mapumental

Here’s something new – mysociety.org in the UK is introducing their new service called Mapumental. It’s a dumb name, but at least they didn’t call it Mapology… In any case, the video that explains is it well worth watching: I always talk about how innovation is often simply the act of making new connections. Mapumental […]

follow ups

Right after talking about Google wave, I ran across this story about the release of Microsoft bing. I like to use google as an example in classes when I talk about intellectual property ideas. The google search algorithm isn’t patentable, and yet they’ve made a ton of money off of it. But I suspect that […]

mapping innovation networks

I just wrote this for the UQ Business School Alumni publication: Innovation is particularly important in turbulent economic times. As Scott Anthony points out in his upcoming book, The Silver Lining, nearly half of the current Fortune 500 companies were founded during recessions, including firms such as Bridgestone Tires, Digital Equipment Corporation, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, McKinsey […]

googlenomics

First off, I apologise for the title of the post. I’m now declaring a moratorium on all titles of anything (especially books) that end in ‘nomics’ or ‘ology’. I just wanted to get one of my own in before I started enforcing the moratorium (still not sure how I’m going to get the publishers to […]

solar business model innovation

I spent a lot of time in my talks this week discussing business model innovation. The main point is that this is often the most powerful form of innovation while also being one of the most overlooked. I ran across a great example of business model innovation today on Kevin Kelly’s blog. One of the […]

understanding innovation

Here are the slides from the talk that Mark gave at the UQ Business School Industry Breakfast yesterday: Understanding Innovation – Industry Breakfast View more Microsoft Word documents from Tim Kastelle. The people there were a bit sceptical to hear that Josiah Wedgwood is the greatest innovator in history, but in the end I think […]

the innovation spectrum

The NESTA Connect blog is probably one of the two best innovation blogs going, and Jonathan Crowley wrote a terrific post there today, which nicely summarises a lot of issues that we’ve been discussing here. He starts with this picture: which shows the spectrum of innovation. He then goes on to say that most people […]

talks – invention, innovation & business models

Here are the slides from a talk I gave this morning: Innovation Business Models View more Microsoft Word documents from Tim Kastelle. They might not make much sense as standalones – so here’s a summary of the two main points. The first is that invention and innovation are two different things. It is pretty closely […]

innovation networks

I was thinking again about the discussion here last week about fuzzy concepts – in particular that of networks. In that post, I was trying to get at the value of the network concept for economic analysis. Neil Kay made an interesting point in the comments – which was that you could substitute the word […]