Author Archives: Chris Coldewey

UBC Sauder Alumni Mag Profile

November 29, 2011 – 3:24 pm

I am thrilled and honored to be featured alongside Ryan Beedie, Gregg Saretsky, and Livia Mahler in the current UBC Sauder School of Business alumni magazine cover story on entrepreneurship and innovation. What company! I hope to accomplish half of what they have been able to achieve in their careers. Here’s to the many other [...]

Posted in People | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Port 2050: Vancouver scenario planning

November 28, 2011 – 1:46 pm

Robin Silvester, CEO of Port Metro Vancouver, gave the annual address at the Vancouver Board of Trade and wrote an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun on the subject of long range planning and the implications of four future scenarios for the Greater Vancouver Gateway region. The scenarios were part of a Port Metro Vancouver initiative [...]

Posted in Ideas, Observations, People | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Strategy vs. Business Model innovation

November 7, 2011 – 10:19 pm

A post on the Innovation Excellence blog asks, “Is business model innovation just another name for strategy?” The author, John Steen, answers in the affirmative in the case of incremental innovation, but argues that radical business model reinvention reaches beyond the conventional strategy toolkit. I think that strategy and business model innovation diverges when we [...]

Posted in Ideas | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Five Dysfunctions of a Digital Team

October 18, 2011 – 9:46 am

When an organization’s external digital presence is inconsistent or incoherent, this is nearly always a symptom of deeper internal structural problems, such as: Silos: The people responsible for digital work are isolated from the rest of the organization. They can’t get the information they need to support other teams/departments until it’s too late. The digital [...]

Posted in Observations | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Integrating Sustainability and Corporate Strategy

July 29, 2011 – 12:38 pm

Integration of sustainability commitments into a company’s competitive strategy plan will increase the likelihood of ongoing funding. More and more Fortune Global 500 companies are following this approach. Ben Packard, VP of global responsibility at Starbucks described his company’s rationale like this: At Starbucks, sustainability and strategy are now integrated at the strategic planning level. [...]

Posted in Observations | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Bombay v New York

July 25, 2011 – 1:02 pm

Photo series by Nisha Sondhe on the two cities, via @ethanz.    

Posted in Observations | Comments (0)

Engineering Serendipity with Kris Krug

July 23, 2011 – 12:55 pm

Kris Krug is a photographer extraordinaire, social media documentarian, and global nomad who splits time between Vancouver, nearby Galiano Island, and the rest of the world. He was most recently in the South Pacific, documenting videographer Chris Jordan’s film on plastic pollution in the oceans, Midway. We met up on one of the rare days [...]

Posted in People | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Why innovation resists codification

July 20, 2011 – 3:50 pm

The latest book on [design thinking] is Designing for Growth, a “design thinking toolkit for managers” and it provides a pretty good snapshot of how people are thinking about the discipline right now. Namely, that the reins of design thinking lie firmly in the hands of executives. In this world, design thinking is shorthand for the [...]

Posted in Observations | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Associating. Questioning. Observing. Networking. Experimenting.

July 20, 2011 – 10:51 am

Clay Christensen and coauthors write in The Innovator’s DNA about “what makes innovators different.” They point to five skills or behaviors: First and foremost, innovators count on a cognitive skill that we call “associational thinking” or simply “associating.” Associating happens as the brain tries to synthesize and make sense of novel inputs. It helps innovators [...]

Posted in Observations | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

A Few Key People

June 10, 2011 – 10:55 am

I keep coming back to Mark Suster’s Techcrunch/BothSides article — just great advice about new venture management and jumpstarting regional technology ecosystems. I finally decided to just reproduce the whole thing here for my own easy reference. Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. [...]

Posted in People, Technology | Tagged | Comments (0)
Copyright © 2010 chris coldewey. All rights reserved.