Archive for June, 2008

Friday, June 13th, 2008

A question with William Gibson

I’m really interested in science fiction as a predictor of technologies. As Paul Saffo remarked in his (highly recommended) Long Now speech, science fiction starts “meme bombs” in the minds of teenagers. These bombs detonate when they’re in a position to do something about them – usually when they are going through a midlife crisis [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision,Futures Thinking by Roger Dennis

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Gladwell on Insight (The New Yorker)

Over at the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has written as essay on insight – more specifically – how to cultivate it artificially. Besides being a damn fine read, there’s some great sections on cross-sector discovery. Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision,Innovation CULTURE,Innovation PROCESSES by Roger Dennis

Friday, June 6th, 2008

The future is… (Sarah Michelle Geller in Southland Tales)

Southland Tales is a very odd movie. Very odd indeed. However the character played by Sarah Michelle Geller has a line in the film which was just too good not to share: “Apparently, the future is much more futuristic then scientists thought.” Here ends the Thought-For-Today.

No Comments » - Posted in Inspiration by Roger Dennis

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

The importance of Edges

A quick pointer to a highly recommended post (and article) from John Hagel (and John Seely Brown) about how changes on the edges impact the core. John Hagel writes: Instinctively, I have been drawn to various edges because of the opportunity and challenge they represent. Over time, I have focused more sharply and explicitly on [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Hacking and innovation (HBR)

Umair Haque has a nice – very unHBR – conversation started over at HBR (of all places). He has a thought-provoking post about hacking and innovation, of which one paragraph resonated with me: Big problems aren’t solved overnight, and they often can’t be solved in a tightly structured way. Hacking goes (way) beyond the limits [...]

1 Comment » - Posted in Fringe scanning / peripheral vision by Roger Dennis