visualisation

Yesterday’s post about mapumental has gotten me thinking about visualisation. Something that has always struck me as a bit of a paradox is that I’m a highly visual thinker, but I’m really bad at graphics. Which is frustrating. But one the reasons that I like network analysis so much is that it provides some really […]

mapumental

Here’s something new – mysociety.org in the UK is introducing their new service called Mapumental. It’s a dumb name, but at least they didn’t call it Mapology… In any case, the video that explains is it well worth watching: I always talk about how innovation is often simply the act of making new connections. Mapumental […]

follow ups

Right after talking about Google wave, I ran across this story about the release of Microsoft bing. I like to use google as an example in classes when I talk about intellectual property ideas. The google search algorithm isn’t patentable, and yet they’ve made a ton of money off of it. But I suspect that […]

mapping innovation networks

I just wrote this for the UQ Business School Alumni publication: Innovation is particularly important in turbulent economic times. As Scott Anthony points out in his upcoming book, The Silver Lining, nearly half of the current Fortune 500 companies were founded during recessions, including firms such as Bridgestone Tires, Digital Equipment Corporation, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, McKinsey […]

googlenomics

First off, I apologise for the title of the post. I’m now declaring a moratorium on all titles of anything (especially books) that end in ‘nomics’ or ‘ology’. I just wanted to get one of my own in before I started enforcing the moratorium (still not sure how I’m going to get the publishers to […]

impact

There’s an interesting post on the Six Pixels of Separation blog today about metrics for social media. Here’s the problem that is set up: Maybe we have it all wrong (and I’m just as guilty as the next person). Why are we looking at how many people have joined Facebook overall? Why do we care […]

solar business model innovation

I spent a lot of time in my talks this week discussing business model innovation. The main point is that this is often the most powerful form of innovation while also being one of the most overlooked. I ran across a great example of business model innovation today on Kevin Kelly’s blog. One of the […]

Where do valuable innovations come from?

Tim does a really nice talk on the invention of the computer and he has posted the slides on this blog. While he uses the story to discuss the difference between innovation and invention, I think there are a lot of other really interesting lessons here. Firstly, I’d like to add to Tim’s story by […]

you are what you share

There’s a nice post by Lisa Katamaya on Boing Boing Gadgets about coffee in a can. She talks about how popular various forms of a coffee in a can are in Japan, and how they are being promoted as being ‘American’ even though there is nothing like it available in America. I love all the […]

understanding innovation

Here are the slides from the talk that Mark gave at the UQ Business School Industry Breakfast yesterday: Understanding Innovation – Industry Breakfast View more Microsoft Word documents from Tim Kastelle. The people there were a bit sceptical to hear that Josiah Wedgwood is the greatest innovator in history, but in the end I think […]

the innovation spectrum

The NESTA Connect blog is probably one of the two best innovation blogs going, and Jonathan Crowley wrote a terrific post there today, which nicely summarises a lot of issues that we’ve been discussing here. He starts with this picture: which shows the spectrum of innovation. He then goes on to say that most people […]

the power of examples

One thing that was really striking up in Cairns is how many Toyota Priuses are on the road. There are a whole lot – led by the taxis. I’d estimate that the Prius makes up about 2/3 of all of the taxis there (including one that’s gone over 500,000 km!). I just did a quick […]