open education

Here are the slides + audio from a talk that I gave this morning as part of UQ Teaching and Learning Week. It was for a panel discussion on what it means to be open in the context of higher education. It runs for just over 13 minutes. Press the green button in the middle […]

synthesis & connecting

Jeffrey Phillips writes a really nice innovation blog called Innovate on Purpose. One of his recent posts concerns the importance of synthesis, where he says: What should be obvious is that one of the most important skills from an innovation perspective is the act and insight of synthesis. This is a real challenge, because most […]

splitting and lumping

It’s hard for birders to see albatrosses. You have to a book a boat trip, they take all day (or longer!), and there are long periods of boredom punctuated by frenzied excitement when you run across birds – which you really hope you don’t miss seeing! And even if you’re not prone to seasickness, inevitably […]

Cory Doctorow’s great experiment

We already know that giving stuff away can be an important part of building an effective revenue generation mechanism – and it seems to work quite well in publishing in particular (even academic publishing!). Two of the strongest proponents for giving away some version of work for free are Seth Godin and Cory Doctorow, and […]

news business model summary

I just made a new page with links to some of the posts we’ve had here that people have seemed to like. It’s there for people that are new to the blog to get a feel for some of the topics that we cover here, but also as a pointer to some of the more […]

connect, connect, connect!

The way I see it, there are three primary ways to make money in business models that are built around information-based assets – aggregating, filtering and connecting. Previously, I have discussed aggregating and filtering in some detail – now it’s time to think about connecting. In a recent post on the Harvard Business Review Editors’ […]

business models summary

With all this recent talk of business models, it is probably useful to clarify what I mean by it – business model is yet another phrase that ends up meaning different things to everyone. I use the Henry Chesbrough definition, which splits the business model into six key issues (the summary is from quickmba.com): Value […]

aggregate, filter and connect

In response to my last post, my friend Ken Katkin said “Reading your essay make me glad that: (1) I traded in the music biz for academia when I did; and (2) I have tenure!” The only problem is that the more I’ve thought about it, the more uneasy I’ve become. I keep saying that […]