CS 400Y Work Cultures in Tech Ecologies

For me, innovation is creating a new product, method or idea. The topic of innovation is a significant focus that has repeatedly come up in our CS400Y seminar. We have seen how it can be vital to economic prosperity, as well as how it's advanced our production, learning and management. Every country fights for new innovations in different sectors from space travel to telecommunication. I believe that without new innovations and the people that create them, our world would be at a economic stand still. 

For me, innovation is a process of success coming out of failure. Most of us only look at the successful part of innovation. We forget that without all the hardwork, challenges and failures the success would not be meaningful or innovative.

To conclude my presentation from week 2, I discussed women in the technology industry and how they have a difficult time thriving in comparison to their male counterparts. In response, Professor Herman suggested I look into Communitech's Fierce Founders. To further inform the class, Fierce Founders are a group of female entrepreneurs in the KW area that are apart of the Communitech community. They host accelerator programs and workshops for women who are aspiring to start a business. At the end of each of their programs they host a competition, and the winners are granted $100,000 to use toward their initiative! Not to mention that the events are sponsored and judged by representatives from Google, Deloitte, TD and MaRs (just to name a few). So even if you are not the competition winner, guests still learn plenty and have the opportunity to network with beneficial industry contacts. Cool right? For discussion: Since this class is focused on technological innovation and ...

  http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/iphone-x-imitation-innovation/310506 This link is to an article, in which one Apple consumer critics Apple, specifically their iPhone X as being an imitation and not an innovation. A topic we discussed last lecture, about technologies that the government and military forces are funding/ producing for Apple who is then taking these features together into one portable piece of technology. The criticism that this is taking previous innovations and therefore, not creating a brand new or original idea. I thought this article was interesting because of the yearly hype around the iPhone that leaves some consumers wowed with new innovation from added features, and others just bored. It seems that they believe Apple has only made minor improvements on previous technology developments in the features of their phones. Thought it was interesting and would love to know your thoughts. Question for discussion: Do you feel that in some of the recent y...

Innovation to me means the consistent adaptations and changes of ideas that create new inventions and even bigger ideas for the future.

Patrice Flichy urges us to think of discourses—or what he terms imaginaires — as an “integral part of the development of a technical system”. Aside from how an initial idea is crucial, he argues that collective visions and the power of discourses are important parts of the development of our technical system. Expanding on Flichy’s theories, I attached a video called ‘ Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson’ and I want to know what you think about these arguments of where technical innovation comes from. In this video, Johnson notes that important ideas take long periods of time to evolve and how it may take 2-3 or even more than 10 years to ensure that an idea is useful and successful. He goes on to talk about how the ‘collision’ of smaller hunches throughout this time leads to successful breakthroughs, giving the example of the World Wide Web. In other words, Tim Berners Lee had no full vision at first but after manifestations of his initial idea and with time, the success of t...

Article mentioned: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/ Context: The blue state focuses on encouraging innovation believing that it will raise our overall standard of living. However, many of the start-ups that emerge from this model are created with a build to flip model, meaning that they are built simply to be acquired. The majority of this acquisition is made by a group nicknamed the four. The four is comprised of the companies that dominate our daily lives ' In the article titled “Silicon valley's Tax-Avoiding Job-Killing, Soul sucking machine” Scott argues that these 4 companies are killing America’s economy. Through their acquisitions or anti-competitive practices, they dominate taking most of the profits in their respective industries. The problem caused by this is that clever accounting and favorable laws from the blue state allows them to pay very little in taxes. Additionally, large tech companies employ fewer employees th...