Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - April 3, 2012
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Economist Innovation Conference, held at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. It was a fast-paced (almost too fast), jam-packed event, with lots of good speakers and a heady flow of ideas. The downside to the 1-day format was that there was little time for networking, however they did make sure to get Q&A from the audience in almost every session, which was good.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - February 29, 2012
Walking down the main avenue here at Mobile World Congress I watched some gulls having an arial battle, oblivious to the crowds below who all work for companies fighting it out in the turbulent mobile industry. The pace of change in mobile was a theme running throughout the keynote/panel with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telecom, and Ben Verwaayan, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. The topic was ostensibly mobile cloud, but the discussion touched on subjects that affect all of the mobile industry, primarily from carrier and network infrastructure standpoints.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - September 13, 2011
What do Netflix, Zipcar, Mint.com, Nike+, Amazon, the Nintendo Wii, and the Apple iPhone all have in common? They all take advantage of four technologies that once were scarce and expensive but are now plentiful and cheap. These technologies can be combined in numerous ways, and we are just starting to see companies really taking advantage of the possibilities. These four technologies will have a disruptive impact on your business, almost regardless of which industry you're in. The question is whether you will choose to adopt them before a competitor does.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - August 30, 2011
The logical, deductive approach to problem solving that we are all taught is not always the best for trying to create breakthrough ideas. In fact it can be positively counter-productive. You often need to be "illogical," non-linear, and put the cart before the horse (that is, have the idea before you know why it's valuable) to help get things rolling.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - August 25, 2011
After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it's really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he's probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - June 22, 2011
In a talk earlier this year to employees, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop asked a question that many were probably afraid to answer truthfully, given how Nokia is struggling to combat the iPhone. As BusinessWeek described it:
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - June 13, 2011
Apple's World Wide Developers Conference keynote last week will be remembered for two things: the bloodbath of disrupted developers and apps it left in its wake, and that it was as important for cloud services as the iPod was for digital music, and that the iPhone was for smartphones.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - May 31, 2011
How do you build a collaborative mindset in a company? Collaboration needs to be seen as a process that happens over time, and that the crucial groundwork for successful collaboration needs to be laid before the "actual" collaborative work happens.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - March 22, 2011
I recently interviewed Peter Sims about his upcoming book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, as it tackles a topic that is near and dear to us at frog: trying a lot of ideas quickly in order to rapidly find the most promising one. Sometimes this can be seen as a scattershot approach, but if done smartly it is usually more reliable than an approach that puts a lot of effort behind a small number of risky bets.
Peter Sims is the coauthor with Bill George of True North, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-selling book. Little Bets is published by Simon & Schuster: Free Press and will be available in mid-April. Peter has had a long collaboration with faculty at Stanford’s Institute of Design (the d.school), his work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Tech Crunch, and Fortune, and he’s a contributor to the Reuters and Harvard Business Review blogs. Previously, he worked in venture capital with Summit Partners, a leading investment company, including as part of the team that established the firm’s London Office.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - March 8, 2011
We recently hosted at frog a group of mid-career executives who are in the Global Executive MBA program at the IESE Business School in Barcelona. We have done this collaboration for several years now, and it's enlightening to see how the students are facing an ever-changing set of innovation challenges. Given the diversity of countries and industries (everything from energy to telecom, government to nonprofit) and company sizes (multinationals to startups) there are some striking commonalities that emerge. See if these feel familiar, and consider if they are trending up or down for your business:
