How is automated innovation different from the innovation concepts and methods that have recently emerged?

The innovation concepts and methods that have recently emerged are just incremental improvements on the existing means for acquiring and utilizing technology. Automated innovation is the next revolutionary leap for mankind, and will be just as impactful as the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution.

The difference, in terms of both process and impact, can be understood by examining the analogous situation of when human societies made the leap from hunter-gatherers to rancher-farmers.

For many thousands of years humans subsisted by gathering whatever wild grains, vegetables and fruits they could find and hunting the animals that they came across. This was highly inefficient and required all daylight hours to be spent trying to acquire enough food to just survive, and also required constant relocation. Often times it was a losing proposition.

The process is basically the same for the acquisition and utilization of technology today. People scour the internet to gather the latest technology to deploy. Similarly, researchers attend conferences hunting for the latest research to cross-pollinate with their research in order to generate the required break-through. And just like the hunter-gatherers, the present process for technology acquisition and utilization is highly inefficient.

The latest concepts addressing innovation amount to increasing the efficiency of this hunting and gathering. Conferences are held with more frequency and are much larger. Search engines are made more efficient for hunting down technologies on the internet to exploit. More resources are poured into the research process. But in all cases these improvements are addressing increasing the efficiency of the hunter-gatherer process. And although many of these processes do improve the efficiency, because the basic process is so highly inefficient, the resulting change in overall efficiency is not very significant. The hunter-gather may have better eyesight to find the wild berries, but he is still a hunter-gatherer.

And just like the hunter-gatherers who could not imagine ranching and farming and could only increase the quality of their life by refining their gathering and hunting skills, today’s technology people cannot imagine automated innovation, and therefore only address technology acquisition and utilization by increasing the efficiency of their hunting and gathering skills.

Just as hunter-gatherer societies had little understanding of food production, technology people of today do not understand the process of how technology is developed and utilized from the perspective of the technology itself; therefore they refine the hunter-gatherer process for technology, which amounts to improving the sociological, psychological or financial aspect of the process. They strive to increase the effectiveness of the people working to transfer technology from universities to corporations, work to free people's thinking so that they are more innovative, and increase the funding for research and development. But they do not directly manipulate the technology itself.

Ranching and farming were major leaps forward for human societies. Learning and harnessing the actual process of food development increases the efficiency of acquiring food by many-fold. This significant increase in efficiency for food acquisition has had major impacts on all aspects of mankind. Life expectancy has increased, and people went from wandering to establishing settlements which rapidly evolved into villages, towns and then cities. With increased efficiency has come time for pursuits beyond acquiring food.

Automated innovation directly addresses technology itself as a farmer-rancher addresses the process of planting, cultivating, and harvesting food so that he can reap it with a high level of efficiency, as opposed to leaving it to nature and searching for what is available. Automated innovation directly addresses the process for "planting, cultivating and harvesting" technology and does it on a global scale. But in addition to directly addressing the technology itself, it is doing it via automation resulting in a further major increase in the speed, efficiency and agility in which technology is acquired and utilized.

Just as the leap from hunter-gather to rancher-farmer changes the efficiency of food acquisition and results in major changes to all aspects of society, automated innovation will have the same huge impact on society.

How does automated innovation enable the US to overcome the significant resource advantage of a country like China?

How is automated innovation different from the innovation concepts and methods that have recently emerged? Automated innovation increases, to unprecedented level, the efficiency of acquiring and utilizing technology, which includes research and development, for a competitive advantage.

By many estimates, China presently has a $2.6 trillion war chest to drive its competitiveness and for every one indigenous engineer or scientist that the US graduates, China graduates 15. With this significant imbalance in resources, it is impossible for the US to compete successfully using a brute force approach. The US cannot "out R&D" China and the US cannot out spend China on the acquisition of external technology.

The only way that the US and its organizations can compete successfully against China with this massive resource imbalance is to acquire and utilize technology, which includes the high-tech to the low-tech, with a level of efficiency that far surpasses that which is achievable by China today or in the foreseeable future. This can be accomplished with automated innovation.

For example, the process for generating technology breakthroughs, be they incremental or major, consists of cross-pollinating diverse technologies (or science). If the cross-pollination is between two or more closely related technologies the breakthrough is usually incremental. If the technologies are very diverse (i.e., the technologies are located in what are considered very unrelated areas) the breakthrough is very often considered a radical or major breakthrough.

