Ten critical elements for an open innovation culture

Stefan Lindegaard, INTRAP

In our Leadership+Innovation community on LinkedIn, Chris Thoen who is a R&D Director at Procter & Gamble, asked which elements are needed in order to create an open innovation culture. Our community had an interesting discussion and I want to share the key elements that came up.

- Willingness to accept that not all the smart people work for your company. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company.

- Willingness to strive for balance between internal and external R&D. External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.

- Willingness to give part of the control to others. We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it. We don’t need to control everything from the cradle to the grave.

- No need to always be first. Building a better business model is better than getting to market first.

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Really great book - a mix of the history of science and technology with personalities and social-political forces. It reads like a detective story with questions of morality raised but unanswered. The book is long – 886 pages, but it is definitely worth the effort. I’ve collected a few examples from the book that I really liked. I have not put them in quotes but they all come straight from the book. In some cases I’ve added my footnotes to help understand the selection.

I hope that someone writes a screen play around the struggles that the emigrant scientists had with politicians and the military when they tried to convey the potential of the atomic and later the thermonuclear bombs, and their impacts on political systems.

This is a personal selection of excerpts that appealed to me as I read the book. It’s by no means complete. For an excellent review, read the New York Times book review, “The Men Who Made the Sun Rise” by William J. Broad (http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/specials/rhodes-making.html)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Paul Schumann

Complexity and Economic Growth

“Over the past two centuries, mankind has accomplished what used to be unthinkable. When we look back at our long list of achievements, it is easy to focus on the most audacious of them, such as our conquest of the skies and the moon. Our lives, however, have been made easier and more prosperous by a large number of more modest, yet crucially important feats. Think of electric bulbs, telephones, cars, personal computers, antibiotics, TVs, refrigerators, watches and water heaters. Think of the many innovations that benefit us despite our minimal awareness of them, such as advances in port management, electric power distribution, agrochemicals and water purification.

This progress was possible because we got smarter. During the past two centuries, the amount of productive knowledge we hold expanded dramatically. This was not, however, an individual phenomenon. It was a collective phenomenon. As individuals we are not much more capable than our ancestors, but as societies we have developed the ability to make all that we have mentioned – and much, much more.

Modern societies can amass large amounts of productive knowledge because they distribute bits and pieces of it among its many members. But to make use of it, this knowledge has to be put back together through organizations and markets. Thus, individual specialization begets diversity at the national and global level. Our most prosperous modern societies are wiser, not because their citizens are individually brilliant, but because these societies hold a diversity of know how and because they are able to recombine it to create a larger variety of smarter and better products. The social accumulation of productive knowledge has not been a universal phenomenon. It has taken place in some parts of the world, but not in others. Where it has happened, it has underpinned an incredible increase in living standards. Where it has not, living standards resemble those of centuries past. The enormous income gaps between rich and poor nations are an expression of the vast differences in productive knowledge amassed by different nations. These differences are expressed in the diversity and sophistication of the things that each of them makes, which we explore in detail in this Atlas.

Just as nations differ in the amount of productive knowledge they hold, so do products. The amount of knowledge that is required to make a product can vary enormously from one good to the next. Most modern products require more knowledge than what a single person can hold. Nobody in this world, not even the saviest geek nor the most knowledgeable entrepreneur knows how to make a computer. He has to rely on others who know about battery technology, liquid crystals, microprocessor design, software development, metallurgy, milling, lean manufacturing and human resource management, among many other skills. That is why the average worker in a rich country works in a firm that is much larger and more connected than firms in poor countries. For a society to operate at a high level of total productive knowledge, individuals must know different things. Diversity of productive knowledge, however, is not enough. In order to put knowledge into productive use, societies need to reassemble these distributed bits through teams, organizations and markets.

Accumulating productive knowledge is difficult. For the most part, it is not available in books or on the Internet. It is embedded in brains and human networks. It is tacit and hard to transmit and acquire. It comes from years of experience more than from years of schooling. Productive knowledge, therefore, cannot be learned easily like a song or a poem. It requires structural changes. Just like learning a language requires changes in the structure of the brain, developing a new industry requires changes in the patterns of interaction inside an organization or society.

