With the news that Royal Mail wants to end Saturday delivery, I got to thinking about how I'd try to innovate a way out of the mess they're in. The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but email and IM have comprehensively won. Sure, vinyl sales are up, but stamp collectors aren't going to …
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There's a famous quote from Tom Goodwin about the way the world has changed recently: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening. As part of my MSc, I'm being challenged to think about the nature of disruption and how it might apply to my emplo…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, all of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination. One of our missions in The Lab is to introduce the ideas of prototyping and rapid innovation into the business. That's a fairly hefty systemic change for any company - so how do we go about doing it? Paper aeroplanes. Yup. Sheets of paper, crudely folded and then thrown are the perfect way to get people collaborating,…
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