plan a little, implement a lot

That’s a saying that one of our research partners attributed today to Etienne Wenger, and which he said was one of the ideas that drove their successful implementation of a Communities of Practice initiative. While it is saying it in a slightly different way, I think that this supports a couple of my key ideas […]

innovative innovation research

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, […]

getting ideas to spread

Derek Powazek has written a post that pretty thoroughly eviscerates the idea of search engine optimisation. He starts his final paragraph this way: Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free: […]

the news value proposition

Once I start thinking about something, it often takes some time for me to move on to other topics. I have a tendency to dive relatively deeply into things that grab my attention. Which means that you get to read more about new business models for journalism. There’s a decent summary in this post, where […]

connect, connect, connect!

The way I see it, there are three primary ways to make money in business models that are built around information-based assets – aggregating, filtering and connecting. Previously, I have discussed aggregating and filtering in some detail – now it’s time to think about connecting. In a recent post on the Harvard Business Review Editors’ […]

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize

I’m absolutely delighted that Elinor Ostrom has been selected to receive this year’s Nobel in Economics (along with Oliver Williamson). I started reading her work regularly a couple of years ago now, and I am working to pattern my research stream on Innovation Systems after her work on the governance of the commons. Ostrom is […]

but that was MY idea!

I’m not sure if this is just a normal evolutionary step, or if maybe it is just peculiar to a few of the firms that I’ve spoken to, but it seems like often when an organisation decides that it needs to be more innovative, the first step is to try to become more ‘creative’. Consequently, […]

public service innovation

I was talking to one of my MBA students today about innovation the public sector. He was having problems figuring out how a government department could be innovative. How about this? How about this? You can innovate anywhere – but you have to want to do it. Even in situations where you face financial constraints, […]

innovation motivation

Here’s a great talk from Dan Pink at this year’s TED Conference: The implications for people managing innovation are obvious, and to discuss these in too much detail here would diminish the impact of the talk. So all I’ll say is watch it, enjoy it, and then think about how you might act on it.

business models & the three horizons

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 […]

the state of media

Here’s a video from Bob Garfield discussing the main ideas in his book The Chaos Scenario: The Chaos Scenario from Greg Stielstra on Vimeo. He has a lot of stats and a lot of stories that make the point about how all of the media business models have been breaking down recently. His recommendation is […]

Planning for Innovation

Tim and I get to talk to many managers as part of our research and consulting work. One of the good things about doing this is that we get to see common success factors and inhibitors of innovation. A particular tension that exists in nearly all of the organisations that we see is between the […]