Jason Pontin FRSA is one of the world's leading experts on technology and innovation. Pontin is the editor in chief and chief executive of MIT's Technology Review. As editor and publisher, he is responsible for all the business and media of the world's oldest and most-respected technology publication, including the company's magazine, website, and its international editions in China, India, the Middle East, Germany, Spain, and Italy. In all, Technology Review reaches 6 million people around the globe every month with news and analysis of the impact of new technologies on business and society.

Pontin writes a regular column about technology for The Financial Times, and has written for many national and international magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Economist , The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The Believer Magazine, and Wired, and is a frequent guest on broadcast, public, and cable television news. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

From 1996 to 2002, Pontin was the editor of Red Herring, a business and technology publication that the Wall Street Journal called "the bible of the dot-com boom". From 2002 to 2004, he was the editor of The Acumen Journal, a magazine about the life sciences that he founded.

Pontin was born in London, raised in Northern California, and educated in England, at Harrow School and Oxford University.

Pontin is a member of the Innovation Council at the World Economic Forum as well as one of the judges for the WEF's "Technology Pioneers".

How Innovation Works

Drawing upon a wealth of examples from business, the military and intelligence, and the arts and media, Jason Pontin describes how promising new ideas and inventions become actual innovations with real value - and suggests some lessons from organizations that have fostered a culture of perpetual innovation.

The 10 Most Important New Technologies of 2011

Jason Pontin describes the ten emerging technologies of 2011 that have the greatest promise to disrupt existing markets, create entirely new industries - and expand human possibilities.

Miracle Innovations in Energy

The human race knows only one way to create cheap energy: burning hydrocarbons like coal, gas, and oil. But burning those compounds produces the gasses that contribute to global warming. Somehow, by 2050, the planet will have to double or triple its energy production, and significantly reduce greenhouse gasses. What we need are miraculous breakthroughs in energy production that are simultaneously as cheap as hydrocarbons and much cleaner. Fortunately, smart researchers in industry, academia, and even venture philanthropy know what some of those breakthroughs will be. Jason Pontin describes the energy technologies of the 21st century, and explains what will be necessary to make them reality.

Jason Pontin's latest Financial Times article, "Apple minus its genius will be less lovable"

The first time I met Steve Jobs, he walked out of the room. It was 1994, he was chief executive of NeXT Computer and exiled from Apple, and I had asked him why he made beautiful, expensive machines that only a few enthusiasts wanted. He swore at me, barked "I created the Mac and it's still the best!" and was gone. Five years later, after he had returned to the company he co-founded, I wrote that he had saved Apple, but said I didn't care, because Microsoft enjoyed a near-monopoly in personal computer software and so controlled computing. This view was conventionally savvy, but wrong. Mr Jobs has turned out to be much more influential than Bill Gates.

As competitors, Apple and Microsoft have been the two poles of technology. Microsoft sold its software, uncomfortably bundled with the hardware of manufacturers, to corporations. Its customers were IT functionaries whose concerns were cost and risk; its products were ugly compromises, developed in response to market research, which no one loved. But Apple sold integrated hardware and software directly to consumers. It strove to elicit passionate fandom from its customers; its products were simple, elegant, genuinely novel devices.

Today, Apple enjoys near-monopolies in tablet computers and music players; its iPhone outsells all other smartphones. More surprising, its computers' sales have outpaced Windows personal computers for several years. As Microsoft wanes, Apple waxes. The latter's market capitalisation is more than $355bn; the only company of comparable value is ExxonMobil. By contrast, Microsoft's capitalisation is about $211bn. Mr Jobs has succeeded by turning hundreds of millions of people into Apple enthusiasts.

The strategies of the two companies derive from the characters of their founders. If Mr Gates ever cared about beauty it was at the level of software: as a young man, he wrote what developers call "elegant code". But aesthetic considerations were irrelevant to his ends. ("The only problem with Microsoft," Mr Jobs said in 1996, "is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.") Mostly, Mr Gates was motivated by a desire to govern the standards for personal computers, whose early buyers were enterprises.

But Mr Jobs isn't really a technologist: he has never written code, and he is not an engineer. He combines and refines borrowed ideas (from Xerox Parc most famously, but also from typesetters, industrial designers and artists). He does not care about the computer industry for itself, which is why he has been able to expand Apple's business beyond computers to music players, phones and tablets. Instead, he wants people to do things they couldn't do before: create documents on laptops with fonts that only professional printers once used; listen to music on phones; read books, play games and watch movies on slim, crystalline screens.

The paradox of this preoccupation with delighting people is that he disdains questioning customers. How he imagines creations like the Apple II, which predated the IBM PC by four years, or the first Macintosh, whose ease of use was universally imitated but never surpassed, is, by his own account, "hard to explain". He "pushes" at the technology, and "pulls" at what consumers might want, then merges the two points of view. In short, he really is that overused word: a visionary.

What will Apple be like without its obsessive tutelary genius? There are years of Jobs-inspired products in development. The perfectionist culture he created will persist. Tim Cook, the company's long-time chief operating officer and now CEO, wrote to his staff that "Apple won't change". But, of course, it will. Mr Jobs's tastes and visionary abilities are unique. More, the cult of personality surrounding him and the confidence of his board, employees and investors made Apple that rarest of things: a publicly traded corporation, with all of a large company's impact, that was as innovative as a start-up. Mr Jobs could ignore vulgar consensus, take risks, kill unsatisfactory projects and demand that his engineers and designers build "insanely great" machines because it was indisputably his company.

Here is the concern we should feel at Mr Jobs's resignation, beyond any grief at the passing of a golden era. The dark aspect of his mostly benign despotism is how he used Apple's near-monopolies to press partners, publishers and competitors to do things his way. This arrogance is ingrained at Apple and will persist, as will its culture of perfectionism, at least until people start buying other devices. In technology, we deplore monopolies such as the one Microsoft once possessed and seek to regulate them, not because they exert monopolistic pricing (they do not), but for suppressing innovation in everything they touch. We forgave Apple's near-monopolies because of the things Mr Jobs made; we loved his Apple because his ambition was justified by the wonder of his innovations. But Apple without Mr Jobs, inevitably less innovative, will not be lovable.

For the "How to Save Media" program

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, But Who's Counting

For the "Miracle Innovations in Energy" program

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, Liquid Battery

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, Traveling Wave Reactor

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, Q&A with Bill Gross

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, Light-Trapping Photovoltaics

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, Solar Fuels

For the "Ten Emerging Technologies of 2011" program

View the Technology Review video, Ten Emerging Technologies

For the "How to Save Media" program

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, How to Save Media

For the "How to Innovate" program

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, 10 Ways of Thinking About Innovation

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, Geography of Innovation

Read Jason Pontin's Technology Review article, On the Evolution of Technology