New Product Development Wraps at AIM 140.0
Awesome prototypes from a two-month course Three teams showed off their final prototype projects in a contest of technical, commercial and presentation skills yesterday. They had worked through an intense two-month new product development course that Prof Matt Escobido and I team-teach at the Asian Institute of Management. The winning team had an Apple iApp [...]
Total Factor Productivity in the Philippines 135.0
Cororaton says TFP was negative for 35 years to 2000 Dr Caesar Cororaton, formerly of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), said in his paper that for 35 years through 2000, factor accumulation accounted for all growth and Technical Change (another name for TFP) was negative for most of the same period. From his [...]
Peter Senge Teaches Organizations to Learn 133.0
Systems thinking puts the world together Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, considers systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and dialogue as the “core learning capabilities of teams.” I first read The Fifth Discipline in the 1990s as a pioneering but, I thought, standalone work on the same stream as Just-in-Time (JIT) [...]
Time for Smelling the Flowers 129.0
My reading list is growing … On a vacation in Beijing ten years ago, a favorite cousin counseled me to balance my reading with immersion in the real world – her phrase, “to smell the flowers!” The months of November and December will involve intense immersion for me with projects that ask for deep thought [...]
A Different Take on Innovation from Adjacency 128.0
Tiny Tatua dives deep into milk to regularly deliver large payouts Tatua Cooperative Dairy Co Ltd of New Zealand shows another approach to adjacency. Instead of moving to an adjacent application (like BYD), Tatua dives deep into milk fractions and derives a more valuable mix of products to consistently return better payouts to its cooperative [...]
Managing for Medium-Term Peso Appreciation 120.0
The usual first response of Filipino exporters and contact and BPO center businesses to a strong peso appreciation is to ask the government, through their industry associations, for a foreign exchange bailout. With the government considered a soft touch and not proactive, this has created a culture of dependency over the years. It made companies [...]
We Need Change to Compete 112.0
The World Economic Form (WEF) 2009 Global Competitiveness Report shows how badly the Philippines is performing absolutely and relative to its neighbors. The Philippines dropped 16 places to #87 out of 133 countries from #71 in 2008. I have always read the Report with reservations based on Paul Krugman’s comment that competitiveness does not apply [...]
Creating Innovation Winners for the Philippines 109.0
In designing innovation policy, Lundvall proposes an alternative to picking industry winners in a working paper submitted to the Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies in 2007. He suggests creating winners instead! For Lundvall, winners in a small country like the Philippines could well be in the diffusion end than in the invention end of [...]
Innovation as Intensive Learning and Emulating the East Asian NIEs 103.0
Intensive learning facilitated the technological catching up process of the East Asian NIEs like South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980′s, said Professor Patarapong in his paper at ASIALICS 2009 (Posts 80, 81,82, 86 and 87). The subject fascinates. For me, the hunt goes on for innovation models to emulate so I can enrich the [...]
Competence-Building Technologies for Out-of-School Youths to be Innovative Entrepreneurs 99.0
I submitted a draft proposal to input innovation into a framework being put together for mentoring and coaching out-of-school youth (OSY) on entrepreneurship at the APEC seminar on Friday, August 28. I focused on competence-building techniques as inputs into learning-by-doing to be the best way to increase the OSY’s chances of success. The seminar was [...]
Change Agents in the New Age of FREE 93.0
Reading Chris Anderson’s book, FREE, reinforces my belief that, at bottom, nothing is really new about business management and the language of business in the Internet age. Entrepreneurial change agents doing creative deal-making that satisfy all parties is still key! In the past, these change agents, as emperors, tycoons and demagogues, became wealthy and powerful [...]
In My Innovator Toolbox is Change Management 92.0
I have a new project involving corporate culture change. The project is constrained so that I cannot use John P. Kotter’s popular change management model. The same constraints also do not allow me to adapt from Henry Mintzberg’s later ideas that propose a different approach. Still, as an innovation practitioner, change management is in my [...]
