Regulate or Innovate

One of my favorite debating points in my MBA class is the limited usefulness of regulation to promote fair competition and stimulate economic growth at the same time. While competition is a good thing, achieving it through regulation usually stifles innovation. Of course, this is a complex area of economic policy that stirs up very […]

more news business models

Just gathering together a few loose ends concerning news business models… First off, I think that Steven Johnson’s ‘news ecosystem’ idea from his SXSW speech is a pretty useful way to think about things. Here’s one of the key quotes: But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up […]

innovation in plentiful times

One of they key drivers of an increasingly low price for many items is that we are now in a time of plenty. As the marginal cost of many technologies approaches zero, they become too cheap to meter, and effectively become free. This is another of the key ideas in Free by Chris Anderson, and […]

free news?

I keep coming back to the idea of business models in news for a couple reasons. The main one is that we are seeing a major industry being transformed right in front of us, in real time. And a critical industry at that. We’re seeing all of the issues that surround the idea of free […]

the price of free leads to innovation

I just finished reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. As usual, Anderson takes ideas that have been out there a while and packages them in an insightful and valuable way. I’m a bit late to the party, so there has already been plenty of reaction to the book. Much of […]

4 rules for managing your network

Here are the slides with audio for the talk I gave this morning at the Brisbane AusBiotech breakfast meeting. Hit the green ‘play’ button in the middle to get it started. It runs for about 18 minutes. 4 Rules for Building Your Network View more presentations from Tim Kastelle. Kate Morrison from Vulture Street Innovation […]

presentation innovation

I’ve been pushing Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide-ology by Nancy Duarte to anyone that will listen for about a year now. The two books both advocate making presentations that are more than simply slide after slide of bullet points. This year, I’ve given my MBA classes the task of doing presentations more in […]

your new idea is ruining everything!

Here is a bit from a superb interview with linguist Dennis Baron about the impact of new technologies on communication: Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we […]

rules for positive deviance

Atul Gawande ends his latest book Better with a set of rules for positive deviance. This is building on the idea that performance in most fields follows a bell curve, and that if you want to end up in the good tail, you need to take steps to deviate from the norm in that direction. […]

business ecosystems

One topic that is guaranteed to get my classes fired up is Apple. They’re great to use as an example because they elicit a strong reaction. Consequently, I’ve been giving some thought to some of the issues surrounding iPhones, particularly as they relate to other 3g phones, like Google’s Android-based phones. Whatever you might think […]

cargo cults

Jeff Veen paraphrases Picasso with ‘Good designers copy, great designers steal’. Since innovation is in large part finding new combinations, I think that Veen’s point applies to innovation as well as design. He expands the Picasso quote to include a similar statement from TS Eliot, saying a great poet that steals ‘welds his theft into […]

systems thinking

Recently I’ve been running into a bunch of things that say what I want to say so clearly themselves that I don’t really need to add much. The most recent is this essay by Don Norman on systems thinking in product/service design, which includes: No product is an island. A product is more than the […]