Enochlophobia. It means “fear of crowds,” and I have it. I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near Times Square on New Years’ Eve, and how did I ever endure the stadium-sized rock concerts of my youth? I’m thinking all this as I navigate the sea of people at the National
How is it that some companies can come up with a big idea and implement that idea successfully in the market, while others never get past the idea phase? "In the case of innovation," says Jill Dyché, VP of SAS Best Practices, "big ideas aren't enough." It's also not enough
For many industries, big data analytics have opened numerous doors for more employees to be groundbreaking and to challenge the corporate status quo. Prior to big data technologies, risk taking behaviors were primarily reserved for provocative souls who stretched organizational boundaries to disrupt industries, such as airline revenue management. There were winners and losers
Patent trolls, aka Non-Practicing Entities (NPE), assert patents against companies in an attempt to collect license fees, but do not otherwise manufacture products or provide services themselves. They use the cost of the litigation as leverage to force settlements from the operating companies. For small companies, it could mean closing their doors.
The No. 1 retail trend for 2014 will be innovation powered by advanced analytics. Why? Because retailers with the ability to surface and validate new ideas from customer data will be able to test new ideas faster, launch them faster in stores, and roll out profitable programs faster. Transformation today
The National Academy of Engineering identified fourteen "Grand Challenges for Engineering" that must be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable, economically robust, and politically stable future. (see the full list here) The challenges are a call-to-action for solutions to some of the most pressing issues in the 21st century:
A question was recently put to me by everyone’s favorite futurist – Thornton May: “Most people don't put innovation and infrastructure in the same sentence. They simply tend to view savings derived from optimized infrastructure as a funding source for “other” innovation investments. My thoughts?” My thoughts initially circled in
At the beginning of a recent customer meeting I was involved in, I mentioned how easy it is to shut down idea generation by judging too soon or too harshly, to which a CIO at the meeting shared this story about five monkeys in a cage. You may have heard
Really, the hardest part of writing these weekly recaps is narrowing down the great list of SAS blog posts we publish every week and picking just a few to highlight. This is a bit of an estimate, but I've been telling people that we publish an average of eight posts
When companies launch innovation initiatives, they typically focus all of their time and energy on a feverish quest for the big breakthrough idea. But that initial spark of inspiration is merely a starting point. The real innovation challenge lies beyond the idea, in a long, complex journey from imagination to
