'innovation' Tag
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Moving beyond adaptability
June 27, 2019Our French president is in Japan this week and addressed a small group of the French community in Tokyo yesterday at the ambassador’s residence. It was a refreshingly honest discussion, relatively devoid of the airy platitudes to which we’ve become accustomed to hearing from our political leaders. I won’t focus on the politics of it, […]
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Why Europe should be on Japan’s corporate innovation agendas
January 21, 2018[This post paraphrases an interview I gave last week to Japan’s ITmedia group. The original interview is here.] Over the past decade Europe has witnessed such a dramatic transformation in innovation and entrepreneurship that I submit that the region now represents one of the most compelling areas of the world for investment from Japan. This […]
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Longevity of the firm and zombie corporations
May 20, 2016In stark contrast to say, The Netherlands, France bemoans the moment one of its home-grown emerging champions gets acquired by a foreign company. [I have a whole blog post in my head on just this topic alone]. Corporations are viewed in France as containers of jobs, with the obligation to provide secure employment to its […]
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Is France prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to foster the innovation ecosystem it claims to want?
October 28, 2015Open Innovation, the Year of Innovation, Young Innovative Enterprises, etc. we cannot stop talking about innovation. But we also should acknowledge that innovation comes with certain demands. For example, innovation requires flexibility. For companies to be innovative, they must be agile. Lack of agility is one of the reasons large established firms are caught flat-footed […]
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When engineers mix with artists, amazing things can happen. So why segregate them?
July 7, 2015Skimming through the alumni magazine of my undergraduate engineering school, I stumbled onto an article about a student project from a course called Data as Art. Data as Art is a course that groups students from my engineering school alma mater with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in a combined art-meets-engineering curriculum. […]
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Pour une France Compétitive
September 25, 2012Over the weekend I had the pleasure of reading France Digitale’s whitepaper “Pour une France compétitive et créatrice d’emplois.” I say pleasure, because I really did enjoy reading the organization’s pragmatic proposal of four concrete measures to include in the upcoming Loi des Finances 2013. For those who are not familiar, France Digitale is a […]
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Los Suns
May 5, 2010I’ve written before about the entrepreneurial virtues of open immigration and its role in spurring innovation and ultimately job creation. Accordingly, I was pleasantly surprised to learn of yesterday’s decision by Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver, General Manager Steve Kerr, and the entire Phoenix Suns basketball team to wear « Los Suns » jerseys for […]
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Innovation for the rickshaw pullers
September 20, 2008This month’s IBEF newsletter highlights a low-budget innovation that could fundamentally improve the lives of millions: Manoj Mondal is the inventor of the crank pedal – he successfully tweaked the pedal of a bicycle to an extent that it generates almost double the torque (force multiplied by the distance from the centre) than in normal […]