Cumulative Disruption
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If anyone ever asks you why innovation is important, consider this: Year Technology Lighting Efficiency 1750 B.C. Oil Lamp 17.5 (lumen hours per BTU) A.D. 1800 Tallow Candle 22.2 1815 Whale-oil Lamp 39.4 1875 Kerosene Lamp 46.6 1883 Electric Light, Carbon Filament 762.0 1920 Electric Light, Tungsten Filament 3,463.7 1992 Compact Flourescent Bulb 20,111.1 The […]
Amazon’s Business Model Innovation
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I thought I’d experiment with a video blog entry. I’ve got no editing software here, so everything was straight to tape. Well, straight to bits. Anyway, if it seems to work ok I’ll scale it up! It runs for five minutes. Amazon & Business Model Design from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. To summarise my main […]
Know How You Add Value
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A fundamental business problem right now is caused by the rapidly decreasing costs of storing and sharing data. The combination of these price drops with the increasing ease of sharing digital information has disrupted several industries – music, journalism, and book publishing among them. So everyone with a business model based on information being scarce […]
Don’t blame uncertainty for not changing
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Three Ways to Win With Your Great Ideas
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I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently talking about how ideas are cheap. I’ve been doing this for two reasons: the first is that ideas really are cheap; the second is that organisations often overinvest in idea generation when they’d be better served by getting better at executing ideas. I ran across two […]
The Pace of Economic Evolution
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The pace of economic evolution is slow. Shockingly slow. Here are some examples: The Difference Engine: Invented: 1823 by Charles Babbage First Built: 1998 by the London Science Museum First Sold: Never Photocopier Invented & Prototype Built: 1938 by Chester Carlson First commercial prototype: 1948 by Haloid (who licensed the patent from Carlson) First Sold: […]
Information Overload?
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How do we cope with the barrage of information that we face each day? Yesterday I suggested that the information glut has been with us for a long time. Stowe Boyd ended up talking about the same issue yesterday in a terrific post called The False Question of Attention Economics. His contention is the same […]
Networks and the Information Glut
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Everyone knows that we’re living in a time of unprecedented access to information, right? Personally, I’m always a bit skeptical of these grand narratives. To see why, watch this short video showing the social networks of correspondence among 18th Century scientists: It’s great research that illustrates some important points: When we talk about ‘social networks’ […]
