I just wanted to share some work coming out of the Prakash lab in Stanford. Manu Prakash is a young engineer and research scientist who has taken a very different approach to how to think about the tools we use to do science. He has focussed on building very cheap tools that can be used by anyone in the world. One of the first tools that his lab created was the foldscope - a microscope built from paper, and a small piece of plastic - that can be produced very cheaply and given out to people across the world (https://indiabioscience. ... (more)

At my current company we are looking at strategies for improving the resilience of our core systems, and looking at the issue of disaster recovery from a broad perspective. This comes under the heading business continuity management. From a product development perspective these considerations are also important. For successful products / product organisations consider these two perspectives: Most new business value that we create from innovation projects comes from improvements or iterations to existing products over the creation of totally new products (from an evolutionary perspective this makes sense, products or services that are already making revenue have proved they they have an environmental fitness function that works, whereas new products are like genetic modifications, the vast majority of which lead towards extinct endpoints. ... (more)