One of my secret pleasures is Ken Burns documentaries. Ever since I saw his breakthrough work on the American Civil War about 20 years ago I have been mesmerized by his careful and beautiful use of images, narrative, music and cinematography (another innovation). It doesn’t really matter what the topic is… the Lewis and Clark […]
Strategy is a big and complicated area of business theory so its nice to simplify things a bit sometimes. My favorite simple theory of innovation strategy is what I call the salami theory. The idea of the salami theory came from my days (some time last century) in a share house while studying a science […]
We have been writing a bit about innovation strategy lately. While innovation and strategy are often poorly connected in the literature and in organisations, a real connecting point between the two is taking an evolutionary approach to both. In other words, if we manage both strategy and evolution as evolutionary processes of variation, selection and […]
Tim has written a bit on Charles Darwin so I thought I would follow along this them with another idea. As Tim says, the first big test of Darwin’s radical ideas on the formation of new species was a presentation to the Linnean society. Darwin’s supporters chose the Linnean society because of its preeminence in […]
Last week I was a panelist on an event hosted by CEDA on the topic of strategy after the global financial crisis. One particular theme that came out of the discussions was a reduced reliance upon prediction and planning. This is significant becuase traditionally, this is what strategy is all about. There was some recognition […]
One of my favorite debating points in my MBA class is the limited usefulness of regulation to promote fair competition and stimulate economic growth at the same time. While competition is a good thing, achieving it through regulation usually stifles innovation. Of course, this is a complex area of economic policy that stirs up very […]
Tim does a really nice talk on the invention of the computer and he has posted the slides on this blog. While he uses the story to discuss the difference between innovation and invention, I think there are a lot of other really interesting lessons here. Firstly, I’d like to add to Tim’s story by […]
About three years ago, Gerald Marion, a friend from the Brisbane office of Deloitte, introduced me to a book called the Alchemy of Growth. This is an interesting book and one of its main ideas is that there are three horizons for developing new business opportunities. Its a reasonably simple idea with Horizon 1 being […]
A significant component of economic activity in Australia is carried out in the sector of capital goods. Compared with our knowledge of innovation in consumer goods, capital goods are a poorly understood part of the Australian economy. Broadly speaking, capital goods can categorized as follows (Acha et al. 2004): (a) Constructs required for production of […]