"Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years--for businesses, governments, and the global community--and how we can navigate them. While Alec Ross was working as Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor on Innovation, he traveled to forty-one countries. He visited some of the toughest places in the world--from refugee camps of Congo to Syrian war...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term used for computers that can think for themselves, communicate, and act in some of the same ways as human beings. Today computers have become "smarter" than ever before, with AI machines capable of diagnosing medical conditions, driving cars, and detect fraud and criminal activity. However, despite these and other positive uses for AI, not everyone is excited about the potential benefits of this technology. Some...

Explore the science, innovation and sheer genius it takes to transform the most basic ingredients into powerhouse machines. From aircraft to big rigs to earth movers, venture deep inside factories and witness the hard work and craftsmanship necessary to build these incredible machines. Uncover the hidden stories of human ingenuity that have transformed the earth's most essential raw materials into monumental marvels of modern technology. Natural resources,...

To extract precious metals found beneath the earth requires a massive 232-ton, two-story-tall dump truck with a load capacity of 320 tons — a giant earth-mover like the Komatsu 930E. This amazing engineering achievement is made possible by five essential raw ingredients: coal, chromium, mineral oil, latex rubber and sulphuric acid, an electron superhighway that generates massive power.

The highway truck — a modern workhorse, a heavy hauler vital to commerce — carries an 80,000-pound payload and must operate in every condition from sub-zero cold to triple-digit heat. To survive, it must be strong, durable and fuel-efficient, like the Mack Pinnacle, an engineering achievement made possible by platinum, petroleum, copper, manganese and polyurethane.

Successful innovations must be desirable to consumers, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. But how do you meet these requirements? Tim Brown advocates using the three stages of "design thinking": inspiration, ideation, and implementation. For inspiration, innovators must look at the world through the eyes and the ears of users, perhaps studying analogous situations or extreme users to spark a generative process. Ideation,...