Category: The innovation blog

Making sense of the blogosphereFor smaller businesses – a term which describes most wide-format printing companies – the internet and social media can seem a tedious drain on time and budgets. The Internet seems to offer...

The trouble with cloning

Printers dissatisfied with their own website – and let’s face it, if you’re not, you ought to be – may be tempted to just copy one they like. Some call this plagiarism, others say it’s just learning from best practice. Yet web usability guru Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/copy-big-sites.html) says whatever you call it, you shouldn’t do it.

Don’t copy, just be inspired

Nielsen’s warnings should not stop you learning from what other companies are doing online. The Chicago large format printer Benchmark Imaging and Display has a simple page on its site called The Idea Gallery (http://www.benchmarkimaging.com/Gallery/index.php?option=com_joomgallery&func=viewcategory&catid=1&Itemid=61 ) which does pretty much what the name suggests. The work is simply presented, the notes accompanying each idea/application are succinct and relevant, and the cumulative effect is pretty impressive.

Computer says “What?”

The collision of two powerful forces could stifle business innovation in the 21st century: new fangled computers and old fashioned bosses. That is the fear expressed by Andrew McAfee, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://andrewmcafee.org/ ). While new technology gives companies the potential to create a collaborative, networked business – a model that some have labelled Enterprise 2.0 – most bosses, McAfee insists, aren’t interested: “They say let’s not have a networked enterprise, let’s have a row-and-column enterprise, let’s have a grid enterprise, where people are sitting at their work stations everyday, with their heads down, getting work done every day, all day, not really forming communities and having voices, but just cranking out work.”

Innovation in their DNAMcAfee’s point is underlined by an interview once given by James Watson who, with Francis Crick, discovered the double helix structure of DNA. Asked how they had succeeded where others had failed, Watson...