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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Networks and the Information Glut

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Everyone knows that we’re living in a time of unprecedented access to information, right? Personally, I’m always a bit skeptical of these grand narratives. To see why, watch this short video showing the social networks of correspondence among 18th Century scientists: It’s great research that illustrates some important points: When we talk about ‘social networks’ […]

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Innovation Diffusion Lessons from Edison

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How do we win with innovation? I’ve been arguing strongly that one of the key changes in thinking that we have to make is shift from an emphasis on the importance of ideas to one on the importance of execution. In other words, instead of spending so much time trying to have ideas, we’d be […]

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Craft or Scale? An Innovation Dilemma

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In December of 1992, there were 50 websites on the internet. A year later, when they started building Yahoo, we had jumped to 623. So if you were going to build a search engine, what would be the best way to index things? Actually, at the time there weren’t any search ‘engines’ – we’d go […]

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The Best Innovation Opportunity Ever!

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We are facing the best innovation opportunity in the history of business right now, and everyone is missing it. The sector that provides the best opportunity for innovation right now is older adults. And you can tap into this market with one fairly simple change to your business model. My wife Nancy is a geropsychologist. […]

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Oh, the Academics & the Managers Should be Friends

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If I gave you the choice between two training courses – How to Use Twitter for Business or Principles of Social Media, which would you rather take? Now, let’s say it is 2004, and your choices are How to Use Friendster for Business or Principles of Social Media – which of those would you rather […]

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Using Jams to Select Ideas

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I have talked a couple of times recently about some results from the assignments in my MBA class this year. In assessing the Innovation Value Chains within their firms, 3 out of 60 identified their organisation as ideas-poor, while the other 57 had bigger problems with idea selection and idea execution. The paradox is that […]

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Networks for Design Driven Innovation

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How do we come up with substantially new products, services and ways of doing things? When we are able to do this well, innovation provides our organisations with difficult to replicate competitive advantages. Yesterday, I talked about some of Roberto Verganti’s ideas in this regard in his book Design-Driven Innovation. One of the key points […]

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Design Driven Disruption

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This morning I thought of yet another way to talk about the incremental-radical innovation spectrum. Incremental innovations help you do things better, while radical innovations help you do things differently. If you follow the prescriptions in most business books, even when talk about having a radical message, you will end up doing things better. Actually, […]

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My Theme for 2010

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Here is a quote from R. Buckminster Fuller that sums up my theme for 2010: You never change things by fighting the existing model. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. I’m not big on resolutions, but I like Steve Shapiro’s ideas for building a New Year’s Theme. So […]

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Expand Your Sphere of Controversy to Improve Innovation

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One of the biggest barriers to innovation that I see in firms is this: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” I’m sure you’ve heard it yourself – when I hear people say that it just drives me crazy. It’s always used as a way to kill a new idea. I ran across an interesting […]