Nice Summer?

Well, on this unofficial last day of summer, I thought if fitting to briefly comment on the summer.  It has been an enjoyable few months and one that produced little blogs from me—my apologies.  While I was still being “innovative” and providing Product Development training and consulting, I was also enjoying time spent on other activities.  One was frequent camping trips with my family, many in my beautiful home state of Colorado.  We have a trailer complete with Internet access that has served me well everywhere we visited.

Another activity has involved more innovation – the creation of a web service for recommending great books for kids called MomsKidsBooks.  I partnered with the Bachelors of Innovation program at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.  This is a unique program that provides a rare cross-discipline education merging business and technical fields (such as computer science or engineering).  I met the director of the program, Dr. Terry Boult, at a PDMA meeting, and learned that students are often involved in “real” projects for organizations as part of their education.  My project to develop a website for MomsKidsBooks (launch is pending early 2011) was a good fit.  Dr. Boult organized a small team of students to begin coding the site, contribute graphic skills, and perform marketing functions.  It has been a very good experience for me and an educational one for the students involved.

I hope you had a great summer as well!