Archive for September, 2006
Saturday, September 30th, 2006
Old banking vs new banking
Compare and contrast the two stories : 1. I needed a new debit card for my UK bank account. I called the customer service number for this relatively simple request, only to be told that I did not meet “the criteria” for getting a new card over the phone. Bear in mind that I have [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Innovation CULTURE by Roger Dennis
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
Crowdsourcing (of a type) at Royal Bank of Canada
In the banking industry innovation is usually limited to printing customised pictures on credit cards. The most significant paradigm change in the industry in the last few years has come not from the mainstream banks, but from Zopa. However The Royal Bank of Canada has started a fascinating competition called “The Next Great Innovator Challenge.” [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Innovation PROCESSES by Roger Dennis
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
“Limited to the size of a matchbox”
From the BBC today comes news of a new type of projector developed in Germany. The big thing about this projector is that it’s not big at all. It’s under 16mm wide and 9mm deep. While that’s news in itself, the most interesting thing about this article is the closing comment : Other laser-based video [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Emerging Technology by Roger Dennis
Monday, September 18th, 2006
Innovation at the fringes of science
As I’ve mentioned before, the really interesting innovations don’t usually come from the core of a sector or industry, they come from the edges. The edges are places where people either don’t know or don’t care about the rules and paradigms at the core. Next week at Duke (in the States) there’s a symposium where [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis
Friday, September 15th, 2006
Harnessing the ‘lunatic’ fringes inside a corporation
They look like lunatics – but they make millions (errr..they don’t work for TI) Fortune Magazine has a great article about how Texas Instrument harnesses the power of the fringes to generate new ideas, and explore opoortunities that would otherwise be ignored. It reveals how a senior TI manager – Gene Frantz – has an [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis
Friday, September 15th, 2006
Technology at escape velocity?
I was listening to an interesting podcast from Supernova 2005 about Reinventing Media (if you want a partial transcipt check out the Strange Attractor blog) While the panel discussion was interesting, the bit that raised my interest was a question from the floor from a guy called Greg Allen. Part of his query involved the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Emerging Technology by Roger Dennis
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Graffiti innovation
Graffiti in itself is an interesting art form. Free from the unspoken rules that govern many artforms, graffiti artists have a unique license to express themselves. Good graffiti can be beautiful as a quick look at Google images reveals With that level of freedom you’d think it’d be hard to make a splash in the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis
Monday, September 11th, 2006
McKinsey talks about capitalising on customer insights
The latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly has an article which discusses how to get an understanding of your customers in order to develop new markets and better understand existing ones. It makes a few good points, and the sentiment is certainly correct. It’s a new world out there, and building markets based on assumptions, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Innovation CULTURE by Roger Dennis
Friday, September 8th, 2006
More transistors made than grains of rice grown…
Try thinking about the digital revolution in sheer weight of numbers. It’s mind bogglingly overwhelming. Last year more transistors were produced, and at a lower cost, than grains of rice, according to the Semiconductor Industry Assn. Thanks to Z+
No Comments » - Posted in Emerging Technology by Roger Dennis
Friday, September 8th, 2006
BusinessWeek talks about the fringes
The ever interesting Andrew Zolli writes in BusinessWeek about the importance of the fringes for spotting innovations. I’m a great believer in the potential of innovation that happens outside the core. Indeed most interesting developments are increasingly happening as far away from the core as you could imagine. Think Shawn Fanning, Marc Andressen and the [...]
