Innovation Blog
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 | Total Views: 6020
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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Monday, August 17, 2009
| Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
infographic,
global,
statistics,
chart,
World Patent Report,
patents | Total Views: 3684
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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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
| Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Media,
Technology
| Tags: Innovation,
Facebook,
Bill Gates,
Mark Zuckerberg,
Ross Perot,
Steven Levitt,
social networking,
Social media,
Superfreakonomics,
Economist Innovation Award,
billionaire,
award,
Microsoft,
Google | Total Views: 3536
Mark Zuckerberg has a huge problem – what’s he going to do next? This year’s Economist Innovation Award winner, the 24-year old billionaire creator and Facebook CEO, may have peaked too early. Until Facebook develops an application to tell the future, the profile of another Ivy League drop-out, entrepreneur and programmer provides some insight. Zuckerberg may be the next William Gates III – energetic, opportunistic, commercially savvy.
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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 | Total Views: 3474
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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Friday, August 07, 2009
| Posted by: Brian Maguire
| Total Views: 3004
Summer in Paris, it’s no picnic this year. Last month’s Paris Air Show was as exciting as yesterday’s croissant; and EasyJet have flattened aeronautic soufflés, scaling down new aircraft acquisition. As President Sarkozy likes to say: “I feel… little… faint…”
Carla arrived at L’Hospital on a motorcycle; it was certainly more chic than an entree with a police car. But what if Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had a ‘Skycar’?
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Thursday, May 28, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Environment
| Tags: innovation,
government,
renewable energy,
national grid,
biogas | Total Views: 2816
National Grid’s Head of Sustainable Gas Group, Janine Freeman, discusses their approach to innovation, including the opportunities and hurdles surrounding their quest to meet sustainable energy targets. In particular, she offers insight into the potential for injecting Biogas – the innovative renewable energy source – into National Grid pipelines. Compiled of the UK’s various waste streams, Biogas has the potential to simultaneously cut methane and carbon emissions, boost renewable energy capacity and provide a domestic replacement to waning North Sea gas reserves.
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Monday, September 14, 2009
| Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Media,
Technology
| Tags: technology,
FT,
Twitter,
fashion,
Dell,
IFA,
Ralph Lauren,
pay-per-click,
Samsung,
consumer technology,
Netbook,
Sascha Pallenberg,
3-D home cinema,
Berlin,
The Times,
Scott Schuman,
The Sartorialist,
Gap, Blogging | Total Views: 2696
Berlin’s brand ‘n’ blog gateway opened to a flood of technology innovation last week. The annual IFA, one of the world’s largest tech exhibitions, served as the launch pad for streams of new consumer devices, not least of which is the 3-D home cinema experience. At the hotdog stands, the buzz was all about Samsung’s giant exhibition space, the heart of which was a thirty metre tall entertainment dome. It was all very sci-fi, and I’m still not sure if there was a point to it, other than to elicit hundreds of thousands of “Wow” sounds from visitors, and to create a buzz, around the hotdog stands.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: Accountancy Age, awards, innovation, Bespoke, Elevate | Total Views: 2695
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, June 25, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Healthcare
| Tags: health,
john wilden,
global healthcare | Total Views: 2504
“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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Tuesday, August 25, 2009
| Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
chart,
Twitter,
investors,
conversation,
inventors,
real-time,
StreamGraph,
graph,
Neoformix,
invention | Total Views: 2482
Innovators, investors and inventors – and, no doubt, lots of other types beginning with ‘I’ – need to keep their ear to the ground. How can you do that in a fun way? With this new Twitter infographic, you can tune into real-time conversation just by typing in a keyword.
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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 | Total Views: 2398
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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Friday, April 24, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Technology
| Tags: innovation | Total Views: 2330
Marie Wold discusses the drivers of innovation at OnRelay, including the role of stakeholders, the financial gains, and ultimately the thrill of developing new technologies. Marie founded OnRelay, a software company specialising in fixed mobile convergence – an innovative technology integrating mobile phones into fixed telephony networks, 9 years ago.
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Monday, July 27, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
technology,
research,
global,
intellectual property,
university,
science,
europe,
engineering,
robots,
defence | Total Views: 2294
http://www.wordle.net/
21st Century Western defence systems are based on Sun Tzu’s assertion: “The art of using troops is this…when ten to the enemy’s one, surround him.”
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Tuesday, June 02, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business
| Tags: innovation,
financial,
international,
emerging markets,
talent | Total Views: 2081
“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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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
| Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Business,
Environment,
Media,
Technology
| Tags: links,
Twitter,
robots,
TED,
climate change,
photography | Total Views: 2038
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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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 | Total Views: 2035
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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Thursday, May 21, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Media,
Technology
| Tags: innovation,
media,
technology,
digital | Total Views: 2021
Alex Johns, MD of iblink left his job with Siemens 3 years to start up iblink which filled the niche created by technologists who knew a lot about technology and less about marketing and marketeers who knew a lot about marketing but little about technology. Today iblink is an award winning digital marketing business with a number of blue chips clients such as Titan, Superdrug, Bluewater, P&G and Unilever.
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
| Posted by: Grant Thornton
Categories:
Business,
Education
| Tags: government,
intellectual property,
teri willey,
cambridge enterprise,
ip laws | Total Views: 1998
Turning great science concepts into commercial reality.
Teri Willey, Chief Executive, Cambridge Enterprise spoke with a Grant Thornton representative at the Economist ‘Innovation Island’ conference. Tasked with leading innovative research oriented companies to commercial success, Willey said it is important to shield innovators from excessive managerial constraints, to let them ‘do the science’ then lead them through financial and governance processes. She bolsters Britain’s claim to be a leading centre of innovation, saying our overall approach provides an opportunity to leap ahead of the United States, her home nation.
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Friday, July 10, 2009
| Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories:
Education
| Tags: innovation,
financial,
media,
government,
entrepreneur,
university,
india,
car,
talent | Total Views: 1946
Neutron Jack is back. Jack Welch, General Electric’s supercharged former CEO, is putting formidable wealth right next to his informative mouth, launching a new online MBA which he claims will compete with bricks and mortar programmes.
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Friday, March 27, 2009
| Posted by: Brian Maguire
| Tags: india,
sir roger bone,
car industry,
boeing uk,
biofuels,
tata,
aerodynamics,
ryanair,
nano,
federal reserve | Total Views: 1938
Small, is the new big. Tata Motors is combusting old car industry models with the launch of its petite Nano – a car so small you can put it on your credit card. News of the Nano got analysts engines running a little faster, which was a surprise, given that the Nano is to be made in India. Its tiny price point, at about $2000, is the spark set to revolutionise our concept of value – this will be the most important product pitch in a generation.
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