Smart Mobs picks up on a recent article in CIO that highlights the potential of using neurotechnology for competitive advantage.

Neurocompetitive advantage was the focus of recent talk I gave in Dubai at the Arab Strategy Forum. While the neurotechnology industry is currently being driven by the need for better treatments for brain-related illnesses, you can bet, that if there is a way to safely improve human capital productivity, individuals will them to compete and keep their jobs. (see neurofinance)

By enabling a higher level of productivity, neurotechnology represents the next form of competitive advantage beyond information technology.

Mental health is the ultimate competitive weapon.  Mental health underpins the development of intellectual capital and competitive advantage. It anchors the capacity of employees, managers and executives to think, use ideas, be creative and be productive.  Like never before, businesses depend upon the consistent, sustainable mental performance of their employees.

By enabling a higher level of productivity, neurotechnology represents the next form of competitive advantage beyond information technology.  I call this neurocompetitive advantage.  As I mentioned recently, innovation is one ubiquitous organizational process that will be impacted.  Just as workers today leverage information technologies for competitive purposes, workers in the neurotechnology wave (2010-2060) will turn to neuroceuticals to enhance their competitive performance.

As Randall Parker surmises, financial organizations will be the first to leverage neuroceuticals to boost productivity.  He is right on target.  In her seminal work, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez details how financial institutions have been at the forefront of adopting, testing and disseminating the latest cluster of technologies that have driven each of the previous five techno-economic waves.  This goes all the way back to the water mechanization wave (1770-1820) where banks were among the first organizations to extensively use the penny post.

As more people live longer and global competition intensifies, many people will turn to regulated neuroceuticals as the next set of tools they will adopt to help them survive and succeed. Using cogniceuticals to increase memory retention, emoticeuticals to decrease stress and sensoceuticals to add a meaningful pleasure gradient, neuroceuticals will allow people to compete without being constrained by their neurochemistry. 

An important point: the type of effective neuroceuticals to which I am referring are still at least 10 years away as we still need to break the brain imaging bottleneck and develop inexpensive biochips for DNA, RNA and protein analysis. Only then will neurotechnology have matured enough to begin influencing all parts of society.

By By Pat Kane

I'm always keen to expand what we mean by play, moving beyond the usual Puritan cliches of triviality and frivolity. And the capacity of science to give us the power to play with matter and biology itself is one of the most urgent "ethical" issues of all.

There's a great play quote from novelist Margaret Atwood in the New York Review of Books (unfortunately, not free-to-web), reviewing Bill McKibben's intelligent-Luddite analysis, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (extract here). McKibben's argument is that our new disruptive technologies (bio-, info- and nano-tech) allow us too much power, over nature and ourselves. Do we really want to head towards immortality, for example, if these technologies allow it?

Atwood asks us to question whether all this intelligence is being properly applied:

There are some very clever people at work on the parts that will go into making up our immortality, and what they're doing is on some levels fascinating - like playing with the biggest toy box you've ever seen - but they are not the people who should be deciding our future. Asking these kinds of scientists what improved human nature is like is like asking ants what you should have in your backyard. Of course they would say, "more ants".

Two other thinkers on "playing God with science" perhaps worth exploring, and from very different perspectives, are Robert Kegan and Bruno Latour.

Kegan, a Harvard psychologist says that our techno-scientific evolution far outstrips our mental evolution: thus, in the title of his book we are 'in over our heads' , subjectively drowning in the demands of life. How we close that gap and become, as Kagan puts it, "reconstructive post-modernists" - ie, big enough to 'play across' the various levels of our personal development - is his agenda. How do we attain the wisdom to deal with all this?

Bruno Latour, a French sociologist of science, has a more direct answer about who gets to "play God" with science: we all do. In the edition of Wired magazine edited by Rem Koolhaas , Latour proposes an update of the old US anti-colonialist slogan - 'Taxation without Representation is Tyranny'. His version is, 'Experimentation without Representation is Tyranny':

The sharp divide between a scientific inside, where experts are formulating theories, and a political outside, where nonexperts are getting by with human values, is evaporating. And the more it does, the more the fate of humans is linked to that of things, the more a scientific statement ("The Earth is warming") resembles a political one ("The Earth is warming!"). The matters of fact of science become matters of concern of politics...

Provigil, short for "promotes vigilance," was approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, a condition in which people fall asleep uncontrollably. 

Provigil apparently has the ability to keep people awake and alert for hours, or even days without the side effects — the buzz and jitteriness, or the risk of addiction — of coffee or amphetamines.  

It is an interesting example of how individuals and companies might leverage early neurotechnology for their competitive advantage.