Innovate: A new way of thinking about technology

By John Moravec | 5/12/2006 | Filed under: Articles, Innovation, Technology

This year’s April/May issue of Innovate includes an interview by James Morrison with Joel Barker and Scott Erickson, who:

propose an ecological model that classifies technology according to different clusters or regions, each of which entails its own perspective of technology and how such technology should be utilized. Their five regions model thus shifts the focus away from defining technology in terms of its origins and towards defining it in terms of values, purposes, and results.

This is an interesting read, but I am not particularly impressed with the five regions model. In particular, it needs an “ideo tech,” or space for masternarratives, as well as a space to accommodate culture and new culture formation. Without these spaces, the model lacks the recognition of purposive, transformative, goal-oriented (and goal-generative) change.

View the Innovate article.

Comments

About John Moravec

Dr. John Moravec is a faculty member in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development and the Innovation Studies/Master of Liberal Studies graduate programs at the University of Minnesota. He is the principal of Education Futures LLC; a co-founder of the Horizon Forum, a roundtable on the future of education at all levels; and is the editor of Education Futures. He can be emailed at john@educationfutures.com.

http://www.educationfutures.com/john

Tags: postmodernism

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Related posts

The futures of the state fair

Time for shameless self-promotion! The StarTribune is running an article on the future of the Minnesota State Fair, which contains input from Arthur Harkins and myself. From the article: “The State Fair has traditionally been a showcase, but in the future, we see it becoming much more of a collaborative, idea- and product-generating place,” said [...]

The “great Singularity debate”

ZDNet is running a blog story on the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. Particular attention in the article is focused on the debate between Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Hofstader on utopian versus dystopian futures: Kurzweil acknowledged that Singularity could lead to an unappealing or cataclysmic future, but he believes his vision will have a soft [...]

Leapfrogging to an innovation-driven society

In an interview with Frank Moss, director of MIT’s Media Lab, BusinessWeek uncovers a vision for the future driven by disruptive change. This thinking is behind a new breed of entrepreneurs who, says Moss: Resist the current temptation to make incremental changes to attract funding. It might get you off the ground, but I don’t [...]

New Scientist: Emerging dark age of innovation

New Scientist’s Robert Adler writes: “…we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. [...]

NY Times: Business reorganization affects innovation

Article link: Innovation and disruption still going hand in hand The New York Times reports that “the cutthroat environment of ever increasing competition could actually hinder future technological advances.” The drive for innovative business models in an increasingly deregulated and globalized environment creates rapid continuous change in the global economy. An American school textbook publisher, [...]

tumblr statistics