I’ve been asked to join the Board of Directors for the Tech Museum.  If you can’t tell by now, my wife and I support educational institutions that help others understand, learn and apply technology and innovation.   In particular, the Tech Museum has a great program for school kids to come in an experience “labs” where they can get hands on experience...

I’ve been asked (more like challenged) to create a dozen or so killer questions that could be used by teachers, schools, districts, state education agencies, federal agencies, etc. to help  innovate the educational system in the US.  I took up the challenge as a “pay it forward” project to help the officials think differently about the problem they...

Just do a quick comparison of the market value to the book value for public U.S. companies over the last two decades and you will see the dramatic upward rise in value attributed to intangibles – ideas, innovations. In this new world, wealth creation is dependent upon the capacity of a nation to continually create ideas.  In short, a nation without a vibrant creative...

Since the beginning of time, it’s been entrepreneurs that drive the creation of innovation.  True breakthroughs have been the result of an individual or small team who had an idea and the determination to see it through to fruition.  In many cases, ignoring the advice of friends and the lack of what many would call standard market research/validation.   While...

During a recent meeting I attended with educators and government officials, I shared my frustration with the “output” of the current educational system.   In my opinion, the system is optimized to produce graduates with deep technical skills and the ability to take tests.  One competency that I see missing is the ability to apply creative problem solving...

In a recent BusinessWeek article, Bruce Nussbaum made the proclamation that innovation is dead. “Innovation” died in 2008, killed off by overuse, misuse, narrowness, incrementalism and failure to evolve. It was done in by CEOs, consultants, marketeers, advertisers and business journalists who degraded and devalued the idea by conflating it with change, technology,...

Recorded live April 4th 2008 at the Business Alliance Bootcamp for Growing Companies and Entrepreneurs … Change is something we may try to stop but never will.  From the agriculture economy to the manufacturing economy to the knowledge/information economy to that of the creative economy … where wealth creation is dependent upon the capacity of a nation...

On my flight back to the US yesterday, I was reading the Wall Street Journal Europe and came across an editorial piece by Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City.  In the editorial, Mayor Bloomberg takes the current education “industry” (if you could really call it that) to task … “For much of the 20th century, the education level of...