All this pre-supposed that we had a clear definition of what innovation was. From my time there, there seemed to be an assumption that all IT and biomedical related businesses were essentially innovative (unless they competed against our existing client base).

Whereas a food business that borrowed the ‘virtual fab’ model from chipmakers in the semiconductor industry to take on big guns like Proctor & Gamble or PepsiCo wasn’t. I guess the bottom line I am trying to get across is that innovation is critically important, yet tragically misunderstood by many people.

Judy Estrin has a genuine pedigree in innovation coming from a family of innovators. Her father worked with John von Neumann (the father of modern digital computing) at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and her mother was a professor at the computer science department of UCLA.  Judy has a Silicon Valley pedigree having had senior roles or been a board member at: Sun Microsystem (who build servers on which banks, telecoms providers and many dot.coms depended – now part of Oracle), Cisco (who pretty much are the internet infrastructure) and FedEx.

The book addresses the challenge of innovation that we currently have.

I have had a gut feeling about the decline in pace of innovation over the past decade or so. In a lot of respects improvements in computing have lost their sparkle, they longer feel like a leap forward, but more of the same.

When I think about the dot com period there were meaningful improvements in telecoms hardware, web technology, software and business processes – not all of them where financially successful but things felt as if they moved forward.

If I think about web 2.0 – the biggest single improvement was more of a software engineering improvement with a deliberate focus by the likes of 37signals and the original flickr team on avoiding feature bloat at the expense of usability.

Facebook is an evolution from the likes of The WELL, Friendster, Friends Reunited and MySpace – rather than a true innovation.

The iPhone whilst beautifully crafted in terms of software and hardware, increasingly reminds me of my long departed Palm Vx PDA – but with a shitty battery life.

In Closing the innovation gap, I found the book to fall into three distinct sections:

• Charting the origins and progress of what I will call ‘innovation entropy’ in the west. This talks about how the cold war was entwined with the rise and stall of innovative research that helped in creation of technology that we take for granted today: keyhole surgery, the internet, modern computers, cellular phones and CCDs (coupled-charged device which go into digital cameras.)
• The economic and cultural effects of ‘innovation entropy’. In this respect Estrin echoes the work of Will Hutton’s The state we’re in published in 1996 which I read in college. Like Hutton, Estrin is a critic of short-termism in business, the financial markets, academia and government spending. Some of this short-termism was unintentional as the law of unintended consequences kicked in due to changes in regulations that were designed to encourage innovation. A secondary factor that Estrin points out is a corresponding lack of appetite for risk – or the rise of risk management which has helped cripple long-term research which begat big innovation
• How to address ‘innovation entropy’. Estrin maps out the areas where educators, government, financiers and businesses need to change and collaborate on. This collaboration requires root-and-branch change

Estrin’s book is powerful as she pulls together a coherent story which makes it easy to read. As a prominent person within Silicon Valley she gains access to many people who are at the head of organisations driving innovation at the present time.

You can find out more at Estrin’s website developed to support the book.

Young geeks interested in homebrew computing used to dumpster dive HP trash for parts they could use in their own projects. The bench in the garage of a hardware engineer where he would be building the prototype of a world-changing widget would feature at least some HP test equipment. Steve Wozniak took the Apple I to his employer HP before Steve Jobs and him set up Apple.

Apple’s laser focus on product design, quality and customer service is mirrored in the writings of Packard decades earlier.

Packard tells his and Bill Hewlett’s story in a matter of fact way. It is honest and informal like a blog post, though it is obvious that he had at least one eye on how history would judge both him and Hewlett. Returning to the HP Way after having first read it in the early 1990s, I was struck by how progressive it was. At the time HP must have had more testosterone running round it than the average episode of Mad Men; yet managed to produce a thoroughly modern organisation.

The title of the book rests on its status exposing the yakuza groups, in particular the Yamaguchi-gumi and its former member panderer turned police informant Goto Tadamasa. The crime aspect of the book I found to be disappointing, not because Adelstein is a bad writer; but that the yakusa are disappointingly normal – just the same as the criminals I knew and grew up with back in Liverpool – but with better body art. Though Adelstein does a good job conveying the fear of retribution that he has from Goto through the book.

From my personal perspective Adelstein’s book comes into its own from my point of view was the descriptions of how ‘press clubs’ work and insight into the very different dynamic between the media and authority – this is a real eye-opener for western PR people.

But the thing I really liked was his effortless way of describing everyday Japanese life from eating pre-packed noodles, Japanese etiquette to the rituals with colleagues and interactions he has with Japanese friends. At the end of the book I was left with the impression that Tokyo and everyday Japanese living was Adelstein’s real vice.

Coupland skillfully pulls together a multi-threaded story that pulls together globalisation, environmental angst, economic decline, end times, murder, drug abuse, changing media consumption and corporate corruption in a tight plot. Coupland drives the story on through five narrators and still manages to provide each one of them with a well-rounded character profile. I particularly like the way Coupland manages to understand and articulate how his characters use and related to technology.

