sift everything

My name is Jeremy Heigh. I am a husband, father, son, brother, friend, reader, thinker, economist, investor, gamer, artist, writer, and young man.

I liked school and have three degrees. The last is an M.Sc. in environmental economics. I enjoy thinking and got paid to think on behalf of the Government of Canada, BASF, several commodity groups, and tonnes of small companies.

For the last two years I ran a portfolio of investments in the bioindustrial products space - investing in pre-commercialization of clean technologies. I helped craft national policy for three years. I helped Canada tackle BSE. I helped soybean growers revolutionize their industry. I’ve written for the Globe and Mail, National Post, and economic journals. I started three successful companies. I was once a great tree planter. And I make a nice cup of coffee.

I’m good at analyzing and refining innovation - I can translate those insights in a way almost anyone can understand. I make new ideas work better. I can see where new things will end up and fiddle around with how to get there. I think, write, and speak very well. I understand the brilliance in people and get a bang from inviting them to be great.

I like philosophy, stuff about how people learn and understand, animal behaviour, graffiti, scotch, science fiction, movies, modern architecture, and probably surfing.

At the moment I work on a handful of products. I am helping a private company identify which of several emerging technologies it should pursue. I am back helping the government lead in driving new technologies in two commodity crops. I am helping two companies get their next stage of financing. And in between I’ve started planning to do something by summer in foresight and M&A across ma’n'pa businesses.

Busy busy.

Curious? Send me a note.

Nicholas Negroponte is founder of MediaLab and one of the founders of Wired. In a recent interview he described the evolving direction of MediaLab:

“The biggest criticism I hear is, ‘Nicholas, you’re not crazy enough — the lab should be nuttier’,” he told a corporate audience on a visit to Dublin-based Media Lab Europe, or MLE.

The MIT labs are facing funding problems. But their backers don’t want another set of traditional research labs, Negroponte insists.

“They don’t need us to do those things,” he said. “They need us to be on the lunatic fringe — a very interesting place to be, but you can go over the edge very quickly. It’s a very delicate line.”

Negroponte goes on to describe the consequences of the recent recession and the resulting shift toward industries with market dominance and government. One can’t blame him, he’s got to follow the money if he wants to keep working - but where’s he going to find the “lunatic fringe” when he’s buried the bureaucratic lunatics?

There’s two ways to get emergent information. One is to be a lunatic - which is costly (as Negroponte discovered). The other is to watch them. The hitch is that option two is time consuming and most entrepreneurs can’t spare a minute.

sift is an experiment to see if young companies benefit, in a measurable way, when given access to emergent lunacy.

In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature , Sarah Tomlin describes her recent cross-walk between physics and music. The opportunity came when she was invited to hear the product of Piers Coleman, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University and Jeremy Coleman, a composer-in-residence with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. The two brothers, self-described as Renaissance men, had cooperated to produce a three part composition called Music of the Quantum. Each of the movements tries to embody different physical concepts: emergence and broken symmetry, phase transformation and criticality, and the duality of the quantum world.

Successful or not - the brainchild of these two brothers is a perfect example of something sift is deliberate about pursuing: innovation by recombination.

Successful examples of recombination are legion. Jazz (mixture of blues and classical). Alternative rock (musical equivalent of Impressionist painting). Yahoo messenger (solitude of the letter, immediacy of the phone).

Part of the research I do for sift involves combing learning from science, music, art, business, technology … whatever I can find to bring young companies new combinations of knowledge that might keep them innovating.

I’ve used Google for a long time but never really looked behind the interface. Now that I have, I see a whole world back there that I need to understand. My first clue came when I read their mission statement which comes with an invitation to Gmail:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible.

Google certainly makes information accessible - Gmail is a spectacular move toward fulfilling that aspect of their mission. With Gmail they offer a massive storage capacity so users don’t need to delete emails. At first glance that seems like a recipe for chaos. Never delete? But Google shines with a solution, use their engine to sort your ever-growing volume of personal information. Gorgeous.

