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 […]
When Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone, he offered to sell the patent to Western Union. He knew that getting the idea to spread was the hardest part, and he figured that a big firm that was already in the communications industry would be better equipped to get the idea out there. This was part […]
If we were starting today, would we do this? A perfect question to ask for business model innovation from journalist Jason Fry in a recent post (hat tip to Mark Coddington). Fry looks at some of the issues facing newspapers these days, and decides that the entire model needs to be rebuilt from scratch. I […]
Nancy and I were chatting with Phil Long over the weekend about some of the barriers to innovation that we run into at our university. We concluded that some of the biggest ones come from slavish adherence to the Handbook of University Policies & Procedures (the HUPP). I’m not saying that organisations shouldn’t have rules. […]
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 […]
Edward Glaeser has written a couple of posts over the past week looking at Argentina on the Economix blog for the NYT. It’s an interesting topic. Argentina was a wealthy country at the start of the 20th century, but by almost every conceivable ecnomic measure available, it is much worse off now than it was […]
Here are the slides + audio for the talk that John gave today at the Brisbane Innovation Network meeting: The Three Stages Of Innovation Strategy View more presentations from Tim Kastelle. There were a few key points that John made. The one that really jumped out for me was the issue of time. This process […]
