Year: 2024
-
Who really invented the light bulb? On collaborative innovation, and the stories we tell
Ask anyone who invented the light bulb and most people would probably say Thomas Edison. And yet, whilst Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879, the invention was (like many innovations) a cumulative and widely collaborative affair. Several innovators paved the way for the modern electric light bulb including Alessandro Volta, Humphrey Davy,…
-
NASA, the Space Shuttle Challenger and Decision-making
There’s a renowned fictional case study (originated by Jack Brittain and Sim Sitkin) which is used in business schools to help students understand the risks around poorly informed decision-making. The scenario that students are given is to imagine that they are John Carter, the founder of a car racing team. The team is coming up…
-
Techniques and procedures
This episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast starts with an interesting question (why do airline pilots typically speak in the same way and all sound the same when addressing the passengers?) but then brings in some tangentially interesting concepts towards the end. One of them is what cockpit crews would call ‘techniques and procedures’…
-
Breaking out of optimisation
I wrote a post last month on understanding technological-driven change and innovation through the lens of optimisation and transformation. Both can deliver significant benefits but they are fundamentally different approaches. Optimisation involves first order change. It relates to adaptations within the current system or structure that are designed to improve. It tends back to homeostasis…
-
Techno-admin and surplus value
A while back over on LinkedIn James Caig wrote a post talking about modern digital services and how ‘technology and automation has led to more customers of those products and services doing more of the work involved in delivering them’. James linked to an article by John Lanchester on Marx’s theory of surplus value, which might…
-
On Self-Renewal
This speech on the topic of self-renewal, delivered by John W Gardner to McKinsey & Company in November 1990, is outstanding (thanks to Zoe Scaman for the link). Gardner, who was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare for President Lyndon Johnson, wrote his book Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society in 1963. The…
-
The Apps-Infrastructure Cycle
Thanks to Ian Leslie for pointing at this post on the myth of the infrastructure phase in the development of technology (worth reading his ten useful concepts post which mentions it). In the post Dani Grant and Nick Grossman argue that when new technologies emerge we tend to believe that we build out the infrastructure…
-
Shoshin, and the Beginner’s Mind
Falling down an internet rabbit hole I ended up on this post, part of an anthology of submissions from the University of Sydney on the topic of ‘simple pleasures’. The author uses Mozart as an exemplar of having a childlike approach to life: ‘Growing up, my piano teacher would paraphrase 20th century pianist Artur Schnabel, saying…
-
What the Bar Code tells us about innovation
The bar code has become a completely ubiquitous technology (there are more than 6 billion bar codes scanned every day) and yet it very nearly didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it could so easily have been completely different than how it ended up. I’m a sucker for a good invention tale so…
-
On Mastery
One of the most thought-provoking things that I read over the past week was John Durrant’s notes on the book Mastery, by George Leonard (thanks to Johnnie Moore for the link). Worth reading the whole thing of course but they were so good that I wanted to capture some of the more interesting take outs…