Carte Blanche and the Creativity of Constraint
As Los Angeles native, I can’t help but see parallels between my home town’s industry (movies) and my adopted home’s (startups). Today’s parallel concerns the problem with having too much money. In Hollywood, studios love to work with successful directors. When a director produces a critical and commercial smash, a studio or production company is […]
Design thinking: A New Approach To Fight Complexity And Failure
Photo credit: String Theory by Michael KrigsmanThe endless succession of failed projects forces one to question why success is elusive, with an extraordinary number of projects tangling themselves in knots. These projects are like a child’s string ga…
VisualBee –Trying to Automate Creativity
Like many people in the technology industry, I’m regularly tasked with creating and delivering presentations – it’s something I really enjoy – spreading the message of cloud to the world. One of the things I don’t especially enjoy however is the design process around presentations – luckily I have a
Taking The Quotes Out Of "Design Thinking"
Bruce Nussbaum, a design thinking thought leader and a professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design, recently wrote that Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. He claims that: Design Thinking has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer and is beginning to […]
Shift Happens! revisited
Way back in August 2006 a teacher called Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, USA created an 8 minute PowerPoint presentation with some music. It aimed to highlight the rate of change of the world we live in, and remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others. […]
Starting a New Series on Entrepreneurialism
I continually talk about how starting a new company can be one of the smartest things you can do in the current recession. Especially if you are part of the growing legions of the unemployed for 14 weeks or more, it is going to be a difficult 2010 for many people, and many of the […]
Attend The Medici Experience San Jose on 9/24
My old friend Frans Johansson, the author of The Medici Effect, is working with the city of San Jose to bring his innovation workshop to the Bay Area next week. The Medici Effect refers to the amazing innovations of the Italian Renaissance, sparked by the mingling of disparate cultures and experiences. I went to Frans’ […]
Business Models and Right-brained Geeks
Both Ben and myself often talk about how lean business models provide a competitive benefit in good times, and are crucial in a downturn that we are now living through. We can keep on explaining the pull-model vs. traditional software sales again and again … or jus sit back, shut up, and let a company […]
