Category: innovation
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Building the Agile Business – The Launch of My Book
An important announcement. The manuscript is finished and submitted and we have a publication date for our book on Building The Agile Business. It will be out on April 3rd. I don't mind admitting that it's been something of a marathon to write it but I'm really pleased with the result. I've been writing here…
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Labour Clouds
'By 2040, I’m pretty confident that every skilled worker will have their own signpost. You will be your own enterprise, in a much more meaningful way than the lip service of today.' Stephen DeWitt This was a pretty fascinating look at what the future of work could look like, featuring Stephen DeWitt of Work Market, the…
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AI, and the Shifting Value in Mobile
As Blackberry announced that it's finally going to stop manufacturing phones, we're seeing a big shift underway in where the value sits in mobile. One of the slides from Mary Meeker's last Internet Trends report showed how the year-on-year increase in global smartphone shipments is slowing dramatically as the market reaches a higher level of maturity. She's…
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Data is the new coal
We're in danger of overdoing it when it comes to digital analogies but sometimes they can be really useful in framing something in an instructive way. The 'data is the new oil' metaphor has been doing the rounds now for a number of years, but one of my favourite Firestarters quotes came from Graeme Wood…
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When Not to Listen to Customers
I liked the point made in this Quartz piece on Parrot, the French technology and drone business, about when not to listen to customers. We're drilled on the importance of continuous customer feedback but this is far less useful when we're originating something entirely new. It is of-course a myth that Apple don’t do research (as…
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Technology vs Humanity
My good friend the Futurist Gerd Leonhard has a new book out on technology and humanity which, knowing Gerd, should be a great read. More recently, he's been focused on all the myriad issues that surround our ever more complex relationship with technology, and this captures his argument for 'humanising the coming waves of technological disruption'. You…
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Dots Conference 2016
This year I'm working again with the lovely folk at Brilliant Noise to help curate the third Dots Conference. Dots always thematically focuses on innovation and transformation but this year we're concentrating particularly on stories about turning ideas and inspiration into action, and the behind the scenes details that create brilliance. The last two conferences have…
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The Unreasonable Consumer
A couple of years ago I saw Adam Morgan talk at the APG conference about 'Strategy in the Age of the Unreasonable Consumer', a keynote in which he described how rapidly consumer expectations are shifting for digital-based services. As soon as we're spoilt by a seamlessly intuitive, smartly designed, on-demand customer experience like Amazon one-click,…
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Two More Things About S-Curves
I wrote recently about S-curves (or Sigmoid Curves) as a way of understanding the lifecycle of a technology, and the trajectory of many successful systems. Charles Handy (in The Empty Raincoat) used S-curves as a way to demonstrate the need for significant and regular reinvention and change, and also why disruption often happens just when an existing…
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Horizontal Innovation
IBM's recent global C-suite study interviewed over 5,000 business leaders from more than 70 countries and from 21 industries. One of the most interesting findings (IMHO) focuses on so-called 'horizontal innovation' – the idea that where once it was comparatively easier for senior leaders to be able to anticipate where competition will come from, there is…