babbage and lovelace solve the global financial crisis!

John & I are both working on other posts at the moment, but in the meantime, this is hilarious: Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace use the Difference Engine to solve the Global Financial crisis! It’s a webcomic by Sydney Padua, and it’s fantastic. Padua touches on a lot of issues that I regularly talk about […]

leaning into change

I’ve been teaching the MBAs today so I’m pretty wiped out at this point – so I’ll let Seth Godin do the work for me tonight. I’ve watched this twice in two days now – and Seth is, as usual, right on target. His stated objective is to show people how to lean into change, […]

business models summary

With all this recent talk of business models, it is probably useful to clarify what I mean by it – business model is yet another phrase that ends up meaning different things to everyone. I use the Henry Chesbrough definition, which splits the business model into six key issues (the summary is from quickmba.com): Value […]

aggregate, filter and connect

In response to my last post, my friend Ken Katkin said “Reading your essay make me glad that: (1) I traded in the music biz for academia when I did; and (2) I have tenure!” The only problem is that the more I’ve thought about it, the more uneasy I’ve become. I keep saying that […]

higher education business models

After all this discussion of journalism, it’s only fair to turn the focus on to my current industry – higher education. Despite the fact that most academics spend a fair bit of their time trying to come up with new ideas, it is not often regarded as an overly innovative field. This is probably due […]

Regulate or Innovate

One of my favorite debating points in my MBA class is the limited usefulness of regulation to promote fair competition and stimulate economic growth at the same time. While competition is a good thing, achieving it through regulation usually stifles innovation. Of course, this is a complex area of economic policy that stirs up very […]

more news business models

Just gathering together a few loose ends concerning news business models… First off, I think that Steven Johnson’s ‘news ecosystem’ idea from his SXSW speech is a pretty useful way to think about things. Here’s one of the key quotes: But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up […]

innovation in plentiful times

One of they key drivers of an increasingly low price for many items is that we are now in a time of plenty. As the marginal cost of many technologies approaches zero, they become too cheap to meter, and effectively become free. This is another of the key ideas in Free by Chris Anderson, and […]

free news?

I keep coming back to the idea of business models in news for a couple reasons. The main one is that we are seeing a major industry being transformed right in front of us, in real time. And a critical industry at that. We’re seeing all of the issues that surround the idea of free […]

the price of free leads to innovation

I just finished reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. As usual, Anderson takes ideas that have been out there a while and packages them in an insightful and valuable way. I’m a bit late to the party, so there has already been plenty of reaction to the book. Much of […]

4 rules for managing your network

Here are the slides with audio for the talk I gave this morning at the Brisbane AusBiotech breakfast meeting. Hit the green ‘play’ button in the middle to get it started. It runs for about 18 minutes. 4 Rules for Building Your Network View more presentations from Tim Kastelle. Kate Morrison from Vulture Street Innovation […]