A Blog about Technology and Innovation

  Ideas are easy to come by but developing them, giving them form and ensuring they are most likely to succeed when they are put out into the world is a real challenge. How might we ensure our ideas stand the best chance of success? Many an entrepreneur is motivated to launch a disruptive product or service. To make their mark with a new idea that changes how people see the world. How might we develop disruptive ideas? What criteria should we use? Here are some ways in which people can discover disruptive business ideas:   Know your type of idea. Is your idea solving a problem? Is it fulfilling an aspiration? What is the Job To Be Done ( JTBD ) that you seek to improve upon? Know the status quo. How are people currently resolving the JTBD? What competition already exists? Knowing this will allow you to identify how people are currently achieving the outcomes you hope to help them with. It will show you where competition is already fierce and guide you to wh...

  A theory that was first coined by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation explains the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector. This occurrence typically happens when the introduction of simplicity, convenience, accessibility or even affordability challenges a market where complexity and high costs are the status quo. Disruptive innovation commonly takes place in niche markets that initially appear as unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents but are gradually redefined as a result of the new product or idea. 1. Identify your Company's Key Markets Reach a consensus with senior leaders on your firm’s priority markets. Whether abundant with opportunities or plagued with risks, priority markets need to be initially established and then segmented. 2. Decide which market segments are of utmost importance Once the segments are identified they may need to be redefined based on the segmentation criteria that is e...

  Technology isn’t an industry, it’s a method of transforming the culture and economics of existing systems and institutions. That can be a little bit hard to understand if we only judge tech as a set of consumer products that we purchase. But tech goes a lot deeper than the phones in our hands, and we must understand some fundamental shifts in society if we’re going to make good decisions about the way tech companies shape our lives—and especially if we want to influence the people who actually make technology. Even those of us who have been deeply immersed in the tech world for a long time can miss the driving forces that shape its impact. So here, we’ll identify some key principles that can help us understand technology’s place in culture. 1. Tech is not neutral. One of the most important things everybody should know about the apps and services they use is that the values of technology creators are deeply ingrained in every button, every link, and every glowing i...

  Throughout the 80s and 90s time period, there was a strong competition in the point-and-shoot camera film industry amongst Canon, Fujifilm, and Kodak. But not all of these companies exactly saw the future of disruption coming with digital cameras and digital imaging photography, and how it would change the way people take and share photos.  Here are some ways businesses can avoid getting disrupted: 1. Adopt a wider-ranging perspective  Too much is changing with innovation and technologies for businesses to have a nearsighted or myopic lens as you watch for disruptions happening. You must be willing to have a perspective that goes beyond the narrow slice of their industry verticals. Market disruptions can happen when a new startup introduces a new technology or a different or innovative way of delivering goods or services to customers. Disruption can also come from new economic developments, government policy changes or even extreme weather (climate change) event...

  Disruptive innovation is a term that’s often thrown around the boardroom, but isn’t always fully understood. Rife with misconceptions, we aim to set the record straight and clearly define what the term truly means by looking into its origin, the misconceptions surrounding it, and its effect on business. We’ll also show how businesses can embrace disruption and use it to their own competitive advantage. No market is safe from disruption. PwC carried out a survey of 1,379 chief executives in September 2017 that found 60% of these executives said their sectors have already been changed or reshaped. Seventy-five per cent of those surveyed anticipated that they would see their market disrupted by the year 2022. EY Global, a multidisciplinary professional services organisation, points out that change can be difficult for most companies and leaders who avoid it can land up being unprepared. In order for managers and leaders to bring their teams through this change, they need to star...

  UK lawmakers are sick and tired of  shitty  internet of things  passwords  and are whipping out legislation with steep penalties and bans to prove it. The new  legislation , introduced to the UK Parliament this week, would ban universal default passwords and work to create what supporters are calling a “firewall around everyday tech.” Specifically, the bill, called The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill (PSTI), would require unique passwords for internet-connected devices and would prevent those passwords from being reset to universal factory defaults. The bill would also force companies to increase transparency around when their products require security updates and patches, a practice only 20% of firms currently engage in, according to a statement accompanying the bill. These bolstered security proposals would be overseen by a regulator with sharpened teeth: companies refusing to comply with the security standards could repo...

  When people worry about robots coming to take their jobs, I don’t think “poet” is what they had in mind. Enter Ai-Da, a highly realistic, AI-driven robot firmly rooted in the uncanny valley that can paint, draw, sculpt, and, yes, write its own poetry. In a first for robot-kind, Ai-Da gave a public performance of poetry “she” created in commemoration of famed Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The event took place Friday at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum as part of an exhibit honoring the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. For Ai-Da, writing poetry isn’t as simple as putting pen to paper: She was given all 14,233 lines of Dante’s three-part epic, the “Divine Comedy,” to digest and then, by drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis programs, used algorithms to draft a reactive work. The results are pretty nonsensical, but to be fair, so is a lot of poetry. Maybe it’s just too high-brow for me. Or it could be that I’m too distracted by he...

  Virigin Galactic has announced that its first lucky winner will be going on space tourism trip. The name of the winner is Keisha S. The winner, Keisha S. (her last name is being withheld by the company), is a personal trainer from Antigua and Barbuda. She will be the first person from the Caribbean islands to visit space and hopes to bring her daughter, who studies astrophysics, on the spacecraft with her as her guest. The sweepstakes was done in partnership with Omaze, a fundraising company, and Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that wants to ensure an inclusive future in space. Virgin Galactic  announced its plan  to raffle two seats on its spacecraft in July following a successful launch and return of its Unity 22 mission that sent Virgin Galactic  founder Richard Branson to space . More than a hundred thousand people donated to the sweepstakes, which drew in a projected $1.7 million in eight weeks following its kick-off in July, according to Virgin Galactic. ...