Monday, August 13, 2012

insight labs




Tweets

15m
"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination." via 
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1h
Doing the right thing is hard when you're worn out - writes Dan Ariely 
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Eventually, when we’ve said “no” to enough yummy food, drinks, potential purchases, and forced ourselves to do enough unwanted chores, we find ourselves in a state called ego-depletion, where we don’t have any more energy to make good decisions.
Enter Baba Shiv (a professor at Stanford University) and Sasha Fedorikhin (a professor at Indiana University) who examined the idea that people yield to temptation more readily when the part of the brain responsible for deliberative thinking has its figurative hands full.
Depletion doesn’t only affect our ability to make good decisions, it also makes it harder for us to make honest ones.
What this means is that when we become depleted, we’re not only more apt to make bad and/or dishonest choices, we’re also more likely to allow ourselves to be tempted to make them in the first place. Talk about double jeopardy.
The key here is planning the indulgence rather than waiting until you have absolutely nothing left in the tank. 
1h
Let's establish empathy-driven, human-scale solutions in our digital designs so that every innovation makes us better 
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11 Aug
: "If you start to fix the problem as if it's one big lump,you'll never get there." See how he DID get there: 
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11 Aug
Ahh...THAT"S why there's more talk about innovation than actual innovation. Got it. 



So what stops their development? Excessive government regulation and high taxes, stifling animal spirits among innovators and entrepreneurs, are commonly blamed. I see it differently. Invention and development of genuinely new, beneficial products are being stifled, as in the pharmaceutical industry, by big, established companies, not government. Just as drug companies tweak existing products, and deploy large marketing budgets to present them as new, so do other companies tweak and sometimes incrementally improve technologies that were familiar to our grandparents.

Innovation always entails risk. But the bar is set higher because those who innovate or support innovation must overcome the entrenched interests of monopolistic rent-seekers, who usually have the ear of governments and regulators. Knowing this, many scientists and mathematicians put their innovatory talents at the well-rewarded service of financial companies rather than struggle in research labs. Light and Lexchin argue for better regulation of the drugs industry. We need better regulation of rent-seekers across the board if the British and US economies are to be steered towards creating genuinely new, marketable technologies that are both job-creating and socially beneficial.
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