newspaper innovation??

When I was writing about Kristin Hersh the other day I asked why the record labels weren’t able to come up the new music business model that she’s using. I’m still a bit perplexed by this. Similarly, there’s been lots of talk recently about how newspapers find themselves in a pretty unfavourable position these days […]

persistent economic ties

There’s been a bit of a slow roll through the (mostly) academic blogs discussing a recent paper by Bronnenberg, Dhar & Dube from The Journal of Political Economy called “Brand History, Geography, and the Persistence of Brand Shares”. Here’s the abstract: We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer […]

fail now! fail fast!

I grabbed a copy of an odd little book yesterday – it’s called Books vs Cigarettes by George Orwell. It’s a collection of six essays. They’re all pretty good (Orwell is always pretty readable), but I don’t see a lot of logic in assembling these particular essays into one book (the title essay is excellent […]

the cone of uncertainty

Here’s a really nice talk that Paul Saffo gave for the Long Now Organization up on fora.tv. It’s a bit long (85 minutes in total), but the 30 minutes of questions can be skipped. If you’re in a hurry, hit the link and then go to the menu to watch the sections titled ‘The Cone […]

kristin hersh is brilliant

I subscribed to Kristin Hersh today. That probably sounds a bit weird, so let me explain. If you’re not familiar with her, Kristin is pretty much a genius. She started making music over 20 years ago with her first band, Throwing Muses. The Muses have made around 7 records in that time, plus she has […]

shameless self promotion

Actually, when I first typed that, it said ‘shameless elf promotion’, which would probably be better… In any case, I’m giving a talk on the evening of May 25th as part of Brisbane’s Innovation Festival. It’s going to cover fairly basic stuff, like what innovation is and why it is critically important especially in tough […]

trees vs. electrons

I find it ironic that Wired magazine, of all things, is much better to read in its physical paper version than it is to read it on its website. Every time I buy a copy, it seems a bit archaic (and wrong!) to be reading the physical version. But the design in the real magazine […]

emerging themes

In my previous incarnation as a blogger I mostly wrote about entertainment-related things. But one of the themes that quickly emerged was a discussion of the various projects that my cats got up to – including building a particle accelerator, starting a management consulting company, computer repair (see above) and making a trebuchet. I probably […]

Use and misuse of the three-horizons

About three years ago, Gerald Marion, a friend from the Brisbane office of Deloitte, introduced me to a book called the Alchemy of Growth. This is an interesting book and one of its main ideas is that there are three horizons for developing new business opportunities. Its a reasonably simple idea with Horizon 1 being […]

Where’s my Large Hadron Collider?

I was working through one of my papers today with Neil Kay, and we had this discussion: Neil: I wrote a paper which essentially says ‘I’m not sure if dynamic capabilities exist, but if they do, they probably look like this’. Me: So dynamic capabilities are the Higgs boson of economics? Now I guess we […]

black swan innovation

After John & I yelled at him for an hour last friday, our PhD student Sam MacAulay was still gracious enough to continue talking with me. In the course of discussion he asked a good question – what actual impact complexity science has had on management studies? We talked about it for a while, and […]