The first session of the first day is a round-table (actually, a round room, with concentric circles of people facing in, confusing all the panellists at the centre and making them dizzy as they talk: an innovation itself, I suppose). It's about innovation, and the people at the centre begin listing what they think are the best innovations of the last year.
Kigge Hvid of Index, in Denmark, says the basic first aid kit has not been updated since the first world war. She then tells us that the great danger for the injured is a blocked airway that robs us of oxygen. So she shows a tongue-sucker invented by students at the Royal College of Art, in the UK, after the 7/7 terrorist attack. It's a simple plastic tube with an orange bulb on the end that grabs the tongue and frees the airway, saving lives while waiting for the pros.
A person in the room cautions that this may complicate the simple instructions given to people in CPR; Larry Keeley, of Doblin, adds that sometimes we need "de-innovation": that is, simplification is innovation.
Keeley then says an innovation that could matter is the Kindle, because if all the newspaper readers in America stopped reading on paper and started reading on e-paper, the country would meet all the requirements of the Kyoto agreement. But then he says the design of the device is a failure, and if more organisations had embraced the concept it would have given us a more compelling device.
William McGlashan of TPG Growth talks about a bio company that is now producing fuels.
Kiyoshi Kurokawa, adviser to the prime minister of Japan, praises the iPhone but says there is nothing new in the gadget: it's all concept and design. Then he talks about programmes that get people to make helping people part of life: Table for Two, with contributions going to deal with hunger, and One Laptop per Child.
Tom Brown, of IDEO, praises Wal-Mart's personal sustainability project and the Open Architecture Network, because both are enriched by the network effect of adding and connecting ideas.
And moderator Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week praises the new video conferencing telepresence systems that let us avoid - my words - innovationless airlines, which waste both energy and time, and empower collaboration.
Nussbam also tells us that a Business Week index of "innovation-driven" companies beats the S&P by 20%.
In the audience is Maylasia's minister of innovation - isn't that also nicely new? - who asks what government's role should be.
McGlashan says the belief in the US is that government does not invest in innovation, though he says that in health that is not true. (Note that this is an issue for Davos: it ends up becoming America-centric. I'd rather hear new ideas of how Malaysia is doing it.)
A Japanese professor frets about how much a company should hold on to and not make open. Thank goodness Brown gives the obvious examples of the benefits of exploiting open networks, starting with Firefox.
Keeley says what's important to open up is the knowledge archive and the challenge archive - that is, what we need - and this opens the network effect by connecting people with each other and with information. He also praises X Prize for giving innovators motivation without hierarchy.
The professor then asks what countries should hold on to. Keeley replies that governments, such as Maylasia, must provide the infrastructure for networks and then "get out of the way and trust the talent".
A member of the audience, Carl Bass, says the thought years ago was that open source would be innovative but not robust, but as it turned out, open source is robust but not very innovative. He acknowledges what he will say next is controversial, but points out that most of the government-backed innovation in the US comes from defence-funded research.
Another points out that the most important part of openness on the internet is "view source", for that spreads the knowledge.
Just as the discussion gets good, the format gets in the way and we're supposed to share our favorite gadgets with each other, one on one: reminds me of handshaking time in church.
My favourite, by the way, is bandwidth. We are told to mash up and invent things together. After we hear a few, Brown says that what we should be sharing instead is the challenges, for these attempts at invention are, frankly, banal. But hearing problems is what leads to real innovation. Innovation is a solution.
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