archive for the ‘glossary (our definitions)’ category

Making work visible: For business practice transformation

19 April 2011 | Peggy Szymanski

"Murky" can describe problems in organizations where you see the cloudy fog obscuring what you’re trying to get at, but you don’t know what’s behind it. "Wicked" can describe problems in organizations that are too tangled to tease apart, politically loaded, or just plain difficult. Whether you want to tactically address an acute process problem in a specific department, or strategically transform the way an entire company fundamentally operates, learns new practices, or engages at the critical "customer front", ethnography-based work practice study is a powerful tool for making work visible...

Innovation: defining, doing, measuring

31 March 2010 | Mark Bernstein

[The Economist invited us to contribute an abridged version of this post, "How do you define innovation?", for their blog.] Innovation is a sorely overused word. Yet we are constantly asked to define it. A number of theorists and practitioners have offered up their variations: product innovation, business model innovation, technology innovation, design innovation, radical innovation, incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, open innovation…and so the list goes on. All are useful; none are complete. I don't have a pat answer, catchy definition, or compelling metaphor for this. But here’s what I do know: however it is defined, innovation is a valuable change, unconstrained by the way things are. I think I can safely claim that we’re speaking from experience…

Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality

2 March 2010 | Bo Begole

What's the difference between Ubiquitous Computing ("ubicomp") and Augmented Reality ("AR")? I hear this question often, and you could replace "augmented reality" in that question with any of the following buzzy paradigms for people-interacting-with-computers: Virtual Reality, Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing, Wearable Computing, Multi-Device Interaction, Cloud Computing, Intelligent Systems, Ambient Intelligence, Context-Aware Computing, Adaptive Systems, Machine Perception, Social Computing, Smart Environments, Everyware, and so on. For the most part, I don’t find formal definitions useful; you can call it whatever suits your fancy. All that matters is that I understand what you mean when you use a term and that you understand what I mean when I use it. The attributes of a definition that carry lasting meaning are not technological properties (performance, cost, size, distribution, latency), but the core capabilities that the paradigm enables for usage.