I recently came across an article in Cell Science that intrigued me and gets to the core of this question. The title—”The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research”—was reason alone to pique my curiosity. What I didn’t expect was to find a powerful insight into student learning in today’s highly uncertain world.

Martin A. Schwartz, of the University of Virginia Department of Microbiology, wrote that “we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid—the kind of stupidity inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.” Dr. Schwartz is referring to scientific education when he says “the more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.” Yet this same logic applies to other areas of learning.

Outside the classroom, “big” societal problems are multidimensional, seemingly intractable, and cut across disciplines. They involve solutions that may appear distant or daunting, and may require many steps. Students often give up on the excitement of discovery because they believe they are incapable of successfully addressing such problems.

This is unfortunate. Whatever their interests, students should find a place to study that helps young people acknowledge their “productive stupidity” and use it as a base for engaging in problem-solving and discovery. Their studies should combine the best of predictive logic—rooted in the scientific method—with a complementary logic that starts with action and is punctuated by reflection, learning, and more action. This is a method that is not just for the entrepreneur who starts a business; it is for the entrepreneurially minded person who wants to create economic and social value in the world.

Action-learning should play a much greater role in education. Students need the mind-set and tools to be successful in an environment where the assumptions they are working under change at a rapid pace and where, as Dr. Schwartz suggested, they “must be encouraged to push their way into the unknown.”

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Ask Scott Raskin to name the number-one innovation that changed the world of project management and business collaboration, and he has a surprising answer: the whiteboard.

It’s not that the answer is nonsensical—Raskin may well be right. It’s that it’s coming from the CEO of Mindjet, a San Francisco software company devoted to helping workers capture their thoughts and plans digitally. After all, if Mindjet’s 2 million users gave up their laptops, PCs, and tablets for old-fashioned whiteboards, the company would be out of business.

Raskin’s real point, though, is that business people deal with lots of data and ideas, and it’s often helpful to arrange this information visually, in a place where everyone can see it. Whiteboards are great for that—the problem is that they aren’t very portable or shareable (your team in Hong Kong probably won’t see the brainstorming notes that your team in Atlanta captured last night). Mindjet’s “mind mapping” software lets teams organize their thoughts on virtual canvases that can be accessed and modified from any Web browser, with the data on the maps feeding directly into project management tools such as Cohuman, a social task management platform startup that Mindjet recently acquired.

“The value of the visual is that you understand where everything is and where to get it, by going to the map,” says Raskin (pictured above). “What we’ve done is marry that with all of the other fundamental things you need to do when you’re working as a group.”

A mind map made using Mindjet's free iPad app

Judging from adoption in the corporate world, it’s been a successful gambit: Mindjet’s software is used today inside 80 percent of the Forbes Global 2000 companies, and entities like BMW, Cisco, and Siemens pay for thousands of seats apiece. Yet Mindjet has been through a challenging transition lately. To cope with the rise of the cloud and the Software-as-a-Service business model, the company had to hire an entirely new engineering team to recreate its Windows- and Mac-based software for the Web. It had to figure out how to take the information encased in mind maps and make it more actionable. And it had to shift away from its old revenue model, which was based on getting companies to pay for yearly upgrades, and adopt a more fluid (and hazardous) freemium model.

But there was no choice about these changes, Raskin says: “If you don’t disrupt your own business model, someone else will.” Alongside the product overhaul, Mindjet has been staffing up—it’s now at 270 employees, and plans to double its software development staff—and has gone on an acquisition binge, buying myMind, Cohuman, and Thinking Space. The company’s latest releases are meeting early success. Mindjet’s iPad app was downloaded 150,000 times in its first two days in the iTunes App Store and rose to number 4 on Apple’s list of productivity apps. This week, the company introduced new features that, for the first time, link MindJet Connect, the cloud version of its mind mapping platform, with Cohuman, which is a sort of Tweetdeck for task management.

Mind mapping isn’t new. The concept dates back at least to 1993, when it was first popularized in a book published by British author Tony Buzan. Mindjet was founded not long after that, by the husband-and-wife team of Mike and Bettina Jetter. As Raskin explains it, Mike Jetter was a young programmer who decided, after being diagnosed with myeloid leukemia, to build a PC-based mind mapping tool as a way to keep occupied during a long period when he was in an isolation ward, awaiting a bone marrow transplant. (The Jetters recount the tale of Mike’s illness and recovery in a 2003 book called The Cancer Code.)