Expanding the amount of productive knowledge available in a country involves enlarging the set of activities that the country is able to do. This process, however, is tricky. Industries cannot exist if the requisite productive knowledge is absent, yet accumulating bits of productive knowledge will make little sense in places where the industries that require it are not present. This “chicken and egg” problem slows down the accumulation of productive knowledge. It also creates important path dependencies. It is easier for countries to move into industries that mostly reuse what they already know, since these industries require adding modest amounts of productive knowledge. By gradually adding new knowledge to what they already know, countries economize on the chicken and egg problem. That is why we find empirically that countries move from the products that they already create to others that are “close by” in terms of the productive knowledge that they require.

The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge that each country holds. Our measure of productive knowledge can account for the enormous income differences between the nations of the world and has the capacity to predict the rate at which countries will grow. In fact, it is much more predictive than other well known development indicators, such as those that attempt to measure competitiveness, governance and education.

A central contribution of this Atlas is the creation of a map that captures the similarity of products in terms of their knowledge requirements. This map provides paths through which productive knowledge is more easily accumulated.

We call this map, or network, the product space, and use it to locate each country, illustrating their current productive capabilities and the products that lie nearby. Ultimately, this Atlas views economic development as a social learning process, but one that is rife with pitfalls and dangers. Countries accumulate productive knowledge by developing the capacity to make a larger variety of products of increasing complexity. This process involves trial and error. It is a risky journey in search of the possible. Entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers play a fundamental role in this economic exploration.

By providing rankings, we wish to clarify the scope of the achievable, as revealed by the experience of others. By tracking progress, we offer feedback regarding current trends. By providing maps, we do not pretend to tell potential explorers where to go, but to pinpoint what is out there and what routes may be shorter or more secure. We hope this will empower these explorers with valuable information that will encourage them to take on the challenge and thus speed up the process of economic development.”

From the Preface of The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity, Hausmann, Hildago, et al, http://atlas.media.mit.edu/media/atlas/pdf/HarvardMIT_AtlasOfEconomicComplexity_Part_I.pdf

The Gardens of Democracy

This little book is a "must read" for every thinking citizen of America. It offers some fresh thoughts about the issues we face and potential solutions. In actuality, it is neither liberal nor conservative, but a third position, a new progressive based on the newer sciences, especially complexity. The central paradigm shift described in this book is from "machine brain" to "garden brain".

“The failure of American politics to address and solve the great challenges of our time-climate change, debt and deficits, worsening schools, rising health care costs, the shriveling of the middle class-is not just a failure of will or nerve. It is equally a failure of ideas and understanding. And the failure to address these challenges isn't just a matter of politics, but of survival.

To begin with, we labor today under a painfully confining choice between outmoded ideologies on both the left and the right. On the left, too many remain wedded to paradigms first formed during the decades between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. They are top-down, prescriptive, bureaucratic notions about how to address social challenges. These state-centric approaches made sense in a centralizing, industrializing America. They make much less sense in the networked economy and polity of today.

On the right, we hear ideas even more historically irrelevant: laissez-faire economics and a "don't tread on me" idea of citizenship that might have been tolerable in 1775 when the country had 3 million largely agrarian inhabit-ants, only some of whom could vote, but is at best naive and at worst destructive in a diverse, interdependent, largely urban nation of over 300 million.

Our politics has become an over-rehearsed, over-ritualized piece of stage combat between these two old ideologies. False choice after polarizing false choice emanates from Washington. Both ideologies-indeed, the surrender of American politics to ideology itself, and the abandonment of pragmatism as a guiding political philosophy- make it harder by the day for America to adapt.

We wrote this short book to offer a new way. We aim to reach not "moderates" or "centrists" who split the difference between left and right. We aim to reach those who think independently. That might mean those who claim no party affiliation, though it also includes many loyal Democrats and Republicans. It definitely means those who are uncomfortable being confined by narrow choices, old paradigms, and zero-sum outcomes.

