Electronics supplier SparkFun designs dozens of products a year and they haven’t patented a single one. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
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The Tyddyn Teg cooperative has eight members and some lovely volunteer helpers. We share a commitment to the importance of quality local food and the challenges of sustainability in the twenty first century. We see ourselves as part of the global family of small farmers and aim to become a practice based centre for research and education for sustainable local food production. Our primary objective has been to maintain vegetable production and meet the needs and expectations of our veg box customers. In this we have had a great deal of help and advice from John and Pippa (who were the previous owners of the farm). We are also supplying vegetables to Moelyci Shop and Dimensions Shop in Bangor. Our aims over the coming years are: Expand and improve our vegetable growing Develop the Farm to support WWOOFing Create new spaces for events Open opportunities to have a small scale restaurant/cafe on the farm Establish a luxury camping business where people can come and stay Provide a living wage to every member of the cooperative
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Design Like No One Is Patenting - How SparkFun Stays Ahead of the Pack - 0 views
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makes its living by shipping kits and components like bread boards, servo motors and Arduino parts to a mixture of students, hobbyists, and professionals making prototypes
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the company has made its name is in a stable of its own custom parts and kits, the designs for which it gives away for free.
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“We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”
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the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.
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You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.
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SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.
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“We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”
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“We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”
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along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.
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the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”
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monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”
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“They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”
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symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community
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“There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”
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Fostering creativity. A model for developing a culture of collective creativity in science - 0 views
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Scientific progress depends on both conceptual and technological advances, which in turn depend on the creativity of scientists
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creative processes behind these discoveries rely on mechanisms that are similar across disciplines as diverse as art and science
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research into the nature of creativity indicates that it depends strongly on the cultural environment
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create optimal conditions in a research organization with the aim of enhancing the creativity of its scientific staff
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Creativity has been traditionally associated with art and literature but since the early twentieth century, science has also been regarded as a creative activity
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Measurement of brain activity showed that creativity correlates with two brain states: a quiescent, relaxed state corresponding to the inspiration stage, and a much more active state corresponding to the elaboration stage
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have a common feature: they depend on a balance between analytical and synthetic thinking, and usually describe the creative process as a sequence of phases that alternate between these states
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However, more recent studies suggest that creativity also depends strongly on the social and cultural context
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Although creative individuals are essential, the strong link with the environment indicates that creativity might be greatly enhanced by generating a culture that supports the creative process.
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Many of the interviewees repeatedly emphasized three main qualities necessary to be a good scientist: rigorous intellect, the ability to get the job done and the ability to have creative ideas.
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Although breakthroughs in science depend on such an ‘internal' conceptual shift, they also rely on ‘external' experimental results. However, most interviewees described their breakthroughs as largely internal:
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Only two scientists expressed the view that their breakthroughs were purely external events, based on the observation of novel data.
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Although the synthesis of a new concept relies on intuition, which is based on subconscious mental processing, it must be subjected to conscious examination and analysis
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The majority of interviewees answered that other people provided them with ‘inspiration to do something new'
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positive feedback after the emergence of a new idea is almost as important as the inspiration that triggered it
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Therefore, scientists would value a culture of interaction and mutual inspiration more highly than access to technology, although the latter is essential for their experiments.
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At the end of the interviews, each scientist was asked to describe the best possible conditions for generating creativity at a research institute.
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These results indicate strongly that an interactive environment is the single most important factor for stimulating creativity
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hierarchy is based on genuine respect because people are great scientists, but at the same time they're very approachable and open towards what you have to say
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These results suggest that the best conditions for scientific creativity come with a free-flowing hierarchy and a highly developed culture of interaction to guarantee the exchange of ideas and inspiration.
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Finally, because of the freedom to try new things, these ideas can be tested and eventually generate new insights.
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The importance of a ‘freedom to try new things' and a ‘free-flowing hierarchy' further supports the idea that individual components in an emergent system must be able to interact flexibly without central control
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During the interviews, it became apparent that although a culture of interaction and creativity exists at EMBL, this itself is not often the subject of discussion. The values on which this culture is based are seemingly implicit rather than explicit
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Potentially, the EMBL culture of interaction could be strengthened further by consciously expressing and discussing the values on which it is based
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Lectures in preparation for the presentation on Open Science. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lCEl7cU-oA5IlJ8xiOQ3jyyc_xiJ0216kkt46xhNMek/edit#slide=id.g36f1fcffd_014
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Smart contracts · FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions Wiki · GitHub - 0 views
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Once voting groups are someday eventually added to OT, they will also be able to act as parties to agreements, and they will be able to take a vote in order to change their own bylaws!
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The script code is unable to manipulate any assets excepting those explicitly declared beforehand on the smart contract,
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Not only can the smart contract move_funds() between these declared accounts, as its script logic dictates, but it can also stash_funds() directly inside the contract itself!
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You can also define variables in your smart contract, which persist through its entire lifetime. As the smart contract—including its internal state—continues to process over time, receipts will continue to drop into the relevant parties’ inboxes,
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A signed copy of the original smart contract shows it as it was, when the parties first signed and activated it. Additionally, a server-signed, updated version of the contract comes with each receipt, showing the latest state
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Once the contract expires (or is deactivated) then a finalReceipt is dropped into all relevant inboxes, after which no other receipts are possible for that smart contract.
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Let’s say a party needs to DIRECTLY trigger one of the clauses on the contract. (Instead of waiting around for it to trigger automatically based on some rule.) For example, perhaps an escrow user wishes to execute a clause in order to DISPUTE THE OUTCOME, or perhaps an arbitrator wishes to activate a clause in order to RENDER A JUDGMENT. OT’s smart contracts can do precisely these sorts of things, limited only by your imagination (and my pre-alpha code.)
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