This visualisation of Nobel Prizes won by colleges and other affiliates of Cambridge University between 1905 and 2020 shows that the University has won Prizes more than any other institution in the world. It also demonstrates the importance of pure research and the world-changing impact of unbridled curiosity and speculation. Along with the power of accidental collisions with people and information this is perhaps something that successful entrepreneurs have in common with Nobel Prize winning academics – the ability to see the world as it is and ask ‘why?’ or to see the world as it could be and ask ‘why not?’.
But what of the future? What might a physics prize be won for in the year 2040 and how might such research eventually be applied to real world problems? Moreover, how might the Nobel Prizes themselves evolve? Could there be a new category created in 2029 for data modelling or data ethics perhaps? And why is there still no suitable accommodation made for aspects of environmental science, artificial intelligence or philosophy relating to tech?
With some luck, a future Nobels graphic is on the cards….
I think I’m getting somewhere with this. I often find that before looking forwards at the future of something, artificial intelligence, for example, it’s often worth going backwards to the start of things. This is a draft of a visual looking at the history and influences of computing and AI.
It needs a sense check, contains errors and is somewhat western-centric, but then I am all of these things. It’s also very male-heavy, but then that was the world back then – and in AI and IT possibly still is. Perhaps I should do a visual showing women in AI – starting with women at Bletchley Park, NASA and so on. I may spin this off into a series of specific maps looking purely at robotics or software too.
My book writing might have hit the doldrums for a moment, but my map making is going gang busters. I’ve got five maps/visuals on the go including two on AI. Here’s a very early sketch of a somewhat expansive map looking at the history and influences of/on AI
This one has been a while coming. It’s a visual exploration of some of the traits and states associated with an entreprenerial mind. Obviously not everyone will possess all of these traits or states and neither are they static – these will change over time too as a start-up grows and new people join the business. Perhaps a question is which states work best throughout an organisations lifecycle?
Bibliography:
Peta Levi, ‘Flourishing in the Cambridge parkland’, Financial Times, November 1980
Segal Quince Wicksteed, The Cambridge Phenomenon: The Growth of High Technology Industry in a University Town, 1985
Lyle M. and Signe M. Spencer, Competence at work: models for superior performance (Chapter 17, Entrepreneurs), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993
Sally Caird, What do psychological tests suggest about entrepreneurs? Journal of Managerial Psychology, 8(6) pp. 11–20, 1993
Tom Byers (Stanford), Heleen Kist (Stanford) and Robert I. Sutton (Hass), Characteristics of the Entrepreneur: Social Creatures, Not Solo Heroes, Handbook of Technology Management, Richard C. Dorf (Ed), CRC Press, October 1997
Yin M. Myint, Shailendra Vyakarnam and Mary J. New, The effect of social capital in new venture creation: the Cambridge high‐technology cluster, John Wiley & Sons, June 2005
S Kavadias, SC Sommer, The effects of problem structure and team diversity on brainstorming effectiveness, Management Science, 2009
T Miller, M Grimes, J McMullen and T Vogus, Venturing for others with heart and head: How compassion encourages social entrepreneurship, Academy of Management Review 37 (4), 616-640, 2012
J Hutchison‐Krupat, RO Chao, Tolerance for failure and incentives for collaborative innovation, Production and Operations Management, 2014
The Cambridge Phenomenon: 50 Years of Innovation and Enterprise, Kate Kirk and Charles Cotton, Third Millennium, 2012
M. Frese & M. M. Gielnik, The psychology of entrepreneurship. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 413–438, 2014
M. J. Gorgievski & U. Stephan, Advancing the Psychology of Entrepreneurship: A Review of the Psychological Literature and an Introduction. Applied Psychology, 65(3), 437–468, 2016
Lynda Applegate, Janet Kraus, and Timothy Butler, Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful, HBR Working Knowledge, June 2016
Dean A. Shepherd and Holger Patzelt, Entrepreneurial Cognition: Exploring the Mindset of Entrepreneurs, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Nicos Nicolaou, Phillip H. Phan and Ute Stephan, The Biological Perspective in Entrepreneurship Research, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, November 2020
All good things come to those that wait. Here, finally, is the future of air info-graphic. Tomorrow (hopefully) I’ll post a link to the static map (PDF). Today, here is a rather spendid interactive version. (Click to enlarge and reveal hidden content).
