How can you tell how well a project is going? Many types of projects have formal milestones that help you track your progress, and there are many tools available that enable project management. However, in our research group meeting yesterday, I realised that there are some informal project milestones that are just as important to […]
I have run across a few useful resources for network analysis recently, including: Mini-Course on Networks: Howard Rheingold has put together a very nice mini-course on networks and network analysis. It includes two videos where he describes the history of networks and some of the basic concepts of network analysis, links to other videos, a […]
The problem with measuring innovation is that you can’t measure innovation. This makes it a difficult thing to manage. Now obviously, organisations figure out ways to measure how innovative they are – but they usually doing it by finding metrics that approximate some part of the innovation process. The fact that our metrics are all […]
I did some media training last week, which was interesting. In the course of the morning, I had to think about the main messages I would like to communicate to people about my research. The key one is that the networks that people form within innovating groups have an enormous impact on how successfully the […]
Is google making us stupid? No. We keep hearing the argument that relying on technology makes us less smart somehow. Plato was probably the first person to make this argument. His target? Writing – his argument was: So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you […]
How do we fix news? We need an answer because having news reported accurately and quickly is a central part of well-functioning democracy. This makes the problems facing newspapers these critical. Arianna Huffington gave a talk yesterday at the journalism conference put together by the Federal Trade Commission in the US – here is the […]
Yesterday I wrote about how Western Union decided not to invest in telephone technology back in 1880. After posting, I sent this off over twitter: An #innovation lesson from the story of Western Union & the telephone http://ow.ly/HBvt About an hour later, that post got retweeted: Good story, good lesson: RT @timkastelle: An #innovation lesson […]
When Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone, he offered to sell the patent to Western Union. He knew that getting the idea to spread was the hardest part, and he figured that a big firm that was already in the communications industry would be better equipped to get the idea out there. This was part […]
Here is David Lazer’s keynote talk at the Political Networks 2009 Conference that took place recently (James Fowler’s talk is also worth watching): David Lazer at Political Networks 2009 from David Lazer on Vimeo. Lazer shows examples from a lot of state-of-the-art network research, mostly centred around politics. It gives you a pretty good idea […]
I was thinking about my talk from yesterday, and one bit that I just spontaneously threw in is probably worth expanding on. I spent a lot of this week marking assignments from my MBA students (who were an exceptionally good bunch this year). For the major assignment this year, I had them analyse their own […]
Here are the slides + audio from the talk I gave this morning for the UQ Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology‘s planning day. One of the things that they were working on was thinking about what they want their innovation culture to be, so Phil asked me along to give some thoughts on that. […]