Weekly Insider (Dean Kamen, Water Invitation & A123 Battery IPO)

Here’s three things for your Labor Day weekend.

First, join me and Dean Kamen at the NanoBusiness Conference next week in Chicago at www.nanobusiness.org

Second is a private invitation to listen to a Lux Research webinar: “Lux Research Water State of the Market: Global Energy -- Unshackling Carbon from Water” on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/269154627

The huge water footprint associated with energy production plays second fiddle to worries about carbon dioxide output in the popular imagination, but it is a vitally important consideration in our increasingly parched world. New energy technologies – from advanced methods of extracting fossil fuels to low-carbon renewable energy – may look appealing, but they exacerbate water worries, creating ugly trade-offs between carbon and water. As water stresses, multiply energy technologies’ water intensity will often play as great a role as their carbon footprint in determining the future makeup of the global energy mix.

In this webinar, Lux Research will examine conventional and alternative fuels and electricity generation and investigate the myriad of technologies – including water reuse and recycling, increases in energy production efficiency, and large-scale distribution – and answer the following questions: How much water is used today to produce electricity and fuels through conventional means? What is the relationship between water intensity, carbon intensity, costs and reliability for alternate energy sources? How does the water relationship affect the viability of biofuels and alternative methods of extractive fossil fuel? What technologies and approaches are available to reduce energy related water intensity while allowing for a reduced carbon footprint? What are the implications of water intensity on the future roll-out of energy technologies? Which companies stand to win or lose and how will this affect investors?

Third, here’s fellow Forbes columnist Mark Mills citing Lux Research’s battery team in his newest piece: “Battery IPO Could Recharge New Issue Market”

“Confidence, the Rorschach of economic indicators, is a weird thing. Easier to recognize than define or measure. We may soon learn something about confidence in our economic future via the market's reaction to the forthcoming IPO of A123, a Boston-based energy green-tech company just over half a dozen years old with cool new MIT-derived battery technology.

The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), benchmarked as 100 in 1985, dropped to 65 in 2008 and plummeted to 25 earlier this year, even lower than post 9/11. We're a long way from the heady days of confidence exhibited during tech mania when the CCI approached 200, but the index has been tracking up recently, hitting 47 in July and 54 by late August.

For calibration; the index was 100 in 1985, the year Nintendo came out; one year earlier Apple had launched the Mac at a time when only 40,000 people in America used cell phones.

Confidence both reflects and creates the economic future we want more than any single characteristic of the human enterprise. Of course confidence is what drives people to create new companies, and jobs, to compete with big established guys, and, apropos of emerging from our Great Recession, let us not forget that small businesses with one to 499 employees account for nearly two-thirds of job creation..."

The full article can be found on Forbes.com, to be linked to the article click here.

Weekly Insider (Heroes, Lifelong Learning & Inventor Dean Kamen)

Here’s the thing: education matters. That’s no zinger. Who doesn’t agree on that? But what do you do after tiring from nodding hypnotically to politicians’ pandering platitudes of “improving our schools”. I fell upon a shrine of serendipity—“randomness” and “optionality”, the twin pillars supporting the lectern of luck. And I met Jacob Mnookin. Jacob was starting the first ever charter school in Coney Island, Brooklyn—where I was raised and my family resides. We teamed up (I became Chairman), got chartered and open this August after a three-times oversubscribed lottery filled our founding 5th grade class. 80 incoming 5th grade students won the lottery. But most of the community has lost the proverbial ‘ovarian lottery’: born into poverty, out of wedlock and onto a uneven playing field they’re ill equipped for. Our mission is to right this.

I believe the two most important things that kids (especially inner-city kids) require for a successful education are (1) picking the right heroes and (2) developing a deep desire to learn. The first fosters the second. As a society, culturally we get what we celebrate. Celebrate celebrities, kids will seek to be socialites. Celebrate sports stars, kids will be aspirant “persperants”. Weekly gossip rags display celebrities riding bikes and eating ice cream, declaring “they’re just like us”. No. If we want to inspire greatness, it is not likeness, but distinction and achievement we should display. Besides: most great entrepreneurs that mint a fortune inventing the future don’t even know what they’re worth. The fellow who does things that count, doesn't usually stop to count them. One such fellow, similarly espousing the importance of education and doing a lot about it, is Dean Kamen.

Dean Kamen is an inventor, entrepreneur, and a tireless advocate for science and technology. As founder of DEKA Research & Development Corporation, he develops internally generated inventions and provides research and development for major corporate clients. Dean holds over 440 U.S. and foreign patents for innovative devices that have expanded the frontiers of health care worldwide. Some of his notable inventions include the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics, the HomeChoice™ portable peritoneal dialysis machine, the INDEPENDENCE® IBOT® Mobility System, and the Segway® Human Transporter. Among Dean’s proudest accomplishments is founding FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization dedicated to motivating the next generation to understand, use, and enjoy science and technology.  Mr. Kamen was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2002, is a member of the National Academy of Engineers and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2005.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME AN INVENTOR?
The alternative seemed so grim! I couldn’t imagine ever working for anybody, and I knew nobody was going to pay me to sit around and think of big ideas, so I decided to develop the skills to produce things that people would want. That way, people might be willing to part with their hard earned cash to let me do the things I really enjoy doing, like solving problems.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST INVENTION THAT CAUSED PEOPLE TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOU?
I built audiovisual systems in the early days of power electronics. At the time, these new power devices were revolutionary, allowing for thousands of times more power than you could get out of a little single transistor. I realized that I could take these high power devices and apply them in relatively simple engineered systems to quickly create things like light shows or control systems for big audiovisual displays. The new technologies allowed for very reliable, high performance shows, without the need for an enormous amount of equipment. I started building these when I was in high school and turned it into a whole business.
I personally think the entire horrible age of disco is a result of the achievements of the power semiconductor industry. An unintended, but very real consequence!

