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Showing posts from 2013

The powers in an organization

This post is about the powers in an organization. It might sound a little  "Machiavellish", but I hope the innovators can take it as a practical guide on how to make things happen in an organization. One might also think that powers, diplomacy and politics are things that do not belong to innovative organizations, but it is not so. Politics and diplomacy are normal parts of any organization that consists of human beings. For example did you hold trading negotiations with your brother/sister about candy, cleaning, money etc? If even brothers/sisters negotiate and argue about who makes decisions then it is only natural that organizations consisting of hundreds of people have similar processes. It is the transparency and the objectiveness of decision making that is important. But now lets discuss the power that an Innovator needs to consider when trying to improve things. Firstly lets look at the formal and visible powers. There are three types of things that someone with a po

IT and telecommunications product development project manager needed!

We are looking for a project manager in our product development team called The Cloud Services Factory. Here is the official announcement: http://ts.easycruit.com/intranet/elion/vacancy/1063875/66841?iso=ee   Let me know if you are interested!

What they don't teach you on innovation courses

In a few weeks there will be the annual  Innovation Summer Academy hosted by Tallinn Technical University. It will be a great event and if you have a chance then do participate! However, there are things that are almost never taught on such courses. Skills necessary for innovation and product development (especially in big corporations) that are never mentioned in neither innovation management books nor trainings. Hereby I would like to fill in that hole a little bit. Otherwise it so often happens that people come back to work after innovation trainings full of ideas and then just get smashed by the corporate world. So let's begin! Let's say you have an idea of a new product that your employer should launch and you want to make it happen. How should you proceed? Before you do anything take a moment and think it over - are you sure you want to do this? It will be hard, it might take years, it most probably will fail. If you do decide to go forward (and you should - we only

Artificial intelligence taking over

In recent years an interesting discussion about artificial intelligences presence in our everyday life has started up. It is somewhat un-noticed that we have come to an era where artificial intelligence is starting to take over work, decisionmaking and even jobs that no-one could ever predicted. Here is an interesting TED talk from Ken Jennings who was the best jeopardy player and then was beaten by a super computer . I think this trend is very important, most probably it is un-avoidable and it is important for humankind to notice that. Let us think of a few examples. The most scary and almost un-noticed example is that of the high-frequency trading on stock markets. Read here more about it . In essence artificial intelligence owned by investment banks and capital funds are driving now over half of the trades on stock markets. So how did it happen that we now have a casino, where computers are playing with our pension money? It never was a conscious decision, it just happened. Does

Some Thoughts About Doing SaaS and IT Business on the B2B Market

Arctic Startup published my article about the IT business on the B2B market . I hope you find it interesting reading!

How to make it so that people working in a big corporation would feel and work like in a family business?

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"How to make it so that people working in a big corporation would feel and work like in a family business?" This is a vital question if one wants to run a successful big corporation. It is the employees who make the difference between good and bad service and success and bankruptcy. If the employees work with the same care and soul like they do in a family business then the chances of success are great. So how to achieve this? In my experience the maximum number of people in a team that acts like a "family business" is somewhere between 10-20. If the number of people in a team grows over 20 then it becomes hard to keep a 100% one family feeling and a split into smaller units is advisable. So if there are hundreds or thousands of employees then the key question becomes how to organize them. A corporation having such a number of employees is probably offering more than one service or its service can be logically divided into different areas.  The first and the most