John W Lewis

Category: innovation

  • Welcome, all you Like Minds!

    Welcome to Exeter in Devon, all of you who are attending the Like Minds conference this week (Thursday and Friday, October 28 and 29). The success of the Like Minds conference is a great credit to the organisers, the speakers, the sponsors, the local community and, of course, the participants. With each conference, there has…

  • Sell the opportunity

    Treat every problem as an opportunity, we are told. At first sight it is an attractive idea, but further investigation reveals that it is a little too glib. Problems and opportunities are similar but different things; in a sense they are the opposite of one another. Edward de Bono, I think it was, who captured…

  • Meeting Ann Holman

    Innovation was a theme on Friday morning, when I had the pleasure of meeting Ann Holman in person. What an energetic and forward thinker she is! We’d already conversed briefly by electronic means, and so we arranged to meet IRL (In Real Life), as others have termed it. Ann had already tweeted, although at the…

  • Is “IT” “in denial”?!

    This is probably true, but who really cares?

  • Less is more manufacturing productivity

    Recollections of an memorable project Thinking about the concept of “less is more”, takes me back to a small and initially unpromising project that a maverick boss of mine persuaded me to get involved in many years ago. It provides an interesting example of counter-intuitive optimisation. The scene… There was a manufacturing plant which produced…

  • Less is more!

    There seems to be an upsurge of interest in the philosophy of “less is more”. A couple of recent articles about product design, in general and in a specific case, address relevant aspects of this phenomenon. What do we know? On one level, we tend to question: how can “less” be “more”? We know it…

  • Social communication is with us

    The technology of communication devices, systems, services  has changed over the years. There have been telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and a variety of others. The characteristics of each technology have dictated the behavioural model of the systems and the services available to users. With the advent of the internet, systems have tended to emulate traditional…

  • Liking LikeMinds 2010

    A global local conference How often does a great conference on an emerging subject attract local, national and global participants to a quiet corner of the UK? Not often, I suspect. Nevertheless last Friday, 2010 February 26, it happened again at LikeMinds 2010! The first time it happened was in 2009 on October 16th. Back…

  • A better Java programming course?

    Questions, questions! What would a better training course be like? In what ways would it differ? For whom would it be better? How would we know that it is better? What would we measure? Better for learners and providers In general, whatever you are learning, all of these questions might be important to you. To…