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Category: Design Thinking, Innovation
Dec 25
In autumn 2015 I gave a talk about Design Thinking at the Reckoning 2015 conference in Half Moon Bay, California. The talk walks you through the Design Thinking concept and shows a couple of examples.
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Category: Government, Startup
This was a question on Quora, to which I wrote the following response. And there are quite a number of things. The obvious are of course: Make it easy to incorporate (online, no or low registration fees, no need of go-between services such as notaries or lawyers, low or now capital requirements) tax breaks for …
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Category: Innovation, Intrapreneurship
When you browse job postings that are looking for innovation managers, you’ll be surprised how companies are unprepared for them. It often starts with a confusing job description that uses innovation in an arbitrary way. The actual jobs are often nothing else than administrative or managerial jobs that look for keeping the status quo. Once …
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Category: Behavioral Economics, Innovation
When you give people the task to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or listing all things that one could do with a brick, they for sure come up with some ideas. But if you tell them beforehand to imagine themselves as a seven-year-old child, they not only scored far higher on the …
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Category: Culture, Innovation, Mindset
We generally consider innovation as something that is good and desired, even that we know that people in disrupted industries will lose their jobs and investments destroyed, or that the innovative product or service can be used for nefarious purposes. Innovation to be good needs to create more value for society than it destroys. But …
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Category: Innovation
It was the third pitch that I heard, while serving as pretend venture capitalist at this accelerator in San Francisco. But my reaction to this pitch was different. A quarter of the time in, I stopped listening to what the startup-founder said. Not, because his startup ideas was uninteresting, but because he just had said …
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Dec 11
Nine out of ten startups are failing, and this puzzles someone who is not familiar with startups or businesses. Creating a business is a risky move in every sense. Can you attract enough customers, is the location right, is your service or product attractive enough to have customers come and come again? The Product / …
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Category: Automotive, Innovation, Startup
The current unfolding of the Volkswagen cheat-scandal doesn’t miss out in drama. Millions of VW/Porsche/Audi-cars seem to be affected, recalls, multiple solutions, fines and damage payments, a sales decline, investigations all over the world, troves of people leaving, and now also Opel (a GM brand). We are just waiting for how more car-makers are involved …
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Category: Innovation, Innovation Outpost, Silicon Valley
The question that keeps many entrepreneurs awake at night is how they can survive in an ever faster innovation cycle. Successful companies have seen their business being transformed from one day to the other. Polaroid, Nokia, Blackberry, navigation system manufacturers, media companies, have been disrupted and now the car industry is on the cusp of …
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Category: Case study, Failure, Innovation
Growing up in the 70s and 80s I fondly remember the magic of instant cameras. While we never owned one, my parents’ friends had a Polaroid camera and took pictures that magically transformed from a black square to a colorful image within minutes. Those pictures taken back then still fill our boxes with photographs. But …
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