I still haven’t discovered how they’ve made information more useful. They can help me find a pin in a haystack, but they can’t identify what the pin should be used for. I think this is part of the explanation for a new Google phenomenon - the Googleguy.

In describing himself, Googleguy writes:

I’m a Google engineer. About three years ago … I was reading what people online were saying about Google. I remember seeing a question from a site owner … and thinking it would be great if a Googler could just pop by to answer technical questions like that. And then I thought, I’m a Google engineer. I can answer technical questions like that. So I did.

This is the useful part of the Google mission statement. But you’ll notice - Google isn’t doing it.

sift is a response to this part of the equation. While there’s lots of information, the trick is to make it useful. Even better, it’s to make it valuable.

In the future, I’ll use this blog to add usefulness and value to information I find in the books, arts, sports, science and everything else around us. The plan is to make young companies better by giving them access to the valuable information they need but don’t have the time to find themselves.

As this blog builds I’ll start using the information to write quarterly reports to point readers to the always accessible but now valuable information they need.

Karen Rader just published Making Mice (Princeton University Press, 2004). In the book Karen chronicles three themes - mice, genetic engineer and mice breeder Clarence Cook Little, and Little’s laboratory. Little repeatedly characterised his work as research but his greatest contribution was the purity of the mice stock he bred.

What’s interesting is that while Little is credited with the development and protection of one of modern science’s most foundational assets he was focussed on something entirely different. Part of excelling at innovation involves identifying core competencies. For Little it was breeding ultra-pure strains of mice. Another part of innovation involves driving change within those competencies with new learning.

sift is my business science experiment. I want to measure how much young companies benefit if they can clearly identify the core value of what they provide.

The current state of Russia’s scientific community is a brilliant study of the power of purpose driven (or lack of) enterprise. In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature they’ve included a brief glimpse into the Russian Academy of Science. Once the pinnacle of any Russian scientists career, membership in the academy is followed the same path of degradation as the rest of the Russian public sector. In the thirteen years since the fall of communism, the Academy has yet to address the pressing issues of health and industrial innovation. Once respected, the Academy is directionless, un-competitive, and not taken seriously.

Russia’s scientific experience illustrates three important points for those of us striving within a knowledge economy.

First, knowledge without purpose is valueless. That’s not to say research and innovation must be directed at a product before proceeding. It means that knowledge without application is worth as much as a wrench in a world without bolts.

Second, to maintain relevance and respect knowledge must inform the issues of the moment. Russia still has great scientists. However, most are focussed on mathematics and a few branches of physics. The real issues facing Russians are resolving an escalating health crisis and injecting innovation and technological advancing into their struggling industries. Until that’s achieved, the Academy won’t get respect.

Third, knowledge provides a great return on investment if managed successfully. The prestige once enjoyed by the Academy members was the product of purpose-ful, relevant and actionable research. Whether it was pointed at innovative weapon systems, getting people into space, or providing medical insights - the Academy enjoyed success by consistently providing a high ROI.

sift is a quest to provide specialised knowledge to meet the specific needs of entrepreneurs. The test is if the knowledge can bring actionable insights that drive innovation.

In another article in the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature Gautam Desiraju describes the process through which he discovered the birth of crystal engineering which today is one of the principle challenges of modern chemistry. His story is one of irreverence, curiosity, and discomfort - prime ingredients for innovation.

In 1983 Gautam was studying crystal structure determination but a strong inclination for unconventionalism led him to team up with two other researchers poking around in the then unrecognized field of crystal packing. Tucked away in a warehouse full of art projects, this team of three discovered the first principles for designing organic solids with specific physical and chemical properties. Gautam credits his discovery to a heady mixture of midsummer madness and willingness to question existing concepts and paradigms.

Through sift I can ask irreverent questions. I often suggest audacious solutions. All of which is supported by unfettered curiosity. I want to see if it’s measurably valuable to entrepreneurs when I bring together the ingredients for innovation.