Redeploying Agricultural Intellectual Capital
May 27, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
The challenges facing the food industry provide an important chapter in the story about the end of the industrial era.
In past posts, I have talked about how the large industrial model has lead to dangerous monocultures in bananas and unsustainable concentration of salad green production in the Salinas Valley. There is a growing realization that we need to think about sustainability in agriculture. This is a significant challenge–but also an enormous opportunity. Read more
Is Sysco an Example for Sustainability?
May 22, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
One of my favorite magazines for recreational reading is Saveur. It is a food magazine that features everyday food around the world. It’s like being invited into a private home on a trip around the world. No pretension, just real people and real food. And there is an incredible variety of real people around the world so it gets pretty interesting.
But I don’t read it for business information. So I was surprised to see a recent column (although I probably shouldn’t have been) on Sysco entitled Greener Giant. It asked the question, “Can an emblem of industrialized food also stand for sustainability?
Most of us think of Sysco as the giant distribution company that delivers mass quantities of food to institutional kitchens. And that’s what they do. But it was very interesting to see how they see sustainability relating to their business. Read more
Bookstore as Printing Location?
May 18, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
Wow. Just read a post from Intangitopia about the Espresso Book Machine. This is basic a digital printing press that has 500,000 titles pre-loaded, most of which are apparently out of print.
You pay for the book and it is printed right there in the store. Interesting way to disrupt Amazon. Or should Amazon buy it? Or will Amazon become a re-seller of these books (I buy many more used books than I do new ones on Amazon through their marketplace).
Of course, Amazon has already made a play toward electronics with Kindle. This is just another example of how the knowledge economy is changing almost every intellectual capital market…
Simple but Powerful Ways to Generate Ideas and Track Satisfaction
May 15, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
Michael Fraser is someone who gets the power of using technology to put knowledge to work within the organization. He has held a number of positions since I first met him. Currently he is the Recovery Act Program Manager for the Loan Guarantee Program Office at the Department of Energy. He recently wrote to me:
One experience I wanted to share was about employee ideas for improvement. On a former project known as CHRIS, one of the major subsystems was Employee Self Service which was a home grown web site built in Cold Fusion. All employees and contractors had access although the contractors’ was limited to a smaller subset of functions. Read more
Innovation in Health Care
May 15, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
There is no one solution to the challenges that face us in any industry. Health care is definitely a great case in point. This month’s Fast Company shares four stories worth telling about The Doctor of the Future.
These include:
- Dr. Jay Parkinson’s use of all the latest on line tools in the Myco Platform to be a more connected and more effective physician
- The International College of Robotic Surgery that uses on-line content to train doctors in these very effective techniques
- SimulConsult a “crowd-sourcing tool for identifying neurological disorders”
- InTouch Health, a remote access system for specialist MD’s to get fast care to patients in remote or under-served areas
Most of these are situations where existing intellectual capital is better deployed thorugh new tools. The challenge for every businessperson in the healthcare and every other industry is to find new ways to leverage what we know.
Surprising Research on Corporate Intellectual Capital Management
May 14, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
IAM Magazine recently published an article that I wrote with Peder Hofman-Bang of Intellectual Capital Sweden entitled The Weakest Link in Corporate Intellectual Asset Management.
The article examined the combined results of over 430 intellectual capital ratings that have been performed using the IC Rating tool. It found that the ratings of the companies’ IC portfolios and the strength of their IC management shook out as follows (from strongest to weakest): Read more
Could Twitter Save the New York Times?
May 14, 2009 by Mary Adams · 1 Comment
Here’s a new perspective on the newspaper question that I have been examining a lot lately. Umair Haque suggests How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter). He says that it is time for some different thinking. Twitter is a new delivery mechanism. And newspapers definitely need new delivery networks.
Remember that it was recently disclosed that the Boston Globe had an opportunity to invest in Monster.com fourteen years ago. It would have disrupted their cash cow: classified ads. In hindsight, we realize that they made a big mistake.
He is on to something.
America’s Continuing Failure to Innovate
May 13, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
The very first blog post of my career was at Denise Caruso’s Hybrid Vigor that I called The Intangible Imperitive. The post was inspired by an article about how Brazil’s farmers were out-innovating those in the U.S. I felt frustrated that we were not stepping up to global competition. Since then, I have blogged about similar concerns for the automotive industry. I had the same feeling when I read a story yesterday in the New York Times entitled China Far Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants:
By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, and by building many identical power plants at the same time, China has cut costs dramatically through economies of scale. It now can cost a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States. Read more
The Dangerous Myth of IP Value
May 12, 2009 by Mary Adams · 7 Comments
For quite a few years now, many folks in the IP world have been hawking the idea that IP is a hidden treasure that can be monetized immediately in the market. Here’s the latest angle on it from CFO Magazine: Those Lucrative Intangibles.
The idea goes like this: companies have this unseen trove of treasure that is sitting unused inside corporations (one book called it Rembrandt’s in the Attic–like a corporate version of Antiques Road Show). In this way of thinking, licensing and sale of the IP is found money, a great way to get fast cash. Read more
New Media for Newspapers
May 11, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
At the IMCNE conference last week, one of the speakers was Michael Olivieri, Publisher of the Boston Business Journal and Mass High Tech. He shared some interesting thoughts relative to my on-going discussion of the challenge of monetizing newspaper intellectual capital:
- His papers have more email than print subscribers
- They deliver daily news on line so have to compete with print edition
- 29% of Mass High Tech’s revenue comes from their online media
- Larger screen electronic readers could be important for the industry
Lots more interesting ideas at the conference. Here’s the Twitter conversation of IMCNE tags.
