Märt Ridala's thoughts

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...

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...

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?" 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...

There has been a lot of talk about the skills shift in the labour market in Europe and USA. A big part of the simpler jobs are moving to robots, low-cost countries and are being exterminated by more excessive use of materials, standardization, computerization and better processes. There is a very interesting TED talk (Are droids taking our jobs) about how this trend will get more and more powerful. But have you noticed that the same thing is happening at home? I mean can you even get all the stuff at home working if one of the parents is not a highly educated and experienced technician? For example when I was young the technical problem to solve was sharpening pens. Maybe you needed to sharpen a knife for that, but it was more about hands and less about brains. Now one must struggle with problems like Gmail is not working in a tablet because WiFi gets disconnected. Or reinstalling a telephone, because it cannot connect to the PC maintenance software anymore.  Try to remember ho...

Many countries, including Sweden and Estonia , have started open data initiatives in the last couple of years. The goal of these initiatives is to open up publicly owned data for enterpreneurs who can develop services on them and well... make money. However, the success of these initiatives has been only moderate until now. I think the highest success has been with services offering public transport route planning and similar, but mostly the services are more or less only interesting toys. So why is the success moderate? I see several reasons for that: - The data being opened (for free) is usually commercially un-interesting. It is not the citizen or business registrys that you get access to for free. - Consumers in general are not willing to pay anything for e-services. It is the businesses that make money with e-services and who are also willing to pay for them. - The institutions themself, like for example Stockholms Lokaltrafik  and also Google, provide very good services o...

All office workers and especially managers know that development and change are very uncomfortable. Changes like new products, new processes, new structures demand extra effort and work. There are usually many loose ends and many new things you need to think of. Perhaps a change would mean cleaning up the mess you currently have in the IT systems, technological architecture or processes. You probably might also need to talk to people that you do not know previously or maybe even don't like. All this is very stressful. So how you as a manager can silence that (annoying) guy with the new bright idea. How to kill the enthusiasm of creating new ways of working? Here are some ways how one can accomplish that: It all starts by creating a process for incoming development ideas. The process must definitely not start with an e-mail or a phone call to you. No, no, no - that would have the opposite effect. Instead consider the following methods: - Create a mailinglist for the incoming idea...