Purposeful Innovation

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, [...]

No Silver Bullet for Group Collaboration over Distance?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 22, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Lots of organizations have to deal with the challenge of implementing standard work and best practices over physical distances. With sales offices, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations scattered across the country, what’s the best way to get people who know their stuff to collaborate on process improvement – and then take that knowledge back to [...]

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 [...]

Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 12, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

This the time of year when organizations (companies, departments, and teams) review their performance from the previous year. Breathless presentations are made to upper management and/or the Board of Directors, in late December or early January. Typically, the IT department will go through their projects and talk about how many significant chunks of work got [...]

Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 16, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

I’ve talked with a couple of IT leads that are thinking about putting in an enterprise search capability. It always seems to come down to two basic options; search integrated with a collaboration / portal platform, or a dedicated appliance, pointed at the G: Drive. You know the G: Drive – every corporation has one [...]

Euphemisms, and a career-extending paradox

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 11, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

I use a number of euphemisms all the time, in my conversations with folks, trying to balance complete yet brief communications. A common phrase when trying to show that you’ve seen a similar situation before is … “In a previous life …” (IAPL), as in “In a previous life, we did consolidated financials within the [...]

Tracking patent submissions via RSS

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 1, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Via GNC and Scoble, we have PatentMojo – RSS feeds for patent submissions. I found it quite interesting that big pharma is in their demo list (with software and telecomm) – reasonable target markets, but a more interesting patent watch would be against biotech. Also, their selection of 5 companies was probably by brand recognition [...]

Beermat App Development

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 18, 2004 ⋅ Post a comment

Nice article on gapingvoid – you could replace all the marketing concepts in the punchline paragraph and replace with systems development ideas. Although it’s not often any more that folks suggest major software deployments or custom development projects just to make themselves look good, it was defnitiely prevalent in the 90′s. Of course, don’t get [...]

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