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BECOME AN INVENTOR? WERE YOU SELF-TRAINED?
I was always fascinated by math and physics. I liked the pure idea of looking at the world around you and trying to figure out the rules that make it comprehensible. We take the properties of our natural world for granted in many ways, but it is so repeatable and so consistent! Where do those properties come from? As a kid, I used to think about these things all the time.
Frankly, going to school and answering some trivial question in a textbook didn’t seem like learning or knowledge to me. So I spent a lot of time on my own trying to understand the laws of physics in the world around me. I learned that from the laws of physics, societies have developed the rules of engineering, and as long as those rules don’t violate those laws, you can achieve some pretty powerful results. That’s when I became fascinated with engineering, and I determined I would develop a skill set to become capable of producing things that everybody wants.

BRING ANY FAMOUS INVENTORS BACK TO LIFE – WHO WOULD YOU SPEND THE DAY WITH?
That’s an easy question. Archimedes and Galileo. Archimedes lived almost 2300 years ago, yet he had a better insight into the beautifully intricate and self-consistent rules of nature than most people do to this day. He was able to literally do what we now call calculus - figuring out the volume of solids like cylinders, cones, and spheres – without any prior knowledge. It took about 1,500 years for another great mind like his to come along in Galileo of Galilei. You look at what Galileo was able to do through just pure logic in understanding essentially the laws of motion, acoustics, mechanics, and optics- it is nothing less than astounding!
It’s almost inconceivable to me that these guys were able to have the clarity of thought and expression that they had, without the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants that we take for granted today. 

View my complete interview with Dean Kamen at Forbes.com. 

Premium Features: Inventors & Innovation

See my featured interviews on Forbes.com, highlighting the ideas and accomplishments of famous inventor Dean Kamen and sharing insights on innovation from the wise Richard N. Foster. 

Weekly Insider (Nightmares, Delicate Machines & Strange Zoos; Of Keynes, Darwin & Cato)

Our new issue comes out next week with exclusive sit-downs with iconic

inventor Dean Kamen, ex-McKinsey veteran and innovation luminary Dick

Foster and Lux Research President Matthew Nordan. Their words are

breadcrumbs. Follow the clues...

Today, we'll follow the rational clues of Keynes, Darwin and Cato. And

then next week stay tuned for I will-unable to resist railing against

the foolhardy futility of prioritizing global warming as direr than

cancer, heart disease, AIDS or alzheimers-share two of the most elegant

and persuasive arguments I've heard yet on why curbing carbon isn't

worth the cost.

First some thoughts on time. The more time until a hoped-for-event

occurs, the more chance it won't happen. Or inversely the more chance

the undesired event does. When a target is in your sight, do everything

you can to seize it, for it can quickly flee your scope. Time is the

marshall of Murphy's Law; it paves detours to the undesired; it's a

bedfellow of uncertainty; an inept shepherd of the sought; an agent of

entropy and an enemy of the anxious.

Now for some soothsaying sages who are unusually un-anxious. Following

Warren Buffett's style, Bill Gates released his first annual letter this

week. Buffett passed Gates a quote from John Maynard Keynes on the

current environment. It said this:

"This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the

resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive

as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material

problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of

affording for everyone a high standard of life-high, I mean, compared

with, say, twenty years ago-and will soon learn to afford a standard

higher still. We were not previously deceived. But today we have

involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control

of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The

result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a

time-perhaps for a long time."

Meanwhile, on a similarly delicate machine-the human mind-and the animal

spirits swirling in us social primates which caused the current crisis,

professor Paul Seabright, says "If Darwin had been around to reflect on

the financial crisis, he might have reminded us, in his diffident way,

to think of human beings not as inadequate calculating machines, but as

remarkably well-adapted apes. As group living primates, they are

intensely competitive, alert to the narcissism of tiny differences in

status, navigating their social life through coalition formation.

The way to get ahead is to join powerful groups. The key to social life

is not unfettered competition, nor universal cooperation, but a subtle

mix of the two: competing fiercely to join up with the most attractive

cooperators. And the cognitive capacities they deploy involve a capacity

for strategic reasoning of the second, third, even the fourth degree.

You have to be impressed how well they have adapted to life in the wild.

The problem is that many primates do not adapt well to life in zoos, and

Wall Street is the biggest and strangest zoo of them all. It presents

our large primate brain with vast challenges, of which the greatest has

been solving strategic reasoning of the thousandth degree.

Faced with evidence that a housing boom can't continue forever, we do

not unravel it back to the beginning but try to ride the boom till the

very end, to do just a little better than the very best of the others.

Those differences in status, you see.....Though Darwin's name is often

wrongly associated with admiration for the outcomes of natural

selection, the man who wrote "what a book a devil's chaplain might write

on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of

nature!" would doubtless have been less than surprised at the kinds of

terrible games Homo sapiens gets up to when he spends too much of his

time in the zoo."

One advocate of avoiding the zoo as much as possible has been Vanguard

fund founder and advocate of indexing, John Bogle. John recently said,

"We can't say that we haven't been warned about the perils of ignoring

the past. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman orator Cato noted that,

'there must be a vast fund of stupidity in human nature, or else men

would not be caught as they are, a thousand times over, by the same

snares . . . while they yet remember their past misfortunes, they go on

to court and encourage the causes to what they were owing, and which

will again produce them.'"

Have a great weekend and enjoy the Super Bowl.