By 2006, the company’s original product, MindManager, had reached 650,000 users and had “evolved from being a mind-mapping tool to, really, an information-mapping application, capturing and linking to all sorts of sources,” says Raskin. That year was one of change for the company. Investor Growth Capital helped to recapitalize Mindjet in a … Next Page »

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We’re quickly moving to a new world where the wealth gap is compounding and increasing. We’re moving to a world that is going to look a lot like Hollywood: a few people enjoying insane success … and everyone else spends their days waiting tables.

The delta between A-players and B-players in companies has always been high. A-players get promoted faster and they earn more. My guess is that an A-player earns about 30 percent more than a B-player in that same position for most professions. An A-player administrative assistant usually can earn about 30 percent more than a B-player in the same position. That’s a significant difference and even more when you compound that difference in savings and lifestyle over the course of one’s career.

In some professions like sales and entertainment, an A-player might earn 300 percent more than a B-player and essentially live an entirely different lifestyle. In the future, everyone’s jobs will look more like salespeople.

Let’s focus on the profession I am most familiar with: software engineers.

Today, an A-player software engineer has a lot more job prospects than a B-player. That seems obvious. But there are plenty of B-player and C-player engineers that work at great companies and get paid well. Their services are needed and important. And while they don’t make the contributions that an A-player makes, they still are very valuable to a company and have a lot of importance to the success of an organization.

But things are changing (queue in the Darth Vader music).

There are three forces that will drastically change work, compensation, and our value to each other forever:

1. A productivity boom will automate B- and C-player work.
2. Globalization will commoditize B- and C-player work.
3. A-players can have much more impact.

The productivity boom will automate your job.

Everyone is massively more productive today than they were just a few years ago. A salesperson can use tools like Salesforce.com to track customers, LinkedIn to find prospects, and they can easily call and send documents from the road with their iPhones (unless they are on AT&T). The Internet makes all of us extremely productive and automates parts of our jobs.

In the 1990s, I was a software developer and I remember writing a script to determine if a string was a valid e-mail address. It took about 12 hours for me to write. First, I had to research what could and could not be in an e-mail address (dashes are ok, commas are not, only one “@” symbol, etc.) and there were a bunch of corner cases that I had to guard against and test against. After coding into the night, I finally came up with something I was proud of.

Today those 12 hours of work would take about 1.2 seconds. There are hundreds of libraries that have been written by really smart people and tested by thousands of programs. All one has to do is … Next Page »

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The digital travel sector was a hot source of news for Xconomy readers in the past week—specifically, we had three major appearances from Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE). The online travel giant made its biggest headlines with its decision to spin out TripAdvisor into a separate public company. As Xconomy’s Greg Huang reported, Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor has been part of Expedia since 2004, but the two companies operated independently. That setup seems to have worked pretty well—TripAdvisor reported $486 million in revenue in 2010.

The TripAdvisor announcement came just one day before the federal government said it would approve Google’s $700 million acquisition of Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software, which makes airfare pricing and shopping software. Expedia was among the online-travel companies that opposed the original bid by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). But that coalition praised the U.S. Justice Department’s firewalls and ongoing oversight as conditions of the deal.

If that wasn’t enough, we also had an in-depth report from Xconomy Detroit’s Thomas Lee about the entrepreneur working on Expedia’s first native hotel-booking iPhone app, Expedia Hotel, which debuts this month. The guy behind the new product, Ben Kazez, sold his startup Mobiata to Expedia last year. The new app is a big step for Expedia, which gets most of its revenue from hotel bookings.

Elsewhere on the Seattle-area tech beat:

—I stopped by venture capitalist Tom Huseby’s office for a chat on the implications for the Puget Sound region’s mobile innovation community if AT&T‘s blockbuster $39 billion purchase of Bellevue’s T-Mobile goes through. Huseby is a veteran of the industry here, and has specialized in startups that work with wireless carriers. One of his major takeaways from the buyout was a bit of “chin up” advice for the local community: Yes, losing a major headquarters is bad. But it’s not as bad as everyone thinks. Go check out the whole thing for more insights on our mobile talent cluster, the carrier duopoly (plus Sprint), and why mobile and place-bound computing convergence is the biggest disruption of them all.

