Risk-welcoming Distinguished visiting professor, Peter Keen, is an IT-consultant and seer for many of world’s largest companies. He’s in Delft this week to share his business world wisdom with students at the faculty of Technology, Business and Management.
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Entering the faculty of Technology, Business and Management is like stumbling on to a corporate movie set. No absent-minded TU professor types with pea soup stains on their shirtfronts around here. It’s conservative corporate wear only, conservative suits and ties, the plush carpets, potted plants and arty wall prints serving as a facsimile of the corridors of power out in the real business world.
It’s an atmosphere where Peter G.W. Keen should feel right at home. As a big-time IT consultant, Keen’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of global behemoths: Glaxo, IBM, Unilever, Citibank, British Telecom%. Keen is in Delft this week as the distinguished visiting professor for the Cor Wit changable chair, established to ‘promote awareness of the opportunities and effects of telecommunication’
Keen, the author of some 25 business-technology books, is a modern day oracle of Delphi with his own website (www. peterkeen.com). His latest book is ‘The Freedom Economy’, described by one reviewer as ,,a primer on mobile commerce (m-commerce) for business managers, describing how companies can exploit possibilities emerging from the convergence of electronic business and mobile telephony.
M-commerce, Keen asserts, is “the start of a new era in business.
To find the value, or ‘new freedom’, in m-commerce, Keen says the rule is that: “An application or service becomes a freedom, and therefore value, when it changes the limits of the possible in the structures of everyday life.” M-commerce technology is capable of bringing about this change. Mobility, he says, means freedom, which creates choice among customers and, consequently, value. E-mail, credit cards, SMS, and cash machines are all examples of past developments that have created new freedoms and changed the structures of our daily lives.
With his feet up on his desk, necktie loosened, Keen is clearly a man at ease with himself, a man who knows his own mind and isn’t afraid to speak it. In fact he gets paid handsomely to do just that, advising companies on how to exploit the latest technologies and predicting what new, new things are coming around the next business curve. Keen has served on the Harvard, MIT and Stanford faculties and brings front-line experience of the dog-eat-dog business world with him to the TU.
While in Delft, Keen gives workshops, hosts brainstorming sessions, lectures, and advises undergraduate and graduate students. And when not here in person, he does all this via state-of-the-art video conferencing equipment set up in the basement of his Washington D.C home.
Keen’s impressed by the TU’s use of decision support, using ICT to make plans and decisions. He’s also praises his faculty’s position within the TU: “The connection between the hard and soft side of the technology is excellent. Most people are good at one or the other, but seldom both. Here, students learn both sides of technology.”
Keen says that major difference between business in Europe and America is the extent to which people are willing to take risks. “Being risk-welcoming is a driver of business success,” he says. Exploiting new technologies and economies requires taking risks, and Yankee capitalists are great risk takers. Keen: “In Europe, going bankrupt is shameful, you become a social pariah. But in America, a guy with three bankruptcies on his record is more likely to get venture capital money, because it shows that he’s in the game.”
Distinguished visiting professor, Peter Keen, is an IT-consultant and seer for many of world’s largest companies. He’s in Delft this week to share his business world wisdom with students at the faculty of Technology, Business and Management.
Entering the faculty of Technology, Business and Management is like stumbling on to a corporate movie set. No absent-minded TU professor types with pea soup stains on their shirtfronts around here. It’s conservative corporate wear only, conservative suits and ties, the plush carpets, potted plants and arty wall prints serving as a facsimile of the corridors of power out in the real business world.
It’s an atmosphere where Peter G.W. Keen should feel right at home. As a big-time IT consultant, Keen’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of global behemoths: Glaxo, IBM, Unilever, Citibank, British Telecom%. Keen is in Delft this week as the distinguished visiting professor for the Cor Wit changable chair, established to ‘promote awareness of the opportunities and effects of telecommunication’
Keen, the author of some 25 business-technology books, is a modern day oracle of Delphi with his own website (www. peterkeen.com). His latest book is ‘The Freedom Economy’, described by one reviewer as ,,a primer on mobile commerce (m-commerce) for business managers, describing how companies can exploit possibilities emerging from the convergence of electronic business and mobile telephony.
M-commerce, Keen asserts, is “the start of a new era in business.
To find the value, or ‘new freedom’, in m-commerce, Keen says the rule is that: “An application or service becomes a freedom, and therefore value, when it changes the limits of the possible in the structures of everyday life.” M-commerce technology is capable of bringing about this change. Mobility, he says, means freedom, which creates choice among customers and, consequently, value. E-mail, credit cards, SMS, and cash machines are all examples of past developments that have created new freedoms and changed the structures of our daily lives.
With his feet up on his desk, necktie loosened, Keen is clearly a man at ease with himself, a man who knows his own mind and isn’t afraid to speak it. In fact he gets paid handsomely to do just that, advising companies on how to exploit the latest technologies and predicting what new, new things are coming around the next business curve. Keen has served on the Harvard, MIT and Stanford faculties and brings front-line experience of the dog-eat-dog business world with him to the TU.
While in Delft, Keen gives workshops, hosts brainstorming sessions, lectures, and advises undergraduate and graduate students. And when not here in person, he does all this via state-of-the-art video conferencing equipment set up in the basement of his Washington D.C home.
Keen’s impressed by the TU’s use of decision support, using ICT to make plans and decisions. He’s also praises his faculty’s position within the TU: “The connection between the hard and soft side of the technology is excellent. Most people are good at one or the other, but seldom both. Here, students learn both sides of technology.”
Keen says that major difference between business in Europe and America is the extent to which people are willing to take risks. “Being risk-welcoming is a driver of business success,” he says. Exploiting new technologies and economies requires taking risks, and Yankee capitalists are great risk takers. Keen: “In Europe, going bankrupt is shameful, you become a social pariah. But in America, a guy with three bankruptcies on his record is more likely to get venture capital money, because it shows that he’s in the game.”
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