Brad Rourke

Category: innovation

  • Selling To Business And Thinking About Using Social Media? You're LATE.

    A remarkable report crossed my desk from the Groundswell folks at Forrester Research. It’s a study of the social media habits of a representative sample of business-to-business buyers. These are the folks you imagine are dry. Buying stuff for their company, from other companies. Where’s the innovation to be had there? Well, you’d be surprised.…

  • Selling To Business And Thinking About Using Social Media? You’re LATE.

    A remarkable report crossed my desk from the Groundswell folks at Forrester Research. It’s a study of the social media habits of a representative sample of business-to-business buyers. These are the folks you imagine are dry. Buying stuff for their company, from other companies. Where’s the innovation to be had there? Well, you’d be surprised.…

  • Is The Future Smart?

    In “The Smart Growth Manifesto,” Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque points to a wholesale collapse of “old” things: Obama is stimulating. Davos is deliberating. C-levels are eliminating. Wall St is recriminating. Welcome to the macropocalypse: no one, it seems, can put the global economy back together again. He asks: “It’s time to reboot capitalism. So…

  • Electric Bicycles: Their Time Never Came

    Some of my friends know that, hidden in my dim, dark past, I used to do something involving electric bicycles. I’m here to tell you that, yes, it’s true and it was a colorful period of my life. While I was working for then-California Controller Gray Davis, I met up with a charismatic man who…

  • Peer-To-Peer Higher Education

    My friend Sutton Stokes drew my attention to this from Ars Technica: Internet connection + English = college degree. The University of the People wants to bring online education to anyone who can speak English and access the Internet, and to do it for as little as $15 a course. The goal? A real college…

  • After Facebook

    As Facebook turned five years old last week, it marked the passage with a cute retrospective of its various profile page designs and a subdued message from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that members give virtual gifts to their friends. Facebook is a 21st century success story and is the giant in the room…

  • Experts

    Through a circuitous route, I got to thinking about experts. Seems a Ketchum PR man who’s billed as a social media expert was on his way to present on social media (natch) to a key client, FedEx, at their headquarters in Memphis. Upon landing, he tweeted: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns…

  • Institution Revolution

    Andrea Jarrell pointed out to me that, according to Inside Higher Ed, Brandeis University is selling all of the art it owns.  Says the article: “These are extraordinary times,” said a statement from Jehuda Reinharz, the university’s president. “We cannot control or fix the nation’s economic problems. We can only do what we have been…

  • The Civic Implications of Student-Centered Education

    My friend John Creighton and I have been thinking together about what it might mean for education to become far more “student centered – a trend that has already begun. Education is one of those areas that so far has been sheltered from some of the more turbulent changes taking place in society. But we…