Posts Tagged ‘Google’

A geek-fest, but no geeks?

Posted in Business Management, Event Review, Human Resources Management, Innovation, Strategy on August 7th, 2009 by Paul McArdle – 2 Comments

For the second time this week (following from Scott Ginsberg’s session), Adam and I were entertained, and intellectually stimulated, by a seminar focused on helping business do better.

This event was titled “Leading and Enabling Innovation through ICT” and was  presented by Zernike Australia in conjunction with Australian Institute of Commercialisation (AIC), Brisbane Technology Park, and QUT.

The event was part of the “Innovation Series”.

1)  Some great content

After having the session kicked off by Rowan Gilmore (CEO of the AIC), we were then treated to some great ideas from three top speakers:

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What can we learn about Innovation from Google?

Posted in Event Review, Management on July 15th, 2009 by Paul McArdle – 8 Comments

For us, the answer is not as easy as it might first seem….

(a)  Note that my question was NOT “what does Google know about Innovation?” – for surely they would know enough for several book’s worth of material.

(b)  I am more focused on us (a small-sized software company based in Milton, Brisbane) and wondering what WE can learn – provided we are not too dumb, distracted or egotistical to really hear the messages that were presented to us.

I’m writing this post 2 weeks after the Warren Centre’s “2009 Innovation Lecture”, featuring Lars Rasmussen of Google.

There were three of us who attended – myself, and two of our developers.  Paul has already posted his comments about what he gained from the lecture.

Given my focus is more on “Working ON, not IN, the business” (or at least I try for it to be), my interest was moreso in the lessons we could learn from the two projects (Google Maps and Google Wave) rather than the technology per-se.  For this reason, I found the obligatory product demo of the Wave mid-way through the presentation a little tedious, and would rather have heard more about Lars’ personal experiences of innovation during the two projects.

However, I was not totally disappointed – as the lecture was accompanied by some well-written notes (big copyright notice, so can’t scan here) and the synopsis also provided by the Warren Centre online.

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