Male, 22 years old, dark haired. If I turn on the television or the radio, which combined account for the vast majority of ad spending, sooner or later I will come across the advertising of a disposable tampon, a denture adhesive and a shampoo for curly red hair.
Author: izw
Change and Innovation
There is no novelty in the fact that carrying change, in whatever dimension, is a difficult task. Already in 1513 Niccolo Machiavelli affirmed that “there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful on its success, then to be a leader in the introduction of changes”.
Incremental vs. Radical Innovation
This led academics over the following decades to start exploring alternative variables that could explain what companies would be in a better position to innovate and under what circumstances. In this article we will cover one of the first theories that emerged during the late 1970s, the Incremental-Radical innovation dichotomy.
Philips and the Quest for Simplicity
Have you ever been annoyed by the subscription cards that fall out of magazines? I guess most people have, they not only interrupt the reading experience but also force you to make an extra run to the trash bin. Incredibly, though, such cards still generate around 12% of magazine’s new subscriptions, no wonder editors stick them wherever they can.
Innovation and Unarticulated Needs
I do agree with the author to a certain extent, mainly with the idea that under some circumstances only companies are able to develop radical innovations. But that has to do with the fact that consumers often times are not able to articulate their needs, and they are not necessarily aware of what one could possibly do with current technologies.
Top 10 Crowdsourcing Companies
There is a lot of buzz going on around “crowdsourcing” lately, a term coined by the Wired journalist Jeff Howe is his article “The Rise of the Crowdsourcing”. The first time I googled (lower case g because it is already recognized as a verb by the Webster dictionary) “crowdsourcing” it generated around 200.000 results, and that was only a couple of weeks after Howe’s article!
More Predictions Gone Wrong!
This is the second part of my collection of quotes (click here to see the first part). I find particularly interesting the companies that turned down multi-billion dollar opportunities like IBM refusing to invest in the photocopier or Atari rejecting Steve Job’s proposal to develop the personal computer. Those companies were nonetheless being managed by very smart people, understanding what influenced such decisions is the complex matter.
China and the Management Education
China has invested heavily over the past decades to improve its industrial capacity and competitiveness and to create internal Research & Development poles. Now the domestic companies, in order to become true global players, will need to mix all that investment with solid management techniques and business expertise.
Innovation and Schumpeter’s Theories
In previous articles I have outlined how the usage of the term innovation has grown exponentially over the last years. You can hear it in politics, institutions, international organizations and so on. Despite this popularity, however, we can say that innovation management is still an immature “science”. There is no dominant theory on the field and little agreement among managers and academics alike regarding what affects a company’s ability to innovate.
Convert bps into KB/s
Remember that a bit (binary digit) is the single piece of information in digital systems, it is either a 0 or a 1. A byte, instead, is a group of 8 bits. When we talk about computer memories or data storage 1 kilobit refers to 1024 (2^10) bits, 1 megabit refers to 1024 kilobits (or 1024 x 1024 bits), 1 kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes and so on. In telecommunications, however, transmission rates have traditionally been declared in bits per second (bps) and 1 kilobit refers to 1000 bits and not 1024 as in data storage.