—I took a look at how Bellevue-based LiquidPlanner, a startup that makes mid-range online project management software, is capitalizing on the trend of blending social and mobile features with boring old business software. As CEO Charles Seybold explained, there’s more than beauty in the user-friendly design of LiquidPlanner—the Facebook-like look and feel, and the instant messaging-style features … Next Page »

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The explosion of faster networks, connected crowds and mobile computing has made millions of Americans into astonishingly fast and efficient consumers. But when the weekend’s over, too many of us walk back into a technological time-warp of email chains, conference calls and endless meetings.

Bellevue-based LiquidPlanner is among the companies trying to break down that wall. Founded in 2006 by two veterans of Expedia and Microsoft, the startup is trying to make productivity software sexier—and just plain better—by incorporating elements of social networks and app-based computing.

It’s one example of an emerging trend in business software. Author and venture capitalist Geoffrey Moore, the guy behind the classic business text “Crossing the Chasm,” describes the change as a migration from “systems of record” like databases to “systems of engagement,” allowing workers to collaborate and share more information.

“The next big wave of investment in enterprise IT will be around this consumerization of enterprise IT,” Moore told us in an interview last month. “And it’ll be around, in particular, helping companies communicate, coordinate, and collaborate across company boundaries.”

Charles Seybold, the co-founder and CEO at LiquidPlanner, couldn’t agree more. The company is trying to overhaul boring old business software by including the features and visual language that people already use in their private lives—and that younger workers will increasingly demand.

“Our whole design was built around this concept of social management. It’s about people working together to get things done,” Seybold says. And he says that is a big change in the world of project management, a multibillion-dollar market where software has traditionally focused on technical rather than social solutions.

“A lot of our competitors are involved in what I like to call the kitchen sink wars—they’re trying to add more features. But it’s not really about adding more features. It’s about making them easier to use,” Seybold says.

LiquidPlanner’s story is a classic: Techies frustrated by the bureaucracy of a larger company set out to solve a nagging problem. Seybold and co-founder Jason Carlson both worked at Expedia before it spun out of Microsoft, and were with the company as it grew into “one of the Four Horsemen of the Internet,” as Seybold puts it.

“From an insider’s perspective, this was a company that grew really fast,” Seybold says. “And its process, inside the company, became quite a challenge.” Seybold got to see that firsthand as he worked to set up Expedia’s first project management system. After spending millions on consultants and … Next Page »

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There’s lots going on in Xconomy-land, so this week’s column will be shorter than usual. Which is probably fine with you, since everyone seems pressed for time these days.

Microsoft is notorious for its lame ad campaigns, but lately the software giant has been putting its finger on the overcommitment problem, through an amusing series of ads for Hotmail under the theme “The New Busy.” As Microsoft implies in its ads, everyone in a knowledge-worker role spends more time than they would like managing stuff like incoming e-mail. I can’t quite see how Hotmail solves that problem—but there’s no doubt it’s a real one.

So, on this subject of being too busy, I want to come back to a 2009 column I wrote about the “e-mail bankruptcy” method for getting over your inbox management blues. I’ve noticed more and more people turning to this technique. Just this week, for example, David Cancel, CEO of Amesbury, MA-based Web analytics startup Performable, tweeted that he was getting ready to do the deed.

Declaring e-mail bankruptcy is simple, and not nearly as painful as its financial namesake. All you have to do is admit to yourself that you’re never going to have time to deal with the huge backlog of unanswered e-mails clogging your inbox, and archive or delete them en masse. (It’s polite to let your frequent correspondents know that you’re doing this, so they can re-message you if they were waiting to hear back about some urgent inquiry.)

But clearing out your inbox is only the first half of the solution to chronic e-mail overload, and it’s the second half that I want to touch on today. The trick is to prevent another backlog from building up by completely emptying your inbox at least once every work day.

Emptying your inbox the first time is easy. But keeping it empty requires vigilance and dedication, as I learned after I deleted some 15,000 unanswered e-mails back in January 2009. I kept to my zero-inbox routine for a couple of months, but then I fell off the wagon, allowing one day’s accumulation of e-mail to build up to a week’s and then a month’s. Pretty soon my unread message count was back up to 3,000. That mountain of e-mail is pretty easy to build up in a hurry if you get 150 to 250 e-mails a day, as I do.

