The J.P. Allen Blog

New technology and corporate entrepreneurship

Corporate entrepreneurship is the idea that large corporations can overcome their “risk-averse cultures” that “stifle innovation” and learn how to “create, develop, and sustain innovative new businesses”.

I’ve prepared a new executive lecture session on the opportunities offered by new information technology for promoting corporate entrepreneurship, broken down into three categories:

• Collaboration through ’social computing’ - enabling people to find each other and not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’, let voices and ideas be heard, and allow people to describe and categorize knowledge in the way they find most useful.
• Analytics and business intelligence - finding ways to take advantage of the masses of data being collected by firms.
• ‘Mass collaboration’ with the outside world - linking to innovation capabilities outside of any one business.

But can mere technology make a difference? Conventional wisdom says that corporate culture and leadership ultimately determine whether businesses can become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and that technologies are just tools. I wonder. Maybe the technology itself, if it connects enough people together, can be the source of significant change. Let’s see what our visiting executives have to say.

The slides are available here. This session will be part of the USF Corporate Entrepreneurship Latin America program for the ADEN Business School of Argentina, rated as the top MBA program in Latin America by Latin Trade magazine. Thanks to my colleague Carlos Baradello for organizing the session.

The joy of information systems

(Note: I’m sharing this essay for a friend who has no idea what my academic field is, or what we do.)

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In business schools, my academic specialization is called Information Systems. Information systems people study the design and use of information technology in all kinds of organized human activity: businesses, government, schools, hospitals, even social movements.

Information technology offers us the possibility of changing the world for the better. Humanity now possesses a mind-boggling ability to store information, process it, and send it around the world for almost no cost. And the raw power of information technology is still doubling every couple of years.

Over the past few decades, we information systems people have found that converting better information technology into better human activity is hard work. The difficulties can come from a hundred different places–technological complexity, organizational confusion, human frailty–but all stem from a common source: the absolutely central role that information plays in organized human activity. When you try to change the guts of anything, it can get messy. Read the rest of this entry »

The iPhone pricing debacle

Last night, our local ABC 7 news featured my startling insights into the recent iPhone pricing uproar. When Apple dropped the price of an iPhone from $599 to $399 after only two months, even Apple’s crazed fanbase rebelled. The early adopters got labelled as “losers” (or worse) for buying too soon.

You can find the ABC7 news story and video clip here. If you’d like the whole story in higher resolution, there’s a link to a (large) movie file here.

Remember: when you do a media interview, they usually choose the juiciest soundbites…

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Update: my clip went national today on Good Morning America and on the abcnews.com site. Story and video clip are available here.

The national story ran under the titilating title “$599 iPhone Buyers: Hipsters or ‘Losers’?” Where’d they get that word from?