If you can hold these paired thoughts in your head, we wrote this book for you:

• The federal government spends too much money. The wealthy should pay much more in taxes.

• Every American should have access to high-quality health care. We spend far too much on health care in the United States already.

 • We need to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to ensure our economy continues to grow.

 • Unions are a crucially important part of our economy and society. Unions have become overly protectionist and are in need of enormous amounts of reform.

 • We need strong government. We need strong citizens.

Contemporary American political discourse sees these pairings as either-or. Independent-thinking Americans see them as both-and. Our goal in these pages is to push past the one-dimensional, left-right choices of contemporary politics-between more government or less, selfishness and altruism, suffocating collectivism and market fundamentalism-and find orthogonal approaches to our challenges. The great challenge of this age-and the point of this book-is to rethink how we as citizens create change, how the economy truly works, and what government fundamentally is for. The great challenge of this age is to change how we see, and by so doing, improve our ability to adapt.”

 I don’t personally think that the metaphors of machinebrain and gardenbrain as all that useful, and may be confusing, if it helps people to understand the concepts, then OK.

 “This is not just about economics or politics; it's about imagination and our ability to conceive of new ways of conceiving of things. It is about our ability to adapt and evolve in the face of changing circumstances and the consequences of our actions. History shows that civilizations tend eventually to get stuck in the patterns that had brought them success. They can either stay stuck and decay, or get unstuck and thrive.

We posit in these pages that this country has for too long been stuck in a mode of seeing and thinking called Machinebrain. We argue that the time has come for a new mode of public imagination that we call Gardenbrain.

Machinebrain sees the world and democracy as a series of mechanisms-clocks and gears, perpetual motion machines, balances and counterbalances. Machinebrain requires you to conceive of the economy as perfectly efficient and automatically self-correcting. Machinebrain presupposes stability and predictability, and only grudgingly admits the need for correction. Even the word commonly used for such correction-"regulation"-is mechanical in origin and regrettable in connotation.

Gardenbrain sees the world and democracy as an entwined set of ecosystems-sinks and sources of trust and social capital, webs of economic growth, networks of behavioral contagion. Gardenbrain forces you to conceive of the economy as man-made and effective only if well constructed and well cared-for.

 Gardenbrain presupposes instability and unpredictability, and thus expects a continuous need for seeding, feeding, and weeding ever-changing systems. To be a gardener is not to let nature take its course; it is to tend. It is to accept responsibility for nurturing the good growth and killing the bad. Tending and regulating thus signify the same work, but tending frames the work as presumptively necessary and beneficial rather than as something to be suffered.

Machinebrain treats people as cogs: votes to be collected by political machines; consumers to be manipulated by marketing machines; employees to be plugged into industrial machines. It is a static mindset of control and fixity, and is the basis of most of our inherited institutions, from schools to corporations to prisons.

Gardenbrain sees people as interdependent creators of a dynamic world: our emotions affect each other; our personal choices cascade into public patterns, which can be shaped but rarely controlled. It is a dynamic mindset of influence and evolution, of direction without control, and is the basis of our future.

 Machinebrain allows you to rationalize atomized selfishness and a neglect of larger problems. It accepts social ills like poverty, environmental degradation, and ignorance as the inevitable outcome of an efficient marketplace. It is fatalistic and reductionist, treating change as an unnecessary and risky deviation from the norm.

Gardenbrain recognizes such social ills and the shape of our society as the byproduct of man-made arrangements. It is evolutionary and holistic, treating change as the norm, essential and full of opportunity. It leads you to acknowledge that human societies thrive only through active gardening.

Gardenbrain changes everything.”

The authors write:

“We acknowledge that we could have written separate books on these three topics: citizenship, economy, role of government. But our aim was precisely to show that these things are connected-not least by a need for new thinking and new seeing. In making our book short, we know that we trade detail for perspective. We simply believe this is a time when perspective matters most.

