When Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at WorldCon a couple of years ago, the first question out of Krugman’s mouth was “Where are the flying cars?” Krugman asked this because he knows that science fiction authors like Stross have been imagining the future for quite a while, and that currently impossible technologies […]
I’ve been invited to participate in a symposium on Deep Practice, organised around the theme “Deepening knowledge and innovation through design practice.” The program includes this free talk by Professor Mark Burry on March 24th in Melbourne. To prepare for the event, we’ve been asked to write a brief piece on the topic. This is […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. One of the critical steps to successful innovation is getting your idea to spread. Hugh MacLeod’s outstanding new book Evil Plans has a lot about how to get your ideas to spread more effectively. One of his tenets is that we should create random acts of traction. There […]
The first thing that I ever bought from the J. Peterman catalog was the Otavalo Mountain Shirt: I had discovered the Peterman catalog very early in its existence, and after getting a few in the mail, I finally bought the shirt. I quickly discovered that the quality of clothes from Peterman was very high, and […]
I’m in the middle of reading Evil Plans, the excellent new book by Hugh MacLeod, which reminded me of one of my favourites from him. I think this is a pretty good and concise explanation of business model innovation: One way or another, to innovate successfully you have to be distinctive. In other words, Hugh […]
In a nice post inspired from the classic TED talk from Malcolm Gladwell, Harry Connolly’s talks about the importance of experimenting in a guest post on Charlie Stross’ blog: Another important point from the video is that consumers do not always know what they want. This isn’t exactly a revelation to readers, who are always […]
I watched The Future is Unwritten again this weekend, the documentary about Joe Strummer by Julien Temple. The Clash were my absolute favourite band for a long time, and I’ve always thought highly of Strummer. The movie gives a pretty balanced view of his life, exploring his faults as well as his strengths. But the […]
The most successful ad campaign that I ever designed only ran two weeks before the owner of my company killed it. I was working for a software company at the time, but our parent company also had a consumer hardware division. I was asked to help with their advertising. The budget was extremely limited – […]
