Category: trends
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Using SAMR to navigate technological change
One of my favourite frameworks for helping to understand and navigate technological change is the acronym SAMR, which stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. SAMR originates from the education sector, and was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura as a way for instructors to understand how they could best integrate new technology and tools into…
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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…
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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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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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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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Scott Brinker on MarTech trends: Composability & Orchestration
The two critical technology trends that speak to the future of marketing technology
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The Social Context for New Technologies
There was an interesting example of how the social and anthropological context shapes the use and evolution of technology in Mark Allen Peterson’s book ‘Anthropology & Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium‘. Referencing Naomi Baron, Peterson describes how we have a tendency to think of the modes of how we use technology…