Los Angeles Times (May 1)
California “continues to attract more manufacturers and create more jobs than almost any other. The numbers don’t lie.” Toyota and Occidental Petroleum both announced plans to move their headquarters from California to Texas. Nevertheless, California’s business environment remains vibrant given the state’s unique “ability to incubate new companies and tech innovators, putting its businesses in the vanguard of new industries.”
Tags: Business, California, Environment, Innovators, Jobs, Manufacturers, Occidental Petroleum, Texas, Toyota, Vanguard
MIT Technology Review (June 5)
Of late, companies have been embracing open innovation contests to pull off low-cost breakthroughs. This approach can succeed. “Open competitions can help find an optimal solution to a well-understood problem,” but typically these contests fail to deliver true innovation for a well-known reason. “Real innovation is always the outcome of ongoing discourse among a small group of innovators who truly understand the importance of what they’re working on. No matter where we look, from the American Revolution to the digital revolution, it’s always a small group of obsessed individuals who know and talk to each other that are responsible for big innovations. As John Stuart Mill observed: ‘Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority.’”
Tags: Breakthroughs, Genius, Innovation, Innovators, John Stuart Mill, Low-cost, Minority, Open contests, Problems, Solutions