Today, in both China and the US, the cross-pollination of technology for breakthroughs is almost serendipitous. It is a chance meeting between two researchers at a conference cocktail party where they discuss their respective research that has the attributes to cross-pollinate to generate the required breakthrough. And even when the meeting of the researchers is instigated and takes place over the internet where a much larger group of researchers can interact and the group can interact in a more efficient manner, the process is still one of "hunter/gatherer" with its inherent high level of inefficiency.

In the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System, a complete real-time map of technologyspace (not a model which is a simplified representation of reality) is generated and utilized. Technologyspace is the complete set of present and "future" technologies whose four dimensional structure dictates how technology can be acquired and utilized, to include the generation of breakthroughs, for a competitive advantage. In the case of technology breakthroughs, the automation of the system examines the full set of present and potential future technologies worldwide to identify those technologies with the required attributes within the four dimensions to cross-pollinate and generate the desired breakthrough technology. Then beyond that, the system is able to determine what competitive advantage the breakthrough technology will posses for what length of time relative to the competitors.

So instead of relying upon a chance encounter at a conference, or searching the internet for journal articles, both with their inherent extremely low level of efficiency, the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System enables technology to be very precisely and accurately targeted worldwide to generate a technology breakthrough with a very precise and accurately known competitive advantage. The result is an unprecedented level of efficiency for generating a breakthrough.

But the competitive advantage generated by the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System goes beyond just unprecedented efficiency. The Quadrigy System also provides unprecedented speed and agility in the acquisition and utilization of technology.

In the case of technology breakthroughs this means rather than a researcher wading through the long and arduous trial-and-error process of locating and trying various technologies for cross-pollinations, he or she can know which technologies to acquire from which organizations with what level of capability at what point in time to generate the breakthrough with the required levels of capability.

Beyond the unprecedented efficiency and speed that the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System provides, what is even more effective for a competitive advantage is the agility that the Quadrigy system provides. The Quadrigy system provides the ability to adroitly outmaneuver the competition in the full range of technology acquisition and utilization maneuvers, including R&D, to consistently generate and maintain the required competitive advantage no matter how the world evolves.

The Project Socrates system was designed to demonstrate both the viability and impact of automated innovation, and did so successfully. The Quadrigy Automated Innovation System is a fully operational system with capabilities that far exceed the capabilities of the Socrates test-bed system.

For example, whereas the Socrates system required considerable effort and training to use and left many of the functions to the user to accomplish manually, the Quadrigy System is highly intuitive, requires minimal training and is almost fully automated.

The Quadrigy System interface provides a highly intuitive, graphic representation of four-dimensional technologyspace and the ability to navigate within the technologyspace to explore in real-time how to use the user organization's (or region's) strengths and weaknesses to exploit the opportunities and constraints within techspace relative to the competitors' strengths and weaknesses to generate and maintain a competitive advantage.

The Quadrigy System "plays" like a highly sophisticated video game but instead of maneuvering in a software developer's imaginary world, the user is maneuvering in the real 4-D technologyspace. And, unlike the result of a video game, the result of maneuvering in techspace is a concrete technology strategy for the user's organization (or region) which enables the organization to consistently outmaneuver the competition in the acquisition and utilization of technology worldwide (including internal R&D), to acquire and maintain the required competitive advantage.

What functions within an organization does the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System support?

Because technology exploitation is the foundation of all competitiveness (when technology is properly defined as any application of science to accomplish a function), and the final objective of all functions within all types and sizes of private or public organizations is to generate or utilize a competitive advantage, the most effective foundation for planning and decision-making is technology-based planning. From marketing and finance to human resources and operations, all are most effective when the foundation for planning and decision-making is technology-based planning.

Technology-based planning is the most effective foundation for the full range of functions and enables all the functions to be executed in a highly coherent manner further increasing their effectiveness both individually and as a set.

The Quadrigy System is deployed in a country (or smaller region) as a countrywide asset where it is available to all private and public organizations for their respective planning and decision-making.

In addition, to further increase the impact of the automated innovation, the deployment of the Quadrigy System enables the private and public organizations of the country to work symbiotically in their acquisition and utilization of technology. The symbiotic relationships between the organizations enable the technology of the country to be exploited in a highly coherent, but flexible and independent manner. But because technology exploitation is the foundation of all competitiveness, when the technology is exploited coherently, the rest of the resources of the country (e.g., manpower, funds, natural resources), are also exploited in a highly coherent but flexible and independent manner.

The final result is that the symbiotic deployment is a force multiplier on the competitive advantage that is generated for a country or region by the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System.

What role does the government play in the deployment of the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System as a countrywide asset?

The exact role of the government various from country-to-country, but in general the organizations of the government are users of the Quadrigy Automated Innovation System for their respective planning in the same manner as the private organizations of the country.