggin’ Aeolus-powered jetpack

#short kings in stem

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

solas approving of june's constant questioning is so funny bc he Will be regretting all his life choices about it later

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

honestly, I feel like Dave McKean's work elevated Neil Gaiman way more than the other way around and we don't distribute credit for that properly. I truly don't think--and, critically, never have thought--the early Sandman writing was so good that it would have gotten far without the heavy hitting art lending it such an air of respectability. McKean's work is so visually distinct still, let alone 20 years ago, let alone 30. "This is serious art for serious stories for serious people," those mixed media paintings say when they're surrounded by pen and ink put out on a brutal schedule. "I am a serious person with sophisticated tastes," the buyer says, given permission to be pretentious and smug as hell, which is very alluring to many people.

[openinnovationoilf]

What is about Open Innovation Lotus Foundation OILF by Yashraj Bharwaj Yuvraj Bharwaj

In Alliance With Berkeley Haas Welcome to the blog of the Open Innovation Lotus Foundation In Alliance With Berkeley Haas! We are an organization that strives to bring together the best minds from both the academic and business worlds to collaborate and create innovative solutions to global challenges. Our mission is to foster a spirit of innovation, collaboration, and creativity to make the world a better place.

We are proud to partner with the prestigious Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Together, we are working towards making meaningful progress in the areas of health, education, and economic development. We believe that innovation is essential to the world’s progress and that collaboration between the best minds in the world is essential to reach our goals. Our blog is dedicated to showcasing the innovative projects and ideas our team is working on, discussing current topics in the areas of health, education, and economic development, and offering insights into the world of open innovation

We look forward to sharing our stories and insights with you and hope you will join us in the important mission of creating a better future for everyone. Thank you for helping us to make the world a better place! Visit http://www.oilf.in/ to know more about Open Innovation Lotus Foundation.

[abyssembraced]

Working on an iterator design for GLaDOS <3

[asiadealhub]

R&D partner sourcing

Our partner hub assists you in finding operational partners who will help your business grow faster across Asia through partnership services like R&D partner sourcing, patent research, supplier research, open innovation, etc.

[groupidea]

Today, the Groupidea application will be withdrawn from the web. It had been there on the web for years even though the work to further iterate it, attract users and make it a viable business or organization had been halted since early 2017.

Groupidea's scope (as a platform for organizations to collectively break down goals into ways to achieve them) did not receive sufficient interest. The vision of having a place/website to gather possible ways to achieve a goal, and structure them in tree diagrams/a directed graph, perhaps required too much effort from organizations with an unknown or undemonstrated return. Some of the feedback we received is that organizations use problem tree diagrams. However, the tree diagrams they produce are usually short-lived as part of quick brainstorming sessions in small groups and only expand a few levels down. Areas of focus evolve, thus maintaining a particular tree structure over time may not be useful. That said, we could have tried other things, such as expanding the use cases for the system we had created to relate any given issue to any number of child-descendant issues through a tree diagram and any number of parent-ascendant issues through another tree diagram (noting that both tree diagrams were just views of the directed graph relationships stored in the backend). Some of those uses cases could have been:

Notes taking (enabling organizing notes in any number of sub-categories each of which could have many parent categories).

Tasks management (enabling breaking down tasks into many levels of subtasks and linking any of them with many parent tasks).

Unfortunately, as is the case for most startup, we ran out of runway to keep iterating and exploring addressing other use cases such as the above. The aim of this post and video is to share this attempt/experience so that others could perhaps develop something valuable using it.

@rayorbit

[possessedpasm]

I don't mean to be a bother with an ask like this, but do you have an idea of when your commissions may be open again?

I was planning to wait until July was over since I'll be taking that time off for artfight and visiting friends for my birthday :D so August most likely for those who are interested ✌️

[croc-odette]

Maybe I’ve come to love 90s Star Trek so much recently because seeing humans who forget money and banks even used to be a thing is soooooo satisfying it’s like a warm bath