It started snowing this morning, and hasn’t stopped. I didn’t expect to see several inches by this evening, but that’s what we’ve got.

I went to the conference for a morning session on innovation systems; it was interesting to compare attempts to build systems here to ones I’ve seen or been involved with in Silicon Valley, thought reading John Kay’s Obliquity has made me skeptical of all attempts to reduce things as complex as innovation and entrepreneurship to a set of business processes. However, that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t keep trying to work on these issues, just that we need to recognize that our best efforts are likely to move the needle just a little.

I confess I didn’t know much about the Mobile Life Centre, but was quite favorably impressed with it. There’s a neat group of students, and several really great senior researchers, including a couple who’ve had close ties to Microsoft Research.

After that I met Heather and had lunch in a pizza and kebab place in Gamla Stan.

It was unexpectedly huge, so instead of eating out, after going to the Royal Palace and the medieval museum, we had coffee at Coffeehouse by George, bought some bread and cheese at NK, and had dinner in our room. Between Heather having a bit of a cold and it being freezing cold outside, a quiet evening inside seemed like the thing.

Our hotel room, by the way, has been quite nice: it’s essentially a studio apartment, with a little kitchen, and one of those slightly mysterious European bathrooms (what do people have against showers that don’t spill water everywhere)?

We leave Stockholm tomorrow morning, and head back to England. Then we have Saturday to ourselves, and Sunday the kids arrive for a week.