Feb
20
Innovation is History
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Innovation happens when you recognize it, not when people invent something. Innovation is a state of mind, not a process of will. Innovation cannot be switched on or off like a light. Innovation is not about making things anew, and then making the new as unchangeable as the old it replaced. Innovation is about looking behind you to measure the tide and the speed of flow. Innovation is knowing when to leap in and swim boldly, knowing that stopping swimming means sinking. Innovation has nothing at all to do with the concept I find described everyday in information companies: “we need some younger managers in here to innovate, then we will take the best of their ideas and go with them”. “We have set up a group to go away and do innovation and then we will see if they come up with anything”. “Our innovators are very smart but have no idea of how important the cash cow is to the company and how important it is that we do not compete with ourselves, so we have taken up the best of their ideas and used them to freshen up the existing services”.
After weeks of working with companies that can talk change but not implement it the spirits can flag. But then, like last week I have a space when every door I push open seems to exude innovation. And it is not the perk of the young or the monopoly of garage dwellers in Southern California. Innovation spreads right across the age and gender divides. It is a cast of mind, almost a type of intelligence. Last week I met two real innovators, both of whom were deeply dissatisfied by the difficulty our industry, both information marketplaces and enterprises at large, have in handling change. I would guess they were 30 years apart in age, and their ideas of innovation were radically different, but both were temperamentally discontented by the thought of leaving the status quo unruffled.
Rather than embarrass the innovators who gave me such a filip, let me describe the innovations. E-Qual (http://www.e-qualcompetence.co.uk) is a competency environment. Created initially for the oil industry, it is a way of getting all the relevant information in one place in order to form judgements about whether employees have the background knowledge, the formal learning, the experience on the job, the continuing development activity and anything else they need to be judged as “competent”. In many ways, competency is the shoe that has not yet dropped in the compliance marketplace. Yet what is it about innovation that means that no one in forestry would look at what works in oil and gas, or no one in light engineering would look at how things are done in pharma. And the information players in vertical sectors are just as blinkered. Small wonder that innovation and scale are real problems.
The other innovation I encountered was Wizdom.ai, a child of the team that incubated Colwiz (www.wizdom.ai). Here we. Are in a whole sector – academic research and scholarly communication – but this is one with an almost theological loathing for “not invented here a look at this Claim” continuously updating with billions of data points. Gain powerful insights about the past, present and future with the most comprehensive knowledge graph covering the entire universe of research.
50K organizations
235 countries
2.7B facts
700M citations
289M concept mappings
$700B research funding
78M publications
50M authors
28M affiliations
60K journals
150TB data
Using cutting edge machine learning algorithms, wizdom.ai continuously generates analytics about the scientific developments that are the harbingers of our future world to progress research in the right direction, further and faster.”
A huge amount of data and some large claims, yet whatever happens here we should note that this is the first time someone has walked through the front door of the problem – finding what scholarship is best of breed, worth funding and most likely to have real impact – and said simply “let’s start by putting all the salient data in one place and then see what our best analytics can do”. While I am sure that in those analytics there is great innovation, the dramatic change here for me is a hallmark of innovation – simplicity of approach. The jury is out on whether, beyond its existing case studies and great graphics, this service will produce the insights claimed for it – but if it does it will comprehensively alter the field of vision of academics, funders, researchers in industry, publishers, and government. A big data solution in this sector at this point could be as influential as the foundation, by the truly innovative Eugene Garfield, of ISI and the impact factor. As I left their Oxford offices the most frequent thought in my head was “why hasn’t a publisher invested and acquired this yet!”
Which returns us to the beginning – no one recognises innovation until it has happened and is history – and too late.
Dec
30
Time is. Time Was. Time Will Be
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Resolution: whatever we do in 2017, let us not enumerate our actions. “20 new uses for AI”, “Six fastest ways of going broke online”, “9 rules for investment success Digitally”, “3 certain ways of employing the right strategies for…” Enough. ENOUGH!
