Future Technologies with Sir Tim Berners Lee, Stephen Fry and more

The Royal Society are currently celebrating their 350th anniversary with a series of events under the See Further banner. Last night, I attended a panel session entitled Future Technologies featuring Sir Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Stephen Fry, writer, broadcaster and technophile [...]

21st century market research

I’ve just finished reading Communispace’s latest position paper “You are now leaving your comfort zone: 21st century market research” (link points to their blog post, which in turn links to the pdf). It is unquestionably one of the best research papers I have read in quite some time. It has to be taken with the [...]

Recommended Reading – 18th June 2010

It’s been a few weeks since my last update. I’ve kept the recommendations to a manageable number – seven – which means that the average quality of the posts and articles I’m linking to is even higher than usual. Enjoy. Edward Boches has written a fantastic post on putting together a new creative team, and [...]

Meaningless statistics in the World Cup

As most people are, I’m currently enjoying watching the games during the football World Cup (though this enjoyment is tempered by the fairly poor quality of the matches and the sounds of the vuvuzela). Occurring just once every four years, there are relatively few instances where statistical norms or trends can be deployed. For instance, [...]

Harold Evans on the Spirit of Innovation

Earlier today I attended a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts given by Sir Harold Evans entitled “The Spirit of Innovation”. During an extremely distinguished career, Evans has been, among other things, Editor of both The Times and Sunday Times (of London), Publisher of Random House and an author of several acclaimed books. This [...]

Finding that extra 10% to improve

Innovation – commercialising inventions of new ideas and methods – is a necessary component of business success. There are other factors in play, but the more innovative a business is, the more successful it is likely to be. It avoids obsolescence and finds/maintains a differential advantage, among other things. But many people seem to be [...]