Category: Innovation

  • There’s a little-known scene in the movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” where Lt. Commander Data, an android, observes Captain Jean-Luc Picard touching the hull of an historic spacecraft. The captain smiles and taps the ship with his bare fingers, to which Data asks, “Sir, does tactile contact alter your perception of (the ship)?” “Oh yes,”…

  • Remember the Apple Lisa? Of course not. The Newton? I hope not. But without them, there would have been no iMac or iPad. Hell, there probably would have been no Pixar. Steve Jobs had success because he had time to fail. The same can be said for Bill Gates and Ted Turner, or J.K. Rowling…

  • HP started in a garage. And, I don’t know, about a million other business and products did too. Albert Einstein began solving the mysteries of the universe as a patent office clerk. Thomas Edison saw a light bulb go off in his head and then invented the real thing. Walt Disney turned a farmhouse mouse…

  • In two or three years, my brother-in-law will either be bankrupt or a millionaire. He will either profit from a complex set a business deals or go down in flames; nearly a decade of work and planning will be left to smolder on the pyre of What Might Have Been. No middle ground. No contingencies.…

  • The easy answer to how much consumers will pay for online news – if there is such a thing as an easy answer – is “they’ll pay what it’s worth.” Of course that’s’ the problem: In a world where free access to news is a presumed birthright and stories have been reduced to commoditized pieces…

  • It’s easy to let your mind to wander while driving along the Blue Highways of Mid-Missouri, especially in the Winter. To the naked eye there is little with which to occupy your thoughts — just gray two-lane roads and thin, sleeping trees. All around it’s tombstone quiet, the rumbling of the tires competing only with…