Innovation and Ambidexterity

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Tim wrote a post on “Staying Innovative While Growing”. I fully concur with his conclusion: “But it’s another innovation paradox – the small firms that might be most innovative often don’t have the market clout to get their ideas to diffuse. The firms that are big enough to get ideas […]

Don’t Underestimate Business Models that Don’t Look Like Yours

I ran across a shocking quote today. It’s from an article in the July issue of The Monthly by Malcolm Knox called The Next Chapter – which is about the current state of play with e-books. Here is the quote: Until this year, the argument over e-books centred on whether they would ever overtake print. […]

You Are What You Do

I often have people ask me how to build an innovative culture. The simple answer that is hard to execute is this: you build an innovative culture by innovating. Executing ideas is a critical part of innovation. If you think that innovation is only about having ideas, you won’t actually make anything. As fake Mark […]

Ten Tensions in Innovation

In a series of journal articles, Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman have talked about the importance of being an ambidextrous organisation in order to succeed at innovation. To be ambidextrous, organisations have to be good at both exploration and exploitation. All this sounds a bit academic, so here it is in clearer terms (I hope!): […]

The Complexity of Economics and the Paradox of Mankiw

Note: This is a guest post by Neil Kay. It is part of a chapter that he is writing for a book that I am editing with David Rooney and Greg Hearn called Handbook of the Knowledge Economy, volume 2. We’ll post Neil’s chapter as he writes it over the next few weeks. I’ll do […]

Welcome to the Attention Economy

Most of the economy now is based on information. Even physical things are embodied information. Consequently, the scarce resource that is being competed for now is our time. Here is how Richard Lanham talks about it in an interview discussing his book The Economics of Attention: The basic argument is simple enough. We’re told that […]

Dr Yes and Mr No

There was a nice interview in the Weekend Australian with Virgin’s CEO, Stephen Murphy. Quite honestly, I hadn’t heard of him and like everyone else I had assumed that Richard Branson was in total control of Virgin. Murhpy is a fairly conventional management accountant, so what is he doing at the helm of an entrepreneurial […]

What Does a Knowledge Economy Look Like?

Note: This is a guest post by Neil Kay.  It is the outline of a chapter that he is writing for a book that I am editing with David Rooney and Greg Hearn called Handbook of the Knowledge Economy, volume 2.  We’ll post Neil’s chapter as he writes it over the next few weeks.  I’ll […]

Innovation and the New Beancounters

A while ago I wrote a post on how standard methods of valuing business opportunities hindered innovation. Somewhat foolishly I called it “How accountants kill innovation” and it received a lot of comment from our blog readers, which was mostly very positive. Deb Schofield pointed out the uses of alternative valuation methods in her work […]