Archive for: October, 2011

Ideas trump hierarchy

Yesterday I was having lunch with a buddy of mine who is looking to create a startup incubator in Tijuana. I told him that it seems to me that everyone wants to start an incubator nowadays as a good excuse for stimulating the economy.

But more importantly, what nobody is asking themselves is: How do you establish a culture of innovation?

There’s a reason why places like Silicon Valley and New York are breeding grounds for startups. They have a unique mixture of people that come there to create new things. To innovate.

Because of this diversity, the quality of ideas is very high.

Infographic: Most Disruptive companies in tech by the numbers

What is disruption?

Disruptive companies create innovations that invade the market, force change, and create new sectors of the industry. And for companies like Google, Apple, Netflix, Skype, Tata and Pandora, disruption is their game.

And what do the most disruptive companies in technology have in common? They challenged the conventional market and created a new one.

Innovation posts of the week: Innovation lessons from the life of Steve Jobs

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Customer service sucks in Mexico

I’m currently in Mexico meeting with executives from a few large companies, including the nations largest telecommunications company, to talk about social media technologies and what this means for them. Let me say this, it’s incredible how separated from the current reality these companies are.

While some companies in the U.S. are already taking advantage of social media for both external and internal activities (think social business), in the Mexico it isn’t so. For example. I asked a female executive from this telecommunications company if she knew if her company had a Twitter account. She said no.

They do.

But what I really wanted to know is if she knew that her Twitter account gets dissed the most by customers. In other words: there is a lot of hate towards your company on Twitter.

I told her she should check it out because it would be eye-opening. She did and immediately directed me to another female executive who had more ‘decision power’. I asked her the same thing. Same response. I told her to open up her browser, go to www.trendsmap.com, put in her company name in the search box and click search to see the magic.

Bang!

Infographic: How MIT Media Labs turns lab work into real-life applications

I asked last week if technology clusters drive innovation, there isn’t any evidence that says it does. What is evident is that there are institutions (not clusters in the traditional sense) who are driving innovation.

With that said, I found this cool infographic from MIT Media Labs on how they turn lab work into real-life applications.

Innovation posts of the week: Better ideas through failure

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