It’s been a while that I’ve had time to write on my blog. I wanted to share with you this fascinating crowd-sourcing project that essentially is building a complete reference of life existing on the planet earth.

If you are working in a field where you are in position to help, please contribute. This is an important step for us in building understanding of the life on our planet. See also the video of the award-winning speech of E.O. Wilson at TED conference in March 2007 regarding this project.

In a recent article in New York Times, Judy Estrin warns about current lack of long term government and private funding for groundbreaking technologies that could build foundation for future products and services. Estrin is a former CTO of Cisco and a serial entrepreneur, so her words have serious weight behind them.

In my opinion, there is no such problem. The real trend here is that the innovation is shifting from scientific findings and core technologies towards applications, design and user experiences. In many areas, the core technology is just good enough as it is, enabling ever increasing opportunities for new uses and applications. The last years have seen tremendous innovation in social web and mobile applications, as well as completely new generation of productivity tools that leverage ubiquitous broadband and mobile access to the web.

The rise and growth of companies in the markets of social networking, blogging, instant messaging, mobile and web recording, streaming and document sharing are good examples of the shift of innovation from core technology to the application of technology. Due to the maturity and commoditization of the core tech, applications are relatively cheap to develop and launch. This lowered barrier of entry has led to unprecedented shifts in market forces in multiple markets, including communication, media and enterprise applications.

Obviously, there are still many areas of technology that are currently in fundamental breakthrough phase, for example green/clean tech, renewable energy and bio/nanotechnology. These areas require significant investment to basic research as well as applied research and product innovation.

For savvy entrepreneur, taking the application route is much safer bet, but has also very short windows of opportunity due to low competitive barriers. I have personally been entrepreneur in enterprise applications, nanotech, mobile and web applications businesses, and my first hand experience tells clearly that breakthrough technology takes much longer to develop into products than application of existing tech to innovative feature applications.

If you are ready and willing to put 5-10 years of your lifetime to try to build significant breakthrough technology, and you have access to major funding sources, trying to reduce science to commercial technology is the right type of venture for you. Otherwise, try to do quick, iterative innovation in the application space, and never invest too much for the first try.

According to recent news from New Straits Times, Philips has recently developed a new, radically improved Computer Tomography (CT) device that can do extremely accurate 3D imaging of organs such as heart and brain. It also does it faster and with less exposure to x-rays.

With this extremely accurate imaging technology, what else could we be possible? Let me just throw some ideas: What about anonymously publishing images of organs that have problems that can’t be located by the doctors? Maybe with this crowdsourcing approach, somebody might find slight abnormalities that otherwise would be unnoticed. Maybe, just maybe, we could find new sources of problems and new cures to them. Or maybe we could use the technology in other applications, such as industrial defect analysis?

I think this development could open new research and business opportunities for entrepreneurs and existing companies.

Please post your ideas, whatever they may be, onto comments.

There was an interesting article in my native Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat about a layman reporter who managed to find a potentially important cause for migraine, and got it approved on a respected scientific publication NeuroReport.

Long story short, a Finnish science reporter named Jani Kaaro, a high school dropout, got interested in the cause of migraine through his son’s sleeping problems. He started surfing the net on different causes, including developmental heart defects that may be caused by serotonin level changes during pregnancy. He continued his research and found connection to heart’s lateralization as well as Nodal clusters and eventually to brain’s pineal gland. This amount of cross-discipline research created him advantage against many researchers who usually are focused on their respective narrow fields in scientific research. He also was clever enough to cooperate with different leading researchers on their respective fields to build credible scientific test of his hypothesis.

The point of this is: with internet, anybody with passion to his/her topic can conduct breakthrough research by utilizing internet’s vast resources and cooperating with experts in different fields. Internet enables true democratization of scientific and non-scientific research for common benefit and entrepreneurial intellectual property development.

I wanted to start out with a few thoughts on disruptive innovations. Wikipedia defines disruptive innovations in the following way:

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a term describing a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a “disruptive” strategy, rather than an “evolutionary” or “sustaining” strategy, to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market.disruptive innovation.

All of us have seen a few major market disruptions in our lifetime. For example, digital cameras and photography disrupted the market for traditional films, only to be outgrown by cellphones with cameras. Digital downloads and streaming are currently visibly disrupting the retail distribution of music, and gradually it is also causing disruption in movies and games industries.

Many times the disruptions erode massive amounts of value from the existing players, and lowers the cost at which the goods are enjoyed. However, they may also greatly expand the marketplace in terms of potential clients, and therefore provide lucrative opportunities for savvy investors. Disruptive technologies are highly risky investments, and the likelihood of any company succeeding is low.

I have always had a personal dream of being able to disrupt an existing market or invent a completely new market for greater good for the customers, society and eventually mankind. But where are those opportunities now? Which markets are in need of disruption, and what areas of technology are ripe for disrupting existing markets?

In my opinion, the following markets are ripe for or already in state of disruptions:

1. Personal health care products replacing need for expensive doctor visits. The cost and accessibility of technology has come to a point that consumer devices can replace hospital and specialist equipment in diagnosis, treatment and preventive care. This will provide huge cost savings in multitude of markets, and will create unprecedented wealth for companies and individuals who are able to get their products funded and launched.

2. Music Industry. The ongoing disruption that is painfully killing the existing business of the big labels is going to last for a while, but when the new marketplace emerges, there will be new opportunities too. The problem is, we don’t know how long the labels have money to continue suing everybody out of business.

3. Video Game Industry. We see quotes like “Flash is the new console”. iPhone emerged as a new game platform. Social Networks count for ever increasing share of consumers’ play time. There is a lot of content available for free, and the budgets for developing games are still increasing. We will see major shifts in business models in the coming years.

4. Media. Ongoing major shift of the advertising dollars from traditional to new media, as well as increased pressure to shift to performance based marketing is putting the traditional media and TV channels into major financial pressure. Migration to the web as well as deaths of traditional papers are already everyday news.

5. Automotive industry. Major shift out of oil dependency will be the main trend within car makers for the coming years. This industry will not change fast, though, it will take years.

6. Real Estate, Energy, and so on… Got the point? The market is still full of opportunity!

In the future posts, we will try to cover innovations in areas of common interest. Please send your ideas and hints to editor@discoverse.com.

Discoverse is a blog dedicated on finding and debating ideas and opportunities that could make a difference, i.e. “change the world”. We will cover multiple areas of science and technology that could lead to a better future for the mankind.

Our focus is in the new innovations and people behind the innovations, not on mainstream ideas. In other words, we want to cover things that are bubbling under and not yet in the mainstream awareness. We hope you will find the articles enjoyable and a good source of inspiration.

Stay ahead of the curve!

Sincerely,

Mikko Alasaarela