Content tagged with “innovation”

“A collection of stories about 20% and ‘skunkworks’ projects and what makes them tick. The stories were interesting – the first ones were slanted toward tech, and the later stories branched out – but I was having trouble drawing any common principles out of it. This was remedied somewhat in the…”

“This book is meant to describe a new approach/strategy to marketing. The ‘blue ocean’ strategy means that you find some aspect of your market that no one is doing, and try to dominate that, rather than fighting it out with other vendors in your space – which is a ‘red ocean’ strategy. It’s a good…”

“Classic book (in its fifth edition) about how new ideas spread. I like how Rogers has a set of ‘generalizations’ about his ideas. These are things that might not be proven by statistics but feel generally correct. A lot of network theory, but a very good read. Just the right mixture of density and…”

“ A solid history of Bell Labs. Interesting, but a bit tedious. It’s astonishing how much stuff was invented there – it puts Xerox PARC to shame, really. The transistor? Wow. Meticulously researched, but tends to bog down under its own weight in places. ”

“This book is a legendary examination of how companies handle ‘innovation,’ by which the author means new aspects of their business that come out of nowhere and eventually come to dominate their markets. The problem: you can’t just give customers what they ask for. Because lots of customers actually…”

“I’m reading a book on the philosophy behind structural engineering. I was struck by this quote (also in the image): While engineers can learn from structural mistakes what not to do, the only thing they learn from success is to repeat what led to the success without change. The idea is that failure…”

“This book was written 25 years ago, in 1995, right on the cusp of the Internet as we know it today. Bill Gates was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and this book was really meant to be an look at the exciting things that we coming in the future. It’s chapter after chapter about how the…”