Purposeful Innovation

PacMan at MoMA – Interaction Design

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 16, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

One of the benefits of ditching cable and going to internet streaming TV is that I’m watching more TED talks for a mental stretch break. True, I’m missing half of the Stanley Cup playoffs, but I catch stuff like this from Paola Antonelli, on bringing video games to New York’s Museum of Modern Art … [...]

Suburban Robots that Monitor Reality (The Internet of Things)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 13, 2013 ⋅ 5 comments

Another month, another presentation – something I am trying to do more of this year, somewhat to the detriment of my blog post frequency. However, I may have one or two new posts to put together based on the content of this deck. Here’s a link to the slides I am presenting this week (Thursday [...]

Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ 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 [...]

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

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ 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 Jim MacLennan ⋅ 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.

Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech … and How to Change the Game

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 6, 2010 ⋅ 6 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 [...]

Practical Innovation Lessons from Software Vendor R&D

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ 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 Control A question from the floor – how sensitive are the R&D arms of major vendors to existing investments in infrastructure [...]

Inspiration, Images, Insight, Imitation, Innovation

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ 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 [...]

Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 22, 2008 ⋅ One comment

I’m exchanging email with someone interested in establishing a skunk works, and they are asking some very interesting questions about the nature of innovation and the ingredients for an “environment of possibilities” … … things are … [as they are] because someone already tried unsuccessful alternatives … [This] begs the question: when it is required, [...]

The Innovation Generation and User Interfaces

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 10, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

I don’t intend for all my posts about Millennials joining the workforce to be anti-youth. There are some significantly good things this new generation can bring to established organizations – ways of thinking that foster innovation and forward-progress in how organizations use information. For example, let’s talk about user interfaces (UI). I’m not an old [...]

Purposeful Innovation

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