All posts tagged: innovation

#hashbased for week 47

November 25, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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Blockchain

#hashbased is a blockchain innovation newsletter provided by HashBased.com, an OKA innovation brand Bitcoin energy consumption is comparable to a medium-sized developed country (~50-75 TWh) and there are doubts that it can be made more sustainable. Another issues related to bitcoin mining are CO2 emissions and generation of electronic waste. The waste is mainly from discarded ASICS, which can be used only for mining Bitcoin – most ASICS end up being incinerated when new models […]

#hashbased for week 45

November 12, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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Blockchain

#hashbased is a blockchain innovation newsletter provided by HashBased.com, an OKA innovation brand John Griffin and Amin Shams, authors of the 2018 article “Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?“ have dropped an update on SSRN. The article is worth reading. It has been heavily criticized on Twitter but some of the major conclusions and their implications have not been really addressed yet. We will see this paper being discussed for many weeks to come. AbstractThis paper investigates […]

Assorted links for 09/24/2019

September 24, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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Links

1. Health 4.0: Challenges for an Orderly and Inclusive Innovation (innovation, Technology and Society) 2. How Bicycles Can Revolutionize Our Lives: Case Studies from the United States, Netherlands, China & Britain (society, Open Culture) 3. The Lemonade Ultimatum: Game Theory in a Gift Economy by Kelly Peters (game theory, Behavioral Scientist) 4. The girl in the box: the mysterious crime that shocked Germany by Xan Rice (crime, The Guardian) 5. A German Court Defines Hangovers […]

Assorted links for 09/21/2019

September 21, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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Links

1. Google researchers have reportedly achieved “quantum supremacy” (technology, MIT technology Review)details are sketchy, additional information also in: Google Claims ‘Quantum Supremacy,’ Marking a Major Milestone in Computing (Fortune)What Is Quantum Supremacy, and Why Is It Such a Computing Milestone? (Fortune) 2. Blockchain hysteria: Adding “blockchain” to company’s name (blockchain, Economics Letters)one can compare this to the dot-com boom: A Rose.com by Any Other Name (pdf here)

Assorted links for 09/16/2019

September 16, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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Links

1. With Harvard as the Backdrop, NBA Players Learn Business from the Best and Brightest (Sports Illustrated) After NBA representives noticed the interest across the league and reached out, Elberse and others put together the mentor-based program that gives athletes insight into the business world by pairing them with second-year MBA students who share similar interests. The program, which started with only NBA players, has been expanded to include players from the WNBA and NFL, […]

Assorted links for 08/29/2018

August 29, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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Links

1. The great book scare (history, Smithsonian) 2. Why Not Hi-tech Forms? by Robin Hanson A half century ago, when people tried to imagine a future full of computers, I’m sure one of the most obvious predictions they made is that we today wouldn’t have to work so hard to fill out forms. Filling out forms seemed then to be a very mechanical task, based on explicit mechanical rules. So once computers had enough space […]

Patents and the invention of the telescope

August 25, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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history / knowledge / optics

There is an ongoing discussion whether patents encourage or hinder innovation. Patents grant a temporary monopoly as an incentive for the inventor to commercialize the inventions and come up with follow-up innovations. However, many companies file patent applications to block competition even though the companies owning the patent do not intend to commercialize the invention. It is tempting to speculate what would have happened to many technologies were they patented or not. Although we can’t […]

Decentralized innovation: data analytics and access to differentiated knowledge

August 25, 2019
by Nikodem Tomczak
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articles / economics / knowledge

Innovation is not a fixed-rate process and can be influenced by our ability to exploit the existing stock of knowledge, especially if that knowledge translates into broader distributions of available product complexity. However, before we build products we need to assess existing knowledge. If we are lucky enough to have already the right data we can use data analytics for that purpose. Modern tools for data mining, management, retrieval and processing allow for fairly complex, […]