This Week in PopTech: Radical Innovation, 100 Hammers and Inception
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Friday, August 06, 2010 UTC
Happenings:
- As part of our Ecomaterials Innovation Lab, we’re exploring how competitions might spur the development of greener materials. PopTecher Colleen Kaman recently caught up with Erika Wagner, Executive Director of the X PRIZE Lab @ MIT, a partnership between the university and the X PRIZE Foundation, to talk about using contests to drive radical innovation.
- Our friends at Project M have a new project called 100 Hammers, a collaborative effort inspired by Maine artist David McLaughlin, a locally known craftsman and collector who passed away in early May of 2010. David spent his life inspiring others not just through his art but through his passion to see new life in otherwise unwanted materials. The M’ers gathered 100 second-hand hammers with the intention of keeping David’s dream alive by passing the hammers along to people who could give them a life they otherwise wouldn’t have had, creating a new and unique history for each hammer.
- Social Innovation faculty member John Balen, a General Partner at Canaan Partners and a board member at numerous early-stage firms (including Blurb and ID Analytics), tells us about pitching a VC.
- 2009 PopTech speaker Jonah Lehrer explores the The Neuroscience of Inception. (About this post – Jonah says the entire post is a spoiler. Stop reading if you have not seen Inception, because 1) It will reveal major plot points and 2) It will make no sense.)
- Worth a listen: Secrets of Success a romp of a conversation between Radio Lab co-host Robert Krulwich and PopTech speaker Malcolm Gladwell.
- Secretary Clinton gave a nice shout to Ushahidi and Apps4Africa at the African Leaders Forum in Washington, DC.
- Failure quote of the week: “If you’re a politician, admitting you’re wrong is a weakness, but if you’re an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you’re always right, then you aren’t getting enough information out of those experiments.” -Peter Norvig
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