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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the long tail for restaurants…

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… doesn’t exist, does it? Well, it exists, but how can you get to it? I was thinking about that today while Nancy and I had a fantastic lunch at a Japanese noodle place called Ganbaranba in Cairns. We’ve run across four classes of Asian restaurants in Australia, and you can divide them up by […]

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biomimicry

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One of the more interesting ideas I’ve run across recently is that of biomimicry. The basic concept is that the best way to find sustainable innovative ideas is to mimic natural processes as much as possible. There are a wide range of r&d projects going on in this field at the moment, like trying to […]

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fat tails

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Here’s a fat tail for you – technorati tracks the ‘authority’ of blogs, which is basically measured by how many other blogs link to yours in a post. We got linked to by my friend Mike Lupica, increasing the authority of this blog from 0 to 1. Which meant that the ranking of this blog […]

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the value of executing ideas

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This addresses the other part of my ideas post, and does quite succinctly: Talking about your work does not directly improve the actual quality of your work. Ultimately design happens in the world and in your hands, and not in your mouth. That’s from an interview with designer Jack Schulze. The other quote that’s been […]

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albatrosses v. salmon

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I think that last Friday’s post on ideas being cheap ended up being less clear than I had hoped. Ironically, it’s because I tried to tackle too many ideas at once – which supports my main point, but which detracted from my ability to make it! So I’m going to have another go at just […]

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meandering through an idea or two…

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When Paul Krugman writes a blog post that is more academically oriented, he always labels it as ‘wonkish’ in an attempt to protect his general interest readers. So in that spirit, this post is ‘wonkish’. Very wonkish. Which is ironic given my exhortation for clarity yesterday, but that’s the way it goes… I quite like […]

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getting ideas to spread

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I ran across an interview with David Foster Wallace on Salon from just after Infinite Jest came out. It included this quote about the state of Literature: If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have […]

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lotsalinks saturday!

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Here’s another twist on the business models for artists meme. A. Koford has been drawing a fantastic web cartoon featuring the Laugh Out Loud Cats, two cats that look like depression-era hobo comics characters, but who speak LOLcat. It sounds screwy, but works beautifully. Check out the site – All of the comics are freely […]

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newspaper innovation??

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When I was writing about Kristin Hersh the other day I asked why the record labels weren’t able to come up the new music business model that she’s using. I’m still a bit perplexed by this. Similarly, there’s been lots of talk recently about how newspapers find themselves in a pretty unfavourable position these days […]

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persistent economic ties

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There’s been a bit of a slow roll through the (mostly) academic blogs discussing a recent paper by Bronnenberg, Dhar & Dube from The Journal of Political Economy called “Brand History, Geography, and the Persistence of Brand Shares”. Here’s the abstract: We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer […]