Overview: Innovation Strategy

The Turing Test is supposed to determine whether a machine can think, or seem to think. How would you test whether a machine can process and simulate feelings so well that a human user could develop real feelings for it? Well, how do you test whether you could love anyone?You flirt.... The goals of flirting... resemble the goals of contemporary …

After so much talking about the risks of ultraintelligent machines, it is time to turn on the light, stop worrying about sci-fi scenarios, and start focusing on AI’s actual challenges, in order to avoid making painful and costly mistakes in the design and use of our smart technologies... Believers in true AI and in Good’s ‘intelligence explosion’…

AI can be effective, particularly its Natural Language Processing (NLP) aspect — but only in the right context... we need to work out when it’s a help and when it’s a hindrance... Whilst AI may be the new kid on the technological block, it works best as a complement to good UI, not a substitute.

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

TL;DR: because you think it’s a solution in itself, while it’s merely a framework for organizations to create them in an efficient and controlled manner.

But Go programs still fell far short of human players in ability. It seemed as though a strong intuitive sense of board position was essential to success.What’s new and important about AlphaGo is that its developers have figured out a way of bottling something very like that intuitive sense... .Just because neural networks can do a good job of cap…

The hard part is striking the right balance. The just-right spot where everyone knows enough, no one feels like they know too little, and no one feels like they’re being over-informed to the point of it being annoying or distracting. And doing it all at a variety of resolutions — big picture, medium-picture, and small picture — without overdoing i…

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.”... AlphaGo ... has beaten the very best by playing in ways that no human would.... AlphaGo has taught him, a human, to be a better player. He sees things he didn’t see before. And …

AI still can’t ... deal with natural language well enough, but it’s getting much better. And the way translation’s currently done will change because Google now has what promises to be a much better way to do machine translation.

the rise of Trump using language of how we talk about startups that become black swans.

the fear is that the platform will change without warning, and teams will have ended up wasting precious time and effort before they get a chance to get it right or reap the benefits if they do.

What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.... All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time... Frazzled, exhausted, and …

data enrichment platforms have become a valuable resource for data scientists looking to automate and scale the cleaning, labeling and enrichment of data using human intelligence for machine learning — i.e. training data creation.

companies made huge bets on branded content... to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers... invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. Digital crowds now serve as very effective an…

This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task... Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year... Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow... suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-…

Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more... with its head of AI taking over search, the company seems to believe this is the way forward.

“Innovation is not just a cool thing. It’s not just a process. It’s a culture. We research. We design. We build.” Innovation should not compete with the daily grind of the company, it must emerge from it

an edge is not just a term for advantage itself; it can also be the place where you can find that advantage... the outer rim that frames what you do and separates it, quite conveniently, from what you don’t... When you proceed beyond this border in business, the main thing that changes is risk. they are the places where the inside and the outside…

a new role that I believe will become more and more important: the Minister of Culture.WARNING: REAL CONTENT AHEAD! This essay links to most of the best research on culture. ... I’ll also show how to generate a culture score for your company and improve it. ... a full 3-6 month course on culture ... Don’t think of this as a long post — think of it…

... high levels of skills obsolescence. We must anticipate massive quantitative and qualitative educational needs. Technological literacy will be key, obviously, but I also believe we will need to cultivate our “core human competencies”. Collaboration, empathy, active listening and caring, creativity ... anticipate the social effects of a “winner-…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

AI in itself isn’t good or bad. We’re just beginning to go past our initial, vague apprehensions, and to look concretely into how AI can benefit society while ensuring that it doesn’t hurt us.

If we define design as the decisions that determine how something works ... then Design Thinking is simply the process to make more thoughtful decisions.... We can only knit together what we already know in new ways to get to the something that’s never existed before.... Design Thinking offers — a way to get where you’re going when you don’t kno…

For the US daily newspaper sector over the past decade, weekday circulation has fallen 17 percent and ad revenue more than 50 percent ... a key for the industry is changing the culture of newsrooms to foster innovation. This includes allowing interaction of different groups—journalists, technicians and others which the study referred to as "tribes…