Why your networks and collaboration are at the heart of the value you create

By

I was recently interviewed for an extended article Networked Business: The wealth in your connections written by Nick Saalfeld for the Microsoft Talking Business series.

Here are some excerpts from the article, which provide a neat summary of some of my thinking on the space.

It’s a fallacy to think of networking as a sales tool. Firstly, it’s not. Secondly, it might instead be one of the defining sources of value in your business. Business strategist Ross Dawson, author of the (free and highly comprehensible) Future of Work Framework explains how.
Read more →

“Shoezam” app mimics Shazam to image, identify, and replicate shoes on the street

By

This morning I attended the Innovation Bay breakfast on Where to for retail now?.

It was a fascinating discussion, which was definitely useful as I develop my forthcoming Future of Retail framework. (Still working on it, I don’t know when it will be ready for the public, more later.)
Shoesofprey
Michael Fox, founder of the highly innovative and successful Shoes of Prey, spoke about some of what they envisage for the future of retail.

One of their internal initiatives is an app they dub “Shoezam”, which acts like Shazam in that people can take an image of a shoe they like in the street, which the app analyzes so that users can immediately order that shoe for themselves.
Read more →

Keys to innovation: Tapping communities of lead users

By

Today I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s ByDesign program on how our expectations of beauty are increasing. You can listen to the interview here.

At one point the conversation shifted to how companies could generate the innovation that will meet the soaring expectations of users.

Notably through the work of MIT’s Eric von Hippel, companies have grown to recognize the critical importance of co-creation in innovation, and in particular the role of ‘lead users’. Lead users are typically those who find new applications for products, extend their use, and are the most discerning.

In the interview I was asked how companies can find these lead users to help them innovate.
Read more →

The 7 roles of company directors in driving successful innovation

By

I have just finished running a two-day program in Phuket for the Malaysian Directors Academy on The Innovation Zone: Unleashing the Mindset.

The Academy also asked me to contribute an article to their magazine Board View. The piece is below, providing a high-level view on the role of company directors in driving innovation.

I find it interesting how little attention seems to be paid explicitly to the role of directors in innovation. Many aspects of driving successful innovation are operational, so within the purview of management. However there are critically important roles for boards of directors to play in innovation, and innovation must be squarely on directors’ agenda.

How Directors Can Drive Innovative Organisations

As the pace of change in the business environment increases, driven by technological and social shifts, innovation is moving to the centre of value creation in organisations. Efficiency and effectiveness in well-established business processes and business models are of no value if those models are being destroyed by new products or new classes of competitors.
Read more →

Meeting of the Minds: Key future trends with Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard

By

When I was in Switzerland recently, esteemed colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a number of video conversations, produced by Jonathan Marks. Following ones on Big Data, the future of privacy, and the future of Switzerland, here is our conversation on Key future trends.

For more conversations about the future see Meeting of the Minds.

After discussing some of the major trends, we go on to discuss our own preferred futures.

Trends and implications that we raise and discuss in the video include:
Read more →

How technology is enabling the humanity of organizations

By

After my recent opening keynote at the SAP Australia User Group Summit on Leadership in Enterprise Technology, I did a video interview for Inside SAP magazine, shown below.

The full transcript of the interview is available on our new publication CIO of the Future.
Read more →

As more jobs are automated, how many of us will still have productive work?

By

There has been a lot of press the last few days about a paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?, published by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology.

Almost all the coverage has been on the headline figure that 47% of US employment is at risk. However the paper provides many more interesting insights when you examine the detail.
Read more →

[VIDEO] Conversation with Gerd Leonhard: The future of Switzerland

By

When I was recently visiting Switzerland to deliver a keynote on the future of work my colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a series of video conversations that are featured in his Meeting of the Minds series.

Following our conversations on the implications of Big Data and the future of privacy, here is our dialogue on the future of Switzerland.

While I haven’t spent a lot of time in Switzerland recently, I lived there for 13 years in my childhood, so do have experiences and perspectives to bring to bear on the topic.

Here are some of the issues we discuss in the video:
Read more →

Launch of CIO of the Future

By

Advanced Human Technologies is, among other things, a publisher. To complement our existing ventures and publications, we have been building the platform and capabilities to generate more web publications and soon, more books and reports.

The general theme of our publications is the future, or in some cases what we need to do today to be successful in the future.

The first of our new phase of publications is CIOoftheFuture.com, looking at where the Chief Information Officer role is going.

CIOoftheFuture_500w
Read more →

Meeting of the Minds with Gerd Leonhard: The implications of Big Data

By

My futurist colleague Gerd Leonhard and I have highly complementary perspectives, so we are finding increasing interest in engaging us together for executive sessions.

When Gerd was in Sydney two years ago we created a series of videos together. After I recently did a keynote in Interlaken, Switzerland, I visited Gerd at his home in Basel where we did another series of videos for his Meeting of the Minds project. Here is the first one in the series, on Big data.

Just a few of the points we cover in our conversation:
Read more →