Maura Nevel Thomas is an expert on the topics of productivity, attention management, and work-life balance. She is a speaker, trainer, and author of Work Without Walls and Personal Productivity Secrets. You can find out more about Maura here maurathomas.com.

We talk about our waning attention spans, how we are training ourselves to have less focus. In the current shift to a knowledge worker economy, where we do most of the work with our brains, we must protect those brains. Deep work is essential and so is the ability and environment to perform it. We talk about the workplace, open space working, email culture and personal hacks to overcome email fatigue, which accounts for half of our workdays every day. We talk about leadership understanding the outputs of knowledge work and telecommuting and what it means to the workplace and leadership.

On this week’s innovation show we talk to Dr. Wendy Suzuki, PhD, author of “Happy Brain, Healthy Life”, Wendy is Professor of Neural Science and Psychology in the Centre for Neural Science at New York University.

We talk about how exercise changed the course of Wendy’s life, her career and her brain. We talk about Brain Hacks and how we can all benefit from small changes for big effects. We talk about how new experiences create new synapses and brain connections and how children can get an advantage in a distraction and tech obsessed society. http://www.wendysuzuki.com/the-book/

On this week’s Innovation show, we talk to Author, lecturer and Futurist in Residence at the Tech Foresight Practice at Imperial College, Richard Watson. We talk about the threat to deep thinking in this digital age, even though that’s the last bastion for human jobs. We talk about the sex life of ideas and how ideas are formed. The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled – Plutarch 46-120AD. We talk about the benefits of free play and how children can escape flippant thinking and a reliance on screens. We talk about screenagers as multi-taskers and how that means less “deep” in their work and how they are constantly connected causing unnecessary mental stress. Despite an increase in IQ, basic reading and writing skills have deteriorated hugely. How they are mentally agile but culturally ignorant. In the workplace we talk about “Busyness” and indeed the lack of “tune-out” and sleep due to distractions and overwork.
 We also touch on corporate resistance to change and how it may be possible to plant new ideas in old companies and how corporations can attract new thinkers. Finally, we look at solutions for the future. You can find out more about Richard and his work here: https://nowandnext.com/who-is/ and the book is here: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Minds-Digital-Changing-Matters/dp/185788549X

On this week’s innovation show we talk to Mark Emalfarb the founder and CEO of Dyadic International, Inc. a public company that trades on the OTCQX Markets under the stock symbol “DYAI”. This is a phenomenal story and a truly remarkable 4 decade entrepreneurial journey. Mark was told he had rocks in his head when he helped pioneer the concept of using rocks (pumice stones) in a washing machine, the process of stonewashed jeans. When Mark looked to innovate and move to enzyme-based stonewashing, he hired a team of Russian bioengineers and biotechnology experts to develop an enzyme that could soften and fade denim using a biotechnology process that was more environmentally friendly, thus making denim more comfortable and fashionable. Through this work he discovered a Russian fungus that he nicknamed C1 which Dyadic scientists hyper accelerated C1’s ability to make large amounts of low cost enzymes Dyadic sold to the blue jeans manufactures like Levi, Guess, Wrangler and others for use in the stonewash process. In December of 2015 Dyadic’s industrial biotech company was acquired by DuPont for $75 million and this has allowed Dyadic to focus on what Mark describes in his interview as the final frontier. Ever the pioneer, Mark and Dyadic are now focussed on pursuing research and development collaborations, licensing arrangements and other commercial opportunities with its partners and collaborators to leverage the value and benefits of the C1 technology to help in developing and manufacturing biopharmaceuticals. In particular, as the ageing population grows in developed and undeveloped countries, Dyadic believes the C1 technology may help bring biologic drugs to market faster, in greater volumes, at lower cost, and with new properties to drug developers and manufacturers and, hopefully, improve access and cost to patients and the healthcare system, but most importantly save lives.

We talk to change maker Bibop Gresta, co-founder and chairman of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.  Bibop tells us about his past as a teen tech whizz, managing a department of developers while a teenager in school. His subsequent stint at being a popstar and then an MTV presenter. After selling his company he moved to California in search of a mission with meaning.  This meaning in fact found him, when he met his co-founder of Hyperloop Dirk Ahlborn. He is now chairman of what is dubbed the biggest startup in the world. Hyperloop was made popular after an Elon Musk white paper outlining the possibility.  That vision is now being realised by Bibop and a team of visionaries, scientists and contributors from all over the world.   Hyperloop is always looking for collaborators and more can be found on this movement on www.hyperloop.global.

Barney Loehnis has a diverse rich background as a Chief Digital Officer, in digital transformation, customer experience, digital product management & integrated marketing. He gives us insight into the future of work and how data can help us make better choices in our lives.

Brian Merchant is a journalist and producer based in Los Angeles. He is editor of Motherboard, VICE’s science and technology department. Brian is also founder of Terraform, the VICE online fiction outlet, and his work has appeared in the Guardian, Slate, VICE Magazine, Salon, Fast Company, Discovery, GOOD, Paste, Grist, and beyond. Brian is author of the great book ‘The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.’ Brian has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, BBC World News, NPR, and a host of other TV, radio, and livestream shows; he’s spoken at SXSW Eco, NYC’s Green Room, and the Social Change Institute, and was an author of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America, published by OR Books.

Kim Parnell is the co-founder and Chief Evangelist of Blank – a ground-breaking technology that builds apps automatically without code, thus making app development available to everyone. She’s a social media influencer, a professional speaker, a fitness enthusiast and a startup veteran with a successful exit under her belt. Her passion for Blank comes from her frustration in finding a technical partner during the early phases of her first software startup. Alongside the team at Blank, she’s working to level the playing field so that anyone with an idea and the ambition to make it happen has the tools they need to do so.

We chat with Nico Bouchard, CEO and Founder of Sex Positive Diagnostics of Sex Positive Diagnostics of Macrofluidics Ltd. His biotech product is an at-home self diagnosis kit for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Nico tells us about his experience in becoming a biotech founder from his previous profession as a teacher. He also shares with us the benefits of being part of the Rebel Bio accelerator in Cork, Ireland.

Joel is founder and leader of MMM, Man Made Music is a strategic music and sound studio. MMM score entertainment and brand experiences by creating and curating soundtracks and sonic ids. Joel Beckerman is an award-winning composer and author and had the vision to set up MMM, when very few saw the value in sound. Fast forward to today and Joel is a leader in his field and his services employed by Global, forward-thinking brands. Joel is author of the great book ‘The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy’. We discuss the book, the main insights and how you can use sound to transform your brand and yourself.

We talk to Professor Barry O’Sullivan, Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in UCC. He is also deputy president of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and current SFI researcher of the year.

Barry discusses the impact of Ai, we talk about the inevitable bias in data based Ai and how it is extremely important to “teach” Ai responsibly.

We discuss UBI, Universal Basic Income, job automation and the societal challenge ahead.