“A key reason for Israel’s success in innovation is the great hunger here for risk taking,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory Media Laboratory director Prof. Nicholas Negroponte was the keynote address at yesterday’s “Globes” and Ernst and Young Israel Journey conference.
Negroponte is considered a profit of the digital age. He is chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association, which aims to provide millions of laptops to children in the Third World.
Negroponte said, “New ideas come from diversity. The worst thing for diversity in terms of new ideas is homogeneity. A country without diversity has trouble with innovation. That’s why it isn't surprising that Japan’s struggles with this. Another problem, which affects more countries like Germany, is discipline. Too much discipline harms invention. There also needs to be a hunger for risk taking.”
Negroponte says developing nations cannot be creative. Commenting on the development of China and India, he said, “Although India and China started out at the same point, it seems that India is stagnating at the same level of development while China is taking off.”
3G was a huge mistake
Negroponte said, “3G, especially UTMS technology, the follow-on technology to GSM, was a missed opportunity and a waste of money that cannot be compared with any other previous technological mistake. It was too slow, too soon, and we’re still paying the price.
“We simply don’t learn. Amazingly, it’s possible to now see that China is still toying with the idea of establishing its own 3G. They should move on to 4G and beyond, before very long. Service provides will be on the brink of extinction if they don’t make huge changes.”
Negroponte believes that peer-to-peer applications will make possible the next qualitative jump in communications and computing. “We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg of peer-to-peer activity. This will be even truer as more parts of the world become involved in software development,” he said. He predicted network-based services in his 1995 book “Being Digital”.
As for the Web 2.0 era, he believes that mass communications will become almost meaningless. “There will be extraordinary events, such as sports events, elections, and breaking news stories. But most people will spend about the same amount of time consuming news, as they do creating it. The days of the couch potato are gone in the sense of merely watching broadcast media.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on September 19, 2006
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