I Was Wrong

When is the last time that you wrong? Hugely, spectacularly wrong? I’m wrong a lot. I’ve learned to live with it. Here’s an example of one of my biggest mistakes – the fundamental premise in my PhD research was completely wrong! I had an idea when I read a paper by M. Angeles Serrano and […]

Where You Are Still Matters

Yesterday I got fed up with reading about music-sharing services like Pandora and Spotify, because neither is currently available in Australia – quite frustrating. After some hunting around, I finally found deezer.com, a French music-streaming site.* I listened to the Punk Rock radio channel on the site, and discovered a fair number of French bands […]

The Value Proposition in Business Models

Anders Sundelin wrote a post earlier this week about the evolution of the business model concept. He does a great job of showing the various ways in which this idea has been operationalized – it’s still surprisingly fuzzy. For the state of the art thinking on business model innovation, a special issue of Long Range […]

Which Part of Your Business Model is Creating Value?

Andrew Keen posted a fascinating interview with Jeff Jarvis yesterday. All of the interview clips are worth watching – they touch on a number of interesting topics, including the relative benefits of publicness and privacy, the future of news and how to best develop new business models for journalism, why google struggles with social applications, […]

Get Out of the Echo Chamber to Improve Innovation

Ethan Zuckerman’s great talk from this week’s TED Global conference was just posted – it is well worth watching (the notes for the talk are here on Zuckerman’s blog): This talk raises an important general point – if we want to be good global citizens, we need to be making more of an effort to […]

Different Forms of Filtering Create Different Forms of Value

Ethan Zuckerman wrote a very interesting post today called What if Search Drove Newspapers? He talks about several different initiatives designed to gauge readers’ interest in different news stories, particularly those that are currently under-reported, and then devising methods for reporting stories on these topics. He asserts (correctly, I think) that this is basically search-driven […]

Innovation Through Prototyping and Experiments

I’ve talked before about the importance of experiments in the innovation process. Experiments are essential for two reasons. First, they allow us to be more confident that our ideas will work. If we run a successful small experiment, that gives us some idea of how the innovation might work as we try to scale it […]

Grassroots Innovation

Veronica Vera pointed me to a great talk by Anil Gupta from TEDIndia. He talks about grassroots innovation, and methods for getting ideas to spread in poorer regions. It’s a fascinating talk: Innovation in developing countries is a wildly unappreciated phenomenon – there are incredibly interesting things going on in places like India, China and […]

What’s the Best Idea?

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in an innovation jam organised by Kate Morrison from Vulture Street Innovation Services – it’s been a fascinating experience. I’ve talked about jams before, but it’s been great to get deeply involved with one. I’ve been thinking about this one through the aggregate, filter and connect […]

Five Forms of Filtering

We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting. The three steps interact and reinforce each other – and successful information-based business models have all three. We can undertake business model innovation by changing our methods in these three areas, or by changing where […]

Innovation Vision

How do we decide what our innovation strategy should be? Jeffrey Phillips says that we don’t need an innovation strategy at all, we just need a strategy, and it should have innovation embedded within it. That’s pretty consistent with what I’ve said here before as well when I talked about four different ways to integrate […]

Putting in the Hours

When I was in university I spent a whole lot of time at the campus radion station. I started out as a trainee DJ in the first semester. I was in the practice studio constantly, spinning records, making segues from one cut to the next, talking on the microphone and taping it so I could […]