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Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Innovation and Creativity for the Darwinian CEO
In part 4 of CNBC's Business of Innovation TV special, co-hosts Maria Bartiromo and Roger Schank explore the role of people & technology in the innovation process. They kick off the show with a wide-ranging discussion involving three top CEOs who have first-hand knowledge of how technology can ...
Coors Light is planning a new online advertising campaign, scheduled for mid-April, that will promote 4:53 as the new 5:00 for office workers. That's right -- the company is actually branding a specific time of the day in an effort to win over beer drinkers across America: "At 4:53 p.m. local ...
In a recent speech that he gave at Parsons School of Design in New York, Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum explains why there has been a backlash against design. According to Nussbaum, the design movement shows signs of faltering for two primary reasons -- designers are arrogant and designers are ...
In an opinion piece for Management Issues ("The Cosmic Egg of Change"), Max McKeown points out that organizations often approach innovation as if they were dealing with a blank slate. However, innovation doesn't just happen -- all "change" must come from somewhere: "Take a quick look and ...
The Wal-Mart name gets dragged through the mud so often these days that it's nice to give props to the company when it comes up with innovative new ideas. Buried in an article about innovative workplace practices is this little gem about the Bentonville, Arkansas retailer: "Wal-Mart Stores ...
On the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist and tech visionary Esther Dyson weighs in on the emergence of new aviation and commercial space start-ups and explains what they mean for the future of aerospace innovation. As Esther points out, the same types of "pioneers" who ...
The Wired blog has put together a gallery of 17 photos documenting the evolution of the computer mouse over the past 45 years. It all started with a simple wooden device created by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English in a Stanford laboratory. Back then, of course, the first "mouse" was actually ...
In Part 3 of CNBC's Business of Innovation series, Maria Bartiromo and co-host Roger Schank focus on the role of the customer during the innovation process. In some cases, it appears that "old dogs" can learn "new tricks" by listening to their customers. At eBay and LEGO, for example, customers ...
With the April 17 tax filing deadline just around the corner, H&R Block has launched the first-ever "virtual tax experience" in Second Life: "The company that first brought tax preparation to Middle America more than 50 years ago is once again breaking new ground - not with an office on Main ...
The notion of corporate R&D is undergoing a radical transformation. Instead of viewing research and development as separate silos of an organization staffed by separate employees, companies are now working to fuse together R & D into a new innovation paradigm that places a premium on bringing ...
In her "Practical Innovation" column for CIO.com, Elana Varon explains why IT departments often have such a hard time coming up with new innovations. On the one hand, the IT department is expected to help run the organization in a smooth, consistent manner and to automate what is already being ...
This thought-provoking cartoon, distributed by the Universal Press Syndicate, is called Unclestiltskin. What happens to America when we deplete all of our natural resources and realize that we've squandered away our long-term future in favor of short-term profits? If you're a company like ...
Within Scotland, economic development leaders are debating what to do about the country's "chronically low level of innovation" -- a situation made all the more distressing by the ability of their rivals, the Irish, to become global innovation leaders. (According to research firm Forrester ...
With much of the mainstream business media focusing on rapid, revolutionary change, it's always a treat to discover bloggers and consultants who adopt more of an evolutionary view of business innovation. For example, Julie Fleischer, the Innovation Thought Leader for Egg Strategy, has been ...
Patty Seybold of the Outside Innovation blog points to an interesting collection of posts from Warren Jones, who has assembled a list of 35 different business best practices for driving corporate profitability. Jones refers to these business best practices as "profit forms" and includes the ...