Dear reader, in the first three weeks of January we have published a look through the rear view mirror on the most popular articles here on The Bearing Wave during the five years since the blog was set up in 2009.
Over the years both employees and guest bloggers have expanded the scope of the blog and today it is more about leading edge ideas related to innovation, than only about the work of the management consultancy.
Today is the final article in this series, as we look back on the past year. 2014 was a year when the blog matured and stabilised with a high number of regular readers from all over the world. Below follows the five most popular articles published in 2014.
1. Comparing Place Excellence in Monaco and Dubai
The most popular article of 2014 was published in December, which tells about how interesting the topic was for our readers. In the article Comparing Place Excellence in Monaco and Dubai, our Research Manager Svetlana Masjutina presented a project where we have analysed the current situation and capabilities of the Principality of Monaco from the point of view of the Place Excellence concept and considering the existing world best practices and sustainable results of its execution in Monaco, and benchmarking those towards the same in the Emirate of Dubai.
Benchmarking, Innovation Radar and Sweet Spot analysis were used as the tools to assess the current capabilities. My colleague Svetlana is very talented in the subtleties of communication and analysis and the full study contains fine points that truly makes it stand out, showing the brand communication in both its open, public layers as in the undertow of modern social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
2. The Value of Science Parks
On November 5th. Lars-Göran Larsson had the opportunity to attend the international symposium The Value of Science Parks at Mjärdevi Science Park in Linköping. Swedish and international speakers contributed to forming The Linköping declaration together with other attendees. In the declaration six factors that contribute to a successful science park are described. These factors also constitutes the grounds for the values created by the science parks.
The symposium focused on various aspects of the future development of science parks within areas such as investors/venture capital, companies in various stages of development, incubators, project arenas/open innovation, national nodes, international trends in the science park industry, the role of property owners, the relationship to other innovative hot-spots, forms of student collaboration, the importance of policy and university collaboration.
3. Whiskey Innovation Radar
With Whiskey Innovation Radar, Bearings Research Manager wrote a brilliant, ironic text, in August 2014, on how business innovation is applied to market positioning and communication in the industry of fine Scottish whiskey.
The main point is that innovation can take place in any dimension of a business system and, when innovating, companies must consider all dimensions of its business system (“The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate”, 2006). A closer look at the 12 dimensions of the innovation radar can be found in this article.
4. Hotel Promotion in the Digital Age
The article Hotel Promotion in the Digital Age was written in the passenger seat of a car during a road trip. Published in July, it became holiday hit. It is about how hotels can and should promote themselves to be seen and booked, in times when websites like Hotels.com tend to absorb the majority of bookings.
The main point of the article is that hotels can create so-called snackable content by converting the media material they already have into small, easy to digest snippets of information, using visuals and short descriptions to convey your message in frequent social media postings to travel shoppers.
5. China embarks on the route of Design as driver for Innovation and Sustainable Growth
During the month of May, our Senior Advisor Lars-Göran Larsson was invited by the Dragon Design Foundation in Beijing, People’s Republic of China (PRC), to attend and give a speech at the 2014 World Green Design Forum Summit in Yangzhou.
He then during ten days had the opportunity to take part in and exchange thoughts, ideas and experiences about a variety of views on how we shall be able to cope with the challenges evolving from four of the mega trends and the hyper competitive global markets the world is driven by today. This blog post is his travel report.