Innovation is not about wearing a white coat
Like all business success, innovative success is based on matching capabilities to market.
View ArticleGoogle’s books drive needs a wider debate
Digital media is the future and two decades from now the book business will look very different.
View ArticleHow to make money without trying
It is particularly sad for me that James Black, the Nobel prize winning chemist, should have died in the same week that my latest book, Obliquity, is published. I am indebted to Black for helping to...
View ArticleWhy you can have an economy of people who don’t sweat
The books that Britain exports have long been made from trees grown abroad. Then globalisation meant the paper was also made abroad, and increasingly the printing took place overseas. Soon selling a...
View ArticlePublishers badly need a new Sir Thomas Bodley
As the commercial market is being transformed, anyone who thinks that the policy challenge is to restrict internet piracy has missed the point.
View ArticleWhy Sony did not invent the iPod
Narratives of industry evolution often represent fairy tales constructed by corporate financiers, or ambitious chief executives. They relentlessly seek rationale, however spurious, for the next deal.
View ArticleNew York’s wonder shows planners’ limits
If unplanned social interactions are the key to a vibrant city, they are also the key to a vibrant organisation.
View ArticleFair value is not the same as market price
The growth of the trading culture has encouraged the belief that the only measure of value is what someone is willing to pay. But this is a mistake.
View ArticleEnduring lessons from the legend of Rothschild’s carrier pigeon
Why do we devote more resources to training carrier pigeons and building fibreoptic links than to understanding military and business strategy?
View ArticleSometimes the best that a company can hope for is death
Humans have always found it hard to cope with the idea that every individual has a lifespan even as life itself goes on. The idea of a natural life cycle for a business, or industrial centre, is even...
View ArticleTechnology’s crystal ball offers only a hazy view of the future
Knowledge is more than additive. What we learn when we bring two bodies of knowledge together may be much more than the sum of each alone.
View ArticleRegulators will get the blame for the stupidity of crowds
Just as dammed water finds new channels of escape, crowdfunding seems to provide a way around the blockage.
View ArticleWhy do we welcome innovation to products more readily than to processes?
Children love to play with new toys but hate disruption to their routines. These traits persist in adult life: innovation is readily adopted when it is incorporated in new gadgets but innovation that...
View ArticleMust we endure excessive drug prices to encourage pharmaceutical R&D?
A mechanism of funding pharmaceutical research which leads to drug prices far in excess of marginal cost is bound to lead to anguish and injustice. But is there a better idea?
View ArticlePharma responsibilities are to a wider community than its own shareholders
Two recent events have served to highlight the range of difficult questions raised by pharmaceuticals regulation. Last week, a man died in the French city of Rennes after a clinical trial of a...
View ArticleWhat Uber and another John Kay teach us about innovation and competition
Uber's superior service threatens London's black-cab drivers, just as (my namesake) John Kay's flying shuttle eventually led to rebellion by out-of-work Luddites in the 19th century. The losers from...
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