I knew I’d have to go through another bankruptcy eventually, but first I wanted to find some techniques that might help me adhere to the zero-inbox habit. My main challenge—and the big reason I’d given up on my routine—was that it was just taking too long. I’d put in a regular 8, 10, or 12-hour work day, and then I’d have to spend another hour or two getting through all of the stuff in my inbox. Faced with a choice between keeping my inbox empty and having a semblance of a life outside work, I had chosen life.

But after I was seated as a juror on a medical malpractice trial back in March and wound up spending three weeks away from the office, my e-mail log jam grew so tangled that I had to … Next Page »

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Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, announced today the company is forming a new laboratory called Future Social Experience Labs, or FUSE Labs, which will focus on aspects of “social computing” beyond just communication and collaboration. The move is part of a wider restructuring of Microsoft’s labs: FUSE Labs is a merger between the Creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Labs; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. As part of the announcement, Ozzie said Reed Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs for the past two years, is leaving the company to pursue other interests.

FUSE Labs will be led by Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who most recently headed the Creative Systems Group and previously managed the user experience teams for Windows Vista. Before joining Microsoft, Cheng worked at Apple Computer in the human interface-advanced technology group, where she worked on QuickTime VR and QuickTime Conferencing products. Cheng is now general manager of FUSE Labs (in Redmond) and will report directly to Ozzie. “I’ve known Lili for many years, and have long been impressed by her vision and ability to create; to engage yet to also inspire; to lead; to make tough choices; to deliver,” Ozzie said in a memo to Microsoft staff.

Ozzie said he has “refined the missions” of Microsoft’s labs, in part because of “changing business conditions.” From his memo, it sounds like the goal of the new lab is to apply research in social computing (things like user interfaces, social networks, and human behavior) to help develop new products in the areas of entertainment, productivity, and teamwork—as well as to explore how Microsoft can extend the ways people use computer operating systems.

“The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices,” he said. (See more on Ozzie’s three-screen vision here.)

It also sounds like the reorganization is meant to focus the impact of social computing research more immediately on the company’s product pipeline. “FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they’re already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with ‘leapfrog’ efforts,” Ozzie said in his memo. “Working closely with [Microsoft Research] and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company’s extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity.”

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If you’re like me, you go through life with the vague hope that someday, technology will help you become a more efficient person. How often I’ve driven to the grocery store or the library to pick up one thing, knowing full well that there’s some other item I needed, but that I’ll never be able to locate it beneath the dust bunnies of my memory.

New tools for tidying up one’s brain come along all the time, of course: the File-o-fax of the 1990s gave way to the Palm Pilot, which eventually gave way to online services like Jott, Evernote, Remember the Milk, and Ta-Da List, and to the hundreds of personal productivity applications available for platforms like the iPhone. There’s even a whole website, Lifehacker, devoted to tracking such technologies.

But I’m still waiting for the über-application, the one central online repository that will allow me to a) file away all of the noteworthy bits of information coming in every day via e-mail, snail mail, catalogs, the blogs and websites I read, the mass media, billboards and posters, and the like, b) curate that information—that is, organize, annotate, tag, rearrange, and share it, and c) retrieve it when and where I really need it, whether I’m using my computer or my cell phone. The tool that currently comes closest to doing all that, for me, is Evernote, created by the Sunnyvale, CA, startup of the same name (I wrote a column about Evernote back in July). But now there’s a promising New England candidate, though it’s still in its embryonic stages: Springpad, an online notebook service launched in beta form last week by Boston-based Spring Partners.

Springpad is a system for creating customizable, task-oriented Web pages called, logically enough, springpads. To each springpad, you can add blocks of data such as text notes, to-do lists, contacts, calendar events, maps, and digital documents such as photos. You can build as many springpads as you want for the various tasks in your life. The company provides useful starting springpads designed for dozens of activities, from planning a vacation to tracking your pet’s medical records. There’s a powerful personal database system under the hood that allows you to tag, search, and share individual blocks, and Spring Partners—a 10-person, venture-backed startup located in Boston’s quaint Charlestown neighborhood —is working on add-ons such as an iPhone app and a Web clipper that will allow you to send information you find on the go or on the Web directly into your springpads.

