Posted: February 24, 2015
Last year Boeing (manufactures of large commercial jets for airlines) was implementing a plan for fiscal improvement that included heavy investments in its smaller 737 production pipeline, enabling them to build and ship 42+ 737s in a month (ultimately planning to scale to nearly 50 a month by 2017). Unfortunately, half a dozen fuselages that were manufactured for Boeing by Spirit Continue Reading →
Posted: February 16, 2015
The modern airline industry could not exist in the form it does today without a number of aviation innovations. The forces driving the adoption of these innovations include safety, consumer comfort, and economics for both the industry and for the consumer.
Posted: February 11, 2015
Many of my readings for CS855 Futuring and Innovation (and also for my dissertation) have touched on the science of Affective Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, flight simulating/training, wearable technology, and self-quantification.
Late last year Gartner revealed a number of predictions regarding consumer adoption of wearable technologies in 2015 through 2018 and beyond. The company predicts a dramatic increase in sales of wearable devices, particularly fitness and biometric wearables (see the excerpt below), including smart clothing. Further prediction includes the sales of these devices through atypical channels such as wellness/health providers, gyms, insurance providers, weight loss companies, and even employers, including subsidized or discounted pricing. Continue Reading →
Posted: February 9, 2015
British Airways Airbus A380 (Creative Commons License) Retrieved February 2nd, 2015 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/24874528@N04/9384083282
In 1993, British Airways was one of the largest and most profitable international passenger airline companies, and remains so more than a decade later. This continued success is in large part due to the introduction of scenario planning by DeAnne Julius, British Airway’s Chief Economist in 1994.
Julius proposed an experiment to the company’s Chairman’s Committee to see if scenario planning was suitable for use by airline: the incorporation of scenario planning into the British Airways annual business plan of April 1995 (Moyer, 1996).
Posted: February 4, 2015
Planning for the Future
Whether considering wearable technology or business economics, the key requirement for successful innovation is predicting how the future will unfold. There are many different methodologies for planning and predicting the future. Two commonly used are traditional forecasting and scenario planning. Continue Reading →
Posted: February 2, 2015
The adoption of Affective Computing principles and data analytics are not limited to wearable technology and self-quantification. These principles are now emerging in the teaching and learning space. The New Media Consortium (2014) discusses the growth of data-driven learning and assessment, and how it will impact higher education in the next three to five years in its annual report on Higher Education. Continue Reading →
