entrepreneurship at the intersection of sports media and the social graph

At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Washington, children in Natosh Jones' third-grade class bend over model cars designed to run on solar power. Working with a team of professional scientists from NASA and other federal agencies, they're putting finishing touches on the cars. With a student body that is almost totally minority and predominantly poor, Martin Luther King is the kind of American public school that has too often failed its students, especially in science and mathematics. But today Jones' students are learning the way all trainee scientists should: hands-on, through the sort of dogged trial and error that has always been the preface to American invention, a method Thomas Edison helped pioneer. "I like it this way because I get to learn how to do things, and when people ask me what I'm doing, I can show them how I'm doing it," says 8-year-old Sinia Stewart. "It makes me want to make other things that you can do in science."

The solar-car lesson was the kickoff event for National Lab Day, May 12 this year. The day is the brainchild of Jack Hidary, an Internet entrepreneur who has moved into education and clean-energy philanthropy. The idea was simple — teachers like Jones would come up with a hands-on science project, and Hidary's website would connect them with local scientists willing to help in the classroom. Kids not only get professional assistance in their projects, but they actually get to see a scientist in the flesh — rare at a time when science has largely vanished from the national conversation. "This is about solving problems and experiencing failure and success — being a scientist," says Hidary, who wants National Lab Day to grow into a permanent initiative. (See pictures of Edison's Menlo Park lab.)

And not a moment too soon, because American pre-eminence in the crucial fields of science and technology is flagging. Invention and innovation have been quintessentially American pursuits from the earliest days of the republic. Benjamin Franklin was a world-famous scientist and inventor. Cyrus McCormick and his harvester, Samuel F.B. Morse and the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone — the 19th century produced a string of inventors and their world-changing creations. And then there was the greatest of them all, Thomas Alva Edison. By the time of his death in 1931, at age 84, Edison had patented a phenomenal 1,093 mechanisms and processes, including a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder and — perhaps a century too soon — a battery for an electric car. He came up with the crucial devices that would give birth to three enduring American industries: electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures. Edison, as the title of Neil Baldwin's 1996 biography goes, spent his career "inventing the century" — the 20th century.

Inventors like Edison helped build America's unparalleled scientific and technological dominance, a dominance that, more than any other single factor, made the 20th century the American century. Of the more than 530 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry or medicine since 1901, more than 200 have been Americans. The ideas that were developed in the country's leading universities and corporate research and development centers became the products that would underwrite economic titans like Ford, IBM, Boeing, Intel and Google. And the federal government played an important role through its own research laboratories and investments in education. Even when America's scientific pre-eminence was threatened by the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch in 1957, the U.S. only came back stronger. "The federal response to Sputnik was an overwhelming investment in science and engineering education," says Teryn Norris, director of Americans for Energy Leadership. "That had spillover benefits across the board."

Much of the world we live in today is a legacy of Edison and of his devotion to science and innovation. He not only invented the first commercial electric lightbulb but also established the first investor-owned electric utility, in 1882, on Pearl Street in New York City. His phonograph, invented in 1877, launched a global recorded-music industry that is worth nearly $150 billion today. But more than a simple series of inventions, Edison's most lasting contribution might be in the system of industrial invention he helped pioneer. Edison's true genius lay in his ability to bring mass brainpower to the process of invention — and then to market the resulting devices with the deep pools of capital just forming in late 19th century America. The Menlo Park way, using a sizable cadre of skilled assistants with expertise in multiple fields, became the foundation for research and development as it is practiced in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. Edison taught us to invent, and for decades we were the best in the world.

But today, more than 160 years after Edison's birth, America is losing its scientific edge. A landmark report released in May by the National Science Board lays out the numbers: while U.S. investment in R&D as a share of total GDP has remained relatively constant since the mid-1980s at 2.7%, the federal share of R&D has been consistently declining — even as Asian nations like Japan and South Korea have rapidly increased that ratio. China's investments in R&D grew more than 20% a year between 1996 and 2007, compared with less than 6% annual growth in the U.S. At the same time, American students seem to be losing interest in science. Only about one-third of U.S. bachelor's degrees are in science or engineering now, compared with 63% in Japan and 53% in China. Though the U.S. was once among the top countries in terms of the ratio of science and engineering degrees to its college-age population, it now ranks near the bottom among the 23 nations that collect that data. And while the U.S. awarded 22,500 doctorates in science and engineering in 2007, more than half of those went to foreign nationals, a proportion that has grown in recent years.

