An excellent cartoon by Stuart McMillen: www.recombinatrecords.com

by Stuart McMillen. December 2009. I liked school I liked learning ideas that I would never have taught myself. I liked being put in situations designed simply to challenge me. I even liked being thrown into the grading process. But my school days are over and the assignments have [...]

 I’ve heard this story many times and always liked it.
 A wise farmer owned a beautiful mare which was praised far and wide. One day the mare disappeared. The villagers, sympathising with him for his loss said Oh what bad luck you’ve had!   The farmer shrugged and replied: Good luck, bad luck. Who knows? Several days [...]

Randy Komisar: What’s his story? He has held various roles at Apple Computer, LucasArts Entertainment, Crystal Dynamics, Claris Corporation and GO Corporation. He’s also helped to build WebTV, TiVo, Mondo Media and other emerging companies.Currently, he acts  as a Virtual CEO partnering with entrepreneurs to create businesses with leading edge technologies. In addition, he’s a Consulting [...]

The third Dublin TEDx talk took place two weeks ago (Friday 12th March 2010) at the Science Gallery. The theme of this talk was around Creativity and Innovation; perfect timing given that the Innovation Task Force Report launched there the evening before.

Damini Kumar, Lecturer/Programme Director of Product Design at NUI Maynooth, Ireland’s Ambassador for [...]

Jeff Bezos talks about how he took the plunge to leave his job and start Amazon.com; he made his decision using what he refers to as the Regret Mininimizatin Framework. If he was to imagine himself at the age of 80 he wanted to minimize the number of regrets that he had. It became very [...]

For some of us if we think of design it brings to mind images of interesting objects, on display in a gallery, spectacular statement architecture or meaningful artwork. For others,  it might be iconic product design-for example, Apple’s iPod (which has sold more than 220 million units) as well as re-defining the music industry, has [...]

With innovation and the ability to innovate perceived as the holy grail of business success the recent report, (by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard entitled Innovator’s DNA, and published in HBR in December 09 makes very interesting reading.
The objective of this six year research study [...]

A review of  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink
Prevailing organisational wisdom seems to be that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money, aka the carrot and stick approach. According to Daniel H Pink, author of  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, [...]

 The Blue Monday mathematical formula was created by Cliff Arnall, formerly of Cardiff University. It marked a symbolic date in January when people are suffering due to the piling up of a combination of negative effects.
The components of the Blue Monday formula are: weather (W), debt level (the difference between debt accumulated and our ability [...]

January and it’s time for the annual JMW Turner exhibition at the National Gallery (A light in the Darkness). In accordance with collector Henry Vaughan’s bequest the watercolours, which are notoriously susceptible to fading, have their radiance preserved, by only being exhibited in the first month of the year. Famously known as “the painter of [...]