Growth is usually a good thing. For a person, it means more wisdom; for a business, it means more profit; for a country, it means increased prosperity. But growth has a darker side too: aging, a sense of impersonality, waste and pollution. At TED@BCG — the latest TED Institute event, held on June 30, 2015, […]
by Nilofer Merchant In the next 30 years, the full Star Trek story will actually come true. Already, we’ve seen many of the show’s far-fetched ideas come to fruition. Everyone now carries a communicator, aka the smart phone. We have medical devices that test for diseases with light, not by drawing blood (like new tests for anemia […]
On March 10, 2011, Joi Ito was in the MIT Media Lab, in discussions about whether he should be the next director of the mythical innovation space, when he heard that a major earthquake had hit the Pacific coast of Japan. “My wife and family were in Japan,” he says. “As news was coming in, […]
3D printing pioneer Avi Reichental is nostalgic for a time he never quite experienced — a time of hyper-local, made-to-order, personalized craftsmanship. While the industrial revolution did a lot to advance humanity, says Reichental, it eradicated local manufacturing that people like his grandfather, a cobbler, excelled in. It atrophied society’s craftsmanship skills. But, says Reichental, there’s […]
Listen to too much talk about innovation, and before long you’re bound to hear someone utter the “cross” word. It might be followed by “fertilization,” maybe “pollination,” perhaps even “disciplinary,” but the sharing of ideas with unlike-minded people is a hot topic, the holy grail of wannabe world-changers. After all, the thinking goes, working with […]
When Jane Chen and her team arrived in India five years ago, it was with a bold idea. They wanted to develop a simple, affordable solution to a terrible problem: infant mortality. They went to the right place. According to a recent Child Mortality report, produced by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, […]
Everyone knows Detroit is in trouble. The list of problems assaulting the once-mighty Motor City is long and, from a look at national newspapers, incessantly documented. Most recently, the city filed for bankruptcy; its former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for public corruption. Since the booming 1950s, the city of Detroit […]
Should the government act like a venture capitalist? It might seem crazy to some, but in today’s eye-opening talk, economist Mariana Mazzucato shows why it might just work — and how it has, in fact, been working for decades. In this talk, Mazzucato flips the script on the image of a big government meddling in […]
In 2012, IDEO founder and longtime Stanford professor David Kelley took the TED stage in Long Beach and shared a deeply personal story. It was the tale of his own cancer diagnosis, of finding a lump in his neck and being told he had a 40% chance of survival. This was clearly a sobering moment, […]
“For many years, travel was probably the most important component of my life. Every time I could throw a little pebble far away and run across the world to pick it up, the more distance I could put between myself and Mexico City, the happier I was. When I was back in the city, I […]
“Economic development is of the people, by the people and for the people,” declared entrepreneur and economist Iqbal Quadir on the TED stage back in 2005. In his talk, he offered a bold vision for bottom-up development and shared a searing critique of foreign aid — that it actually does more harm than good. His […]
The video “DNA Portrait,” above, is a lovely short documentary shot by TED’s own Kari Mulholland. It features the work of the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who spent time collecting hairs shed in public spaces… and then sequencing the DNA therein to print 3D sculptures of what those hairs’ owners might look like. Whoa. The film […]
Technology is such an integral part of everyday life, it can be hard to remember how far we’ve come — and how fast. This session at TEDGlobal 2013 introduces a cadre of technological innovators who are helping to change the world yet further–and thinking about the implications of technology on society at large. Here are […]
Governments’ role in spurring innovation is a controversial one. In rough terms, political debates about public spending usually go something like this: One side argues governments should only spend on the most basic public goods and do whatever they can to keep out of the way of the private sector that grows the economy and […]
We all think we understand the formula for keeping healthy — eat right, exercise, don’t smoke, skip dessert. But that picture is vastly incomplete, perhaps fatally so. In the eye-opening new TED book, The Upstream Doctors: Medical Innovators Track Sickness to Its Source, physician Rishi Manchanda says that while our individual health is highly dependent on […]
By Paul Farmer At the end of almost a decade spent in teaching hospitals and clinics, most (we hope all) physicians have honed their clinical acumen by focusing on the care of the patient who is right in front of them. Perhaps this is as it should be: as patients, we don’t want our doctors […]