At a SIPA Annual 2018 session last June on Creating a High-Performance Culture Across Your Company, Brian Crotty, CEO of OPIS, spoke about identifying star potential in your employees.

I still recall three years ago attending a workshop on creating data products given by Russell Perkins of InfoCommerce Group. His lets-build-an-almost-real-data-product example came from a government list of certified organic companies that sounded glowingly real and public. He showed us the list, how you can structure the data and add to it, what audience the data can serve, and how to create a product from it.

"I never thought of myself as a business person or an entrepreneur. I just initially thought of myself as an editor and wanted to have a magazine to campaign against the Vietnamese War," said Richard Branson, on a Freakanomics Radio interview recently.

Lesley Norins, vice president of Medvostat, offered a prize at the end of his session on Finding and Seizing New Topics at June's SIPA Annual 2017 Conference: a fruitful new topic. He even had a name for the newsletter: Police Video Update.

Harley-Davidson perfume. Orbitoclast lobotomy (medical instrument). Nokia N-gage. Bic for Her pen. Those are just a few of the many items in the Museum of Failure, opening this Wednesday in Helsingborg, Sweden.

I met the playwright David Ives last week. He had a Broadway hit a couple years ago with the play Venus in Fur, but he's probably better known now for his adaptations of old French farces and a very funny collection of one-act plays called All in the Timing.