Innovation Blog

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Driving Innovation

Friday, April 24, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business, Technology | Tags: innovation | Total Views: 4503

Marie Wold discusses the drivers of innovation at

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Nathan Myhrvold’s opens the gates to ‘Invention Capital’

Friday, March 26, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Environment, Technology | Tags: technology, innovators, Bill Gates, economist, eco, nuclear, travelling-wave reactor, Nathan Myhrvold, TerraPower | Total Views: 4202

The Economist online runs a profile of formidable innovators involved in a phenomenal project.

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Roubles from rubble – Take your Russian by the hand

Monday, January 18, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, entrepreneur, government, google, Russia, Japan, Boris Berezovsky, Abramovitch, Sergey Brin, London Evening Standard, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin | Total Views: 4162

Russia is aspiring to be a global force for the innovative and ambitious

“The secret of politics?” said Bismark, “Make a good treaty with Russia.” Otto von Bismark, Prussian Prime Minister, founder and Chancellor of the German Empire, knew how to separate roubles from rubble. Today, more than 100 years after Bismark, the dead dog of communism has awakened as a proud lion. Russia ended 2008 with GDP growth of 5.6%, following 10 straight years of growth averaging seven per cent.

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Innovation cities – “It started with an ‘X’

Wednesday, December 09, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Environment | Tags: innovation, links, europe, Brazil, construction, Brasilia, Climate Change Summit, Los Angeles, Al Gore | Total Views: 4144

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Brasilia was an ambitious new beginning in 1956, emerging from two intersecting lines in the red dust of Brazil’s interior. Given the opportunity, most politicians would role up a handful of their nation’s cities and sling them in the nearest bin - it would be a yellow recycling bin, obviously, with toxic signs and syringe sharps warnings.

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Flawed strategies put business recovery at risk as recession ends

Friday, March 12, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: New Business Models | Tags: innovation, recession, entrepreneur, research, financial, business models, New Business Models, car, economist, Alysoun Stewart | Total Views: 4045

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Nearly two thirds (63%) of UK businesses are hamstrung by their own business models and unprepared for the recovery according to new research from leading financial and business advisers, Grant Thornton.

How is your business responding to the recession?

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Green business – Energy and Auto

Friday, February 12, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business, Environment, Technology | Tags: links, renewable energy, energy, engineering, science, car, economist, eco, euronews | Total Views: 3917

This is the year for green energy. All the main players have put there money where their mouths have been for years. We will see more and more serious, competitive, ambitious lifestyle products focused on green values. Electric cars have been a persisting favourite of this column, and finally our television screens are selling us real, cool, cheaper electric cars we can be smug to be seen in.

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3-D Organ Printing – New Bio Organ Creation

Friday, March 26, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Technology | Tags: research, university, engineering, print | Total Views: 3913

For around $200,000, a true spring bargain, you will soon be able to buy the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs.

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Hail the Chief – Jack Welch Injects Executive Education with Competitive Boost

Friday, July 10, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Education | Tags: innovation, media, entrepreneur, financial, government, talent, university, india, car | Total Views: 3905

Neutron Jack is back. Jack Welch,  General Electric’s supercharged former CEO, is putting formidable wealth right next to his informative mouth, launching a new online MBA which he claims will compete with bricks and mortar programmes.

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Get me a dealmaker – One part innovator, one part salesman. Shaken and stirred.

Friday, May 01, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business, Education, Technology | Tags: innovation, technology, research, financial, university, europe, intellectual property, economist, patent, entrepreneurial, capitalism | Total Views: 3876

Seventy years ago,

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Measuring Innovation: The Success Story of a Start Up

Thursday, May 21, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business, Media, Technology | Tags: innovation, media, technology, digital | Total Views: 3703

Alex Johns, MD of iblink left his job with Siemens 3 years to start up iblink which filled the niche created by technologists who knew a lot about technology and less about marketing and marketeers who knew a lot about marketing but little about technology. Today iblink is an award winning digital marketing business with a number of blue chips clients such as Titan, Superdrug, Bluewater, P&G and Unilever.

