There is a painting by the German painter Peter von Cornelius (1784-1867) in which one sees Gunther, King of Burgundy, ordering Hagen, a Burgundian warrior, to sink the treasure of the Nibelung. Siegfried, the visionary innovator, will win the Nibelung treasure. Akin to the mythological lineage of the Nibelung, managers hold the vast treasure that consists of customers and consumers. As with Siegfried, visionary innovators will win it. But the past is hard to kill, for the visionaries first appear with products and services that initially look like ugly ducklings. In addition to technological failures, the first steamboats were clumsy and even dangerous, while evolutionary technologies made sailing boats increasingly beautiful and more performing. The […]

#Cloud computing, e-commerce, the mobile internet, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things trigger changes in business models and blur the boundaries of industries. Genomics, nanotechnology and robotics question what is ideally described as the scientific method. The human being is subjected to upheavals of such magnitude in his double profile of man who makes and man who thinks. The first, the Homo laborans, questions the ‘how’ the mutations happen; the second, the Homo faber, the ‘why’. Are the two personalities compatible? Do the ‘how’ of making new things efficiently and the ‘why’ of ‘making thinking’ to transform the reality coexist in the same person? Two diametrically opposed scenarios are posed by such […]

Altruism perfectly fits in with inclusive prosperity. Open innovation (OI)-driven growth with knowledge, competencies, and skills freely exchanged across cultural groups is the zeitgeist of the 21st century, characterized as it is by its emphasis on the widest possible access to new knowledge and resources, producing beneficial effects in new entrepreneurial ventures. Emerging from this is a hybrid culture reflecting various strands of OI, in which altruism can be included together with open experimenting that can be unconventional. Stating that altruism is serving OI is tantamount to saying that altruism is a practical social innovation. Inward-looking, selfish organizations minimize cooperation and so stifle open innovation. Altruism opens up a promising prospect for an outward-looking approach […]

The coupling of manufacturing and culture shows how far we can advance along the road towards an entrepreneurial society.   Do manufacturing and culture live in two separate and irreconcilable worlds—manufacturing in the world of things and culture in the world of ideas? Is manufacturing called upon to solve production problems, with culture pronouncing on ‘chief systems’ as in Galileo’s ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’? This is a shared vision of those who identify manufacturing with making and culture with thinking: the manual labour of artisans and technicians as opposed to the intellectual work of professors and scientists. As a result, this fault line fails to recognize that the factory is a culture […]

To translate educational concepts into an entrepreneurial context requires a meeting of hearts and minds, unfettered by preconceived ideas and outmoded powerbases. There are plentiful public and private initiatives to encourage new businesses in every field. This is matched by increasing activity in academic thought.   A growing number of academics, practitioners and business people are aiming to broaden and as well as deepen their knowledge of how business and economies function. The generalist or polymath, so apparent in the Renaissance, is becoming more prevalent.   This is the context in which coworking spaces are on the rise, from Google’s “Campus” in London to NextSpace in California. Much has been made of these shared workspaces […]