At start of my innovation courses, students often think that if their organisation isn’t inventing iPads, then they clearly aren’t (and can’t be) innovative. I end up spending a lot of time trying to help them see the many opportunities available for innovation, even within industries that appear to be pretty tightly constrained. In many […]
In yesterday’s post on Personal Aggregate, Filter & Connect Strategies, I didn’t have room for one key point: one of the key filters to use is your network. When he was in Brisbane last month, George Siemans gave a talk with an example that illustrated this perfectly. For the past couple of years, he has […]
A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised […]
The question of how to best adapt to the changes brought about by the internet is of key importance to all organisations that are in information-based industries. According to Jeff Jarvis in What Would Google Do?, the answer is fairly simple: do what Google would. Here is a video in which he outlines the argument […]
I’ve been reading a lot of things from Umair Haque recently, and there he has some ideas that are definitely worth exploring. This is a talk that he gave last year which outlines several of his major themes. It is 20 minutes long, and well worth the time: Umair Haque at BRITE ’09 conference from […]
One of my secret pleasures is Ken Burns documentaries. Ever since I saw his breakthrough work on the American Civil War about 20 years ago I have been mesmerized by his careful and beautiful use of images, narrative, music and cinematography (another innovation). It doesn’t really matter what the topic is… the Lewis and Clark […]
Do you want to know how to easily find success? If so, then you probably shouldn’t read Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod. One of the themes of the book is that success is not easy. Creativity and Innovation are inherently threatening acts to many people, which makes new ides […]
Today I talk about how you can use a craft-based approach to business model innovation: Craft-Based Business Models from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. The key point is that you can create space for yourself, even in a crowded market, by doing something incredibly well. I use some more examples from the music industry. Here’s the […]
Strategy is a big and complicated area of business theory so its nice to simplify things a bit sometimes. My favorite simple theory of innovation strategy is what I call the salami theory. The idea of the salami theory came from my days (some time last century) in a share house while studying a science […]
I ran across this on Paul Kedrosky’s blog – an article discussing international shipping as a complex network. It reminds me of some of the work I did in my PhD studying international trade as a complex network. Here is the diagram of shipping lanes and ports: It raises a few interesting points about networks: […]
