Kudos to Linda Stone for her piece in Harvard Business Review (that article’s free until Feb 26). She’s #7 on the list of “Breakthrough Ideas for 2007”, talking about continuous partial attention. She’s in equally fascinating company: Duncan Watts on the effect of influencers on social epidemics, a Japanese VC talking about the new culture of Japanese entrepreneurialism, MIT’s Michael Schrage talking about the new applications of old algorithms (side note: I hear computational chemists are in huge demand because their algorithms and techniques are suddenly applicable to a raft of modern computing problems), Eric von Hippel on User-Centered Innovation, Clay Shirky on open source’s fail-fast approach, and so on.
The standout pieces for me were a fascinating piece on the effect of private equity firms on mergers and acquisitions, and an article by the president of the Santa Fe Institute on the different ways that resources and creative outputs scale. His analysis shows patents, wages, GDP, etc. growing faster than resource consumption as population grows. This is the opposite of economy of scale: surfeit of scale, perhaps?