Big Data, Automation and Cows Who Decide When they want to be Milked

I came across this interesting read on Quartz.com. The post is about a farm in Iceland where the entire barn is automated. Here are some quotes from the article. When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes […]

The Role of Imagination in Creating The Next Set of Breakthrough Innovations

I stumbled across the article that Vannevar Bush wrote in 1945 for the Atlantic. You can read the entire post here. The reason I am interested in the post is because this post is a living proof about the role that imagination can play in the innovation process. He was able to predict in part what would the world look and feel like much ahead of his own time. What is interesting is also the method that he uses in order to come up with his ideas. Let me try to share what i learnt from his approach and how […]

PBTO4: Getting Hooked On Customers With Bob Thompson

Welcome to episode number 4 of “Pushing Beyond the Obvious”. In this episode, we have with us Bob Thompson, CEO & editor of www.customerThink.com, the biggest online community about customers and customer centricity. Bob has recently released his book #HookedOnCustomers. We shall talk to him today about what does customer centricity mean and everything that goes along with it. We talk about The fact that most customer centric organizations are such, because their operational fabric is such that they do listen to their customers and act upon it and this is not part of a special program or a project. […]

Advertising, Big Data and Persuasion

Advertising as we know it is changing. There are two kinds of advertising that we see now: Intrusive: This is the kind that is targeted at a customer in a moment of truth (about to buy a product/service) and will try to convince this person to buy your product/service rather than from your competitors. Persuasive: This is the kind that will create new brand associations, market categories or product positioning. As marketers and advertisers, we need to understand and decide, based on our goals, which kind of advertising is more suited to achieve our objectives. The intrusive advertisement will leverage […]