Whilst the book is less literal than Generation X or Microserfs it is still a work of its time. One gets the sense that Coupland writes in a semi-reverential way of his previous works. Even the title of this book Generation A – whilst taken as a quote from a speech by Kurt Vonnegut at Syracuse University in 1994. The style of the novel is an obvious reference to Generation X, and like that book the real focus is on angst as a major force in modern life.

The main protagonist is a former special forces operative who is now a policeman weaving in and out of the political intrigue involving the mayor, the government, oligarchs and political factions. It is the most detailed dense graphic novel I have ever come across and I mean this in a good way. Leon and Lewis manage to encapsulate the intrigue and culture following the collapse of communism.

Without giving too much away the story has a new twist on superhero mythology which is a homage to the ‘man of steel‘. The artwork is bleak and dark, reminding me of Frank Miller’s artwork.

I had wanted to get hold of a copy of Black Blizzard for its famous use of ‘rough’ drawings and diagonal lines to convey movement.

I was not disappointed by Drawn & Quarterly reprint of Tatsumi’s work. The lettering and translation is sympathetic to Tatsumi’s vision. Black Blizzard is a classic work of pulp fiction that Dashiell Hammett would have been proud of, but with a nod to Bushido in terms of a heavy emphasis on duty, respect for authority and self-sacrifice.

The whole earth of the title is a nod to history: The story goes that Brand inspired by the use of acid started a campaign to get a photograph of the whole earth published. He sold badges with Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? on them and found a grassroots movement around it. He rightly summised the image would be a powerful symbol. This was a key point in the history of the modern green movement.

Stewart was responsible for publishing The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link). The Whole Earth Catalog was a regularly published book of useful information not mediated by authority that sprang out of hippie culture – a kind of Wikipedia of its day. The WELL is the proto-social network which connected a diverse range of technocrats, artists and journalists who would go on to play an important part in the modern web and set the libertarian point-of-view of the digerati – its got some great content on there and I would recommend that anyone interested join – my user name is ged if you want to reach out to me there. The netizen mantra that information wants to be free was taken from a speech that Brand gave in 1984 at the first Hackers Conference.

If you want to know more about Stewart I can recommend Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Its a big book but a great read that I completed cover-to-cover one time on a flight to Hong Kong.

Whole Earth Discipline breaks down into two distinct parts. The first part builds on the famous Environmental Heresies essay that Brand published in the MIT Technology Review five years ago. He brings this up to date by surveying the current knowledge on the planet and the solutions that we are likely to require such as widespread use of nuclear power, the use of solar energy as a personal household level and encouraging populations into cities, away from sprawling suburbs.

The second part of the book is demystifying some of the current green dogmas like the evils of genetic modification with a critical eye and taking an unvarnished look at some of the most prominent campaigning organisations out there such as Greenpeace and Friends of The Earth.  According to Brand tens of thousands of people died of starvation in Zambia because of a lobbying campaign to the country’s leadership by environmentalists complaining about poison Frankenfoods.

The book is a thoughtful, engaging, well-researched book on environmental issues that we all face together with ideas on how to address current and future challenges. It is also valuable for communications people working in difficult areas such as energy and biotechnology who are often faced with dogma-based campaigns by well-meaning but misguided organisations.

Wolfe and other exponents of new journalism who covered low and counter culture movements. In his book, Coogan deals with the everyman: the farmer, the factory worker and the publican. He also utilises establishment figures from the clergy, businesspeople, politicians and paramilitaries to help tell his story. He unmasks their insecurities and the apparent craic of events like the Listoonvarna festival is portrayed with its angst, longing and desperation exposed. He strips Irish society of its green-tinted lacquer and shows it unadulterated, but in the process becomes part of the story.

The society crippled and protected by its deference to clergy was very different from modern Irish society rocked by child abuse scandals, discount airlines, overly ambitious property speculators and rampant political corruption.

Its a good read if you want to understand the genesis of modern Ireland before the Celtic Tiger-hype.

I decided to revisit the book, even though it is about a quarter of a century old now. Drexler writes with stream of consciousness-style drawing from science and several centuries of western thought like a polymath Alan Ginsberg on speed. With his theories came justifications and some serious thought given to the consequences of nanotechnology.

The book is also an invaluable read for scientists in the face of skeptics. Drexler’s writings on the press and how they view science would be invaluable to a climatologists who now stand by ringing their hands when some of their science has undergone rigorous scrutiny. Drexler maps the kind of communications strategies that they should take.

The key hypothesis of Petroski’s book is that irritation is the mother-of-invention. One particular example that I liked was McDonalds’ packaging. In the early 1970s they had a complex packaging for the Big Mac of a paper box inside was the burger wrapped in foil and with a paper collar around the outside to hold it all in a nice shape.

Styrofoam shells were ironically used to replace this complex paper and foil packaging for environmental reasons. The styrofoam was unfortunately made using CFC gases which became a focus of environmental protest in the late 1970s and 80s, encouraging a move back to paper-based packaging. Intimately woven into this move in packaging was the organisations corporate reputation and public relations activity.

Petroski’s work is a well-researched, indepth look at design, it is not however the most accessible book. Indeed it has taken me the best part of a month dipping in and out of it; including my flight to-and-from Hong Kong.