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 […]

call to action

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. -Jacob Bronowski via the outstanding book The Social Atom by Mark Buchanan My secret to success in innovation – try something (anything!). See if it works. If it does, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, figure out why and learn from it. […]

good enough

Do things always get better as they evolve? I touched on this idea recently, and I think the answer is definitely ‘No’. Now Wired has made the point for me again with an interesting article on innovations that are not big jumps forward technologically, but rather simply good enough. The idea is that some products […]

iterations

Here’s a video from the people that made the iPhone app Convert, showing all of the different versions that they tried: Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo. There are a couple of things worth noting in this. First, they experimented a lot. They generated a ton of variety, all of which would […]

the role of failure

Atul Gawande from his most recent book, Better: The third requirement for success is ingenuity – thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from […]