Stay out of the red water The authors of the book The Blue Ocean Strategy are contrasting the wide open waters with the red ocean, the ocean seething with the blood of fierce competitors. They argue that instead of facing competition head on, you should strive to find new, uncharted opportunities. Their prescription has a…
Only one wire Back in grade school, one of the smartest guys I ever met surprised me when I realized he didn’t understand that electricity had to flow in a circuit. His assumption seemed to be that electricity poured in, did its job and left, like air and fuel through an engine. It turns out…
Why do I want to fit Principles into SCAMPER approaches? In a recent post (check it here first) I explore how SCAMPER can embrace the 40 Principles of Inventive Problem Solving. The goal is to wrap the complexity of the Principles in the approachability of SCAMPER. Eliminate defined in Applied Imagination Under the category of…
Many autonomous car efforts use lidar (light detecting and ranging) to “see” the world. Combining a laser transmitter and receiver, lidar detects the tiny but measurable time it takes for the laser to bounce off an object to determine how far away it is. By steering the laser, the lidar can produce a 3D scan…
Amazon is a dominant player now, but its birth was plagued with doubt and financial weakness, reveals the book The Everything Store by Brad Stone. Amazon started as an online book seller, and this was a canny move by Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder. Books were true commodities – all the same, no question of whether…