Innovation Blog
Monday, March 08, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Business
| Tags: market, patents, Acacia Research, design, Business Week, Rachael King, law
‘Pimp my patent’ might just be runner as an obscure digital TV channel – with exclusive membership for lawyers. Based on the USA’s cult car show ‘Pimp my ride’, patent attorneys would trawl databases for patents to buy, then sue companies who have infringed those patents. In financial innovation terms, it’s a sort of derivative market, nothing is actually made, just innovative deals made out of current legal frameworks. The presenter wouldn’t be a banker, it would be troll; where differences end and similarities begin?
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Friday, February 12, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Environment,
Technology
| Tags: renewable energy,
links,
energy,
science,
car,
economist,
engineering,
eco,
euronews
This is the year for green energy. All the main players have put there money where their mouths have been for years. We will see more and more serious, competitive, ambitious lifestyle products focused on green values. Electric cars have been a persisting favourite of this column, and finally our television screens are selling us real, cool, cheaper electric cars we can be smug to be seen in.
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Friday, February 12, 2010 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: innovation,
Mars,
Business Week
A Mars A Day, Helps You, Hmm… Make Money
“It was still a real skunkworks operation—we had one small printer, and we hand-bagged everything,” said Jim Cass, General Manager of Mars Direct. He told Business Week: “But the strategy was, ‘make a little, learn a little; make some more, learn some more.”
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Wednesday, February 03, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Business,
Technology
| Tags: digital, video, knowledge, literacy, i-Pad, innovation, management, start-up
The Wall Street Journal hits the mark with and article on finding the next iPod, and why it so difficult to exploit hit products.
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Monday, January 18, 2010 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Business
| Tags: innovation,
government,
entrepreneur,
google,
London Evening Standard,
Sergey Brin,
Russia,
Boris Berezovsky,
Putin,
Abramovitch,
Japan,
Dmitry Medvedev
Russia is aspiring to be a global force for the innovative and ambitious
“The secret of politics?” said Bismark, “Make a good treaty with Russia.” Otto von Bismark, Prussian Prime Minister, founder and Chancellor of the German Empire, knew how to separate roubles from rubble. Today, more than 100 years after Bismark, the dead dog of communism has awakened as a proud lion. Russia ended 2008 with GDP growth of 5.6%, following 10 straight years of growth averaging seven per cent.
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Thursday, January 14, 2010 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Environment,
Healthcare,
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
links,
recession,
patent,
patents,
NHS,
teamwork,
solar power
Ingenious solar-powered designs, successful products from recessions past, radical innovation in the NHS, innovation events around the UK, and more – the Grant Thornton Innovation team aims to bring you the most popular business stories and useful links each month. Here’s what we’ve been reading…
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Friday, November 20, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: Accountancy Age, awards, innovation, Bespoke, Elevate
Praised by the judges for our willingness to move with the times and engage with students, as well as our joined up thinking about how well we evolve into a cutting edge business, Grant Thornton won Best Use of Internet at the Accountancy Age Awards ceremony on Wednesday 18 November
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Thursday, November 12, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: innovation,
recession,
awards,
National Business Awards,
ASOS,
Nick Robertson,
online,
Mid-Cap Business of the year,
Retail
Find out what Nick Robertson, CEO of ASOS plc, winner of Grant Thornton’s Mid-Cap Business of the Year Award, thinks about the UK’s ability to recover from recession and how innovation will help us ‘work our way out of this recession’. Filmed interview courtesy of The National Business Awards.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: awards,
National Business Awards,
ASOS,
Nick Robertson,
Alistair Darling,
Wesleyan Assurance Society,
The Restaurant Group,
Stobart Group,
David Maxwell,
PayPoint,
Telecity Group,
Scott Barnes,
moneysupermarket.com,
Greggs,
Umeco
We are delighted to announce that ASOS are the winners of the Grant Thornton Mid-Cap Business of the Year award. Finalists for this category had to demonstrate exceptional financial returns, strong growth and innovation strategies, and market leadership in their sector. Nick Robertson, CEO of ASOS joined us at the National Business Awards final in London on Tuesday 10th November to collect their award.
