innovation system policy idea

Peter Klein just blogged about his favourite quote at the DRUID Summer Conference, from Sid Winter. One of my favourite quotes at the conference came from Peter himself, when he was discussing the three papers on eco-innovation – that people making innovation policies have to be aware of ‘the Hayek problem – can policies be […]

the spread of academic ideas

There’s an interesting post from the political blog The Monkey Cage, which describes a recent scandal with an open access academic journal. Here’s the key part of the story: Using pseudonyms, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, claiming to be researchers at the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (in case you don’t recall what phrenology […]

reasons to blog

I generally hate blog posts about blogging, so I guess I’ll hate this one. Mainly, I just want to share this terrific article from American Scientist. The main point of the article is that researchers learn their craft better by writing about it, specifically, by explaining their work to people that don’t work in their […]

science comes to the search engine wars!

I found this post on the Data Mining blog, which links to a page that compares bing, yahoo & google. The idea is that you submite a search term, and then it performs the search on all three search engines, and returns the first page of each. You can then pick which results are the […]

people building networks

I just finished reading Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt by Sean Safford. It’s a very good book. Safford compares the histories of Youngstown, Ohio and Allentown, Pennsylvania in an effort to discover why Allentown has been able to recover economically from the collapse of its primary industry […]

the best data visualisation around

The data from Hans Rosling & gapminder.org is finally available to have a play with yourself! (go to the gapminder site and click the link that says ‘gapminder world’) First off, if you haven’t seen Rosling’s first TED talk, you should watch this first: The basic idea is that you can chart a whole range […]

internet mapping project

Kevin Kelly is asking people to map the internet as they see it. He explains the idea here. And you can see all of the maps here. It’s a pretty interesting project. I asked my postgrad class this semester to do a photo essay illustrating an innovation that wasn’t a new product or service, to […]

queen’s birthday links

I hope everyone is enjoying doing whatever it is that we’re supposed to do to commemorate the Queen’s birthday. Here are a few things I’ve run across so far today: The potato gatling gun demonstrates again the difference between invention and innovation. It’s a cool thing to make, but I suspect it’ll be a while […]

business model innovation

There was an article in this weekend’s Australian Financial Review reviewing a book about myspace. The reviewer kept stressing that myspace did not invent any new technology, the implication being that the firm was not innovative. So how did it wipe out friendster? The answer, which wasn’t explored by AFR is that myspace developed a […]

visualisation

Yesterday’s post about mapumental has gotten me thinking about visualisation. Something that has always struck me as a bit of a paradox is that I’m a highly visual thinker, but I’m really bad at graphics. Which is frustrating. But one the reasons that I like network analysis so much is that it provides some really […]

mapumental

Here’s something new – mysociety.org in the UK is introducing their new service called Mapumental. It’s a dumb name, but at least they didn’t call it Mapology… In any case, the video that explains is it well worth watching: I always talk about how innovation is often simply the act of making new connections. Mapumental […]