Robert Scoble, Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace discusses his recent book, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy, co-authored by Shel Israel. Scoble believes that over the next five years we’ll see a tremendous rise in wearable computers, building on interest we’ve already seen in devices like Google Glass. Much like the desktop, laptop, and smartphone before it, Scoble predicts wearable computers represent the next wave in groundbreaking innovation. Scoble answers questions such as: How will wearable computers help us live our lives? Will they become as common as the cellphone is today? Will we have to sacrifice privacy for these devices to better understand our preferences? How will sensors in everyday products help companies improve the customer experience?

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Related Links

• Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy , Amazon
• Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, Amazon
• The Rackspace Blog & Newsroom, Scoble

Jerry Ellig, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, discusses the the FCC’s lifeline assistance benefit funded through the Universal Service Fund (USF). The program, created in 1997, subsidizes phone services for low-income households. The USF is not funded through the federal budget, rather via a fee from monthly phone bills — reaching an all-time high of 17% of telecomm companies’ revenues last year. Ellig discusses the similarities between the USF fee and a tax, how the fee fluctuates, how subsidies to the telecomm industry have boomed in recent years, and how to curb the waste, fraud and abuse that comes as a result of the lifeline assistance benefit.

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Related Links

• Jerry Ellig’s Biography Mercatus Center
• Benefits, Costs and other Important Stuff-Demystifying Regulatory Analysis Ellig, Mercatus Center
• The Future of Regulation Ellig, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy

Richard Brandt, technology journalist and author, discusses his new book, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.Com. Brandt discusses Bezos’ entrepreneurial drive, his business philosophy, and how he’s grown Amazon to become the biggest retailer in the world. This episode also covers the biggest mistake Bezos ever made, how Amazon uses patent laws to its advantage, whether Amazon will soon become a publishing house, Bezos’ idea for privately-funded space exploration and his plan to revolutionize technology with quantum computing.

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Related Links

• One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com, Brandt
• History of Google/About Google, Brandt
• Five minutes with Richard Brandt, Author of One Click, Ennyman

W. Patrick McCray, author of The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, tells the story of these modern utopians who predicted that their technologies could transform society as humans mastered the ability to create new worlds.

Believing that the term “futurist” was too broad, McCray coined the term visioneers to describe those who not only had ambitious visions for future technology, but who carried out detailed and extensive scientific and engineering work to bring those visions into fruition, and who actively worked to promote their  ideas to a wider public.

McCray focuses on the works of Gerard O’Neil and Eric Drexler, detailing their early contributions as visioneers and their continuing impact particularly in the fields of space colonization and nanotechnology. He also identifies modern-day visioneers and their work.

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Related Links

• The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, McCray
• Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age, McCray
• Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology, McCray
• We May Not Have Flying Cars Yet, But Visioneers Are Inventing a New Future, McCray

Alex Tabarrok, author of the ebook Launching The Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast discusses America’s declining growth rate in total factor productivity, what this means for the future of innovation, and what can be done to improve the situation.

Accroding to Tabarrok, patents, which were designed to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, have instead become weapons in a war for competitive advantage with innovation as collateral damage. College, once a foundation for innovation, has been oversold. And regulations, passed with the best of intentions, have spread like kudzu and now impede progress to everyone’s detriment. Tabarrok outs forth simple reforms in each of these areas and also explains the role immigration plays in innovation and national productivity.

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Related Links

• Launching The Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, Tabarrok
• VIDEO: Innovations in Most Fields Are Not Patented, Tabarrok
• VIDEO: End Software Patents, Tabarrok
• Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin, Tabarrok

Joshua Gans, professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and author of the new book Information Wants to be Shared, discusses modern media economics, including how books, movies, music, and news will be supported in the future.

Gans argues that sharing enhances most information’s value. He also explains that the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.

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Related Links

• Information Wants to be Shared, Gans
• Is There a Market for Ideas?, Gans and Scott Stern
• The Product Market and the Market for ‘Ideas’: Commercialization Strategies for Technology Entrepreneurs, Gans and Stern
• The Impact of Uncertain Intellectual Property Rights on the Market for Ideas: Evidence from Patent Grant Delays, Gans, Stern, and David H. Hsu

Ronald A. Cass, Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, discusses his new book, Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas, which he co-authored with Boston University colleague Keith Hylton. Written as a primer for understanding intellectual property law and a defense of intellectual property, Laws of Creation explains the basis of IP and its justification. 

According to Cass, not all would-be reformers share a similar guiding philosophy, distinguishing between those who support property rights but nevertheless have specific critiques of the intellectual property system as it currently stands, and reformers who do not see a place for property.

Cass explains that the current intellectual property system is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but is a matter of weighing tradeoffs. On the whole, he argues, intellectual property benefits society. Cass also argues that intellectual property law in the U.S. is still more functional than that in other countries, such as Italy, and that, while it would benefit from some reform, it is fundamentally a workable system.

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Related Links

• Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas, Cass and Hylton
• Property Rights Systems and the Rule of Law, Cass
• Tom W. Bell on Laws of Creation, Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog
• Book Talk: Law of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas, The Cato Institute

Chris Anderson, former Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, describes what he calls the maker movement.

According to Anderson, modern technologies, such as 3D printing and open source design, are democratizing manufacturing. The same disruption that digital technologies brought to information goods like music, movies and publishing will soon make its way to the world of physical goods, he says.

Anderson tells the story of his grandfather, who designed the first automatic sprinkler system in the 60s, and how different such an invention story would be today. He also discusses his own firm, 3D Robotics, and policy challenges to emerging manufacturing technology.

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Related Links

• Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, by Anderson
• Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson Steps Down to Run Robotics Startup, Wired
• Wired’s Anderson on 3D Robotics Drone Sales, Bloomberg

I’m thrilled to hear that the Economist has just launched a new column about business, innovation and entrepreneurship in honor of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), the brilliant Austrian economist who,

argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress. It gives new businesses a chance to replace old ones, but it also dooms those new businesses to fail unless they can keep on innovating (or find a powerful government patron). In his most famous phrase he likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction”. For Schumpeter the people who kept this gale blowing were entrepreneurs. He was responsible for popularising the word itself, and for identifying the entrepreneur’s central function: of moving resources, however painfully, to areas where they can be used more productively. But he also recognised that big businesses can be as innovative as small ones, and that entrepreneurs can arise from middle management as well as college dorm-rooms.

Schumpeter’s work on the dynamism of high-tech markets (later married with Clayton Christensen‘s concept of “disruptive innovation“) is one of the most persistent themes across cyber-libertarian thinking of all stripes on a wide variety of issues. You can listen to an interview with the new column’s author on the Economist podcast here (MP3). One important point the author makes is that Schumpeter realized that celebrating capitalism did not preclude criticizing individual capitalists when justified and vice versa—something all too often forgotten today.