February, 2015

Toys-to-life games and toys: from Skylanders to LEGO Fusion

Toys-to-life refers to a relatively new category of games and related toys that was born as recently as 2011 with the release of Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. It has been a spectacularly successful category, with the Skylanders franchise alone surpassing $3 billion in sales.

As of late, there have been many new entrants to the competition, so it is a good time to take a look at what toys-to-life games are all about, what kinds of offerings there are on the market, and where the market may be headed.

Continue reading “Toys-to-life games and toys: from Skylanders to LEGO Fusion”

What are we really trying to teach children via computing?

Teaching children computing is all the hype nowadays. The forerunners, such as the UK and Estonia, have already started, with other countries, such as Finland and South Korea, not far behind.

The public discussion in Finland has mainly focused on how children will be taught coding. However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding on what this future subject is about according to its most vehement proponents.

In this post, I will examine what exactly we want to teach children via computing, and whether teaching computing is a good way to accomplish this goal.

Continue reading “What are we really trying to teach children via computing?”

Finland is building and dismantling its data infrastructure

There is an intriguing paradox going on in Finland. The country is hoping to become a key data center location in the digital world (and not without merit), but at the same time the infrastructure needed to access that digital world by the end users is in many places being demolished. Is this a viable path?

Continue reading “Finland is building and dismantling its data infrastructure”

How to change corporate culture to be more open to change

Change management is hard. As a general rule, change adoption rarely, if ever, happens overnight by simply adding a new process or technology and holding a few training sessions.

In a recent blog post (in Finnish only, sorry), Marko Suomi argued that people in organizations in general act according to the technology adoption lifecycle: some are very enthusiastic about new changes whereas others are much slower to adopt them. It is important to note that the enthusiasm of individuals varies between changes too: even a person who is generally an innovator usually does not adopt all changes first.

In this post, I wish to delve a bit deeper into how changes are adopted in organizations and what the management can do about it.

Continue reading “How to change corporate culture to be more open to change”

Times change, can your company change with them?

The world is changing at an increasing pace. There is even some evidence pointing to that, such as the 2012 Innosight study that discovered that the lifespans of top companies have shrunk considerably over the years.

What has been most alarming for many managers is that plenty of companies have not been able to rebound after the Great Recession. With the Great Recession as a convenient cover story for years, it has been easy to miss that some companies are able to succeed regardless, and all poor performance does not result from the recession. Yet, companies can suffer from poor performance even if they have not become any worse. How is that possible?

Continue reading “Times change, can your company change with them?”

Continuous improvement is about small steps: case LinkedIn

I am currently taking Kevin Werbach’s course on gamification on Coursera and in one of the lectures there he presented a real gem of continuous improvement: LinkedIn’s profile completeness meter.

Continue reading “Continuous improvement is about small steps: case LinkedIn”