Making Innovation Happen
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:51PM Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:10PM Humans excel at recognising faces, but how we do this has been an abiding mystery in neuroscience and psychology. In an effort to explain our success in this area, researchers are taking a closer look at how and why we fail. A new study from MIT looks at a particularly striking instance of failure: our impaired ability to recognize faces in photographic negatives. The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, suggests that a large part of the answer might lie in the brain's reliance on a certain kind of image feature. The work could potentially lead to computer vision systems, for settings as diverse as industrial quality control or object and face detection. On a different front, the results and methodologies could help researchers probe face-perception skills in children with autism, who are often reported to experience difficulties analysing facial information.
Monday, March 9, 2009 at 02:56PM Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 08:23PM Many dismiss marketing as manipulative, deceptive, and intrusive. Marketing, they argue, focuses too much of our attention on material consumption. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in his 2007 book Consumed, claims that marketing is "sucking up the air from every other domain to sustain the sector devoted to consumption." He is correct. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks command more loyalty among many consumers than any political party, trade union, church, or mosque. Indeed, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz sought to make his coffee shops the "third place" in our lives, after home and work.
Friday, January 16, 2009 at 08:49PM McKinsey's continue to have some interesting news - here is some of their latest on technology... Eight emerging trends are transforming many markets and businesses. Executives should learn to shape the outcome rather than just react to it. Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