If you go to Springpad right now, you might get the impression that it’s all about holiday planning—the same way MyPunchbowl is all about party planning or Geezeo is all about financial management (both of those life-tool startups happen to be located in the Boston area too). But the Thanksgiving and Christmas motif at Springpad is a bit misleading—and actually represents a marketing gamble of sorts for the startup.

As co-founder and CEO Jeff Janer explained to me when I visited the company Wednesday, the team had to start somewhere. Spring Partners—which consists almost entirely of transplants from Boston-based mobile advertising company Third Screen Media, acquired by AOL in 2007—has extremely ambitious plans for Springpad. Janer sees it as the central place for consumers, starting with the Web-savvy 25- to 35-year-old demographic, to organize all their life activities—shopping, chores, hobbies, eating out, exercise, travel, research, you name it. He describes it as a kind of anti-Facebook: a place to focus not on your social network but on yourself and all the tasks and information you have to manage.

But that’s a lot to explain to prospective users—and historically, quite a few super-duper personal information management tools have fallen victim to what Janer calls “blank slate syndrome,” the problem of having a great tool in front of you, but not knowing what to put into it.

So that’s why Springpad’s front pages are currently full of the kind of tips and advice you might find on the cover of the December issue of Better Homes & Gardens or Real Simple: an “8-week Holiday Preparation List,” a “Christmas Card Log,” a “Holiday Meal Planner.” The tips are linked to pre-built templates that guide users through the traditional tasks related to Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, and New Year’s celebrations. “The idea was to show people, in a focused way, how to survive the holidays,” says Janer. “Yes, there are all these other templates and features and functionalities available, but … Next Page »

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Three of the world’s biggest drugmakers can agree on this—the research and development model for creating new drugs needs a serious kick in the rear. Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly, through a collaboration hatched by Boston-based PureTech Ventures, have agreed to put $39 million into a new Boston company called Enlight Biosciences, whose job will be to create technologies that can enable researchers to make breakthrough drugs.

The venture has attracted very big names. The co-founders include Nobel Laureate H. Robert Horvitz, a biology professor at MIT, and Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School who co-founded Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Abgenix. Enlight’s team also includes a pair of PureTech partners with loads of drug industry experience: Frank Douglas, former chief scientific officer at Aventis, and Bennett Shapiro, former executive vice president of basic research and worldwide licensing at Merck.

Enlight’s stated goal is to foster development of new technologies that can help the industry break out of its funk. Despite pumping tens of billions into research and development every year, including $44.5 billion last year according to an industry trade group, the pharmaceutical industry gets a lousy return on that investment. Only 19 new drugs were approved by the U.S. FDA last year, the fewest in 24 years. An estimated one out of every 10 drugs that enters clinical trials ever makes it through the gauntlet of tests to become a marketed product.

“The biopharmaceutical industry has a great need for innovative enabling technologies that will catalyze fundamental transformation of the drug discovery and development process,” said Steven Paul, executive vice president of science and technology for Eli Lilly, in a statement. “A collaborative entrepreneurial initiative such as Enlight that is dedicated to such technological innovation in R&D meets that need in an ideal way.”

Historical examples of what the founders see as enabling technologies are polymerase-chain reaction machines that do DNA analysis; genetic engineering techniques that use more human DNA than mouse DNA, and therefore make better-tolerated drugs; and RNA interference, or gene silencing technologies, that can attack a disease closer to its root cause.

“Going forward, the idea is to find the next RNAi,” says Daphne Zohar, managing partner of PureTech and a board member of Enlight (as well as an Xconomist), who credits Merck senior vice president Mervyn Turner with really embracing the idea and in effect sponsoring the collaboration. “The idea is provide technologies that bridge across all the stages of drug discovery, development, and patient care, therefore reducing failure rate of drugs and increasing the probability that innovative new medicine can reach patients in a more capital-efficient way—so that it actually eventually affects the cost of the medicines.”

To that end, Enlight will specifically look at ways to better connect animal testing, human clinical trials, and real-world medical practice. Programs have already started in molecular imaging that can predict how humans respond to drugs, better formulations of biotechnology medicines and new drug delivery techniques, the company said.

One reason the drugmakers agreed to team up? Because venture capitalists aren’t bankrolling as many breakthrough technologies that drugmakers can benefit from as they once did. The shift to investment in drug candidates in late stages of development means that “important technologies that could be of great strategic impact to the pharmaceutical industry are not being commercialized,” Enlight said in its statement.

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