Category: Innovation

Ideas, Innovation

Rethinking the Role of a Bank

Can banks transform themselves to remain relevant both in the financial economy and for the network economy? Traditionally, the role of the banks have been to be collect money from people who have money, aggregate the same and loan out the money to people who needed it. The banks were needed as there was no way that people who had money could know about other people who needed the money. Also, banks could assess the risks associated with the loans and cover the risk by way of lower, but guaranteed returns on income for people who deposited cash with the […]

Innovation

Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem, Nor is it a Recognition Problem

In a recent HBR article with the same title, David Burrus argued that Innovation is a recognition problem. He also went on to propose a solution to this problem, one that Rhode Island based Rite-Solutions is already using. The general idea is that people are given a certain fixed amount of virtual currencies (say 10000$) which they can invest in any of the idea that is proposed on their internal idea site. This could eliminate the bias of any one or a set of executives, who are usually responsible for deciding on the feasibility of any particular idea. In my […]

Business Model, Customer Engagement, Entrepreneurship, Ideas, Innovation

New Business Model from Very Unlikely of Places #Publishing

I stumbled upon The New Enquiry by chance and was totally blown away, both by their content and their business mdoel. They are an Ad-Free online magazine & survive by the way of subscriptions (2$ per month) & donations. And they don’t have a firewall. So, for all practical purposes, they create and share content that is free for anyone to consume but still people are willing to pay subscription to receive the same content but in coherent, thematic clusters, which is more intuitive and easy to read. In an interview given to “Columbia Journalism Review“, the founders claim that they […]

Innovation, Leadership, transformation

Can CIO’s or CTO’s become Agents of Innovation or Transformation

Recently, Dan Burrus wrote a couple of blog post for HBR, where he expects that  CIO’s and CTO’s to embrace new roles within their organizations. He expects and the CIO’s should embrace the role of Chief Innovation Officer and CTO’s to embrace the role of Chief Transformation Officer. I do agree that this is an unprecedented opportunity, the current times requires organization to find ways to foster innovation, I don’t agree that every organization needs to start on a transformation journey. There are industries that are currently at the cusp of major transformations (Print media, automotive, retail). Organizations in these […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Elon Musk’s HyperLoop – Hope or Hype

At last Elan Musk unvieled his design for ultra speed travel system – HyperLoop. I think that the idea that he laid out in a 57 page document, is as good an idea as we might have currently. However, After having read through the generic description, I think that this is a good start to the pursuit of sub-sonic ground transportation. However, in its current state, this concept is impractical due to the fact that the entire concept seems to have been designed with the Los Angeles to San Fransisco route in mind, which, is mostly without much curves in the […]