‘Innovation’, ‘big data’, ‘the cloud’, ‘sustainability’, and the list goes on. Business loves buzzwords. There’s no two ways about it, every technology wave, or generation has it’s lexicon. I came across a great quote from Henry Ford’s autobiography in which he speaks about ‘making to order’: Ask a hundred people how they want an article…
Are you really walking the talk? Can you measure your actions and see improvements? This article reveals survey results that cover issues like these — results that might inspire a second look at your organization… As organizations, we believe the future of the professions we represent will be greatly enhanced by our ability not only…
We’re probably all aware of the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’. That we are all connected by six or fewer steps. From a human perspective, in a world of 7+ billion people it sounds far fetched, however, having completed a course on social and economic networks I’ve seen the mathematical proof and been forced…
Today is a big day in the UK with the Chancellor’s budget speech. Whilst he will be laying out what is a set of political policies, much of the proverbial ‘column inches’ will be focused on the underpinning economic facts, figures, and assumptions. In a recent post (‘Are you a ‘digital native’ – and how…
It’s possible that the food retailing business models reached a public tipping point today with the announcement by Morrisons that they had adjusted their strategy to compete more directly with the discount players. Another of the large traditional players Tesco also recently indicated that they were also adjusting their profitability aspirations. The market has been…
…. 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…
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.…
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…