We have a few pieces of blog news to share today, and one request.

First up, we’re very pleased that Kevin Hendry is going to join us for a while as a guest author. Kevin has had a significant influence on both John and me. He is an expert on corporate strategy and governance. He has a wide range of work experience, including a long stint as a Vice President and Managing Director at Monsanto, a Director at Competitive Dynamics, and an interesting mix of consulting and teaching in recent years.

Kevin works with John in the delivery of the Strategy in Action Executive Education courses, and they also collaborate on research and consulting.

Kevin has one of the best business minds that I’ve ever run across, and we’re thrilled to have him contributing here.

The second announcement is that my edited book, Handbook of the Knowledge Economy, Volume 2 is due out at the end of the month. I edited this with David Rooney and Greg Hearn, and I’m very pleased with the way it turned out.

If you follow the link you can see the full Table of Contents. There are some terrific chapters in it. John has one with our PhD student Sam MacAulay on using social network analysis in innovation studies, there is a good one from Roland Harwood and David Simoes-Brown (both from 100Open) on Open Innovation, and cracking chapters from Jason Potts, Richard Lanham, and Neil Kay as well. I’ve contributed one on digital business models, which uses the aggregate, filter and connect framework developed here on the blog.

The chapters are a mix of practical and academic, and the book will probably be a bit dry for many of you. And as is often the case with academic books, the pricing is structured more for libraries than it is for people. But if enough libraries buy it, a more reasonably-priced paperback edition should be released. I’ll be sure to let you know when that happens.

Finally, I have a favour to ask. If you haven’t connected up with me yet on LinkedIn, please do so – my profile is here. The favour I’d like to ask is this: if you’ve enjoyed reading the blog, could you please write a recommendation for my work here on LinkedIn? I’m starting to work on trying to get a book contract for the work around The Innovation Matrix. Since this one will be targeted at you more than libraries, it would be great to be able to show that the work here has been useful.

Thanks for the help!

And thanks for all of the tweets, comments and other help that all of you have given us here since we started the blog. It’s been great to see people respond to and interact with our ideas here. We really appreciate all of the support that we have received.