A Patent is Not a Business Model

A patent is not a business model, and we need to stop acting like it is. One of the statements at the Australian Association of Angel Investors Annual Conference that really rubbed me the wrong way came from a person in a university technology transfer office who said something like: “Open innovation is dead. It […]

See Things Differently

I ran across this story earlier this week about Ludwig Wittgenstein in an otherwise awful piece by Paul Monk in The Australian: A student says to Wittgenstein, “You know, it’s really not surprising that people believed for so long that the sun revolves around the earth, because it looks like that is what happens.” To […]

Designing Espresso Innovation

Here are some thoughts on ‘design-driven innovation’ versus ‘design as making things look cool’: Design-Driven Innovation – Nespresso from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. And here are some related points: We often think of design as making stuff look cool, but when we talk about design-driven innovation, we’re actually talking about creating new categories of goods […]

Building an Entrepreneurial Network

What is the biggest challenge facing an entrepreneur? There’s coming up with a great idea, which can be hard. There’s finding funding, which is definitely a challenge. There’s getting your idea to work, and we’ve been arguing here for quite a while that execution is critical. But I think that the biggest challenge is actually […]

Financing Innovation: Report from the AAAI Conference

We keep talking about how it’s not enough to just have good ideas, we have to execute them to turn them into innovations. A lot of good ideas can be tested on a small scale to see if they’ll work, but many ideas need a fair bit of cash to execute. If you work in […]

Aggregate, Filter & Connect for Smaller Firms

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 […]

New Ideas in Old Systems

The fundamental point that I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that most of us are facing the same innovation problem: it is extremely difficult to get new ideas to spread within most organisations. We are a bit deceived because we hear about innovation at Google, and 3M, and Apple, and we think […]

I Have No Idea How the iPad Will Do!

With all the feverish discussion and prognostication about Apple’s preview of the iPad, I want to be the first person online to make this prediction: I have absolutely no idea how the iPad will perform. I’ll go one step further – neither does anyone else. The benefit of making predictions right now is that if […]

Low Tech Innovation

At start of my innovation courses, students often think that if their organisation isn’t inventing iPads, then they clearly aren’t (and can’t be) innovative. I end up spending a lot of time trying to help them see the many opportunities available for innovation, even within industries that appear to be pretty tightly constrained. In many […]

Changing the Game for News

A lot of people have been talking recently about a Harris Poll that shows that 77% of people in the US say that they won’t pay for online news. Specifically, this is the question they were asked: How much, if anything, would you be willing to pay per month to read a daily newspaper’s online […]

Craft-Based Business Models

Today I talk about how you can use a craft-based approach to business model innovation: Craft-Based Business Models from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. The key point is that you can create space for yourself, even in a crowded market, by doing something incredibly well. I use some more examples from the music industry. Here’s the […]

Amazon’s Business Model Innovation

I thought I’d experiment with a video blog entry. I’ve got no editing software here, so everything was straight to tape. Well, straight to bits. Anyway, if it seems to work ok I’ll scale it up! It runs for five minutes. Amazon & Business Model Design from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. To summarise my main […]