(Not So) Used Ideas

I’m in the middle of a year at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and for each course we get a very extensive course reader full of articles, cases and other stuff. This is in addition to or in place of a textbook.
Now, I might be an exception, but in how I learn and what I [...]

I’m sitting there this morning realizing how ubiquitous my cell phone has become, and I realized that for all of the smarts it contains, it’s really not using much of it unless I ask it to. Why doesn’t it do more? Why isn’t it studying me and learning what I want it to do?
For example, [...]

I had this idea back during the Internet bubble (before we knee it as such) when everyone was spending gross sums on super bowl ads. A startup that wanted to be noticed needed to spend most of their VC money on the ads.
But what about all of the startups and brands that couldn’t afford the [...]

We happened to be visiting “The Shack” today looking for a sort of novelty Xmas present and next door was a hearing aid store. Quickly an idea came to me – why not novelty hearing aids?
On the one end of the spectrum you could have the “hearing voices” model which records random bits of conversation [...]

I know enough about business and the world to know that the rental car business is an unglamorous and difficult business. It’s hard to innovate for a fleet of reasons, but that doesn’t always mean one shouldn’t try or that one can’t succeed.
One of our case studies in business school illustrated the difficulties of managing [...]