Technology Innovation

Can You Outsource Innovation?

August 13, 2010

I’m writing this as I finish up a great week of vacation on the Baltic Sea with my wife and some friends. While our main destination was St. Petersburg, Russia, an unexpected surprise was our visit to Tallinn, Estonia. As you can see in the photo above, Tallinn has many old churches and a well-preserved walled old town. What you can’t see in the photo is the energy and positive outlook in its people, much ...

2 comments Read more →

iPad’s Killer App for the Enterprise

May 27, 2010

I have been using the iPad daily for about 6 weeks and love it. It is a great media computer for video (abc.com and netflix are fantastic), newspapers and books (my Kindle books have new life with the superb graphics). The browsing experience is great and of course the games are plentiful (Scrabble and Jumbline are recent favorites). What is not clear is how (notice I don’t say “if”) the iPad will infiltrate the enterprise. ...

19 comments Read more →

10 Text Mining Ideas

April 13, 2010

I’ve been reading the book Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko, a collection of creativity and innovation tools to use when generating ideas. One of the hundreds of ideas the author offers to get new ideas is from your junk email. He suggests that by scanning your junkmail, you can get some ideas for what is hot or emerging. It’s an interesting idea that I tested by putting about 100 emails into a free text visualization tool ...

8 comments Read more →

Improving Insurance Claims using the iPhone

April 6, 2010

co-authored with Anand Rao Is Claims Processing Getting Any Better? How long does it take for your auto insurance carrier (or your own organization for the insurance professionals out there) to process a claim and how many people are involved in the process? Most insurance claims takes weeks, if not months to fully complete. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nearly 436,000 people were involved in 2008 in either processing insurance claims ...

10 comments Read more →

5 Roles for IT Innovators

March 15, 2010

What is IT’s role in innovation? Is it just about making IT better or is it about driving business value too? We asked 592 business and IT leaders in the US and UK this question in our latest Diamond Digital IQ survey by asking them to choose what innovation role they thought their CIO and IT organization played from the following list: Improve the IT Function Improve Business Processes Improve Customer Service Reach New Customers ...

9 comments Read more →

Innovation for the Rest of Us (presentation)

March 9, 2010

I had the privilege today of sharing some ideas on innovation at the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference. The two points of my talk were: Companies should spend more time solving problems and less time coming up with brand new ideas. There are plenty of good ideas already brewing in the minds of employees, customers, vendors and universities – it’s a matter of tapping into them. There are (at least) 4 things you have ...

1 comment Read more →

Can Haptics Touch the Enterprise?

January 7, 2010

I had the chance to drive the 2010 Lexus HS 250 hybrid while my car was in the shop. While it’s good to see more hybrids hitting the road, the more interesting thing to me was the new navigation system and the controller that drives it. Aside from several mediocre dial-oriented efforts from BMW, Audi and others, most nav systems these days seem to be touchscreens, both factory installed and add-ons. The new Lexus controller ...

4 comments Read more →

Next Entries →