Archives for Study - Page 3
Driver Assistance HUD – Innovation Concept
I picked a meta level problem for my innovation course project. The problem is making it easier for the driver to improve road safety. I've come up with an idea for driver assistance at service level. Too much information on the roadside - (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The idea is that you have get your driver assistance through integrating navigation, a forward facing stereoscopic camera and the WiFi from a smartphone to provide assistance to drivers. This is then linked through the cloud to other nearby vehicles. Driver Assistance What it would do is mount the cameras and projector on the dash forward of the steering wheel. The cameras would provide some sense of how close the next vehicle was, and help with other driving cues. The projector would stick a bar along the bottom of the windscreen to help the driver with speed, and…
Performance Objectives – Public Sector
Performance Objectives - Public Sector Slack et al. identify five generic performance objectives: quality speed dependability flexibility cost These generic performance objectives are explained below. There are public sector examples to help illustrate them. Quality Quality is about consistent performance. This could be meeting a product specification or about providing a superior service. In the public sector, it could be how many decisions get appealed. Or the number of letters re-drafted before being sent. Externally Quality increases customer satisfaction. Excellent services for the citizen should drive public services. Internally Quality reduces costs and increases dependability. Measurement Customer satisfaction surveys where there is a direct service to the public. Internal metrics ( redrafts or errors recorded on a case management system). Speed Speed is about minimising the time lag between a customer request and its fulfilment. This could be the time taken to reply to correspondence, or…
Innovation – what exactly is innovation?
Innovation, like strategy, is constantly talked about yet greatly misunderstood. Government and business alike talk of innovation as driving economic growth. Innovation is a Holy Grail. So what is it? What is Innovation? I think that the best definition is 'an idea that is developed and implemented to bring something new into being'. Lots of people confuse ideas with innovation. I have this great idea for a self-cleaning car. Am I not innovative? Unless you build the self-cleaning car, I don't believe that you are. Ideas are easy. We all have ideas all the time. To be innovative the idea itself does not have to be novel. However the product, service or system you develop as a result should be. The key thing is to bring something new. Incremental Innovation How new is new? It could be a very small increment over what has existed before.…
Themself – now available on kindle
Today is publication day for my latest book Themself - Confessions of an open university creative writing student. As the sub-title suggests it is about my experience of studying creative writing with the OU. Although Themself goes further than that and includes the things I've learnt from my experience of writing, studying and self publishing. Themself - Confessions of an open university creative writing student You'll find some of the content in Themself here on the blog, but only about half of it. You'll also find that I've edited it since I first published it on the blog. Although I've tried hard to keep to the original character of the contemporary blog posts about how I was feeling. The bits I've updated are where I'm summarising what I've learnt. There is also a lot of new material. All of the stories and poems…
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T317 Design and Innovation starts
My second to last open university course officially started on Friday. The course is about Design and Innovation, which I thought would be a very good thing to go into my business studies BA along with the Creative Writing I did two years ago. At the time I booked onto it I was working as a digital architect, designing digital services for the bit of the civil service I was working in. Since then I have been promoted and changed ; I'm still likely to find it useful though, just in a different way. The upshot of this course, 60 credit points at final year undergraduate level, is that I'm likely to stop reading things for pleasure for a while. So there will be fewer blog posts, and what there is may be about design or innovation. I'm expecting my…