Category: innovation
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Prioritising the application of AI
One of the key challenges with the application of AI is that it is such a broad technology with such wide potential applications in so many areas how do you prioritise where to place the effort and resource? I’ve had a go before now at categorising potential application of AI through the lens of seven…
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Navigating change – Optimisation vs Transformation
When leaders are looking at how to get the most out of new technologies they will inevitably be faced with a plethora of options, questions, and prioritisation decisions. Making sense of how to navigate that (and how to navigate the dilemma zone in particular) can be a huge challenge. One of my favourite ways of…
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Navigating change – Technology S-curves
As Charlie Ebdy has adeptly pointed out chasing shiny new trends too early can easily result in wasted resources and time. The timing and speed with which new technologies find genuine use cases, and genuine scale and maturity can be notoriously difficult to predict (and some never take off at all). So making smart decisions…
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Subtraction as a strategy
In a culture of accumulation, the value of taking things away is often overlooked. As I listened to this short Atlantic podcast featuring Professor Leidy KlotzI from University of Virginia (author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less) I was reminded of a couple of things about the challenge of subtraction. Firstly, when it comes…
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The Hype Cycle and the ‘Goldilocks’ Zone
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma have an excellent new report out focusing on major trends in marketing technology. I always think that if you really want to understand how the focus of marketing practice is changing then looking at how technology is deployed in the function is a good place to start. There was a…
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Building 20, and ‘Productively Informal’ Innovation
When Steve Jobs designed Pixar’s new headquarters (he was Chairman of Pixar at the time) he deliberately designed it in a way that would encourage employee mingling, unplanned encounters and cross-team collaboration. The building has a huge central atrium which traffics staff between different areas, houses communal facilities such as the cafe, cinema, toilets and…