Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation. If this is the case, how do we get better at it? I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. […]
If your business model is based on information, and whose isn’t these days, then you need to be able to aggregate, filter and connect. While reflecting on the death of Borders Books, I thought of three stories of filtering in retail. First Story: Tower Records In the mid-80s, I went in to the Tower Records […]
Anders Sundelin wrote a post earlier this week about the evolution of the business model concept. He does a great job of showing the various ways in which this idea has been operationalized – it’s still surprisingly fuzzy. For the state of the art thinking on business model innovation, a special issue of Long Range […]
Ethan Zuckerman wrote a very interesting post today called What if Search Drove Newspapers? He talks about several different initiatives designed to gauge readers’ interest in different news stories, particularly those that are currently under-reported, and then devising methods for reporting stories on these topics. He asserts (correctly, I think) that this is basically search-driven […]
Veronica Vera pointed me to a great talk by Anil Gupta from TEDIndia. He talks about grassroots innovation, and methods for getting ideas to spread in poorer regions. It’s a fascinating talk: Innovation in developing countries is a wildly unappreciated phenomenon – there are incredibly interesting things going on in places like India, China and […]
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in an innovation jam organised by Kate Morrison from Vulture Street Innovation Services – it’s been a fascinating experience. I’ve talked about jams before, but it’s been great to get deeply involved with one. I’ve been thinking about this one through the aggregate, filter and connect […]
How do we decide what our innovation strategy should be? Jeffrey Phillips says that we don’t need an innovation strategy at all, we just need a strategy, and it should have innovation embedded within it. That’s pretty consistent with what I’ve said here before as well when I talked about four different ways to integrate […]
One of the best ways to build connections within the economic network is to be an authority – and since revenue often follows connections, this is a useful strategy to consider. How do you become an authority? I’ve run across a couple of suggestions recently. First up – this from the JournaMarketing Blog (I’m not […]
We know the story by now: as it becomes less and less expensive to transfer digital content, the price firms can get for information-based products and services is being driven down. This has led to chaos in the music, news and publishing industries. So everyone in these industries is doomed, right? Wrong. I believe that […]
