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 […]
How do we fix news? We need an answer because having news reported accurately and quickly is a central part of well-functioning democracy. This makes the problems facing newspapers these critical. Arianna Huffington gave a talk yesterday at the journalism conference put together by the Federal Trade Commission in the US – here is the […]
Yesterday I wrote about how Western Union decided not to invest in telephone technology back in 1880. After posting, I sent this off over twitter: An #innovation lesson from the story of Western Union & the telephone http://ow.ly/HBvt About an hour later, that post got retweeted: Good story, good lesson: RT @timkastelle: An #innovation lesson […]
One of the points that I consistently stress in my innovation classes is that there are many forms of innovation, and that people and firms need to think about more than simply product innovation. This idea goes back at least to Schumpeter and his five forms of innovation: New product or service New method of […]
I got a new mobile phone this week, and I’ve spent a fair bit of the time since then playing around with different programs and applications that are available for it. The killer app in smart phones for me is gps tracking. Using google maps, getting turn-by-turn directions and geotagging photos and notes are all […]
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 […]
Lee Sigelman wants to know why smartphones don’t have keyboards that look like this? That’s the Dvorak keyboard, and by all (well, most) accounts you can touchtype significantly faster on one of those than you can on a qwerty keyboard. The persistence of the qwerty keyboard is the poster child for the idea of economic […]
It’s hard for birders to see albatrosses. You have to a book a boat trip, they take all day (or longer!), and there are long periods of boredom punctuated by frenzied excitement when you run across birds – which you really hope you don’t miss seeing! And even if you’re not prone to seasickness, inevitably […]
It’s been fascinating to see the reaction to the announcement that Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom will receive this year’s Nobel for economics (and if you want to argue about whether or not it’s a real Nobel, let me refer you to Felix Salmon’s take on the issue, which I endorse!). As I said yesterday, […]
Here’s a very good talk from John Temple – the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, discussing how the paper went out of business: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News – Presentation at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex in Silicon Valley from John Temple on Vimeo. (there’s a transcript of the […]
