Tag: Innovation

Latest Read: Upstream

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date November 1, 2022

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath. Today Dan is a consultant to Duke University’s Corporate Education program. Along with his brother Chip, the Heath brothers have been writing impactful books for over 20 years.

Dan is providing great thinking to modern problems. This is even more valuable in the age we live in today regarding opioids and COVID. Perhaps the idea of instilling his lessons of ‘Preventing Problems Rather Than Reacting to Them’ is the ground floor many organizations need today.

Upstream is certainly an excellent book that talks about the value of thinking in systems and finding/fixing the root cause of problems. In fact, our world today is simply more difficult and demanding. The daily ‘grind’ often forces groups to overlook their ability to see upstream.

So, here is a book addressing how we can begin understanding a process needed to mitigate the problem versus just putting out fires. There is certainly a lot of research across this book showing how how Dan certainly understands how colleges operate.

Secondly, Dan Heath has obviously done a lot of research on this topic and has come up with the gotchas that hit many organizations.

Tags change, culture, Dan Heath, Innovation, Upstream

Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Making Numbers Count

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date October 25, 2022

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. Chip is professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath, Karla Starr

Much to my surprise I looked up my first review of Made to Stick, Dan and Chip’s debut book. I read that book over 15 years ago. That book made such an impression that I have read their books without disappointment. However they recently published independent books and I will share Dan’s book Upstream shortly. His brother Dan is a consultant to Duke University’s Corporate Education program.

Chip presents multiple lessons to make numbers more meaningful to any group you are sharing data with in order to make an impression. This book is really one that should be not only on your shelf but also sharing with colleagues.

An interesting point is Chip’s message that nobody is really a “numbers person” as our brains cannot easily understand the analysis of very large number sets.

The focus is numbers in the billions. However, Chip documents how to understand and communicate the difference between one million and one billion that makes an impact within your organization:

You and a friend each enter a lottery with several large prizes. But there’s a catch: If you win, you must spend $50,000 of your prize money each day until it runs out. You win a million dollars. Your friend wins a billion. How long does it take each of you to spend your lottery windfall? As a millionaire….you go bust after a mere 20 days. If you win on Thanksgiving, you’re out of money more than a week before Christmas. For your billionaire friend….He or she would have a full-time job spending $50,000 a day for 55 years.
pg. 10

This example makes perfect sense in helping many users understand how to begin learning how to communicate their data sets.

Tags change, chip heath, culture, Innovation, Making Numbers Count

Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Artificial Intelligence HBR Insights

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date November 5, 2021

Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review by Thomas H. Davenport, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and H. James Wilson. This HBR series is certainly a very good collection of essays from leading AI experts.

Thomas H. Davenport is a Distinguished Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser at Deloitte Analytics. Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a research associate at NBER. H. James Wilson is a managing director of information technology and business research at Accenture Research. Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT, studies how digital technologies are changing business, the economy, and society.

Indeed, this is not a general introduction to AI for business. At the same time, this does present readers with business advantages and challenges. There is no coding and the book is not full of technical jargon.

The messaging across this book is direct and startling for some: if your organization is not using AI you will soon be obsolete. This should not be a surprise since AI was ‘born’ in 1956. Yes, the last decade’s computing performance both on-prem and in the cloud have pushed AI further into markets. Yet the competitive lessons are valuable.

Tags Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Data management, Innovation, Organizational learning

Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: How Smart Machines Think

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date October 23, 2021

How Smart Machines Think by Sean Gerrish. Sean is a Senior Engineering Manager at Google leading machine learning and data science teams. He holds a PhD in machine learning from Princeton.

This book is providing readers with a wonderful overview to advances in artificial intelligence, and specifically how machine leaning is now the most popular subset of AI.

How Smart Machines Think is addressing three key areas that reveal the leaps in advancements of machine learning development: The DAPRA Grand Challenge, the Netflix recommendation engine, and Neural Networks.

Each section is well written, providing above all, deep insights tied to objectives driving new business models.

While Sean is certainly providing a solid grounding in algorithms and their methodologies, I was certainly surprised at the depth of autonomous vehicles, recommendation engines, and game-playing. The larger lessons from his book include amazing progress in neural networks.

Machine Learning for autonomous vehicles

Clearly Sean understands the full picture of how this emerging technology began. The 2004 initial contest found team only to achieve a small distance, perhaps less than twenty five percent of the course before their AI systems failed.

Tags Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, machine learning, Sean Gerrish, Smart Machines

Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: How Innovation Works

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date October 14, 2021

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley. Matt is a British journalist best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics in The Times. He holds a seat in the British House of Lords.

Matt is certainly writing against government regulation and big business across many established and emerging fields: energy, transportation, food, and computing. Regulation and big businesses are hampering innovation due to oversight. He also addresses early innovations including farming and taming animals including dogs.

Every chapter is certainly intriguing. Vast amounts of stories and historical facts drove each innovation. Matt obviously makes it certainly clear that innovation is within democratic countries where freedom allows for ideas to flourish, leading to inventions.

Chapter 2, focusing upon Public Health innovation certainly reminds the reader how vaccines developed to curb the loss of lives across many continents in our global history. A very refreshing chapter for our COVID era. On the other hand, this would be publishing in May 2020, at the beginning of our pandemic.

The first airplane

Chapter 3, Transport has a particularly great recollection of The Wright Brothers innovation. Unquestionably, this storyline is parallel to Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and reveals more details to the road both brothers took in finding success at Kitty Hawk.

Many readers will be captivated by the research Matt delivers in round after round of amazing stories of innovation not by the inventor, but rather by those who saw a vision of how inventions lay the foundation of innovations.

Tags Eniac, Innovation, Matt Ridley