Forces of Change and Disruption

Silicon Valley continues to dominate the VC landscape. But its grip is slipping.

The result is the emergence of a new ecosystem of mobility that could offer faster, cheaper, cleaner, safer, more efficient, and more customized travel.

Innovation

How Likely Is Your Industry to Be Disrupted? Harvard Business Review. Disruptive Innovation. This 2×2 Matrix Will Tell You.  Industry disruption, as Accenture research has found, is reasonably predictable. And with wisdom about its predictability comes opportunity. To help business leaders better understand industry disruption, we developed an index that measures an industry’s current level of disruption as well as its susceptibility to future disruption. JORG GREUEL/GETTY IMAGES View on hbr.org

The New World of Innovation-as-a-Service. Entrepreneur. Capturing innovation from “the crowd” (as in crowdsourcing) is now streamlined enough to become a part of any company’s survival kit.  But here is a truism that seems impervious to all this technological disruption: “You can’t capture lightning in a bottle.” We generally understand this to mean that genius can’t be shackled and turned into a process. Brilliant ideas will happen on their own, not pulled from the mind under duress. Yet there is a growing community of entrepreneurs and academics who think that genius can be distilled into a process. What if lightning could be captured in a bottle? What if the exasperating pursuit of breakthrough ideas and technologies could be distilled into the push of a button or an act as simple as scrolling through an app like Instagram?

Convergence

Forces of change: The future of mobility. Deloitte Insights. THE entire way people and goods travel from point A to point B is changing, driven by a series of converging technological and social trends: the rapid growth of carsharing and ridesharing; the increasing viability of electric and alternative powertrains; new, lightweight materials; and the growth of connected and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles. The result is the emergence of a new ecosystem of mobility that could offer faster, cheaper, cleaner, safer, more efficient, and more customized travel. www2.deloitte.com

Funding

Here’s Where Startups in the U.S. Are Getting the Most VC Funding. Bloomberg. Silicon Valley continues to dominate the VC landscape. But its grip is slipping. Companies in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan area collected $19.7 billion last year, 12 percent less than in 2015.

 

Brain

To Advance Artificial Intelligence, Reverse-Engineer the Brain. Wired. YOUR THREE-POUND BRAIN runs on just 20 watts of power—barely enough to light a dim bulb. Yet the machine behind our eyes has built civilizations from scratch, explored the stars, and pondered our existence. In contrast, IBM’s Watson, a supercomputer that runs on 20,000 watts, can outperform humans at calculation and Jeopardy! but is still no match for human intelligence. GETTY IMAGES

Researchers Find Missing Link to Make Computers That Mimic the Brain. Inverse. The key to a new era of computer. In a paper published in Science Advances on Friday, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado describe how they built what they called a “superconducting synapse.” Biological synapses are the junction between nerves where chemical signals are transmitted from the brain throughout the body. NIST’s synapse can do everything its organic counterpart can do, but better.

Quantum

Here’s why 100 qubit quantum computers could change everything. The Next Web. One of the biggest barriers to advancing quantum computer hardware is dealing with all the noise generated by those qubits, they’re hyperactive compared to regular bits, so it’s hard to figure out what’s going on with them. But a series of advancements in error-correction and noise-supression have recently paved the way forward. And, if history is any indicator, we can expect a usable 100 qubit processor as early as this year. Credit: Guilherme Yagui

Physicists Create New Form Of Light. MSN / Newsweek. For the first time, scientists have watched groups of three photons interacting and effectively producing a new form of light. In results published in Science, researchers suggest that this new light could be used to perform highly complex, incredibly fast quantum computations. This research is the latest step towards a long-fabled quantum computer, an ultra-powerful machine that could solve problems beyond the realm of traditional computers. Your desktop PC would, for example, struggle to solve the question: “If a salesman has lots of places to visit, what is the quickest route?”

Enzymes

NEW ISRAELI TECHNOLOGY REPLACES SURGEON’S KNIFE WITH NO-CUT ALTERNATIVE. Jerusalem Post. People who have to undergo surgery but fear the scalpel will have a less-frightening alternative, the enzymatic “blade.” Researchers at the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a device that replaces the surgeon’s knife with natural biological materials. The research was conducted by Prof. Avi Schroeder, a nanotechnology expert who is head of the targeted drugs laboratory and personalized medicine technologies at the faculty. The “blade” is based on the intelligent use of enzymes – biological molecules by which the body restores itself – as well as nanoparticles and technology for controlled release of drugs.

Steps:

(19) Anticipate the growing shifts in life and business. Nobody wants to swim upstream if the current is moving everything in the opposite direction.