The social tech for social change week
Toronto is abuzz with innovators, social entrepreneurs, digital media developers and leading design thinkers, not to mention a swath of charitable organizations dedicated to social change.
Imagine if these communities were working together. It could be transformational.
Process to handle disruptive technologies
In Part I, I said that implementing good management only could be BAD for your business. Now I’m offering some simple insights on how good companies can avoid failure due to disruptive technologies.
Thinking a little counter-intuitively CAN be good for business.
Crumbling monoliths bring opportunity
Monolitten – “The Monolith” – is a 17m high Norwegian monument. As with all monoliths, The Monolith is carved out of a single piece of rock – in this case, granite.
During the 1990s, the monolithic software application dominated the enterprise software market, both architecturally and in business models. Originally associated with mainframe computing, in software terms, “monolithic” describes a self-contained software package in which user interface and data processing code is wrapped into a single, proprietary solution with little or no interaction with other software. Software empires like Microsoft, CA and Oracle were all built on the back of monolithic solutions.
The enterprise applications market is changing away from the monolithic model — driven primarily by the ubiquity of internet-related technologies, making the monolith increasingly porous and dependent on services, lightweight applications and deep links with data and functions delivered by third parties. This isn’t news to anyone who pays attention to the field – it merely confirms a trend. However, as monolithic software packages become a thing of the past, we’re finding opportunities for start-ups in this space. This is discussed in MaRS’ latest Market Snapshot: Enterprise Applications: Opportunities for Ontario’s software start-ups
Over the past 8 months, the Martin Prosperity Institute has been collecting a massive data set to analyze how well regions in North America perform on our 3Ts of economic development. We did this so that we could benchmark how well Ontario and its regions compete.
So how did Ontario measure up?
Here’s the round-up of the week in the newsfeeds. Below I highlight my favourite articles of the week from each category.
Today’s Top Pick – “Canada Ranks as a Global Leader in Online Video Viewing”. Find out more under Information and Communication Technology.
