Author Archives

Tim Kastelle

Student and teacher of innovation - University of Queensland Business School - links to academic papers, twitter, and so on can be found here.

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Can Innovation Management be a Profession?

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The importance of managing innovation as a process is one of our key themes here. Because the success of any single great idea is pretty close to impossible to predict, the best way to successfully innovate is to try a lot of things, and to manage ideas through a process. If you do this, you […]

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Improve Innovations Through Iteration

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Here’s a great quote from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky: Defending yourself in advance against all the possible ramifications of success has strong diminishing returns. As a general rule, it is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something without […]

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Get Out of the Echo Chamber to Improve Innovation

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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 […]

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Innovating Meaning

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Often when we someone asks us to describe a product or a service, we tell them about features. What does it do? How does it do it? This is a mistake. Products and services are not about features – they are about meaning, and they are about getting jobs done. Here’s an example – listen […]

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The Negative Side of the Network Economy

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The negative side of the networked nature of the economy is that it is not easy to get new ideas to spread through it, even if they are good ones. Part of the problem is that before you can people to connect with your great new idea (new product, new service, new way of doing […]

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An Innovation Paradox

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David Lazer included a really interesting demo in one of his talks at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference. He was in a session talking about using the internet as a research resource, and there were about 100 people in the room. Lazer asked how many people there were under 30 years old – about 40% […]

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Why You Need an Innovation System

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I was originally going to title this post: Vampirenomics! This is because while we were in Italy, I went into several bookstores, just to check out what was there. A couple had superb business sections, but all of them had enormous vampire sections too. Some of them were translations of vampire books originally written in […]

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Different Forms of Filtering Create Different Forms of Value

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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 […]

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What’s Your Story? Three Steps to Better Presentations

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I just finished my second big conference for the year, both within the past few weeks. First I was at DRUID (the Danish Research Unit on Industrial Dynamics – a big innovation-oriented conference), then last week I was at Sunbelt XXX, the annual conference for the International Network for Social Network Analysis. I heard some […]

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What’s the Best Medium for Spreading Your Great Idea?

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I had a very invigorating meeting with Johnnie Moore while I was in London. We discussed a wide variety of interesting things, but there is one idea in particular that has stuck with me – that it is very important to develop the skill of choosing the best way to communicate your ideas. Here’s the […]

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The World Cup Desperately Requires Innovation

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Here is a quote from the FIFA spokesperson Nicolas Maingot responding to questions about the persistently horrible standard of refereeing at the World Cup: Maingot also said FIFA was investigating why the giant video screen at the Soccer City ground showed a replay of the controversial Tevez opening goal in contravention of an understanding it […]