Thus we close the book by trying to put into historical context the need for America now to grow up-and the need for us to understand freedom not only as personal liberty but also as the collective force that fuels adaption and survival. Our extraordinary experiment in democracy and capitalism is over 230 years old. We Americans are not children anymore. Indeed, some think that the nation is in rapid decline. We completely disagree. We think of America as an adolescent or young adult coming into our prime, full of promise, energy, and enthusiasm for the challenges of our times-but in need of maturation of thought, habit, and awareness. The words enshrined in the Jefferson Memorial, written 40 years after the Declaration and 43 years before Darwin authored Origin if Species, capture this spirit perfectly:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Later, they write:

“Our century is yielding a second Enlightenment, and the narrative it offers about what makes us tick, individually and collectively, is infinitely more sophisticated than what we got the last time around. Since the mid -1960s, there have been profound advances in how we understand the systemic nature of botany, biology, physics, computer science, neuroscience, oceanography, atmospheric science, cognitive science, zoology, psychology, epidemiology, and even, yes, economics. Across these fields, a set of conceptual shifts is underway:

Simple → Complex

Atomistic → Networked

Equilibrium → Disequilibrium

Linear → Non-linear

Mechanistic → Behavioral

Efficient → Effective

Predictive → Adaptive

Independent →Interdependent

Individual ability → Group diversity

Rational calculator → Irrational approximators

Selfish → Strongly reciprocal

Win-lose → Win-win or lose-lose

Competition → Cooperation

These shifts, of course, are not as clean or simple as they may appear in such a list. We acknowledge that there are volumes of nuance condensed here. But at a macro level, these shifts are real, consequential, and too often unseen.”

In my opinion, most of these shifts are encompassed by complexity science, game theory and evolution.

A summary of the concepts developed in this book are:

• Self interest: true self interest is mutual interest

• Great citizenship: society becomes how you behave

• True capitalism: we're all better off when we're all better off

• Self government: big what, small how  

The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2011, 173p

Open Science

What if every scientist could share their data as easily as they tweet about their lunch? Michael Nielsen calls for scientists to embrace new tools for collaboration that will enable discoveries to happen at the speed of Twitter.

A physicist turned writer, Michael Nielsen believes online communication and collaboration tools are revolutionizing the way we make scientific discoveries.

Hedy Lamarr: Inventor

Hedy Lamarr(real name Hedwig Kiesler) was an Austrian-American actress celebrated for her great beauty and a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age". During my childhood, she represented the popular image of beauty.

You can image my surprise to find in reading a review entitled “Brainy Beauty” by John Adams in The New York Times Book Review, 12/18/11 of new book, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes, Doubleday, 2011, that she was also an inventor.

She collaborated with George Antheil, known as a musical anarchist, to create new weapons systems.

“What drew Rhodes to the twin story of the Bad Boy of Music and "the most beautiful woman in the world" was their invention of a radio-controlled "spread spectrum" torpedo-guidance system, for which they received a patent in 1942.

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks. And Antheil, arguably the most mechanically inclined of all composers, having long before mastered the byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls, retained a special genius for "out of the box" problem solving.

Over several years the composer and the movie star spent countless hours together drafting and redrafting designs, not only for the torpedo system but also for a "proximity fuse" antiaircraft shell. In reality, their patent was an early version of today's smart bombs. The device as they made it employed a constantly roving radio signal to guide the torpedo toward its target. Because the signal kept "hopping" from one frequency to another, it would be impossible for the enemy to lock onto. To solve the problems of synchronizing receiver and transmitter, Antheil proposed a tiny structure inspired by the workings of a piano roll. This was a feat that years later would be used in everything from cell phone and Bluetooth technology to GPS instruments.

On Aug. 11, 1942, United States Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to them for their design. But persuading the Navy to take it seriously proved insurmountable~ Pentagon bureaucracy, coupled with the fact that the design's co-inventor was a movie star, resulted in their idea being ignored. Hedy's folly may have been in assuming men in government might overcome their prejudice that a beautiful woman could not have brains and imagination. But she lived to see similar versions of her invention be put into common practice, and in 1997, Hedy Lamarr, at the age of 82, and George Antheil (posthumously) were honored with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Conservative and Liberal Moral Values

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.



