TED.com inspires, thrills, amazes, saddens, and enlightens. I enjoy getting their regular email blasts as to new videos, learning something new each time.
This cycle I’m bemused. Ian Richie spoke about how, at Owl, he missed “getting” the World Wide Web when Tim Berners-Lee came to him. In his talk, he brought me back to Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” from The Atlantic in 1945. He brought me back to thinking of how we look at and miss innovations. He also brought me back, in a closer timeframe, to my current enjoyment of Christensen, Roth, and Anthony’s 2004 “Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change” on how we have missed and found past innovations.
I spend a lot of time with my classes and learning partners on trying to look with a critical lens at change and its impacts. Sometimes part of the challenge is to recognize how we are refolding data, time, and space when the idea walks in our door.
