strategies for getting ideas to spread

Here’s our friend Andrew Stephen on getting ideas to spread through viral marketing: Everyone talks about how they need their ideas to go viral, and Andrew has a some excellent data on how to actually get this to happen. The key points – do something that is interesting enough that people actually want to talk […]

small pieces loosely joined

More quotes that I like – this time from Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger: Distance on the Web is measured by links, so the way to make your site ‘close’ to where your customers are is to get lots of places to point to it. How? By being interesting or worthwhile. That’s not […]

the roots of innovation

Sam & I had great meetings with a couple of our key research partners yesterday. I mentioned one of the key points that Nick raised in my last post, but two blog posts that I’ve read this morning have reminded me of his second outstanding point. We were discussing their successful implementation of a Communities […]

plan a little, implement a lot

That’s a saying that one of our research partners attributed today to Etienne Wenger, and which he said was one of the ideas that drove their successful implementation of a Communities of Practice initiative. While it is saying it in a slightly different way, I think that this supports a couple of my key ideas […]

innovative innovation research

It’s been fascinating to see the reaction to the announcement that Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom will receive this year’s Nobel for economics (and if you want to argue about whether or not it’s a real Nobel, let me refer you to Felix Salmon’s take on the issue, which I endorse!). As I said yesterday, […]

getting ideas to spread

Derek Powazek has written a post that pretty thoroughly eviscerates the idea of search engine optimisation. He starts his final paragraph this way: Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free: […]

the news value proposition

Once I start thinking about something, it often takes some time for me to move on to other topics. I have a tendency to dive relatively deeply into things that grab my attention. Which means that you get to read more about new business models for journalism. There’s a decent summary in this post, where […]

connect, connect, connect!

The way I see it, there are three primary ways to make money in business models that are built around information-based assets – aggregating, filtering and connecting. Previously, I have discussed aggregating and filtering in some detail – now it’s time to think about connecting. In a recent post on the Harvard Business Review Editors’ […]

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize

I’m absolutely delighted that Elinor Ostrom has been selected to receive this year’s Nobel in Economics (along with Oliver Williamson). I started reading her work regularly a couple of years ago now, and I am working to pattern my research stream on Innovation Systems after her work on the governance of the commons. Ostrom is […]

but that was MY idea!

I’m not sure if this is just a normal evolutionary step, or if maybe it is just peculiar to a few of the firms that I’ve spoken to, but it seems like often when an organisation decides that it needs to be more innovative, the first step is to try to become more ‘creative’. Consequently, […]

public service innovation

I was talking to one of my MBA students today about innovation the public sector. He was having problems figuring out how a government department could be innovative. How about this? How about this? You can innovate anywhere – but you have to want to do it. Even in situations where you face financial constraints, […]