September 13, 2024

Time is Money, and Money is Time: so if, like me, you’ve ever been involved in starting up a new business, you’ll know just how frustrating the early days of any enterprise can be. Finding the right office space for a start and then navigating your way painfully through the Delphic mysteries of a commercial […]

Suppose I want to buy a new watch, tired as I am of fumbling around in my pockets to check the time on my iPhone: I’m certainly not expecting a team of skilled watchmakers to turn up at my house, hunker down in the study, and begin crafting an intricate mechanism of cogs and springs,

We’ve talked a lot recently about the social and economic significance of global construction technologies, particularly about the crucial dynamic between stuck in the mud, dinosaur construction (which doesn’t work), and new wave modular systems (which do). But, to adopt a clarion call from the dimly lit, black-and-white days of the nineteen seventies: what about the

Bill Gates and Paul Allen knew exactly what they were doing in 1974: way ahead of their curve, they realised global computing companies, and IBM in particular (Big Blue), was increasingly obsessed with Hardware. Because Bill and Paul had learned from their pre-college work on the Traf-O-Data project (analysing flow data at traffic lights), that

You probably have yet to hear of Bent Flyvbjerg (why should you have), but Bent is a force to be reckoned with, Over recent years Professor Flyvbjerg has published some startling research on why public construction initiatives so often go wrong in practice: either stumbling to a halt, or coming in, as he puts it

We hear so much about Disruptive Innovation these days, but what exactly is it…and why does it matter? Well, first things, “The most influential business idea of the early 21st Century” was first propounded by Clayton Christensen (at Harvard) in 1995 before going on to achieve almost immediate runaway success and finally making the front

When we think of emerging technologies, most of us put our spectacles on (if we have them): everything innovative and epoch-making seems to be getting smaller and smaller. In the 1970s, the “world’s first truly portable computer”, the IBM 5100 (since you ask), weighed in at a whopping 55 pounds and came equipped with a

Here are some salient stories: The Home Insurance Building in Chicago was the world’s first skyscraper. Put up in 1885 and rising to the giddy heights of ten stories (six times smaller than the Statue of Unity in Gujarat… how times change), it was the first building in the world to be constructed using a steel and reinforced concrete