invention is not innovation

Here’s an invention of John Muir’s: The image is via the Sierra Club’s blog – and they describe it as a study desk that “would automatically light his lamp and fire, open the right book to study, and then change books after half an hour.” As an object, it’s ingeniusly clever. I was always aware […]

data visualisation innovation

Here’s a really nice piece of data visualisation from Dave McCandless: It’s interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s an innovative and very good approach to data visualisation. Second, Gardasil is the poster child here at UQ for the successful commercialisation of academic research – it is often used as an example in classes here […]

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 […]

innovating with constraints

I’ve been giving further thought to the issue of public sector innovation which I discussed briefly last week. John and I do a lot of work with people in the public sector as that makes up a fairly big part of Brisbane’s economy, and I know that people often find it difficult to be innovative […]

strategies for getting ideas to spread

Here’s our friend Andrew Stephen on getting ideas to spread through viral marketing: Everyone talks about how they need their ideas to go viral, and Andrew has a some excellent data on how to actually get this to happen. The key points – do something that is interesting enough that people actually want to talk […]

small pieces loosely joined

More quotes that I like – this time from Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger: Distance on the Web is measured by links, so the way to make your site ‘close’ to where your customers are is to get lots of places to point to it. How? By being interesting or worthwhile. That’s not […]

the roots of innovation

Sam & I had great meetings with a couple of our key research partners yesterday. I mentioned one of the key points that Nick raised in my last post, but two blog posts that I’ve read this morning have reminded me of his second outstanding point. We were discussing their successful implementation of a Communities […]

plan a little, implement a lot

That’s a saying that one of our research partners attributed today to Etienne Wenger, and which he said was one of the ideas that drove their successful implementation of a Communities of Practice initiative. While it is saying it in a slightly different way, I think that this supports a couple of my key ideas […]

innovative innovation research

It’s been fascinating to see the reaction to the announcement that Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom will receive this year’s Nobel for economics (and if you want to argue about whether or not it’s a real Nobel, let me refer you to Felix Salmon’s take on the issue, which I endorse!). As I said yesterday, […]

getting ideas to spread

Derek Powazek has written a post that pretty thoroughly eviscerates the idea of search engine optimisation. He starts his final paragraph this way: Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free: […]

the news value proposition

Once I start thinking about something, it often takes some time for me to move on to other topics. I have a tendency to dive relatively deeply into things that grab my attention. Which means that you get to read more about new business models for journalism. There’s a decent summary in this post, where […]