What Art Curation Can Teach Us About Innovation

We often think of art as being innovative by its nature – but what about curating art? A couple of weeks ago Nancy and I went to a talk Amanda Pagliarino, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Head of Conservation. She was discussing some the challenges that her team faced in getting all the exhibits ready for […]

Building an Entrepreneurial Network

What is the biggest challenge facing an entrepreneur? There’s coming up with a great idea, which can be hard. There’s finding funding, which is definitely a challenge. There’s getting your idea to work, and we’ve been arguing here for quite a while that execution is critical. But I think that the biggest challenge is actually […]

Financing Innovation: Report from the AAAI Conference

We keep talking about how it’s not enough to just have good ideas, we have to execute them to turn them into innovations. A lot of good ideas can be tested on a small scale to see if they’ll work, but many ideas need a fair bit of cash to execute. If you work in […]

You’re too Scared to Innovate

One of the best live shows that I saw during my university days was Beat Happening and Girl Trouble. All of us were a long way from home in Washington when I saw them in New Jersey. While Beat Happening was playing what I thought was a pretty mesmerising show, my friend Tom leaned over […]

Using Patents to Measure Innovation is a Really Bad Idea

One of the major themes running through the blog is that innovation is a complex process made from different activities. Tim and I have pushed this pretty hard because innovation is often confused with invention (the generation of an idea resulting in a new physical process or thing). There is a lot to be gained […]

Get Better Ideas, Not More

Innovation is all about executing ideas so that they have economic or social value. John and I have both talked frequently about how many firms overemphasise generating ideas when they try to increase innovation. When they make this mistake, they end up with a lot of stockpiled ideas, but the amount that they have successfully […]

Aggregate, Filter & Connect for Smaller Firms

We know the story by now: as it becomes less and less expensive to transfer digital content, the price firms can get for information-based products and services is being driven down. This has led to chaos in the music, news and publishing industries. So everyone in these industries is doomed, right? Wrong. I believe that […]

Creating Value from Information

How do we create value when we’re busy tweeting, blogging, reading and writing? I have been arguing that to create value from information, we need to have systems in place that allow us to aggregate, filter and connect information – and that this is true for people, and for business models. These are the things […]

Think ‘Network Structure’ not ‘Networking’

The biggest problem with the idea of ‘networking’ is that it is a bad idea. Why? Because as it is usually practiced, networking consists of going out and making a whole bunch of new connections, and then hoping that something good will come of them. It is much more productive to think about your position […]

Three Simple Tests for Your New Product Strategy

I was in a business presentation session with a large engineering firm last week, which got me thinking about what I like to see in new product strategies. In this instance, the firm was considering a move into the renewable energy industry, based upon how big this industry might be in the years ahead. Now […]

We Have to Connect Ideas to Connect to People

How do we create value in a world of mash-ups, remixes and nested hyperlinks? As I keep arguing, we do it through connecting – connecting ideas together, and connecting ideas to people. This is one of the core ideas that Jaron Lanier gets at in his frustrating but good new book You Are Not a […]

The Universe, Dark Matter and New Venture Success

You have probably heard of the dark matter puzzle in astronomy. I don’t remember that much from the astronomy unit that I took as part of my science degree but dark matter is one of those big questions that just gets undergrad students thinking. Put simply, the universe is really heavy (!) but if we […]