Category Archives: Innovation

Wind Power Provided Over 1% of Global Electricity in 2007

Posted on October 3, 2008 by John Hunter

Data from World Wind Energy Association, for installed Mega Watts of global wind power capacity in 2007. 19,696 MW of capacity were added in 2007, bringing the total to 93,849 MW. Europe accounts for 61% of installed capacity, Germany accounts for 24% and the USA 18%. Post from the Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog (more posts on energy and engineering). The graph shows the top 10 producers (with the exceptions of Denmark and Portugal) and includes Japan (which is … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Innovation | Tagged ,

Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete?

Posted on September 29, 2008 by John Hunter

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete by Chris Anderson “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Innovation, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

The Ergonomics of Innovation

Posted on September 22, 2008 by John Hunter

The Ergonomics of Innovation by Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton the IHI case teaches us that innovations spread quickly when organizations focus relentlessly on selecting and spreading ideas in ways that ease the burden of thought and action for everyone involved. This mind-set differs from the one that burdens most organizations, where innovation is seen as difficult, expensive, and protracted. The IHI staff’s ergonomics-of-innovation mind-set focused on making things easier and cheaper for everyone, including the staff itself. … IHI … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Health care, Innovation, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged , ,

Seth Godin: Intern Program and the Internet

Posted on September 3, 2008 by John Hunter

Learning from a summer intern program: I was overwhelmed by the quality of what I got back. (The quantity was expected… interesting internships are hard to find). I heard from students on most continents, with a huge variety of backgrounds and life experiences. And these people were smart. Unable to just pick a PDF or two, I invited the applicants to join a Facebook group I had set up. Then I let them meet each other and hang out online. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Education, Innovation, IT, Management | Tagged ,

Future Directions for Agile Management

Posted on August 25, 2008 by John Hunter

Agile management (agile software development specifically) is something that makes a big difference in my work life. David Anderson consistently provides great ideas on agile management and he does so again in this 90 minute presentation on the future directions for agile. As I learned about agile software development, what I saw was a great implementation of management improvement practices focused on software development that was very compatible with Deming’s management philosophy and lean thinking practices. The Agile manifesto: Individuals … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Innovation, IT, Lean thinking, Management, quote, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Toyota Winglet – Personal Transportation Assistance

Posted on August 10, 2008 by John Hunter

Toyota has a long term vision. The population of Japan is aging rapidly. Toyota has invested in personal transportation and personal robotic assistance for quite some time. I must admit this new Winglet doesn’t seem like an incredible breakthrough to me (their earlier iUnit seems much better to me – though I am sure much more expensive too). The interest to me is in their continued focus on this market which I think is a smart move. The aging population … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Management, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , ,

Amazon S3 Failure Analysis

Posted on July 26, 2008 by John Hunter

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20th. Amazon S3 Availability Event [the broken link was removed] We’ve now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Some Good IT Business Ideas

Posted on July 22, 2008 by John Hunter

Paul Graham has some excellent ideas. I have written about some of them previously: Innovation Strategy, What Business Can Learn from Open Source and Google and Paul Graham’s Latest Essay. Y Combinator, which he founded, provides seed funding. Here are some ideas they would like to fund: Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, IT, Software Development | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Google Knows it is a 2.0 World

Posted on June 27, 2008 by John Hunter

You can accomplish a great deal by just talking to people. Google Public Relations: I did not really expect it, but the next day I got a call from Jeffrey Korn at Google California. He explained that he was the one responsible for building the Google Bookmarks and Google Web History tools. The problem with my extension was something I hadn’t imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems :-). The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Zipcar Innovation

Posted on June 21, 2008 by John Hunter

Zipcar is an intriguing idea where you rent cars by the hour. The whole process is a significant change from the previous rental model (gas, parking and insurance included). Zipcar makes deals with local governments to secure zipcar parking near public transportation. They also have deals with universities, apartment buildings and businesses all of which provides a new level of easy customer access with cars available in many locations. The internet is used to schedule and provide up to date … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Systems thinking | 4 Comments

Continual Improvement

Posted on June 10, 2008 by John Hunter

Dr. Deming used the term continual improvement (rather than continuous improvement) later in his life because that would include continuous and dis-continuous improvement (innovation, etc.). I use continual improvement for that reason also. I think the improvement process must be never ending must focus daily on how any process can be improved must focus on adopting improvement systemically (not just locally, by one person or team) must focus on discontinuous improvement which could include high energy kaizen events and dramatic … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Innovation, Management, Process improvement, quote | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments

Engineering Innovation

Posted on June 3, 2008 by John Hunter

(video link no longer works so it has been removed) In the webcast Dean Kamen discusses his latest innovation: robotic arms for people (amazing stuff). Once again he is doing great stuff. It is great what engineers can do (many worked together to get the progress so far) when given the opportunity. We need many more such efforts. The research was funded by DARPA. DARPA, for those that don’t know, also made reading this blog possible. They funded the development … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Management | Tagged ,

Paying New Employees to Quit

Posted on May 25, 2008 by John Hunter

[the video is no longer available] Training new employees and then paying them to quit, sounds pretty bizarre; Zappos is not afraid of doing things differently. Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit – And You Should Too [Harvard broke the link so I removed it – they should pay those responsible (most likely an executive, technical people know better but bad management breaks things) for not maintaining urls to quit]: Zappos sells shoes—lots of them—over the Internet. The company … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Innovation, Management, Respect, webcast | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Toyota Execution Not Close to Being Copied

Posted on May 7, 2008 by John Hunter

The Open Secret of Success Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have [focused] on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful. At the core of the company’s success is the Toyota Production System, which took shape in the years after the Second World War, when Japan was literally rebuilding itself, and capital and equipment were hard to come by. … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Popular, quote, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Find Joy and Success in Business

Posted on April 21, 2008 by John Hunter

David Heinemeier Hansson Talk [the broken link has been removed] at Startup School 2008 (Paul Graham‘s Y-combinator school). It is helpful to appreciate the importance of some simple ideas. Working on web focused businesses people often get carried away with the huge potential and sometimes lose touch with reality. While the ideas are more obvious when looking at web related business their is plenty here for many companies (the second half might be more helpful for many). In this talk … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Fun, Innovation, IT, Management, Psychology, Respect, Software Development | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Bezos on Internet Boom

Posted on April 8, 2008 by John Hunter

The webcast shows Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO, speaking at TED on the internet boom. He compares the boom to the gold rush highlighting the similarities. But then he compares the internet to the development of industry around electricity. I think he is exactly right on the internet: “there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.” Related: Bezos on Lean Thinking – Amazon Innovation – Amazon’s Amazing Achievement – Innovation Thinking with Christensen – management webcasts

Posted in Innovation, Management, webcast | Tagged , , , ,