Dare mighty things!

All writing by topic

Inktober 2018

For Inktober I did a drawing each day illustrating something that is useful/interesting to know more about. The topics were (Click name to jump to the image): Bell Laboratories DARPA Macronutrients Venture capital Fusion GANs science Medieval Tech Reinforcement Learning The Innovation Pipeline Academia Elder Care Sales Pipelines Weddings Human... [Read More]

Startup Constraints

Venture-funded startups are the innovation machine du jour. Uber, Airbnb, Google, etc. Whenever someone wants to make a change in the world, they start a company. Popular opinion is that startups can change anything but there are actually many constraints on startups. These constraints either kill the startup, prevent it... [Read More]

Innovation Channels

There are roughly1 eight channels that enable innovations in the modern world. Each imposes a set of constraints on the projects they support. Why should we think about innovation channels? The channels’ constraints shape the sorts of innovations which can successfully impact the world. If a project doesn’t meet the... [Read More]

Principles for Innovation Orgs

I’ve been systemically learning about organizations that were inordinately effective at producing innovations in the 20th Century: DARPA, Bell Labs, PARC, etc. Despite the celebration and focus these orgs have received, several under-discussed similarities stand out to me. Most of these points involve uncomfortable truths and incentives that we often... [Read More]