MaRS

What's happening in the Valley?

Last year I was a Biodesign Fellow at Stanford University. I wrote, every six weeks, about the latest portion of the fellowship. I posted on my experience with innovation from the hospital room through PubMed research, through white board brainstorms and engineering design, into prototyping, market research, and back to design. Now I am posting something else; I am repositioning, if you will, to provide answers to what you most want to hear about, from the Valley.

Find out what happened and where we're headed

The recently-concluded Social Capital Markets conference (SoCap09) in San Francisco clearly illustrated the tremendous interest we’re seeing internationally around how “money and meaning” can come together. This year, we had a large Canadian contingent present that collaborated around a pre-conference “Canadian Day”, at which we strengthened links between practitioners across the country, as well as defined policy outcomes and objectives we’d like to see in the near future.

Doctors for innovation

Few physicians here in the Discovery District would disagree with the assessment that their involvement in the commercialization of health technologies remains sparse, if not non-existent. Most physicians are likely happy with this arrangement. They would argue that commercialization presents too many conflicts of interest, especially in light of recent reports of ghost-writing peer-reviewed articles by pharmaceutical companies and fraudulent research funded by medical device companies (see this article). Some would go as far as to suggest that physicians should not be involved at all in the medical innovation process.

However, as I recently argued in commentaries published in Nature and Science it is important to recognize why physician involvement that leads to the need to manage conflict of interest is so critical to advancing medical innovation.

How the business of storytelling is changing

24. Star Wars. Harry Potter. Batman. All successful narrative worlds expanding across different media and platforms.

What do these new forms of storytelling, product and service design and branding tell us about future convergence of culture and technology?

These and other questions of importance to media innovators were addressed this week at an sLab Explorations workshop with Dr. Carlos Scolari on transmedia storytelling. It was the first in a two-part workshop.

The social tech for social change week

Toronto is abuzz with innovators, social entrepreneurs, digital media developers and leading design thinkers, not to mention a swath of charitable organizations dedicated to social change.

Imagine if these communities were working together. It could be transformational.