innovation motivation

Here’s a great talk from Dan Pink at this year’s TED Conference: The implications for people managing innovation are obvious, and to discuss these in too much detail here would diminish the impact of the talk. So all I’ll say is watch it, enjoy it, and then think about how you might act on it.

business models & the three horizons

Here’s a very good talk from John Temple – the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, discussing how the paper went out of business: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News – Presentation at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex in Silicon Valley from John Temple on Vimeo. (there’s a transcript of the […]

the state of media

Here’s a video from Bob Garfield discussing the main ideas in his book The Chaos Scenario: The Chaos Scenario from Greg Stielstra on Vimeo. He has a lot of stats and a lot of stories that make the point about how all of the media business models have been breaking down recently. His recommendation is […]

babbage and lovelace solve the global financial crisis!

John & I are both working on other posts at the moment, but in the meantime, this is hilarious: Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace use the Difference Engine to solve the Global Financial crisis! It’s a webcomic by Sydney Padua, and it’s fantastic. Padua touches on a lot of issues that I regularly talk about […]

leaning into change

I’ve been teaching the MBAs today so I’m pretty wiped out at this point – so I’ll let Seth Godin do the work for me tonight. I’ve watched this twice in two days now – and Seth is, as usual, right on target. His stated objective is to show people how to lean into change, […]

business models summary

With all this recent talk of business models, it is probably useful to clarify what I mean by it – business model is yet another phrase that ends up meaning different things to everyone. I use the Henry Chesbrough definition, which splits the business model into six key issues (the summary is from quickmba.com): Value […]

aggregate, filter and connect

In response to my last post, my friend Ken Katkin said “Reading your essay make me glad that: (1) I traded in the music biz for academia when I did; and (2) I have tenure!” The only problem is that the more I’ve thought about it, the more uneasy I’ve become. I keep saying that […]

higher education business models

After all this discussion of journalism, it’s only fair to turn the focus on to my current industry – higher education. Despite the fact that most academics spend a fair bit of their time trying to come up with new ideas, it is not often regarded as an overly innovative field. This is probably due […]

more news business models

Just gathering together a few loose ends concerning news business models… First off, I think that Steven Johnson’s ‘news ecosystem’ idea from his SXSW speech is a pretty useful way to think about things. Here’s one of the key quotes: But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up […]

innovation in plentiful times

One of they key drivers of an increasingly low price for many items is that we are now in a time of plenty. As the marginal cost of many technologies approaches zero, they become too cheap to meter, and effectively become free. This is another of the key ideas in Free by Chris Anderson, and […]

free news?

I keep coming back to the idea of business models in news for a couple reasons. The main one is that we are seeing a major industry being transformed right in front of us, in real time. And a critical industry at that. We’re seeing all of the issues that surround the idea of free […]