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"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

Nowadays, goes the theory, innovation is supposed to be done constantly, by everyone in the company, improving everything the company is about - and new Web-based tools are here to help it happen. Is the theory right? Or do the experiences of companies reveal something different?

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment. Slow hunch: John Snow, who discovered how cholera was spread, had no 'Eureka' moment "But in fact when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems. "The ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash. "But for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."

Joseph Cohen wants to break the backs of entrenched dinosaurs that don't innovate much. How do you craft a strategy that works?

The Arab Social Media Report (ASMR), produced by the Dubai School of Government's Governance and Innovation Program, is the first in a quarterly series that will highlight and analyze usage trends of online social networking across the Arab region.

"If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it's hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain."

"Massive Open Online Courses might seem like best way to use the Internet to open up education, but you're thinking too small. Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences. 5 Comments "

"When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. "We need courses for this thing - yesterday!""

Online versions of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators. Is this fad, or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?

Ospriet is a moderation tool that allows for audiences to post and vote on questions/comments for talks, presentations, and events. The application is written in node.js, uses MongoDB for database storage, and is designed for deployment on nodejitsu.

"While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge - and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught. "

"Whether it's via the administration, the professors, or the students, serious investments in edtech are coming to major universities. Which startups are going to be called upon to help make the transition?"

"La revolución del aprendizaje que dibujaba Isaac Asimov se queda pequeña. Las nuevas tecnologías ofrecen herramientas, una gran oportunidad para los malos estudiantes y un reto para profesores y padres. Cada alumno aprende a su ritmo y en el lugar que quiera."

"José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it's not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland-the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo-"a place of punishment.""

Ideally, you'll find some time over the next few weeks to curl up with a good story. Or hey, at least that's what I look forward to on vacation. If you are looking for some books on entrepreneurship to read, or even to gift, here are some recommended books from 2010. There were a number of great business books published this year, many of which we reviewed here as part of ReadWriteWeb's "Weekend Reading" series. But here are a few of the standouts, startup books we've chosen specifically because they are such great stories

Last month, in a small room on the fifth floor of a high-rise building in San Mateo, Calif., three men sat around a table, thinking. The place was wallpapered with Post-it notes, in a riot of colors, plus column after column of index cards pinned to foam boards. Some of the cards had phrases like "space maximizers" or "stuff trackers" written on them. Many had little three-dimensional ink drawings and titles, like "color-coded Tupperware horizontal stacker." It looked as if these guys had been locked in and told they couldn't leave until they dreamed up 1,000 of the wackiest home-storage items they could imagine.

conferencista, evento 6 de abril