…. it’s what you don’t that can be both an opportunity and a threat. When postcodes were rolled out in the UK back in the early 70’s they were primarily designed with the aim of helping sort and deliver mail better. Today, they are much more than this, and affect almost all of us on…
Big data is a hot topic. In the UK the National Health Service has spent the last 25 years bring forward the concept of anonymising patient data from GPs. The aim is to create a pool of data that can be used for analysis and research into health trends and research. There is a precedent…
The term ‘digital native’ is increasingly being used to describe a set of skills that organisations look to have throughout their teams. But how many organisations have really thought through what they actually mean? Having asked a few people what they mean, my rough and ready research would lead me to believe that there is…
It’s estimated that the hospitality industry in the UK employs about 6% of the total working population, some 1.7m people, and accounts for £55-60bn pa. Just under a half of that figure ~£25bn relates to restaurants, ~56,000 of them if the latest estimates are true. It’s an industry sector that we all probably encounter more…
I’m sure you’ll all have picked up the recent stories around Amazon and Google relating to delivery drones and driverless taxis. Whilst it’s too early to tell whether these are pure fantasy or will one day be a normal part of life, it does raise an interesting topic from an online retail business model perspective.…
The process of making a cup of coffee is about as simple as a task gets. That’s not to say producing the perfect crema doesn’t have its fair share of innovation, science and technique, but ultimately it’s a repeatable, mechanistic process. It’s a market which from the last available research, which was for 2012, grew…
In the age of ‘big data’ we see supermarkets as being at the leading edge of harvesting consumer information in order to drive their business, but are they missing a trick? In the UK, Tesco says that there are over 15 million Clubcard users, and Nectar states that it has over 19 million users. In…
One industry that isn’t a stranger to commercial innovation is the music industry. Taking recording formats as an example, since the late 19th century there have been several waves of advancement, including: – Phonograph cylinder (1888-1920’s) – Vinyl (1920’s – early 1990s ) – Cassettes (Late 1970’s – early 2000’s) – CD’s (1982 – )…
Increasingly we live in a society where we expect everything to be available instantly, 24/7/365. Yet often we take for granted the time and effort that it has taken to achieve this for each individual product or service. On another axis the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and therefore more complex. How many of us…
Whether you like it or not we are all contributors and users of crowdsourced data on a daily basis. Examples are all around us, whether it’s: voting on TV talent shows; product ratings on Amazon; or traffic on Google Maps; or mobile phone coverage maps collated by RootMetrics from user supplied data. Whilst the first…