Davos Newbies

When I started writing Davos Newbies nearly eight years ago (o frabjous day), no one, and I mean no one, in the then-unnamed blogosphere wrote about the things that truly interested me. So my magpie habits in areas like economics, international relations, technology and obscure books seemed a good fit. Now I find that just about whenever I think of something that seems Davos Newbies-like, someone else has already written it.

Viz my earlier item on FT.com and Felix Salmon. Now how about Dani Rodrik and this:

Bad books need to be trashed even if you are a fellow traveler, more or less.  That is the main point made by Emmanuel (via Trade Diversion) in relation to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which is a truly bad book.  I am glad somebody else thinks so, because I was pretty disheartened by the kid gloves with which Joe Stiglitz handled the book in his own review.

My point exactly, if I had been swift enough to come to the point in print. Clearly I face a simple choice:

1. Find a new niche. Given the unbelievable diversity of the blogosphere, that’s unlikely. I’ve never been a specialist.
2. Be quicker on the draw. Possible, but the welcome pressures of my paying job may make it difficult.
3. Be content with lack of originality.

The last strategy seems my likely destination. I can console myself with Bob Sutton’s Law:

If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either; I stole it from someone else.

I didn’t have time yesterday to comment on the Financial Times’ bizarre decision to become half pregnant by allowing free access to its website, provided you didn’t look at more than 30 articles in a month. But I should have known that Felix Salmon had it covered. Everything he writes is true.

One of the main reasons I’ve been so bad about writing on Davos Newbies the last few months is my involvement with a book that is being published today, Innovation Nation. My colleague John Kao wrote Innovation Nation because he believes the United States faces an erosion of its innovation capabilities, and that threatens our future prosperity.

But the message of Innovation Nation isn’t only directed toward the US. John’s assertion is that “what is good for the world is good for the US”. He believes the role of an “Innovation Nation” is partly to work as a systems integrator and broker in a network of innovators to tackle the world’s most thorny problems.

We’ve created a website both to promote the book and to foster a discussion around its themes. There will shortly be more on the blog at that site, so have a look and enter the debate.

There’s also a more dramatic way to connect with Innovation Nation. John will be on The Colbert Report on Thursday evening, the 50th anniversary of Sputnik. What’s the Sputnik connection? One of the ideas in the book is that our diminishing innovation capacity is a “silent Sputnik”: there are no beep-beeps from space, but we need to respond to this silent event with as much vigor and determination as to the one in 1957.