David L. Peterson

International Speaker, Bestselling Author, Serial Entrepreneur, Shipwreck Survivor

Innovation ThinkTime

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Another Innovation Fail—Learn From My Mistakes

The blades on my outdoor fan broke recently. As you can imagine, the fan became unstable, which made for a very bad experience. When this happened, it was July in South Georgia, so having a working fan is imperative. Once I secured the replacement fan blades, I set about working on installing the new blades on the fan. The replacement blades came with pre-drilled holes. However, with the exception of one hole at the far end of the blade, the other two holes did not align with the pre-drilled ones. Since there were no instructions on how to properly indicate where the holes needed to be drilled, I reveled in the opportunity to come up with an innovative way to solve this problem. For my first attempt, I tried to use a Sharpie marker to make black marks on the blade where the holes …

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Moving From Information to Wisdom

One of the truly sad consequences of the Covid-19 shutdown is the cancellation of the University of Colorado’s Graduate School of Banking 2020 session. This is one of my favorite events every year, and I revel in the opportunity to meet with and instruct future banking leaders in the areas of technology, payments and innovation. One of the important points I try to drive home with my students is the need for bankers to get out of the information business (e.g., your available balance is $635.15) and move towards providing wisdom (e.g., if you purchase that large screen TV, you will overdraw your account before your next direct deposit). However, even after delivering this message for many years now, I do not see this move towards wisdom being adopted much in the financial services …

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When the Situation Demands Innovative Thinking

As positive cases of COVID-19 continue to increase, there is a drive by many politicians to retreat back into a shelter-in-place response. And yet, the economic damage the previous withdrawal from public life caused is likely to be more devastating than the effects of the virus itself. In the face of people risking their lives, something must be done to allow public activities to occur with reasonable procedures in place to limit risk. Recently, I was excited to see two stories in my news feed that showed this type of innovation is alive and well. The first story came from Montgomery, Ohio. The city leaders wanted to continue their tradition of holding a 4th of July Parade, but they knew cramming people together on the city streets to view a rolling parade would not be reasonable given …

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Someone is Paying Attention

As a result of the shelter-in-place rules, many people have set up areas where they can participate in online meetings that go beyond just activating their laptop’s camera. In fact, it has become quite common for inane conversation about the weather to be replaced by questions about the books, knick-knacks or awards that happen to be in the view of the camera. Such are the times in which we live. A person’s backdrop and surroundings are not the only critical factors in creating a great looking and sounding livestream. Also important are lighting, video quality and sound quality. Lighting is the element that most people neglect. Even though the camera quality in today’s laptops is actually quite good, there is rarely a natural light source that provides not only the proper shade and …

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Innovation — Right Where You Are

I recently highlighted my enterprising grandson, Liam, and his interest in inventing. We now have a box at our house that is filled with failed electronics and other interesting things that is set aside specifically for Liam. Sometimes he takes things apart (with permission) just to see how they are constructed. Other times he harvests pieces and parts for some other invention. I love watching him learn and invent, and I want to encourage it in any way possible. It should be noted, Liam is an American boy with many advantages over millions of children around the world. His inventions are based on personal interest, not on a need to create a life-giving result that his family may depend on for survival. And yet, we often hear stories about children in far-off places with little to no …

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