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The Evolution of Innovation

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, jackie hunter, pharmaceutical | Total Views: 3680

Jackie Hunter is the Senior-Vice President and Head of External Science Development at

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Consumer Technology – i-Pad

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business, Technology | Tags: digital, video, knowledge, literacy, i-Pad, innovation, management, start-up | Total Views: 3663

The Wall Street Journal hits the mark with and article on finding the next iPod, and why it so difficult to exploit hit products.

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Building on the Shoulders of Giants – Grant Thornton Sponsors ‘Innovation Island’

Tuesday, March 03, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business | Tags: sir roger bone, innovation island, open innovation, boeing uk, imperial college business school, innovation nation, newton, 5-d modelling, professor david gann, darwin | Total Views: 3636

A new innovation eco-system is needed for Britain - that is the message delivered by guest panellists at the launch of Innovation Island, an Economist conference, sponsored by Grant Thornton.

Distinguished panellists, from industrial and research disciplines throughout the United Kingdom, gathered to discuss whether the UK remains an innovative nation. The answer is ‘Yes’, Britain is building on a strong innovative heritage, but it needs to address some persisting weaknesses if it is to deliver economic growth and a prosperous future.

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Robots, ice and taxis – innovation roundup

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Business, Environment, Media, Technology | Tags: links, Twitter, climate change, TED, robots, photography | Total Views: 3602

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This month, the Grant Thornton team has been reading about robots with smiling faces, documenting climate change using time-lapse photography and ‘tweeting’ for a taxi home…

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Healthcare Innovation – Resistance Is Futile

Friday, May 08, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Healthcare | Tags: innovation, entrepreneur, energy, healthcare, science, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology | Total Views: 3562

Defence of our nation’s health persists as a matter of priority. It’s an irrational position to take, for ultimately the nation cannot preserve our health, we all expire, a bit like identity cards. Our expectation, is that one day we won’t shuffle off this mortal coil, but just go for a refit, an upgrade, popping into Me-Me World at lunch to get memory chips expanded and a couple of heart valves replaced.

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Story of the Week – Fox or Hedgehog, What Are You?

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Technology | Tags: digital, video, knowledge, literacy, i-Pad, innovation, management | Total Views: 3560

Article of the week, by a hare’s breadth, is Ben McIntyre’s Fox or Hedgehog piece for The Times. Generously, for those who may have given up on reading in a digital age, Ben’s recorded a short video blog, so you can get the gist without all that grammar and words n’stuff.

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Water rescue: Innovation, a fight for survival

Monday, June 08, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Environment, Technology | Tags: innovation, technology, energy, india, innovators, science, economist | Total Views: 3554

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of food giant Nestlé, told the Economist’s ‘The World in 2009’: “under present conditions… we will run out of water long before we run out of fuel”.

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Pimp my patent – Why Acacia Research is king of the patent trolls

Monday, March 08, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business | Tags: market, patents, Acacia Research, design, Business Week, Rachael King, law | Total Views: 3552

‘Pimp my patent’ might just be runner as an obscure digital TV channel – with exclusive membership for lawyers. Based on the USA’s cult car show ‘Pimp my ride’, patent attorneys would trawl databases for patents to buy, then sue companies who have infringed those patents. In financial innovation terms, it’s a sort of derivative market, nothing is actually made, just innovative deals made out of current legal frameworks. The presenter wouldn’t be a banker, it would be troll; where differences end and similarities begin?

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What should business leaders focus on to survive?

Thursday, March 11, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: New Business Models | Tags: financial, business models, Wendy Hart, New Business Models, Lead Advisory Services | Total Views: 3543

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Business models - the challenges facing UK businesses today

Some of our experts give us their view ...

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Auto innovation - The end game

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business, Technology | Tags: innovation, technology, research, financial, government, energy, university, innovators, science, car | Total Views: 3500

One per cent of the energy we burn driving a car is used to move the driver. In one hundred years of automotive innovation, mankind has fought financial and military battles over oil reserves; only to announce that 99% of our effort was to shift a hunk of metal. Maybe we should have kept the horses.

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