Following the response to my post earlier this week on systemic innovation, here are NESTA’s top tips for effective systems innovators. 1. Even a great product is no guarantee of success Superstar designers might garner the acclaim for iconic products, but much of the value they create lies in the systems that support and enable them. Products […]
A guest cross-post by Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe Institute. In 1894, the physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Michelson declared that science was almost finished; the human race was within a hair’s breadth of understanding everything: It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have now been firmly established and that further advances […]
In this guest cross-post, Geoffrey West, former President of the Santa Fe Institute, argues that just as the industrial age produced the laws of thermodynamics, we need universal laws of complexity to solve intractable problems of the post-industrial era, and that ‘big data’ needs such ‘big theory’. For more on this topic, see David Hales’ guest […]
A wonderfully written piece in today’s FT Magazine by Stephen Foley, on the changing role of physicists in financial markets. A short extract below, and the full article is here (sign up may be required but is free for a certain number of articles). ‘…complex systems are not systematically predictable. They’re only predictable in some regimes…’ The […]
This is the editorial from this weeks’ New Scientist, which looks at complex systems approaches in the context of the US shutdown. I especially like the line towards the end: ‘Few politicians are familiar with this emerging science, and many will be constitutionally disinclined to embrace it.’ If history really is, in the famous dictum, […]
Many would argue that standard economic theory enabled us to analyse and understand the economy as it used to be, with long stable periods punctuated only by occasional crises. However, the recent evolution of the global economy should drive us to pursue ways of expanding economic theory such that it encompasses the new structures and […]
Aid on the Edge of Chaos 