That has become my elevator pitch to explain exactly what I will contribute to your team. At this point in my career, it works better than any singular job title.I help organizations: You could label me design, product management, engineering, … Continue reading “i’m a weapons maker for your sales team”
Why don’t more hiring managers and recruiters demand that potential executive candidates provide videos of their conference presentations? Of impromptu media interviews? Of social media pieces? Of examples of their own personal copywriting, scripts, presentation decks and storyboards to back … Continue reading video killed the resume star
It is absolutely ridiculous to hear the CEO’s of Nike and Dell trying to scapegoat remote work as a root cause for their dismal performance and frozen innovation. I’ve worked remotely and globally for nearly 12 years now, extensively predating … Continue reading the only thing wrong with remote work is how swiftly it exposes incompetent management practices
Innovation is the process of systematically derisking ideas. Like any other process, innovation itself can be made more efficient. Hardly anyone understands this basic principle, with misunderstanding of “innovation” leading to chronic failures of flashy, one-off “innovation” initiatives. The start … Continue reading what is innovation?
I’ve recently seen various designers sharing some “A.I. image per day” posts.That’s so cute! Like a “sketch a day” when I studied architecture in college or even a “dictionary word a day” when I was in elementary school! But I’m … Continue reading can you keep up with a.i.?
I’m always pushing the frontiers of innovation in architectural lighting and technology systems. Over the course of my career, I’ve had countless projects make it far into design and prototyping that then unfortunately, for one reason or another, never saw … Continue reading dead projects club: LED tile, LED linear modules and LED puck
I love this simple framework attributed to DJ Patil, U.S. Chief Data Scientist during the Obama Administration: This hits the fundamentals of lean and agile. Of course, the important thing to remember about innovation management is that this needs to … Continue reading innovation framework
A recurring challenge in innovation process management is interfacing with stakeholders who have various levels of risk aversion and either a generative (creative) mindset or an analytical (deductive) mindset. This is sometimes dumbed-down to a binary of “creatives” vs “bean … Continue reading the innovation attitude matrix
Many professionals working on B2B innovation projects lump together a broad range of the promotional activities necessary to launch their innovation under the generic concept of “MARKETING” – which creates tremendous confusion when trying to properly derisk and scope the … Continue reading innovation management: marketing vs product marketing vs sales communications
Professor Deborah Dougherty at Rutgers Business School produced a wonderfully concise overview video explaining the concept of innovation management. What is “innovation management” you ask? Included with the video description is an elegantly succinct summary: “Innovation entails integrating technologies and … Continue reading innovation management by deborah dougherty
Here’s a short video summarizing my “six trends” concepts – using lots of eye-candy from my own previous project work. This video turned out to be a hybrid crossover of thought leadership with my own professional portfolio. A portfolio of … Continue reading six hot trends in lighting
Delivering new-to-the-world product concepts to market – the key value-add and reason-for-being for many organizations – is an elusive process to manage. The challenges of driving meaningful, profitable innovation programs are numerous. In particular, a paradox seems to exist where … Continue reading what’s the value of innovation management?
Some vintage images for my old Color Kinetics colleagues. Circa April 2007, our very first “MegaBlast” prototype at the old 10 Milk Street office location in the Financial District of Downtown Boston. Our engineers put the first prototype optics on … Continue reading megablast
Corning’s “A Day Made of Glass” was launched in 2011, depicting a very futuristic view of a world were nearly every surface is a portal to the digital world. I posted about it about in 2013, but I didn’t realize the … Continue reading corning’s “a day made of glass” has had tremendous impact
Wow. Samsung is backing away from the lighting business, abandoning its nascent lamps effort (and presumably whatever strategies it had for luminaires) in favor of just producing LED components (which it needs to do for LCD production, anyway). So it leads … Continue reading Is the lighting party over? What’s next?
As part of my ongoing effort to track innovative small companies in the lighting world (see this post and this post for some more ventures), here is a release from the U.S. DOE on their latest Small Business Innovation Research grants: Four SBIR Grants Awarded for SSL Technology (FY14 Release 2 Phase I) The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science has awarded four Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants targeting advances in solid-state lighting (SSL) technology. The FY14 Release 2 Phase I awards will explore the technical merit or feasibility of an innovative concept or technology. The SBIR and … Continue reading U.S. DOE SSL releases 4 SBIR grants
A heartwarming TED Talk about Richard Turere, a young Kenyan boy who invented a lighting system for living peacefully with lions: Richard Turere is a young Maasai man who lives in the wilderness of the Kenya savanna, on the edge … Continue reading richard turere’s lion lights
Do you think it would be possible for a venture capital group to create a model similar to Y Combinator specifically for the lighting industry? For those of you who don’t know, Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley venture model that … Continue reading incubator for the lighting industry?
“The term ‘innovation’ dated back to the sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea…innovation began to fill a descriptive gap. If an idea begat a [scientific] discovery, and if a discovery begat an [engineered] invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by defintion, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved.” Quoted from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age … Continue reading the meaning of “innovation”
How to explain innovation for the masses: “People are very open minded about new things…as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.” –Charles Kettering, founder of Delco autoparts Continue reading quote
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