Forget Products – Think Ecosystems

A colleague has just forwarded the brilliant ‘burning platform’ memo from Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop. If you haven’t read the entire memo to Nokia employees, you can link to a report here. It’s a brutal self-assessment that could be a turning point for Nokia. Learning often starts with a statement of “I don’t know” and […]

Enough of the Commercialization Gap Myth (Already)!

Saul Eslake is one of Australia’s most respected bank economists. In his tenure as the Chief Economist at the ANZ bank, Eslake’s analysis and forecasts were usually on the mark. He also enjoys a reputation for having a razor-sharp intellect and a balanced attitude to life. We both share a connection to the University of […]

Jane McGonigal Innovates Productivity

On a day when the postperson yet again failed to deliver Jane McGonigal’s new book, Reality is Broken, I ran across a video that she made late last year, which is excellent. I know that research shows that videos around 1 minute long are by far the most popular in blog posts, so it might […]

Sustaining Your Small World Network

Two weeks ago I wrote a post on what the research is saying about small world networks and how these networks can make groups innovative. Just to recap, there has been a great deal of progress in network science that allows us to understand how large groups that don’t appear to have many connections relative […]

Innovating in an Emergency

It’s now two weeks since the beginning of the flood emergency in Brisbane. Somehow it doesn’t seem like two weeks. The first two days were pretty much a blur with trying to get my family to higher ground and then moving furniture and other stuff upstairs above the predicted flood level. I was lucky because […]

Is Your ‘Small World’ Network Too Small?

If you are new to this blog, you may not know that Tim and I are business school academics with a particular research interest in networks (person to person) and innovation. We have a few other research interests but this is where we spend most of our time with our doctoral students and industry collaborators. […]

Natural Innovation

A couple of weeks before Christmas I noticed something odd in the garden of my house in Brisbane. While I often see ants around the home, there were now large clusters of ants moving upstairs and taking their eggs with them. The folklore is that when this happens it means that we are in for […]

Listening to Improve Innovation

I’ve been working this week with two teams of MBA students that are working on a live consulting project as part of their studies. This is part of UQ’s partnership with Wharton in their Global Consulting Practicum program, which is a great initiative. This week, we were working on presentations to the clients in order […]

Adam Smith Explains the Network Economy

The economy is a network. To understand how new ideas integrate into it, we first have to understand how interconnected and interdependent it is. Here is a passage from The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith making this point (from Adam Gopnik’s good review of Smith’s work in The New Yorker): The woollen coat, for […]

End of Year Innovation Questions

As you may have already guessed, John and I are mentally wiped out right now and are taking a short break from blogging. We’re saving up ideas and posts and will be ready to go again once the new year starts. In the meantime, here are a few questions to consider. If you’d like to […]

Which Ideas Are the Good Ones?

The problem is, we can’t usually tell in advance which ideas are good and which aren’t. The New York Times has just published The 10th Annual Year in Ideas. As part of this, they asked Tyler Cowen to comment on the previous reviews. He noted this quote from the introduction to the piece: The 2001 […]