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Purposeful Innovation

Real innovation generates business results … it’s not about sitting around and generating ideas …

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This category contains 18 posts

Art, with some elements of Inspiration
Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

By ⋅ July 4, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

This past week saw the introduction of Google+, the search behemoth’s entry into the social networking fray. A slew of posts, articles, opinion pieces, etc. were sure to flow – and as I settled down with some time and a backlog of links to review, here are my initial thoughts on the service. Do I [...]

Alt TExt
A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

By ⋅ August 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught … One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about [...]

The Sandpit

By ⋅ June 7, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

(via GNC, thanks for this one!) A bit of artistic inspiration; a visually stunning film, combining time-lapse and tilt-shift photography. For the intellectually and technically curious – more information here. For the artist and the observationally curious – tai chi under the freeway? Nice.

Art, with some elements of Science
Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech … and How to Change the Game

By ⋅ January 6, 2010 ⋅ 5 comments

I’ve been working with internal developers over the past few weeks, experimenting with a treemap / heatmap-style visualization that is quite interesting / insightful when loaded up with data, but very tough to configure and manipulate. We are also struggling with a presentation layer (surrounding this data control) that doesn’t adapt to the size of [...]

Technical Debt and the Cost/Benefit of Knowledge Retention

By ⋅ July 27, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

A rather rigorous, Financial-sounding title for a high-concept line of thought …Thanks to Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, for calling my attention to this article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debt: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick [...]

Practical Innovation Lessons from Software Vendor R&D

By ⋅ April 16, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I recently had the chance to listen in on a roundtable discussion involving a software developer’s R&D group, discussing some of their thoughts on architecture. Some interesting ideas around “innovation” …Innovation vs. Cost ControlA question from the floor – how sensitive are the R&D arms of major vendors to existing investments in infrastructure for their [...]

Zodiac of Knowledge Capture

By ⋅ January 16, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally [...]

Third Time’s the Charm? Blackberry Bold

By ⋅ January 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I recently had to part ways with my Blackberry Pearl – some heartache, I suppose, but time and product innnovation march on. There is a lot to like about the Blackberry Bold – I am definitely happy to have made the change … <aside> … although my inner conspiracy theorist sees a case of planned [...]

Inspiration, Images, Insight, Imitation, Innovation

By ⋅ December 19, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Just a quick post on this pre-holiday weekend, with my design-leaning kids out of school / back from college for the holidays, and a general sense of creativity mixed in with the holiday spirit. Inspiration …… can come from many places. Nothing new there, but I like to get inspiration for X from looking at [...]

Dueling Collaboration Portals

By ⋅ November 23, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I noticed an interesting phenomenon this afternoon; we are experimenting with SharePoint as our internal project management / collaboration portal. A nice platform to choose, because it’s popularity is growing, and there are a wide selection of add-on products and development partners ready, willing, and able to help us spend our money to make it [...]

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