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. […]
People were using charcoal for art about 30,000 years ago. And we’ve been consciously manufacturing charcoal for at least 5000 years. Because charcoal burns hot and clean, it was the primary fuel source for making iron for quite a while, before it made its recent shift to cooking steaks on barbeques. Most of our charcoal […]
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 […]
Tim and I have recently edited a network focussed issue of a journal called Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice. The really pleasing outcome from the submssions was the wide variety of applications that network analysis was having in the study of innovation management. We received papers from Asia, Europe and Australia and the overall standard […]
One of the key ideas in The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison is that changes in the business environment are leading to a situation where rather than creating great ideas and then pushing them out to the world, we need to take advantage of knowledge flows by pulling […]
Last week Ralph Ohr left me with a challenge to think about how to use experts to get the best outcomes on making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We constantly miss disruptive changes in the operating environment and I suppose if I really knew the answer, I wouldn’t be posting it on a blog. Sometimes […]
I am always skeptical of ‘everything is different now’ style arguments. If we think about the history of business, we have been trying to manage in a state of turmoil going back at least to the start of the industrial revolution, possibly longer. The introduction of railways, the telegraph, electricity and the automobile were all […]
Veronica Vera pointed me to a great talk by Anil Gupta from TEDIndia. He talks about grassroots innovation, and methods for getting ideas to spread in poorer regions. It’s a fascinating talk: Innovation in developing countries is a wildly unappreciated phenomenon – there are incredibly interesting things going on in places like India, China and […]