The Righteous Mind

Bill Moyers and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt talk about the psychological underpinnings of our contentious culture, why we can’t trust our own opinions, and the demonizing of our adversaries. Also, a Bill Moyers essay on why Newt Gingrich might be afraid of Saul Alinsky.

Collaboration

“Say to yourself at break of day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and ungrateful men. All these vices have fallen to them because they have no knowledge of good and bad. But I, who have beheld the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is the wrong; and of the wrongdoer himself, and seeing that his nature is akin to my own - not because he is of the same blood and seed, but because he shares with me in mind and a portion of the divine - I, then, can neither be harmed by any of these men, nor can I become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, or eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another and turn away from him is surely to work against him.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.1

I expect that I will share more from Meditations as I found that it speaks to me. I do not agree with all of his philosophy, but I think that most of what he writes is still applicable today.

Meditations is organized into books and chapters. Each chapter is only a paragraph or two long. The first book is an acknowledgment to writers, teachers, friends and relatives of Aurelius and how they influenced him. This selection is then actually the opening words of his book.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 1997; translated by Robin Hard with Introduction and Notes by Christopher Gill. Marcus lived from 121 to 180 AD (CE).

Leaders and Non Zero-sum Logic

"Leaders who can harness non-zero-sum logic to draw people into cooperative effort prevail in competition for status and other social resources, inviting future leaders to do the same on a larger scale." Robert Wright

Language as the Root of Cooperation and Intellectual Property

Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.

The Power of the People

The Power of the People, Dave Munger, Seed Magazine, 12/22/10

"Some of the most influential scientists in history, from Franklin, to Lavoisier, to Mendel, weren’t formally educated in their fields of study. They just took an interest, and started conducting experiments, sometimes in their own back yards. But more recently, the specialized tools of science have put new discoveries out of reach for ordinary people. Now that dynamic is beginning to change again.

The internet has spawned a fantastic explosion in science that allows non-experts to actually participate in science by interacting with scientific data itself. I wrote about several such projects last year. Now, in just the past week, two new public tools for analyzing data have been unveiled, from two very different fields of study.

First, the Zooniverse project has released its newest endeavor, called The Milky Way Project. One of the astronomers working on the project, Sarah Kendrew, explained how the project works on her blog last week. Users from among the hundreds of thousands registered with Zooniverse log in to their accounts and are shown images of the Milky Way from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Their job: To identify regions known as “bubbles,” areas of gas and other debris that appear to be arranged in nearly-spherical structures."

***

"But the Milky Way Project was upstaged a bit last week by another project that allows anyone to dig deep into data of a different sort: a significant percentage of the entirety of books that have ever been published. The project’s founders are calling it “culturomics,” and their first journal article on the topic was published last week in Science. The research has been discussed extensively on blogs, but the best way to experience the work might just be to visit the tool Google developed that allows anyone to see a cross-section of a vast dataset: the Books Ngram Viewer. Type in any word (or several words or short phrases separated by commas), and you’ll instantly be presented with a graph showing the how frequently that word has been used over the past two centuries. Here’s the graph I made for macaroni and spaghetti, showing that macaroni was the more popular term until about 1950, and spaghetti was essentially unheard of before 1880."

***

"Projects like Zooniverse and Google’s Ngram Viewer represent crowd-sourcing on the grandest scale yet achieved. What I’d like to see next is an analysis of the crowds who are using these tools. What words do people look up? What methods do they use to identify galaxies and bubbles—and how long do they persist at it? The answers to these questions may, in turn, lead to even more powerful tools—and a greater understanding of our world."

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Here's an example that I tried of the Books Ngram Viewer. I searched for two words that I think should go together: innovation and commons:

You can see that the word commons has been dropping for a long time, and innovation has been rising. Interesting. Don't know what it means but it's another cool tool.

On Competitive Collaboration

On Competitive Collaboration, Rolf Heuer, Seed Magazine, 11/26/10

"Fundamental science drives technology and innovation, laying the foundations for progress and improvement. It’s hard to find a company that does not rely on the fruits of basic research in carrying out its day-to-day business. Basic research is the lifeblood of industry—without it, there would be no science to apply, and any commitment to improving the state of the world would be bound to fail.