What follows here will be some things I am tracking that may or may not happen in 2017. This piece will end when I am tired or you are bored. Neither of us is keeping score.
* I am using a keyboard to communicate with you. Why? Since the early 1980s when I had to persuade lawyers to use them (“you mean, like my secretary?”). I have annually forecast the end of the keyboard. It’s stubborn resistance is deplorable, given its slowness and inadequacy as an interface. Will 2017 see at least the beginning of its end?
* Voice is the natural and obvious way to address a machine. We now have really good technology to relate voice documents to text. We can even (Wibbitz) turn text into video. And we have made two decades of progress in annotating documents with rich metadata, telling us what they contain and linking them to other texts in whatever form they have when stored or originated. Yet we still cannot fluently “communicate” with them.
* Yet they are, these texts, gradually getting the ability to communicate with each other. 2017 will see further evidence of self-cross referencing and self-updating environments. These will be essential to a future based on machine learning and machine intelligence. Will 2017 see the beginnings of a greater fluency within knowledge systems, be they business environments, scholarly research or intelligence systems, than exists between the people using them? “Sorry, I can no longer explain to you what we know about that, so perhaps your machine would like to talk to ours and get the full picture?”
* Please can we start inventing words to describe the forms we are using, instead of importing into the virtual world the format hangovers from the past. Book, magazine, newspaper, journal, article. Especially that last one. We need new words for episodes of scholarly communication, for example, that indicate aspects of research reporting: “article” does not cut it where “results” could mean “patent” or “data” or other matter relevant to research outcomes but stored elsewhere, not searchable in the same context etc. And the same confusing, terminological poverty exists everywhere.
* We need more numbers. We have spent the past twenty years trying hard to identify content, sources and authors. Now, in the face of legal sanctions which will only get tighter, we face an urgent need to better identify users. The ability to follow, record and measure online activity, and the value of the individual research trail as a contribution to knowledge, now becomes so great that individuals will be constrained to surrender privacy rights of their own in order to benefit from the data created as a result of others doing so. Or they may even be paid to do so.
* Self-publishing goes further and faster next year. Every publisher will have a system. Much will have been increased in sophistication and many services will be free. Creating documents that automatically join the community of reference and talk to each other in ways that update and restore currency is a predictable outcome, towards which we shall see further progress in 2017.
* “Verticalization” is becoming a key theme. We have seen in 2016 how a number of major information industry players have begun to exit horizontal, multi-market portfolio holdings and try to regroup around vertically-integrated, enterprise-driven corporate structures. More of that in 2017, as content becomes more commoditised and shared more effectively amongst users, and the age of data leads beyond the democratisation of information to the idea that it is not the information that has value that you need to protect as much as the way you treat it and relate it – we should be heralding the Age of Analytics.
* Look to see this reflected in M&A. More divestments of content that does not fit the vertical interest. More acquisition of tools, process systems, data analytics, discovery instruments etc. Once we added value to the information: now we will seek to add value to the process of using it, building client reliance on our ability to outsource whole sections of workflow seamlessly. This changes the dynamics of client relationships in ways that many current information players are wholly unprepared, as yet, to confront.
* Some of the old sayings learnt and rehearsed in the past 25 years of mass online usage remain valid. “Nothing succeeds in the network until it has first failed in the network” (think about current commentary on Blockchain). “Change is infinitely and often imperceptibly slow… but then goes with a rush at the end” (think about networks and user populations and communities and brands). “Nothing is so funny to the coming generation as the old-fashioned and antediluvian way in which the immediately previous generation organised themselves in the virtual world” (think about My Space and Facebook, and then Facebook and…)
How many was that? No, do NOT count them. If you have reached this point please accept the profound good wishes of this writer for a peaceful, productive and overwhelmingly happy new year. And if you didn’t? Well, the interstices between wisdom and idiocy are wafer-thin, and we shall never know whether you will have been wiser for not reading it than I have been by virtue of writing it!
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