Today’s dark satanic mills may soon turn darker still, once we start printing everything in three dimensions. Far less satanic, tomorrow’s mills may be our homes, as ‘economy of scale’ becomes uneconomical and mass production goes niche
Why is neuroscience suddenly such a hot topic right now? Is it just that the latest brain scan technology allows us to see more detail? The answer is yes, but the implications are far bigger
There’s so much talk of biologically inspired innovation, I thought it was about time to start tracking down briefings on ‘how nature got there first’
Ever wondered what would happen if anyone actually bothered to check out those incessant claims everyone makes that ‘customer service standards are constantly improving’?
The more you think about what she’s saying, the more shockingly unthinkable it seems: can we now really see what an eye sees without us needing its brain in order to see it?
Small traditional businesses? They’re already ‘inside’ the startup world, aren’t they? No. They typically know nothing about such things as Lean Startup, Startup Weekend or Y Combinator, and even when they do, they think it has nothing to do with them. Are they right?
One irony is that Fred Gage is one of the world’s leading figures in neuroscience, a discipline which was largely spurred by Phineas Gage’s miraculous survival. Another relevant irony (noted in the Wikipedia article about Fred) is that Phineas (1823 – 1860) had no children
Are so-called ‘clone startups’ (those hoping to be acquired by the mothership after creating a successful, ‘local language lookalike’) too easily dismissed as ‘non-innovators’?
Ty Danco’s ludicrously improbable but riveting tale definitely belongs in the history books, alongside AirBnB’s legendary ‘survive by literally eating your own marketing material’ yarn
This is about using what The Economist calls artificial artificial intelligence (like Mechanical Turk, which uses people as artificial computers) to enhance (artificially intelligent) machine vision
A new report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is being mistakenly interpreted as showing that startups are creating fewer jobs. This view somehow manages to completely ignore those odd things investors call ‘exits’.
Even if you don’t know what on earth a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is, this panel video offers fascinating insights into the latest things that are keeping people in the online display ad world awake at night
Just trying to describe why over two million viewers think this frivolous-looking video is jaw-dropping will inevitably come out sounding like gobbledygook to all but those who already fully appreciate the sensational breakthrough it represents
After my initial TED-talk-inspired enthusiasm, I became seriously disheartened by the seemingly unanswerable criticisms of Khan Academy’s fairly unadventurous ‘talk and chalk’ style tutorial videos as not really representing a genuine step forward in education. But…
At least five of these forthcoming titles major on a healthcare or safety aspect, illustrating just how far this particular management approach has come from its original niche
Intrapreneurship is not for the fainthearted. Inside established organisations, officially-sanctioned bastions of executive dragon slaying can sometimes be found, filled with fearless risk-takers discretely licensed to systematically shred the company rulebook in their tireless search for innovation
Industrial energy waste turns out to be the most surprisingly overlooked opportunity to make outrageous returns on investment. Energy efficiency in industry is a shockingly untapped market. Modernisation at a single large industrial plant can free up an entire power station
If McKinsey’s believe in it, then even if you are unsure, you’d better get the best briefing you can: these videos may raise just as many questions as answers, but they’re a good starting point
At that speed, you can see things that you shouldn’t be able to see at all, things that the camera isn’t actually pointing at. Wherever light has been, as it bounces around our world, it can tell us a story about its journey, letting us ‘see around corners’
“What do you want to do here?” Get a job. “Sorry, but you’ll need to go straight back home right now, next please. So, what do you want to do here?” Start a business, employ people “Great! please sit over there with the others”
Is prohibiting this pursuit an infringement upon the freedom of the individual? Should we make this something that anyone should be able to do, wherever they are in the world?
From the ‘this shouldn’t be innovation, but unfortunately…’ department. You need to be able to answer all of these questions. Don’t wait for the users to ask them
Sharing is useful, right? Motherhood and apple pie, surely? The stampede of sacred cows being ruthlessly sacrificed in this extraordinary video bonfire of academic vanities lends it an intoxicating but perhaps far too beefy aroma for some
Educational miracle worker Sugata Mitra doesn’t take on small challenges. His original breath-taking discoveries overturned everything we knew about early self-teaching. He’s back with enough equally shocking, more recent findings to justify you watching for fifty minutes.
