You’re too Scared to Innovate

One of the best live shows that I saw during my university days was Beat Happening and Girl Trouble. All of us were a long way from home in Washington when I saw them in New Jersey. While Beat Happening was playing what I thought was a pretty mesmerising show, my friend Tom leaned over […]

Get Better Ideas, Not More

Innovation is all about executing ideas so that they have economic or social value. John and I have both talked frequently about how many firms overemphasise generating ideas when they try to increase innovation. When they make this mistake, they end up with a lot of stockpiled ideas, but the amount that they have successfully […]

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 […]

Creating Value from Information

How do we create value when we’re busy tweeting, blogging, reading and writing? I have been arguing that to create value from information, we need to have systems in place that allow us to aggregate, filter and connect information – and that this is true for people, and for business models. These are the things […]

Think ‘Network Structure’ not ‘Networking’

The biggest problem with the idea of ‘networking’ is that it is a bad idea. Why? Because as it is usually practiced, networking consists of going out and making a whole bunch of new connections, and then hoping that something good will come of them. It is much more productive to think about your position […]

We Have to Connect Ideas to Connect to People

How do we create value in a world of mash-ups, remixes and nested hyperlinks? As I keep arguing, we do it through connecting – connecting ideas together, and connecting ideas to people. This is one of the core ideas that Jaron Lanier gets at in his frustrating but good new book You Are Not a […]

The Universe, Dark Matter and New Venture Success

You have probably heard of the dark matter puzzle in astronomy. I don’t remember that much from the astronomy unit that I took as part of my science degree but dark matter is one of those big questions that just gets undergrad students thinking. Put simply, the universe is really heavy (!) but if we […]

How to Filter Better

I was at the mall yesterday eating lunch, and I took a moment to listen to the conversations going on around me. They were, without exception, utterly banal. Consequently, I concluded that conversation is a useless tool, and the widespread use of it is nothing more than a symptom of the widespread decline of intellectual […]

Personal Aggregate, Filter & Connect Strategies

A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised […]

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

The question of how to best adapt to the changes brought about by the internet is of key importance to all organisations that are in information-based industries. According to Jeff Jarvis in What Would Google Do?, the answer is fairly simple: do what Google would. Here is a video in which he outlines the argument […]

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 […]

Darwin on Twitter

Last week I talked about 19th century communication networks, Charles Darwin, and how we have had more information coming at us than we’ve known what to do with for a long time. It seems like it is a problem caused by the internet, but the roots are much deeper. I’ve also been saying for some […]