Was a supportive environment important to Edison? Absolutely. He was a singular figure but not a lone genius. His immense gifts were nurtured by the society in which he flourished, one that reveled in the romance of scientific discovery. When he was still a small boy, his family moved from Milan, Ohio, to the bustling lumber town of Port Huron, Mich. For a budding inventor, it was the right place and the right time. The country was in the full grip of the Industrial Revolution. In Port Huron's lumber mills and shipyards, which fed vessels plying the Great Lakes and beyond, Edison could get his first experience of the machinery that was transforming America from an agricultural nation into an industrial powerhouse.

Watch a video on the invention of the electric light.

View the full list for "The Making of America: Thomas Edison"

The 5 Most Innovative New Online Business Models in 2010

Jan 27, 2010 -

As time goes on, one of the more interesting trends that continues to happen with surprising regularity is how frequently new business models and ways of doing business are emerging through social media and online tools. In many cases, these trends are helping to reinvent how businesses sell and consumers buy all kinds of products. For that reason alone, new sites are worth paying attention to no matter what industry your business happens to be in.  The benefit of that for your small business is that watching these new models may also spark a new idea or method of selling that you can consider for your own business:

1. Woot - This online retailer takes the unique approach of only selling a single product each day. Around each daily product is a dedicated conversation stream, live commentary and a detailed description. By focusing on a single product, not only do they add a layer of conversation and description to the product, but they also give their users the perception that each daily deal is special and only available for a limited time. This focus allows them to add urgency to their site and convert browsers to buyers quickly. While you may not be able to convert your entire business to just selling one product at a time, this model may be the next evolution of the long-standing "deal of the day" model that many businesses have used at one time or another in the past. 

1. Groupon - How much would you lower your standard prices if I could guarantee you 100 customers? Or how about 1,000? The premise behind Groupon is to offer customers "collective buying power" - which essentially means that you can offer a great deal and it will only kick in if a set number of consumers take you up on it. Go on the site and you will see deals sorted by region and many of them have been redeemed by thousands of people. What Groupon shows you is that sometimes you CAN actually count on volume to compensate for lowering your prices. The nicest thing about the site is that instead of trying to recreate this model on your own site, you can add a special offer for your business to Groupon. 

1. Hotwire - By now most people are familiar with the new auction based pricing model that Priceline introduced into the travel industry. Letting consumers set the price for what they are willing to pay was a revolution in the travel industry at the time when Priceline was introduced. Hotwire used the slightly adapted model of offering exact prices, but not letting you know the details of what you booked until after you pay. If you have your own eretail site, this model can be a good way to get rid of excess inventory in a different and more fun way. 

1. Blippy - If you don't live your life in social media, the idea behind Blippy will likely confuse you. It is a social site that lets people automatically share the latest things they have purchased (and how much they paid for them) by linking the site to a single credit card. This level of transparency and sharing may seem crazy to many people, but the site represents a social experiment that points to an interesting opportunity for businesses whose customers may be used to sharing every small detail of their lives. It may be an outlier in this list of business models as they admittedly don%u2019t have a revenue model for the site as yet %u2013 but the shift in what people are willing to share online is the real trend worth watching.

1. Dubli- This site offers some of the most creative pricing models you can find online - and models that have not yet been duplicated across many others sites. The first is what they call a "reverse auction" where products have a starting price and you use credits that you purchase on the site to reveal the current price. Each time a member of the site uses a credit to reveal the price, the price goes lower until someone decides to make the purchase. The second model is based on a "unique price auction" which means you need to have the lowest bid that no one else chooses to have in order to win.

Tags: business models, duct tape marketing, rohit bhargava

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#5 is simply amazing--a reverse auction for retail.