Via Doughnut Economics Action Lab: The Doughnut offers a vision of what it means for humanity to thrive in the 21st century - and Doughnut Economics explores the mindset and ways of thinking needed to get us there. First published... Continue reading

Mobility as a service (MaaS) incorporates the options/elements of an emerging and new transportation model—particularly in urban areas—that removes the need for private vehicle ownership by offering bundled transportation options as a service. Through an integrated effort of public and... Continue reading

Innovation in the generation, transmission and, most importantly, storage of electricity continues apace. Going well beyond interest by sustainability-oriented consumers, microgrids are emerging as an efficient and effective distributed generation option. This recent Time Magazine article outlines the potential this... Continue reading

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Two topics close to my heart - Business models and the Internet of Things Continue reading

The bandwagoneers that comprise and embrace much of the Silicon Valley monoculture have increasingly not been among the vanguard of enterprises that are delivering real change and innovation within and across traditional value chains and business models. Perhaps that is the result of a zeitgeist that manifests in the Valley on a regular basis in which the thinking goes that if one successful business launch makes sense, then several dozen more incremental versions of said business make even more sense. Continue reading

We have discussed the impact that social media and the channels that have emerged based on social technologies will have on the enterprise previously here and here. Rob Harles, of Accenture Interactive has a nice article on the social enterprise... Continue reading

“Business ecosystem” may be a relatively recent entry into our business lexicon but it is, perhaps, not an entirely modern concept. Confederacies of market participants have allied around delivering comprehensive offerings to markets across epochs. One could imagine Christopher Columbus,... Continue reading

Big data, and the analytics that make sense of the exponentially growing volumes of it, seem to be top-of-mind across the business landscape and increasingly central to both strategic and tactical decision making today. In certain realms, marketing comes immediately to mind, it possesses the potential to become the central unifying force that moves the practice further from art and closer to science. But, with big data has come big challenges in using the data for practical and impactful purposes. Continue reading

McKinsey & Company continues to publish some solid thinking on innovation and the evolution of business models. While I have long argued that business models are much more ephemeral owing to the continuing impact of digital technologies, I do think... Continue reading

CMO.com publishes a weekly column, "Mind Blowing Stats" that collects disparate and sometimes arcane data points about a specific topic. A recent edition of the column highlighted the great traction and movement forward that IoT is achieving though most people,... Continue reading

A recent article in the Deloitte Review by Tom Davenport and John Lucker provided some much needed context around the quickly expanding conversations on the Internet of Things (IoT). Having written about the IoT often over the past 15 years,... Continue reading

The growth in Internet of things will far exceed that of other connected devices. By 2020, the emergence of mass-market smart phones, phablets, and tablets, combined with a mature PC market, will result in an installed base of about 7.3... Continue reading

As someone who has spent much of the past 20 years defining, developing, and articulating value propositions to address all types of customer pains, I think this extension to Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas touches much of what I have... Continue reading

We always endeavor to uncover and share great treatments of topics aligned with the themes of Nonlinear Thinking and this recent article at Bloomberg.com on the advances being made by investor-owned and public utilities across the U.S. in building the... Continue reading

Funny and disquieting on multiple levels, this is a creative evocation of Kendra Eash's brilliant advertising takedown, "This Is a Generic Brand Video," originally published by McSweeney's. Stock video provider Dissolve has taken the text of Eash's screed and set... Continue reading

Cisco continues to be among the vanguard of enterprises that are embracing the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, recently delivered another speech on the concept and the bottom line, from Cisco’s viewpoint, is that the... Continue reading

One of the core themes of this blog over the years has been the impact of technology on the marketing art and science. With the advent of digital, social, and mobile media, the strategy and execution of marketing has embraced... Continue reading

A recent study conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting suggests that organizations are now facing a digital imperative and must adopt new technologies effectively or face competitive obsolescence. Among employees, while there is consensus on the importance... Continue reading

As a strategist and market analyst, I have become prone over the years to collecting white papers, reports and any interesting treatment of key topics on my professional and personal agenda. Then, every once in a long while, I go... Continue reading

Operating in a world where the competitive landscape is ever more ephemeral, challenges to the status quo ever more profound, and the life of a successful business model ever shorter, aligning a corporation’s strategic intent and strategic action becomes ever... Continue reading

This "transit map" from Gartner visually represents how hard it is to be a marketer today. Continue reading

A dozen years ago in a white paper on emerging technologies I included a section on machine-to-machine (M2M) technology, though at the time that nomenclature wasn’t generally accepted. My simple example of the power of M2M featured communications among a... Continue reading

A new report by ABI Research on utilities and smart grids spotlights the rapidly increasing capital investment in the component technologies that form the backbone of smart grid infrastructure. We have discussed aspects of the smart grid in the past... Continue reading