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Environment,
Media,
Technology
| Tags: links,
Twitter,
robots,
TED,
climate change,
photography
This month, the Grant Thornton team has been reading about robots with smiling faces, documenting climate change using time-lapse photography and ‘tweeting’ for a taxi home…
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Wednesday, September 16, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Environment,
Media,
Technology
| Tags: entrepreneurs,
links,
Cirque du Soleil,
Innovation,
music
From the reef-like nature of innovation and new ideas, to innovation lessons from the Cirque du Soleil, here’s what the Grant Thornton Innovation team has been reading about this week…
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Tuesday, September 08, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Environment,
Media,
Technology
| Tags: government,
iawards,
James Caan,
innovation awards,
BIS
Is your organisation British and inventive? Does its innovative products, practices and projects deserve wider recognition? Then the iawards might present an interesting opportunity. They’re the first innovation awards to be backed by the British government, in conjunction with entrepreneur and BBC2 Dragon James Caan. You can nominate your own UK-registered company but you’ll have to be quick as the deadline is 16 September 2009. So, how to enter?
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Thursday, September 03, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: R&D, Tax, innovation, investment, government, funding
The Grant Thornton team is aware of revised HMRC thinking in the following areas:
Production costs
Perhaps the most significant of changes relates to HMRC’s stance on costs which relate to the production of products and services for supply to customers. HMRC’s new approach appears to prohibit claims for any production costs where there is the prospect of producing goods or services to customers, even if as part of that production the company is seeking technological advancement through the resolution of technological uncertainty. This is understood to exclude claims in respect of prototypes and ‘first of classes’ that are subsequently sold for use rather than scrapped.
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Monday, August 17, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
infographic,
global,
statistics,
chart,
World Patent Report,
patents
Who is leading the world in innovation right now? Using the latest data from the ‘World Patent Report: A Statistical Review’ (2008), Grant Thornton has charted the new world powers in innovation. The infographic shows which countries have filed the most patents for each dollar of research budget – and which ones have had the most patents granted. The results may surprise you…
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
Graham Kennedy of Alexoria discusses how our risk-averse culture and refusal to ‘fail successfully’ prevents the UK from leading on the innovation stage. Alexoria is an independent consultancy specialising in revenue generation for professional service firms and technology organisations, and improving IT in the public sector, in particular managing the IT implications of the Government’s Shared Services agenda.
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: innovation,
technology,
emerging markets,
asia
Robert Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and Iqbal Quadir, founder of MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, debate where innovation is moving in the 21st century in this week’s Mckinsey ‘Debate zone’.
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Thursday, June 25, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Healthcare
| Tags: health,
john wilden,
global healthcare
“Global Healthcare Futures (GHF) is a UK company that is the brain child of John Wilden, a former specialist and consultant neurosurgeon. GHF is developing and promoting software products for “Time to Cure” and “Cost to Cure” Common Diseases based on the advances of molecular biology and other technologies which will underpin the fast looming world of curative global healthcare, thereby ushering in a new age of diminishing healthcare costs across the developed and developing world”.
Dr Tim Evans, Chairman of Global Health Futures
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: investment,
bonds
Will King, founder of grooming product firm, King of Shaves, is asking his customers to buy £5m in bonds to finance expansion of the brand. It’s a move believed to be the first instance of a company turning directly to its customers to raise investment funds.
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Business,
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
financial,
government,
technology,
research,
energy,
university,
science,
innovators,
car
One per cent of the energy we burn driving a car is used to move the driver. In one hundred years of automotive innovation, mankind has fought financial and military battles over oil reserves; only to announce that 99% of our effort was to shift a hunk of metal. Maybe we should have kept the horses.
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Tuesday, June 02, 2009 | Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: innovation,
financial,
international,
emerging markets,
talent
“We need to reinvent ourselves and invest in innovation to compete in the emerging markets”, writes Gerard Lyons in the Sunday Times 31 May 2009
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