Rodney Douglas is the director of the Institut of Neuroinformatic (INI) of the Institut Federal Tecnología Zúrich, founded in 1995. One of the major research areas of this university is neuromorphic engineering, namely the design and manufacture of artificial neural systems whose principles of design and architecture are based on those of biological nervous systems.

One of their current projects is an artificial retina. It is an artificial silicon retina that operates according to principles generated based on what is happening at every moment.

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“Companies have only two choices: change the environment or fail in a competition focusing on the product”. This is what our next guest thinks. Erich Joachimsthaler is founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners, a strategy, innovation and marketing consulting company.
in his newly published book, “Hidden In Plain Sight : How to Find and Execute Your Company’s Next Big Growth Strategy “ Joachimsthaler provides us insightful answers to real questions facing businesses today: on creating successful innovations and driving profitable growth - by introducing a new methodology “demand-first innovation and growth” (DIG). He will talk about what we have to do to innovate and what we have to avoid. Joachimsthaler offers a poignant view of the misplaced state of innovation in the broader market.
He has been marketing consulter and has a long academic career in IESE and Harvard Business School.

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If we imagine a tale of innovation in Italian design, there is one name: Alberto Alessi, who has been able to constantly reinvent without losing focus: exploring the imaginary of people by ignoring prescriptive marketing research in their product development. For this video interview we travelled to the Alessi headquarters in Crusinallo near Milan where chief design manager Alberto Alessi spoke about his theory of contemporary design management, the ugliness of cars, how Philippe Stark’s lemon squeezer came to life and why the egg is the most singular object ever “designed”.

As Managing Director of Alessi Spa, Alberto Alessi has used his entrepreneurial flair to successfully explore the frontiers of design and technology. As a result, he has repositioned the company as a design leader partnering with world class designers. Deservedly, his risk management skills are sought by prominent technology and design led organizations around the world. For him, Alessi is “an experimental design factory in applied art”.

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What has innovation consulting to do with film making? Let’s listen now to the art on innovation. 20 years ago, Tom Kelley founded the Californian Company IDEO with his brother. Nowadays Tom Kelley is the general manager of IDEO, the world’s leading innovation company and the author of the best-sellers The Art of Innovation and The ten faces of the innovation.

Tom Kelley is a leading speaker and he addresses scores of business audiences on how to use innovation to transform a business’s culture and strategic thinking. Tom gives business leaders tools and insights for managing innovation gleaned from the experience of IDEO and other successful design teams. IDEO, the widely admired design and development firm that brought us the Apple mouse, the Palm V and many other products and services, offers innovation strategy and design services, identifying opportunities for innovation by understanding latent user needs, technology factors, and business requirements for success.

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Alex Steffen is a great communicator on how companies are the only ones that can give an answer to the challenges of the climate change. Steffen is co-founder and Publishing Executive of WorldChanging.com, since he co-founded the organization in 2003. The Worldchanging is a project of non-profit-making communication dedicated to detecting and promoting tools, models and ideas for a sustainable future. That’s what Steffen do: to look for ways to create a future which is sustainable, dynamic, prosperous and fair — a future which is both bright and green. WorldChanging is based on the premise that such a future is not a distant possibility, but a growing reality.
During all these years, Worldchanging has become one of the most widely-read sustainability-related publications on the Internet, with an archive of over 7,000 articles by leading thinkers around the world. Alex Steffen was also the editor of Worldchanging’s wildly successful first book, “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century” (Abrams, 2006), a compendium of writings from over sixty noted leaders around the world. He has also spoken and keynoted at the most renowned design and innovation conferences in the world, including TED, Pop!Tech, Tallberg, Design Indaba, South by Southwest.

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Video David Weinberg These thinkers’ visions we shared today not only created new business models but also a new order of categorization of information. Or maybe we should talk about a new disorder born from a massive flow of information. This is what David Weinberger thinks. The digital disorder is, in fact, the new order. The solution to this massive flow of information is –according to David Weinberger- more information.

In his last book “Everything is Miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder”, Weinberger talks about the failure of the established classification order, and he explains how categorization methods created for physical objects fail when we can place one thing in multiple categories simultaneously, as well as to look for them in many different ways. Weinberger suggests that digitizing information will radically change the way people think.

The philosopher David Weinberger is member of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society of the Harvard Law School and co-author of the famous and influential book “The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual” (C. Locke, R. Levine, D. Searls

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The Rotman School in Toronto has redesign business education on the 21^st century to become one of the world top-tier business schools. How did they get there? With a completely new approach called Integrative Thinking.

Integrative Thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions between opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, they suggest to generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model. This new model will contain elements of the others but it will be superior to each.

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iFest’08 has a twitter channel. Check it and see the latest news, what is happening in the event and find out the most interesting activities, before, during and after the iFest08.

Enjoy it!

http://twitter.com/ifest08

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Already more than 380 attendees have joined the innovation event of the year! Very soon they will participate in a unique experience that will fill them with ideas and inspiration beyond their imagination… Are you gonna be in?

LAST PLACES ON SALE HERE

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