Archive for October, 2006
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Grant McCracken on the need for scanning
Grant McCracken has a great post about the difficulties that corporations have with scanning for non-incremental innovation. His thoughts build on the recent HBS article about fringe scanning which I blogged about here. In seeking a solution to stopping the organisation getting blinded, he suggests : …the creation of an observation platform from which we [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
Is this the current state for play for corporate innovation?
From the FastCompany blog, comes this interesting post about the difference between people talking about something, and actually doing something. This is a classic with innovation inititatives in many large organisations. It’s trendy, it’s sexy, everyone likes to think they’re innovators, and the marketing department just put the word on the box of the latest [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Innovation CULTURE by Roger Dennis
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
The impact of digitalisation
I was listening to a podcast by Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder of Netscape) in which he discusses the history of programming. It’s a bit of a geek out, but he makes some interesting points : 1. Programming tools are no longer made for machines, they’re made for programmers. this makes them really easy to learn how [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Emerging Technology by Roger Dennis
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
“The interesting stuff happens on the edge” (in many sectors)
David Skilling, chief executive of The New Zealand Institute, is quoted in a Time Magazine article about the state of New Zealand as a country. Skilling is a very interesting person for a whole number of reasons, and very bright. In the article in makes some very topical points about the impact of geography on [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis
Monday, October 16th, 2006
Quote of the day
I was listening to a radio interview with Matthew Riley, an Australian writer of thrillers aimed primarily at teens. He was 19 when he wrote his first book, but he got rejected by every publisher in Australia. In the end he published a few copies of the book himself, and went door-to-door in Syndey asking [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Inspiration by Roger Dennis
Friday, October 13th, 2006
The value of fringe scanning (HBS article)
Something I had been meaning to read for a while was the excellent HBS article called Scanning the Periphery (it’s a PDF). The article – which in the HBS tradition – has become a book, examines the value of fringe scanning and suggests methods for doing so. Interestingly there is also a “Peripheral Vision” blog [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
Teaching Systematic Innovation
The Business Innovation Insider reports that two US business school professors are starting an MBA course focussing on systematic innovation. One of the tutors, Glenn MacDonald, professor of economics and strategy at Washington University’s business school, describes innovation as : a fairly analytical process, an ongoing management activity—not going out into the forest and thinking [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Innovation PROCESSES by Roger Dennis
Monday, October 9th, 2006
Banking First Class at the airport
While in transit at Singapore’s Changi airport I noticed what looked like a private art exhibition hosted by the Singaporean bank DBS. Being partial to modern art, I dropped in only to find it was not a gallery, but a private lounge for invited customers of DBS. While it has a full range of very [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Innovations by Roger Dennis
Monday, October 9th, 2006
Netflix and crowdsourcing
Netflix is entering the crowd sourcing game with the ‘Netflix Prize.’ It’s all very Web 2.0 , and links into previous thoughts about the trend. With Netflix, innovation via crowd sourcing is possible because it’s dealing with software. This lowers the barriers for potential innovations, much in the same way that open APIs have opened [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Innovation PROCESSES by Roger Dennis
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
In London…
As a sort of out-of-office notification, I’m in London at the moment and have been for the last few days. I’m working with Innovaro on a fascinating project for a large multi-national. The focus is on building scenarios of how the world is going to look in the next twenty years given the impact of [...]
