How do we navigate in a world without landmarks? We create them. With the rise of mass production businesses turned to psychologists and statisticians to quantify consumer behavior through surveys. Innovators, like sailors, bristled against the certitude of statistics. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” Henry Ford noted, “they would have said faster horses.”
Over the last year, we've found that our loss of geography has brought a correction to our relationship with the internet. The way we collaborate, learn, discover and create has changed, and as a result, we developed Corners, an approach and platform for online flâneurism. In this series I'll explore the notion of looking around your Corner - physically and digitally - to uncover strategic insights hidden in plain sight.
You must obey the forces you want to command. Consider if you were tasked to make Theodore Levitt's proverbial 1/4 inch hole. But what if you had to create the tools to do so? First, you would have to obey the laws of physics and metallurgy to heat the wrought iron to the right temperature. Obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics…
Buyers impatiently wait to be wowed as firms struggle to find new growth opportunities. Today “innovation” is a byword for distraction instead of a force for human advancement. And all signs point to a deepening innovation recession. Look at indicators from a 50% decline in entrepreneurship in the last 20 years; to a pop-culture tech backlash; to the fact that just 3% percent of newly financed product…
