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The Cost of Innovation

Like you, I’m in the business of creativity, of innovation.  Our clients expect innovation from us.  They may engage my firm to reposition an existing property, to create a new brand, but mostly they want a positive shift in their business.  In this Clear on Black Blog Post, I shine a light on the "Cost of Innovation".  

Most of us search for areas, methods, and places to create new and exciting innovations, and that exploration and work has brought me to an unexpected realization.  There are in fact better times to innovate than others.  What does this mean to you the hotel owner or operator?  This means that if you know the best times for high-level creativity, for game-changing thinking, for blue sky conceptual thinking, then you can seriously leverage that creativity and thinking and not risk making changes at the wrong time which adversely impact your project. 

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A Look at Hospitality Design Change from the Inside

While it’s a daily occurrence for many of us to open an industry trade journal and look at hospitality design and how it is evolving from the guest perspective, we rarely pause long enough to consider how design is evolving from the business-of-design perspective which, as the COO and CFO of my company, is the space I live in most of the time.  As I look back at 20 years of interviewing design candidates for Clear on Black, our boutique-sized firm, I see some fairly radical change in how we’re doing the business of design.

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