Too often people think about things happening to them, rather than thinking about how they make things happen. Agency is important, and we must never forget that we have the capacity to act. You can see the results people can have in the current events in Tunisia and Egypt. Agency is a critical part of […]
Social influence is important to innovation. One of the critical steps in innovating is getting our great new ideas to spread – and this is often an issue of social influence. Here is an excellent short talk from network researcher Sinan Aral about how to measure social influence: Sinan Aral: Social Contagion from PopTech on […]
Here’s a persistent innovation management question: is it better to have a dedicated team responsible for innovation, or should this responsibility be distributed throughout your entire organisation? The best answer depends on your circumstances. But if you set up a dedicated team, it’s important to consider what role you want them to play. There are […]
Those of us that spend a lot of time thinking about innovation tend to view it as something that is good. After all, research shows that organisations that are more innovative are more profitable, have happier employees, grow faster, are more resilient, and have many other positive attributes. So how can you not love innovation? […]
People were using charcoal for art about 30,000 years ago. And we’ve been consciously manufacturing charcoal for at least 5000 years. Because charcoal burns hot and clean, it was the primary fuel source for making iron for quite a while, before it made its recent shift to cooking steaks on barbeques. Most of our charcoal […]
The best response to a bad idea is to make it better. When I work with people from government agencies, and also those from many large corporations, they often talk about their risk-averse culture. One of the problems with risk aversion is that if someone tries out a new idea and it doesn’t work, they […]
I’ve been working this week with two teams of MBA students that are working on a live consulting project as part of their studies. This is part of UQ’s partnership with Wharton in their Global Consulting Practicum program, which is a great initiative. This week, we were working on presentations to the clients in order […]
The economy is a network. To understand how new ideas integrate into it, we first have to understand how interconnected and interdependent it is. Here is a passage from The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith making this point (from Adam Gopnik’s good review of Smith’s work in The New Yorker): The woollen coat, for […]
The problem is, we can’t usually tell in advance which ideas are good and which aren’t. The New York Times has just published The 10th Annual Year in Ideas. As part of this, they asked Tyler Cowen to comment on the previous reviews. He noted this quote from the introduction to the piece: The 2001 […]
Here is a quote from Why The West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris – explaining some of the issues with the inter-disciplinary approach he has taken in writing the book: This courts all kinds of dangers (superficiality, disciplinary bias, and just general error). I will never have the same subtle grasp of Chinese […]
