Company of Friends member Naomi Moneypenny reports on MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference late last month. Among the highlights:

• Idea Factories Leave invention to those who are best at it.
• Reinvent Venture Capital In line with the failure of so many innovation stage-gate processes or funnels in large companies, the venture capital industry is overdue for a major shake up.
• Learn from Biological Systems Evolution has had the benefit of millions of years of experimentation. Learning from living systems is a great way to bootstrap our understanding.
• Combinatorics Once an obscure term in math textbooks, combinatorics is just a fancy word for the process of recombination. Recombining ideas, people, and products is the way of the future.
• Learn from Other Disciplines and Industries Jeff Immelt said, "The day of the one-dimensional manager is over." The key to achieve innovation by gaining insights from other areas is communication.