Innovation Blog

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Horizontal Innovation. Why Innovators Need To Break Down Those Silos.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, energy, education, Gordon Brown, healthcare, security, collaborative innovation, Saul Kaplan, downing street

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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, Alysoun Stewart, economist

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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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Innovation Management

Friday, February 12, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, Mars, Business Week

A Mars A Day, Helps You, Hmm… Make Money

“It was still a real skunkworks operation—we had one small printer, and we hand-bagged everything,” said Jim Cass, General Manager of Mars Direct. He told Business Week: “But the strategy was, ‘make a little, learn a little; make some more, learn some more.”

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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, Russia, google, Japan, Boris Berezovsky, Abramovitch, Sergey Brin, London Evening Standard, Putin, Dmitry Medvedev

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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Solar-powered bras, slump-time inventions and a 2010 events calendar – innovation roundup

Thursday, January 14, 2010 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Business, Environment, Healthcare, Technology | Tags: innovation, links, recession, NHS, teamwork, patents, patent, solar power

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Ingenious solar-powered designs, successful products from recessions past, radical innovation in the NHS, innovation events around the UK, and more – the Grant Thornton Innovation team aims to bring you the most popular business stories and useful links each month. Here’s what we’ve been reading…

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Multi-touch platforms, the innovation of precision

Monday, January 11, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Technology | Tags: innovation, media, technology, global, eco, economist, Wallpaper, 3-D, augmented reality, Sensitive Object, multiplatform, Innovation Island Conference

Aretha Franklin wanted us all to “reach out” and we thought it was a bit personal, but today, reaching out, touching, creates a new connection likely to integrate your finger tip with a remote control system based uniquely on acoustics.

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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

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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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Nick Robertson, CEO ASOS plc: From recession to recovery through innovation

Thursday, November 12, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, recession, awards, online, National Business Awards, Nick Robertson, ASOS, Retail, Mid-Cap Business of the year

Find out what Nick Robertson, CEO of

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Listen in on real-time talk about innovation (and more)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Technology | Tags: innovation, chart, Twitter, investors, real-time, StreamGraph, Neoformix, conversation, invention, inventors, graph

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Innovators, investors and inventors – and, no doubt, lots of other types beginning with ‘I’ – need to keep their ear to the ground. How can you do that in a fun way? With this new Twitter infographic, you can tune into real-time conversation just by typing in a keyword.

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Measuring global innovation by patents filed and granted (Infographic)

Monday, August 17, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Business, Technology | Tags: innovation, statistics, infographic, global, chart, patents, World Patent Report

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Who is leading the world in innovation right now? Using the latest data from the

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Mean machines – Hassle-free urban transport

Thursday, August 13, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Environment, Technology | Tags: innovation, technology, renewable energy, energy, engineering, science, car, car industry, eco, fuel, airport, General Motors, hydrogen, heathrow

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“Wanted: silent taxi driver - no jip, no ranting, no dodgy fare charges; must run on hydrogen.” Coming to a terminal near you, this sci-fi reality of urban transport is no false dawn.

For a generation, General Motors and Volkswagen have been focused on manufacturing autonomous vehicles for everyday public use. An initiative which began as a defence sector project to provide self-guided battle craft, has become a marketable public transport solution. If the auto-cabs we see on our streets within five years have a voice, they will smoothly declare: “This isn’t just innovation, this is marvellously spectacular innovation.”

 

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123456789 – it’s the big day at last

Thursday, August 06, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Environment | Tags: innovation, statistics, numbers

Are you a fan of numbers? Or do you prefer to leave all that to your accountant?

Well, today’s number crunching might interest you.

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In defence of a nation - Innovation

Monday, July 27, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Technology | Tags: innovation, research, technology, global, university, engineering, europe, science, intellectual property, defence, robots

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http://www.wordle.net/

21st Century Western defence systems are based on

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Volte Face – Exxon Goes Ga Ga for Algae Oil

Monday, July 20, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Environment | Tags: innovation, technology, government, renewable energy, energy, science, car, eco, desalination, gas, bio fuel

When Big Oil claims its going green, seasoned market watchers sigh deeply and trade a few million barrels before lunch. More generous observers will consider Big Oil’s alternative energy ventures part R&D, part PR. But, what if the numbers really do stack up and the technology really can get beyond drilling holes in the ground?

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Will Asia become the center for innovation in the 21st century?

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, technology, emerging markets, asia

Robert Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and Iqbal Quadir, founder of MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, debate where innovation is moving in the 21st century in this week’s Mckinsey ‘Debate zone’.

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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

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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Auto innovation - The end game

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

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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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

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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Britain must look to the east to grow strongly

Tuesday, June 02, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation, financial, international, emerging markets, talent

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“We need to reinvent ourselves and invest in innovation to compete in the emerging markets”, writes Gerard Lyons in the Sunday Times 31 May 2009

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Alternative energy’s got oil over a barrel

Friday, May 29, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business, Environment | Tags: innovation, entrepreneurs, government, renewable energy, energy, europe, science

OPEC has delayed 35 of 150 scheduled oil production projects. Oil prices have swirled between $147 a barrel last July, to $32 per barrel in February. China has announced investment of $400bn in solar energy production.


 

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