Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford’s Engineering School, illustrates two “weird ideas that work”. This presentation is based on his book Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation, of which a preview is available here.

Two terrific talks: George Dyson gives a quick and entertaining overview of the birth of the computer, and Robert Full shows how engineering can solve problems by taking inspiration from nature.

Growthology’s Tim Kane wonders what Schumpeter would think about the changing face of innovation promotion: “If Schumpeter had lived to see the development of the IT revolution, the Internet, and google, what would he have thought? He probably would be incredibly encouraged to see the acceleration of innovation and the constant re-spawning of innovative small firms. This is the start-up culture, and my sense is that it is the one big idea Schumpeter missed.”

Blake Shaw has a post on innovator Harold Ridley’s desperate battle: “A brilliant eye surgeon performs a revolutionary operation in secret, implanting a new device, the intraocular lens, which replaces the cloudy cataract. Word leaks out two years later, and the world’s most prominent ophthalmologist vilifies and ostracizes him. He suffers from depression, an outcast in his profession. …”

Anita Campbell writes at Open Forum about how technology prices have kept dropping.

On a similar note, at Cafe Hayek Russell Roberts pointed out in late 2006 that “When [the iPod] first came out, it held 1000 songs and cost $399. Today, for $349, you get 20,000 songs. It can also display videos and photos. It’s smaller, too. So it’s $50 cheaper and more than 20 times better.”

In 2008, you can choose from many more iPod models but you can also get that classic 20,000 song version for $249, and a 40,000 song version for $349.

The increasing popularity of social media such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter sparks an interesting discussion at Small Business Trends over whether businesses should take advantage of them for marketing purposes or whether their use would do more harm than good. And over at Fast Company, Stanford professor B.J. Fogg explains why Facebook is “the most powerful tool in human history.”

This great article in Entrepreneur magazine explains briefly some of the essential technology we use daily—such as Unicode, XML and VoIP—but often don’t really think about.