Ian McCaig, CEO of lastminute.com gave a talk titled Innovation in a Crisis at the SPA 2009 conference, with some very interesting thoughts. For example

Labs are a research division without permanent staff, where people volunteer to participate in labs projects and can take a break from their day-to-day routine by participating in something interesting. Staff in labs rotate so that different people get to play with innovative ideas. Hack-days are intensive coding competitions that are organised to give people a break from their daily duties but also promote innovation and allow new ideas to bubble up.

Read more at: Gojko Adzic » SPA 2009: How to foster innovation in a crisis.

Anyone who has attempted to visit this site in the last week or so will have had little success. Unfortunately there was a security problem which meant I had to quickly remove the site from public access while I fixed it. I’m now pretty sure that that the underlying problem has been eradicated, and I am happy to return the site to the web once again.

I apologise for any inconvenience. Thanks for your patience.

Some visitors may have noticed that the “subscribe by email” option was not working properly, and would give an unhelpful “feedburner” error in many cases. This was very annoying, as allowing simple subscription by email as well as RSS and twitter is just the kind of convergence feature I recommend to my customers.

I have now fixed this, so please feel free to subscribe by email if that is what you prefer.

Thanks for your patience.