Here’s a way to get solutions to problems. It isn’t new but many people wouldn’t know about it. Happy to Introduce you to Joe It’s possible to program your brain to become more innovative. But you mustn’t meddle with your brain; it likes to call its own shots. It doesn’t like to be told what to do either. I want to pass on to my readers a hack I h...
Who Knew? This is the very week that Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos went into space (or near as) and Elon Musk has booked a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic for a time yet to be announced. Yet the press coverage has been at best muted and occasionally disparaging. As in, they didn’t actually go into real space, just a 3-minute taste of minima...
The amazing Musk has done it again with the Falcon Heavy! Is it possible he did even more than he told us? According to news reports the original SpaceX launch plan was to get into Mars’ orbit, but the space module overshot and is now on its way to the asteroid belt, where it would presumably be lost. Such a pity. Hmm now let me see. Overshoot?...
Bitcoin, ICOs, blockchain, fintech, CRISPR+20, RAS, gene splicing, XNA, SpaceX, Hyperloop, the Boring Company, algorithms, AI, Siri, and so on and on and on… Incubators, accelerators, innovation hubs, skunk works, Chief Innovation Officers, innovation catalysts, learning to be an innovator, blah blah and so on and on and on… People glued to their s...
Just some idle speculation on my part while I was flossing my teeth. You know, thinking about life when I’m not allowed to drive a car, which looks like it could be soon. Ah well… So it looks like self-driving cars are well on the way. Doesn’t that mean there will be a lot less accidents? The statisterati say that 95% of motor vehicle accidents are...
I just returned from one of my regular trips to China. Air quality worse, even more traffic. BUT a Cambrian-like explosion of bikes and bike-sharing (see Ofo) and now, lots more yummy takeout. Americans invented takeout right? How dare the upstart Chinese try to beat us at our own game? But they have: massively. China and the US are on different pl...
Right now AI is really hot. But to me it’s boring, showing no imagination. Siri still performs at the level of a very dumb 5 year old. Self-driving autos work but the tech is soooo incremental. Basically AI is all about performing party tricks. When will it get truly smart, even shocking? I am sure you have heard of the famous American science fict...
Did you notice that Alvin Toffler, author of “Future Shock” just passed away? His book was published in 1970. That was well before the Internet, Twitter, Facebook and even photocopiers and hand-held electronic calculators. Think what he would say today? Clearly the pace of change has accelerated dramatically since Toffler alerted us to the problem....
For all the angst about the problems in the US, at least we still lead the world in innovation, right? Not so fast, read on for this telling little story. The US Is still in the throes of deciding which e-wallet it will use. There’s a ton of them around so mass appeal is limited until John Q. Public makes up his tiny mind. Then retailers can finall...
Unicorns are so….fashionable. You know what they are right? Startups valued at at least $1 billion, amazing right?. Right now in the US there are over 80 unicorns, mainly in Silicon Valley. One of them, Square, just went public at a valuation of $6 billion which was felt to be a low figure now. Hmmm. Now there are so many unicorns that there is a n...
I just saw the Alex Gibney’s documentary about Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine”. It’s more true to the man than Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs”, also showing now. I’ve already showed my hand in my blog post on the 2013 film “Jobs”: “Can a Narcissistic Bully be a Good Leader? So what’s the message? Jobs was a visionary, bullying, aestheti...
Did you notice that Goldman Sachs (of all companies!) has just forbidden its interns from working after midnight? Seems like their HR people, if not the pooh-bahs, have just suffered an attack of political correctness aka social responsibility. So even if one of their starting interns wants to work his version of overtime (like into the wee hours),...
Have you heard about the scandal with cheating on the SAT? It’s particularly prevalent in Asia with Chinese and Korean students being repeat offenders. The organizations behind the cheaters go to some considerable lengths to get the SAT questions. They send questions to phones by text and other means. The stakes are rising though. Some cities in Ch...
Over the last couple of weeks I have been conducting coaching for innovators identified using our psychometric assessments. This has reminded me of an important issue that usually gets overlooked in discussions on innovation. In the conventional wisdom, an innovator is someone who thinks up an idea and then (maybe) does something with it. I have bl...
You know the usual approach to innovation in a corporation. Hold an offsite for brainstorming and to stimulate creativity. Get a big-name consultant. Team comes up with an idea, makes a plan. Does a public relations blast announcing their breakthrough idea. Fails. Do again. Fail again. If that wasn’t the case the vast majority of organizations woul...
You can’t lift up any piece of news or commentary these days without seeing a discussion or article about entrepreneurship and innovation and how to improve one, the other or both. Prescriptions abound. But my question is: are entrepreneurship and innovation the same thing or are they different? I ask that because you usually see them come in twos ...
I just read Peter Thiel’s new book “One to Zero”. You know Peter Thiel right? Co-founded Paypal, founded Palantir, well-known for his scholarships that give chosen entrepreneurs $100,000 if they quit college and start a company. Quite a guy. The book is really a series of reflections on innovation and entrepreneurship whose quality varies more than...
Did you hear all the latest buzz about those boffins (at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) who just discovered gravitational waves? So we can actually measure time back almost to the time of the Big Bang? And they did it by actually showing the super-imposition of these waves on the Cosmic Microwave Background (Ok don’t ask but look here...
Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bo...
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:w...
