Sitting on a long-haul flight can be a great opportunity to break from the connected world. It forces you to reconnect with things like books, newspapers, and magazines in a way that you don’t when time is at a premium as it so often is. In reality it means for me that I actually read an article…
Through the ages children the world over have used storytelling and game playing to learn and develop knowledge and judgement. Yet in everyday business we see so little focus on its use to help make sense of the increasingly complex and interlinked world that we live in. Latitude Research, who help clients create engaging content,…
As anyone who has worked in a consultancy, law firm, accountancy practice, or the like will know only too well, to keep your position you have to bill as many hours as possible. Managing a firm that runs a consultancy or partnership model relies on balancing order intake, sales, utilisation, and margin. Order intake and its…
With all of the publicity around insurance or legal referral fees earlier in the year it won’t surprise many people that the insurance industry is one of the largest spenders on legal services in the UK, about £5Bn pa, 20% of the market. Unless you’re in the legal services industry though it’s likely that the…
When I read Mat Honan’s article earlier this week it certainly hit home the potential risks associated with life in the cloud. For those of you who didn’t see the article, Mat, a journalist at Wired magazine, found that his Twitter and Gmail accounts had been hacked, and he found out when his computer and phone were…
It’s often said that the UK is a hotbed of invention but lacks the skills to match it with innovation. As a nation we are probably stronger in invention than innovation, however, you only have to look at a business headline that largely went under the radar a couple of weeks ago to see an…
I listened to an interesting interview recently about a new service which brings airline style ticket pricing to restaurant booking. We are all used to seeing the cost of an airline ticket fluctuating with demand. What is going on in the background in simple terms is that the airline, with a fixed supply (i.e. number of seats), …
There have been many column inches spent over the last week discussing General Motor’s decision to move from an outsourced model to an insourced model in relation to its IT. What drives much of the debate is the skills agenda and can GM manage the transition. If you look at the reasons that GM gave…
As reported by 9to5Mac the Apple ads for their Genius Bar experience signifies a new tack for Apple where by they’re advertising a non-product area of innovation. Apple is one of the leaders in the area of blending together commercial innovation and product innovation to create leverage from multiple types of innovation. Their retail experience is world-class…
In a couple of recent postings I looked at the impact of mobile network consolidation and also whether people would be willing to pay a premium for premium network performance. It will be interesting to see how the increased availablility of video calling over mobile netowrks with iOS 6 changes the market.