In his latest book Macrowikinomics, Don Tapscott (along with Anthony Williams) argues that there are two types of business models in existence today: those that have been disrupted by the internet, and those that are waiting to be disrupted by the internet (summarised in an article from the Wall Street Journal). I’m not 100% convinced […]
Can we decouple growth from consumption of resources? Guest post by: James Bradfield Moody Co-Author, The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited World Over the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution, we have seen economic growth strongly coupled with the consumption of more and more resources. The more we grew, the more […]
When I was working on yesterday’s post about the business model experiment that Kaiser Chiefs are running, I came across a quote from Paul Morley that bothered me enough to trigger this post. It’s from the discussion of the idea in the Financial Times, and Morley is suggesting that the experiment is a terrible idea. […]
I was talking with a friend tonight over dinner about the PhD that she is starting. One of the suggestions that I made was to get through the literature review and research design phase as quickly as possible. The reason for this is that data changes everything. PhD students share a common problem with inventors […]
I was talking to one of our PhD students this afternoon about his research design. He was trying to figure out how to structure his network survey to learn about how a firm that we’re working with innovates. He is particularly interested in learning about the role of trust in the evolution of innovation networks. […]
One of the key issues we face in managing organisations is the state of the environment surrounding us. Is it stable or turbulent? This has an impact on our innovation strategy. In stable environments, we can afford to concentrate just on getting better at what we’re doing. However, in turbulent environments, we need to undertake […]
The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and it doesn’t look like we expect it to When scientists first started talking about Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the discussion centred around how to best create AI that would think like people do. This view of AI has dominated […]
I’m still working my way through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. It’s a very interesting book, and nicely written. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m done. In th meantime, I’d like to share a fantastic quote from Schulz, which is in her review of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the […]
When Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at WorldCon a couple of years ago, the first question out of Krugman’s mouth was “Where are the flying cars?” Krugman asked this because he knows that science fiction authors like Stross have been imagining the future for quite a while, and that currently impossible technologies […]
Uncertainty is one thing that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Unfortunately, in most business situations, uncertainty is a fact of life. Graham Hill made an interesting response to my post yesterday about simplistic, complex and simple models. He said: The real world is complex . Most businesses simplify the complexity to ‘manage’ it. Complex […]
I was watching some MBA presentations this week, and they reminded me of a section of “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges. In this short story, Borges describes a map the size of the world (From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999): . . . In that […]
