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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]