“There are no facts about the future.”

I don’t know who first said that, but I keep coming across it lately and I agree. It’s not possible to draw factual conclusions about things that haven’t happened yet (although that doesn’t stop us from trying)…which raises an interesting question: How useful are facts in evaluating innovative ideas?

Facts are important. It’s no wonder that we prize having them…in science, in the courts, in education and in business. Facts, when they’re favorable, can be comforting. They give us a sens

Get full info…

Feel free to embed this infographic on your site or blog. Instructions are here. Created by Creditloan.

Resisting this deal is futile: Buy Enchantment and get Presentation Zen for free. Click here.

We’ve all done Voice of the Customer (VOC) work, where we jump on a plane, visit our largest customers, and ask leading questions. Under the guise of learning it’s mostly a mechanism to justify what we already want to do, to justify the products we know want to launch. (VOC should stand for Validate Our Choices.)

It’s a waste of time to ask customers for the next big thing or get their thoughts on a radical technology. First off, it’s not their job to know the next big thing, it’s ours. The next

Get full info…

Ivy Tech Community College, in cooperation with the Indiana Energy Consortium, is providing free community information sessions about new career and training opportunities in the energy industry.

The sessions are planned for 6 p.m. each.

The schedule includes:

• American Electric Power Co. in Rockport, Ind., Tuesday.

• Alcoa Warrick Operations in Warrick County, Ind., Wednesday.

• Vectren Energy Delivery’s A.B. Brown Generating Station in Mount Vernon, Ind., Thursday.

• Ivy Tech in Evansville, Saturday.

Current energy industry projections indicate that more than half of today’s skilled workers will retire in the next five to 15 years, creating a large industrywide need for trained workers. To

Get full info…

As the number of cruise passengers continues to grow, cruise lines are investing in new technology to reduce their impact on the environment. Many lines are upgrading older ships or building new ones with energy-efficient engines and other ‘green’ infrastructure to be more eco-friendly and also reduce operational costs. Get full info…

The utilities have been awash with bid speculation recently, and yesterday Severn Trent became the latest in the sector to find itself back in the takeover spotlight.

As vague rumours spread that a European company was mulling over a possible approach worth between 2,400p and 2,500p a share, the water group spurted up, briefly touching 1,501p. However, with traders playing down the talk, the plug was quickly removed and it ended up falling back to 1,488p, just 7p ahead.

It is not the first time such chitter-chatter has surrounded Severn, while United Utilities – up 2.5p to 617p – and Northumbrian Water – up 2p to 358.2p – are among its peers which have seen bid talk resurface in the past few months as well.

Market gossips also returned to the idea that Invensys could be a target as they got excited over vague speculation that a possible aggressor is waiting in the shadows. The eng

Get full info…

As per the report carried by the telegraph the finance ministry trimmed the GDP growth projection for 2011-12 to 8.6 per cent from about 9 per cent and added that inflation, currently hovering above 9 per cent, would continue to remain high till December.

“The apparent slowdown in headline growth rates on a sequential basis and slowing automobile sales suggest that growth outlook for 2011-12 may be lower,” said the finance ministry.

The economy grew 8.3 per cent in the third quarter of the last fiscal and 7.8 per cent in January-March, the lowest in five quarters. It

Get full info…

Google has been for years an innovation champion, but innovation often gets slower as you get bigger, even at Google!

Some sour voices have started to raise, criticizing Google failures in their recent product developments, and consequently its innovation processes:

• “Google can’t keep its teams small enough, if a product becomes successful, it will get tons of resources and people thrown at it; Google can’t reduce scope, it needs to support every platform, it can’t iterate in semi-public and scale progressively; Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasn’t developed for small social projects” says Robert Scobler in his “Why Google can’t build Instagram”;
• Google Health did not have “an innovative impact on medical informatics” because “initial user interface was clunky”, and “Google Health’s ‘records management’ value propositions weren’t compelling enough to command commitment from either health care organizations or individuals”; “Google Health failed because it betrayed the very Web 2.0 ideals that made it both a technology and market leader, i.e designing an application that gets better the more people use it” analyzes Michale Schrage in “What Google’s quiet failure says about its innovation health”.
• “Internal processes are limiting Google’s ability to adapt quickly. The launch coordination process sets up a status quo protection team that keeps things from moving forward. Hiring is managed by a group of internal recruiters

Get full info…