Innovation Offiste

I'm at the Semiahmoo Resort in Northern Washington State, so close to Canada I can smell it. (It's right there). We've been here for 3 days now, sitting in lectures, labs and exercises in the process of innovation. To my surprise, I've learned shitloads. I was expecting the usual powerpoint comas, dull analysts etc. but it's been very good. This has all been work to get us in shape for Ballmer today and I'm certainly better educated and more thoughful than I was when I walked in.

Interesting bits so far:

1) Innovation can be mapped as a process and learned by almost anyone. Surprising, as I've always viewed it as a dark art and essentially un-teachable.

2) Much of the mathematical formalism I've been working through in the last few months have paid off in spades. Every piece has clicked into place in an amazing way. I was in a lecture yesterday on business and market analysis and I was consistently 3 slides ahead of the presenter based on Gaussian analytics and market analysis. Why is Best-Buy profitable? They got rid of tail-end Gaussian customers that cost them far more than they earned off others. (The math told me this was happening and sure enough, the lecturer told us a few slides what was going on behaviorally with customers).

3) I may have been wrong about some of my pessimism on technology. I have to reluctantly bump up the probabilities of a number of events I thought would take decades. This is good in some ways and bad in others, but it was certainly a surprise.

4) I need to learn to get on the lecture circuit. These folks are making $50,000/hour for these talks. Yes, read that again.

Damn! I gotta get me a slice of that fat money cake.


Very little time for blogging or anything else. I get up at 4:30, work until 7am, meet the group, work with them until 9:00pm, then go catch-up on email and go back to bed.

Still, it's been educational and worth the time.