cilinc.net » general

the death of the book

maz — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:35:24 +0000

NPR is featuring, at its site, an excerpt from The Shallows titled “The Very Image of a Book” [...]. [It] describes how pundits have, for about two centuries now, been eagerly proclaiming the imminent death of the book. And, over and over again, they’ve been proven wrong.
(Nicholas Carr)

credit: Royalty-Free/Corbis

There’s life in the old dog yet.

“the biggest change in the Internet”

maz — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:38:15 +0000

Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names at ICANN, called it “the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years”. What is he talking about? What would you expect? Maybe social networks?

No, he his talking about the new multilingual domain names like adresses in arabic or cyrillic. One may think that this is a minor change and a multilingual web should be a basic feature but in fact the different character sets make it a big thing. Just have a look at these figures: Web addresses formerly based only on 37 characters–A though Z, the 10 numerical digits, and the dash symbol–can now use 90,000 characters from several languages, many of these being Chinese characters.

Visit the first russian domain or read more about this topic at technologyreview.com.

the wedding of science and business

maz — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:48:55 +0000

Harvard Professor Gary Pisano is currently working on a paper about “The Evolution of Science-Based Business: Innovating How We Innovate“.
The odd couple science and business works side by side in the process of economic growth but a real cooperation is quite infrequent. One example are corporate industrial laboratories but this form of organized science with the aim to maximize firm profits is decreasing. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurial firms that are deeply immersed in science in sectors like biotech, nanotech, and more recently energy.

But there is still a large gap between the profession of a manager and a scientist. So let’s follow Pisano’s studies about the required organizational innovation.

To my mind a profitable kind of this team play could look like the following process:
the scientist finds an opportunity, the manager and the scientist collaborate on the idea and the manager translates the innovation concept into a business model.

innovation checklist for large organizations

maz — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:58:04 +0000

Patricia Seybold conducted a case study concerning “The Anatomy of Innovation”. One of the main results is a kind of checklist for innovations within large organizations:

Hire an outside renegade.

Have him build and sell his vision.

Let him create his own team.

Locate the team off-site.

Take a blank slate approach.

Create a blueprint with an integrated cross-functional team.

Have the team implement the technology, the content, the user interface design, the business plan, and the marketing plan in parallel.

Leverage your corporate technology group by agreeing on design standards up front and having them conduct architectural reviews throughout.

Engage customers as hands-on advisors throughout the process.

Design your information architecture around customers’ activities towards their goals.

Build in instrumentation that lets you measure what matters to your customers as well as your sponsors.

Beta test with friendly customers and invite them to invite their friends.

Promote via the Internet and social media.

Make it easy for customers to tell you what role(s) they are playing.

Let customers see what activities they’ve performed, so they can pick up where they left off; profit from your ability to track what activities customers in different roles are doing.

Pretty useful imho, especially because of the open and cross functional approach as well as the integration of the customers. Because on the long run you innovate to win or retain customers.

xmas & innovation

maz — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:22:30 +0000

Some things do not need an innovation. “Events” like Christmas are innovated enough by far calling them “Xmas”.

credit: Manuela Michalski (via The Design blog)

Other – even incremental – innovations concerning Christmas (like this type of tree) are imho not necessary – although I really like the design

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!