Monsters, zombies, heroes or villains: which of these will we become if video games turn out to be shaping the character of future generations?
Today’s occupiers are in many ways no less ethereal that any lingering spirits which might still be roaming the lonely corridors and passing silently through walls
You’d be forgiven for believing that Christensen’s 1997 classic The Innovator’s Dilemma was the first to detail the phenomenon in all its applecart-overturning glory: in fact it was explored in 1939. Watch this incisive lecture.
Biotechnology book publishing is soaring. It’s making the job of keeping track of ‘what are the most interesting titles coming out, and when?’ almost impossible. This is our first attempt
A startup only has to take one person out of unemployment to make a net contribution to job growth. Instead of ‘Jobseekers Allowance’ why not ‘Business Model Seekers Allowance’?
Biology has replaced chemistry as the primary science behind drug discovery: how did this transformation begin, who was involved, and how did it get funded?
“Customer service here, we’ve decided to do whatever we can to put right this terrible thing that happened to you when you used AirBnB. For a start, can we have your bank details, so that we can immediately deposit a million dollars”
Investment legend Roger McNamee says mobile has already killed search. Smartphone users hardly use search. Is Google no longer the gatekeeper to the web, business, the world? Will Google+ put them back in the money? Does today’s ‘Facebook for business’ launch roll the dice once again?
Free workforce? Marketing substitute? Unpaid website content generators? If you’re hoping for a way to ‘exploit the well-proven willingness of loyal customers to contribute tirelessly to your online promotion, generating enormous traffic and business, and asking for nothing in return’ you need help
The name Plumpy’nut may sound quirky, but this ridiculously simple product idea is already keeping countless famine-struck children from starvation and will save millions of lives
We’ve known for some time that relevant learning which takes place outside of lessons seriously improves attainment levels. Surprising breakthroughs in motivating learners to do this are being reported in highly challenging educational environments
Somehow, something as seemingly mundane as an ‘online errand service’ is helping us discover surprising new ways to support each other
They’ve already managed to print a kidney, so it’s only a matter of time. The replicators used are very affordable mods of off-the-shelf inkjets, but the cartridges? You guessed it
Ten ideas for weaving the lean, low-investment, iterative, failure-tolerant, build-measure-learn attitude toward giving people constructive ways to spend their time into the fabric of every culture
We know we’re creating problems that the next generation will be left to fix, so the least we can do is to give them the skills to fix them, and yet we’re still failing on a grand scale. The good news is that we’re discovering new ways to help them work out how to do this for themselves.
We’ve been looking for a green engineering video ever since our last article on the subject. This excellent briefing definitely makes up for the wait
One theme that appears often in many of these volumes? Discovery processes. If the word ‘innovation’ appears anywhere in your job description, you already know that discovering new discovery processes is a double-edged sword
No motors, gears or levers. 100% virtual physics and yet 100% real acoustics. It doesn’t make sense, but it works breathtakingly well. The catch? It isn’t cheap. Yet.
VCs are interested in finding large, untapped markets. They use startups to do the market research needed to find them
Where is customer service innovation really happening right now? Is it mostly in sales, brands, marketing, call centers, e-commerce, retailing, CRM, products, social media, mobile, games, finance? These titles show that it’s taking place over the entire spectrum
An opportunity to watch Steve Chu, US Energy Secretary, running us through a list of technologies which he hopes will help America reassert itself in the rapidly intensifying struggle for competitiveness and maybe even its very survival
No British press coverage for a major innovation story: biotech legend Una Ryan secures funding from both the UK’s Department for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation
Before the current mainstream recognition of ‘gamification as a business strategy’, these issues were rarely taken seriously by outsiders. Now that we’re all interested, these videos are an utter revelation, even to many insiders
Platforms such as FaceBook have come under criticism for not offering ways to differentiate ‘types of friends’, and as such, not being ‘truly social’. Whilst this may be true, philosophers, sociologists and cultural anthropologists would argue that fixing this may introduce just as many problems as it solves
Surprisingly, we had the opposite problem to our usual one with this category: this time we were not quite as inundated with contenders
For some unfathomable reason, we’ve never covered anything on games design luminary Will Wright, and if that wasn’t bad enough, we never even knew that his latest major project wasn’t even a game.