The timescale from lab to marketplace is often long, far longer than any political cycle, and for that reason basic science is rarely a top priority for government decision makers. So, under pressure to deliver quick results, science policy frequently strives to identify those areas of applied science that can mature before the next election. Thankfully, humans are curious by nature, so basic research continues to attract some of the brightest minds, and a reasonable share of the funding. It’s just as well, since without it progress would slowly come to a halt."

***

"Science and its technological spin-offs are not the only ways in which the LHC* community can contribute to improving the state of the world. Since taking up my mandate as director general of CERN, I have found myself responding to as many questions about the management of the particle-physicists community as about the science itself. Can you run a $10 billion project with hundreds of partners on the basis of consensus? Does competitive collaboration really work? Are there lessons for the business community in how basic science is adapting to an increasingly globalized world? The answer to all these questions is clearly yes. As well as generating knowledge and driving innovation, the way we manage “big science” can serve as a role model for a wider section of society.

Globalization comes naturally to particle physicists. Traditionally, the big labs such as CERN have provided infrastructure that has been open to scientists from around the world. Typically, there have been at least two such facilities in the world addressing the same scientific questions from different angles and engendering a spirit of collaborative competition—two words that do not usually sit comfortably together. What this has shown is that governance by consensus, fueled by collaboration and competition, can deliver outstanding results.

A deeper understanding of the universe, new technologies, and a role model for managing broadly distributed and culturally varied organizations: These are outcomes of basic science that are valuable to society. And it’s reasonable to expect the scientific community to deliver them in the short term. The most valuable in terms of sustained improvement of the world is the one closest to my heart—understanding the universe and in the process laying down a new seam of fundamental scientific knowledge for future generations to mine. Human ingenuity being what it is, the future will undoubtedly bring applications based on discoveries made with the LHC. Although, as with Newton’s gravity, it may be some time before we’re privy to all of them, and to their implications. For our children and grandchildren, however, I am sure that the wait will have been worthwhile."

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* LHC: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature. Wikipedia

On the Next Internet: Grid Computing

On the Next Internet, Bob Jones, Seed Magazine, 2/9/11

"Charles Curran, a physicist who recently retired as the longtime storage consultant at CERN, remembers the old days of data access: when filling a request from a researcher was often a labor-intensive, daylong misadventure.

In the 1970s, information from CERN’s accelerators and experiments was stored on tapes, held in a huge library in the IT department, originally retrieved manually by operators and then copied to disk for the researcher. Overworked operators fell asleep, went missing for hours at a time, invented trickery to make the machines work faster, and overloaded the conveyor belts, causing tapes to fall off and disappear. Tape-retrieval robots squared off against mice (in one documented case, the mouse was found months later, desiccated) or overheated when they couldn’t reach tapes, melting their wheels in frustration. A request to see a certain tape often took 24 hours to fill.

Now the wait is about two minutes, hardly enough time to get a cup of coffee."

***

"The fundamentals of grid computing, first developed to allow complex physics projects, has led to a related technology known as cloud computing, heavily virtualized distributed computing, which has been adopted for many commercial applications. The public may not know they are using a cloud—but they are. Online banking, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, and web-based email are all examples of heavily virtualized services that exist “out in the cloud.” Making a full cycle, grid computing itself is adopting aspects of cloud technology, making more use of virtualization and setting up grid sites in the cloud. However, true grid infrastructure still excels at collaborative sharing of resources belonging to different institutions; clouds spread the resources of one domain to the rest of the world for remote access. Collaboration is the basis of all the large-scale scientific challenges (e.g., CERN has 20 member states). Projects like the LHC are too big for any one organization or one country to do alone; collaboration is the only option. The same holds for the major challenges facing society across other disciplines (energy, climate change, food production). Now that we have excellent ways to reach and share data, we have a whole new set of problems, albeit more sophisticated. Who owns freely shared data? How long should it be kept? What besides the data must be kept so we can use it? Who pays for the energy to store data? How can researchers or disciplines resistant to sharing—afraid their ideas will be poached—be encouraged in a “publish or perish’’ world?"

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