Innovation – Page 3

The success of Uber and AirBnB is (partly) due to structural exploration of legal limits

Most illustrative are the descriptions of failed competitors, which show importance of both luck and ruthlessness.

There are 100s of underappreciated scientific concepts that deserve to be widely known

A rollercoaster ride through a laundry list of hot topics in science today.

Digitization, network effects, and participation will continue to disrupt many markets

Machine, Platform, Crowd – Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson

Decent summary of developments with some nice examples, but not sufficiently new or surprising to classify as ‘essential reading’.

Developing nuclear physics required a lot tinkering and failing

Atomic Adventures – James Mahaffey

Refreshing view on history of nuclear physics with emphasis on ‘failures’ like cold fusion and nuclear rocket engines in this often counter-intuitive branche of science.

There is a myriad of ways in which AGI can be scary, but also a whole array of options humanity can pursue to stay on the top of the food chain

Mike Bostrom – Superintelligence

More thorough and nuanced than most scary-AI-will-take-over-the-world-books, but it still suffers from the same pitfall: over-estimating the importance of superintelligence for evolutionary success (two random examples: cockroaches and Donald Trump).

Only bet (in the casino or on Wallstreet) when you have an edge.

Edward Thorp – A man for all markets

Sage advise from the man who beat the dealer at blackjack and outperformed the market as one of the world’s first quants (but feel free to skip the chapters about Edward’s youth as a prodigy).

Geoffrey Moore – Crossing the chasm

A cutting-edge tech company marketing to early adopters has to completely reinvent itself to appeal to the mainstream market.

Written in an entertaining laid-back style that more business books could use and – above all – surprisingly relevant over 25 years after first publication in 1991.

Kevin Kelly – The inevitable

The narrative of how technology is changing the world told through 12 ‘forces’: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and Beginning.

Enjoyable, yet somewhat theoretical, meandering between fundamental truisms and gross simplicications, leaving the reader with one key question: ‘Where does it pay off to act contrarian?’

Yuval Noah Harari – Homo Deus

Considering incentives for humanity, The most likely future scenario for AI, is for humans to develop into technology-supported cyborgs.

Strongly opiniated view on the future of humanity, mostly valuable due to the emphasis on the role of humans in steering development of technology and AI.

Deborah Blum – The poisoner’s handbook

Following development in chemistry and society, forensic toxicology experienced fascinating progress in the early 20th century.

Treasure trove of slightly lugubrious annecdotes on crimes, accidents and government schemes.

Ben Horowitz – The hard thing about hard things

In the end no-one but the founder-CEO really cares how difficult it is to do the right thing for your start-up.

Comfortingly desillusional perspective on entrepreneurship, with reassuring insights like: “No one cares.”

Michael Smith – Streaming, Sharing, Stealing

For the first time in decades, the simulaneous developments in distribution and production of media give traditional ‘majors’ something to worry about.

Recent move of Disney to boycot Netflixs proves that incumbents are starting to realize the new reality.

Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens

The rise of Homo Sapiens to the top of the food chain has been the result of its remarkable ability to construct a collective imagination of things like God, nations, money, and corporations.

Refreshing evolutionary perspective, emphasizing the cognitive, agricultural, and industrial revolutions as turning points in human development.

Pedro Domingos – The master algorithm

The author’s invention (“Markov logic networks”) may unify the symbolist, connectionist, evolutionary, Baysian, and analogizing approaches to machine learning.

The brave attempt to cover an inherently deep subject in a non-technical way.

Richard Evans – The pursuit of power

The 19th century saw the birth of many aspects that still define our world today; from the end of feudalism to the birth of modern democracy and from the death of god to the emergance of Medicine as a scientific discipline.

Masterful balance between major developments and impact on human scale.

Ashlee Vance – Elon Musk

With the cash you get from selling PayPal you can stay solvant longer than the market can stay irrational.

Do not read the Dutch translation: Henk Popken did a crappy job.

Clayton M. Christensen – Competing against luck

When working on innovation, always ask yourself: “What job does my product/service do for its user?” as a first test.

Good thought starter and a great tool to point out failures afterwards, but usually hard to get “the job” right before launch

Kevin Ashton – How to fly a horse

Creativity ( = ‘logical thinking’ + ‘trial-and-error’ ) does not fit well with most organizational cultures.

Unfortunately, the book contains too many anecdotes that feature Woody Allen.

Robert Gordon – The rise and fall of American growth

High growth is a thing of the past: all great major inventions have been made and can only be made once.

OK… exponential decrease of discomfort may imply decreasing marginal gains, but that does not imply that the future will not see consumer surplus stemming from future inventions.

Elmira Bayrasli – From the other side of the world

Success factors for tech start-ups in emerging economies differ greatly from those in developed countries.

Some well chosen case studies; but with too little explanation on ‘what’ they did and too many stories about how they did it.