Concept Cards
After the Thought Leader Forum, Sente Corporation identified the "big ideas" from each of the speakers and created Concept Cards. Concept Cards include a title for each idea, some text from the speaker's presentation, and a diagram of the idea.

These cards are intended to serve as a proxy for John Holland's "building block" idea. Holland has talked about innovation as the creative combination of familiar building blocks. For example, you can divide a human face into, say, ten components - eyes, nose, lips, chin, cheeks, etc. For each of those components, you can then create a variety of options, or "building blocks". Eyes, for example can be blue, brown, wide, narrow, heavy, etc. You can then assemble just about any face through different combinations of a relatively
small number of building blocks.

The great innovations, according to Holland, are rarely entirely new creations. Normally the great advances in technology and science are the unique and creative combinations between technologies or disciplines that are already quite familiar to us. The "digitization" of the world in the last ten years, according to economist Brian Arthur, is the result of the combination of communications technologies and computational technologies. Advances in either discipline are interesting, but mapping one onto the other created the opportunity for vast networks of computing power and emergent behavior in these complex networks.

The Thought Leader Forum has done a tremendous job of bringing investors together with thought leaders from a variety of disciplines to explore new models and new "building blocks" that might be relevant for investing. The narrative record of the event (the transcriptions of the presentations) serves as an interesting resource, but it does not quite serve the function of a useful tool. The speakers weave their ideas together into a compelling narrative for their presentations, but the ideas might be more functional for our purposes if they were presented as individual, discrete concepts. It is important to keep the context of each of the Concept Cards in mind, but it is the individual concepts that we hope to combine and apply metaphorically. The structure of this site is intended to accomplish both goals - to present the concepts in context, and to present them as discrete ideas that are useful for creative combination.

Click here to download a PDF of all of the 2006 Concept Cards.

Robert Sapolsky
"Stress and its Impact on Behavior and Decision Making"

Gregory S. Berns M.D.
"Neuroeconomics and the Social Brain"

Richard L. Peterson M.D.
"Greed, Fear and the Brain"

Laurence Gonzales
"Cheating the Devil"

Elke U. Weber
"The Determinants of Risk-Taking"

Bill Miller, CFA
Michael Mauboussin
"Thought Leader Forum Wrap Up"