The Value Gap
Engaged in an innovation portfolio management assignment a while ago, we struggled to define why one project should continue to suck up resources in preference to many other seemingly worthy opportunities. We tried all sorts of models, financial and strategic, and...
Algorithms are the new gatekeepers
There have always been gatekeepers, those people who make the decisions about what you see, what you have the opportunity to buy, and weather or not you can participate. The supermarket buyer determines what goes on the shelves, a faceless committee determines what...
The old duck metaphor.
A story on myself. I am in the middle of a small project that requires considerable collaboration amongst people not used to collaborating. Always challenging. In a conversation over the weekend with an old mate, wise in the ways of start-ups, he offered me a gentle...
Modern marketing Trinity and the glue
Sick of the avalanche of unsolicited email coming in to your inbox? Most of us are, and my kids have reacted by virtually turning email off, and using social media to communicate with those in their circles. The volumes however, continue to go up, as email simply...
Simplifying innovation
Innovation takes up a lot of my time, and whilst successfully bring a new product to market is a huge task, challenging as it does all sorts of personal, organisational and financial barriers, it can nevertheless be broken down into a few, simple two dimensional...
The semantic disruption of Agriculture
The success of the last 250 years in western economies is based on the economies of scale. Harnessing technology to deliver greater productivity per unit of input, capital, labour, and raw material. All industries have been disrupted from the cottage stage to...
Reality is visual
I had a post prepared for this morning, relating to the evolution of "local" agriculture, specifically around Sydney. However, the events of the weekend, the burning of Sydney's surrounding bushland, including several of the farms of those I have been talking to,...
The emotion of “close”
Bushfires are raging, again, around NSW, houses lost, businesses destroyed, kids stressing out because they cannot get to HSC locations, and "fireies" putting themselves in harms way.Yet, we watch, are concerned, but go about our dailies as best we can.Last weekend my...
Cottage cheese and the job to be done.
Cottage cheese is a pretty dull category in supermarkets. A relatively tasteless, low calorie (therefore it must taste crappy, right?), price competitive, group of products. Yes, so we thought. Years ago, 25 years in fact, I was the GM Marketing of a major...
Intelligent re-design
Intelligent design is a huge discredited furphy perpetrated by Christian fundamentalists in the US on sections of the school system. But, taking the notion of viewing something through an entirely different lens a bit further, intelligent re-design becomes a notion...