Sometimes these maps are quite quick to create (e.g. the Future of Space) other times they take forever. This started out as a scribble almost 2-years ago. I then looked at weather maps, ancient cartographic maps and stylised images of sails, even breathing and wind, but eventually the scribble morphed into a street map. At this point I stumbled upon the work of an illustrator called Ed Fairburn and the scene was set for what I hope will become a great example of art/science collaboration.
The visual is a fictitious city street map with the face of a child hand-drawn by Ed over the streets. (the child was a quite deliberate choice, because children are linked to the future and, more importantly, it is far more provocative than if we’d used the image of an adult). Visually based tends, inventions and ideas then cluster around the eyes, sound-based thoughts cluster around the ears, smells around the nose and so on. But before I go on to explain what’s on the map, why does it exist at all?
I did a map looking at the future of water with Imperial some time ago. I’ve done food in the past too, so air felt like an obvious theme. Various people at Imperial were looking into air (as was Davos) and a quick Google search found there to be next to nothing about the future of air or the future of air in cities, which is always a good sign. Why urban air? Because most of the big problems and opportunities surrounding air in the future will be found in cities and mega-cities in particular. Of course, conveying ideas about something that cannot be seen (air) is challenging, but hopefully the map itself will help and there are a couple of entries of the map itself that might solve this too.
Maps generally are a powerful way to convey information, messages, arguments or ideas and hopefully this one will provoke some conversation about what is, after all, the most precious and perhaps most threatened resource of them all.
So, what’s on the map? Here’s
a list. It’s not the final one, but it’s close and it does show some of the
thinking that went into the map (things that got removed, debated etc.). BTW, ‘head’ is a cluster that comprises some
cerebral thoughts, along with things that frankly didn’t fit anywhere else.
Credits for the map belong to yours truly, Richard Watson, Maria Jeansson and Graciela Sainz de la Fuente with academic input provided by Dr Audrey de Nazelle.
Head
Clean air as a fundamental
human right
Smog refugees
Natural
airflow architects
Air quality activism
Artificial
thermal cloud management
Urban Wi-Fi free zones
Google smell maps
Memory enhancement during
sleep via diffusers
Use of smell to influence
public mood
Street misting to reduce
temperatures
Databases of
smell landscapes
Rising awareness of indoor
air quality
Pollution as a business opportunity
‘Prescription’ of nature to
address illnesses
Artificial noses to treat
anosmia
Cognitive decline caused by
air pollution
‘Open air’ movement
Atmospheric water generators
Socio-economic clean air
divide
Clean-air lawsuit on behalf
of future generations
Identification of terrorist threats using smell
Pollution
harvesting ignites circular economy
CRISPR to increase CO2 adsorption by plants
Eyes
Solar power generating
windows
Artificial moons to replace
street lights
Drone blocking around
buildings
Artificial clouds
Printing of
light using nanoparticles
Augmented reality to visualise pollution
Lasers to monitor air quality
Passenger & delivery drones
Nano-bionic plants to indicate pollution
Smart dust
storms
Go away cloud machines*
Paramedic drones
Micro-wind harvesting
Proliferation of low-cost
quantum sensors
Dark sky movement
Moss facades turn buildings
into air purifiers
Indoor
particulate sensing
Nose
Fresh air kiosks
Personal nose-plug air
filters
Authentic smells movement
Taxation of unnatural smells
Digital scents
Breathable alcohol
Homes with air quality scores
White smells to mask odours
Air quality forecasting using
HPC
Use of nootropics to
influence productivity
Artificial noses for disease
discovery
Artificial nose to treat
anosmia.
Fresh air tourism
Rain ‘bombs’ to clean air
Mouth
Windows that separate fresh
air from noise
Open window legislation
Obligatory air-filtering for
all buildings
Vaping of fresh air
People ‘snacking’ on fresh
air shots
Pollution absorbing clothes
Outsourcing of air quality
to private contractors
Air provided by utility
companies
Sound ‘seasoning’ of food
& drink (cusp of mouth)
Pollution
protected pushchairs
Ears
Silence as a
class issue
Silent fireworks
Use of metamaterials to
reduce noise
Narrowcasting of sound
CRISPR for auditory
augmentation
Addition of fake noises to
silent technologies
Crowd sourced noise pollution
maps
Sound sensing proteins
Quiet road surfaces
Conversation cloaking devices
Individual noise taxes
Silent cities movement
Ubiquity of EVs
Increase in noise due to voice interfaces
Sensorial
interventions to influence public behaviour