Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ Labs.

Publishing

• George Macgregor looks at the usage impact experienced by institutions which have retired their Institutional repository in favour of the Pure Portal product. Fascinating bit of analysis:
  
• One of the problems we’re musing over is that it’s quite hard to do bottom-up innovation using machine learning technology if you’re not aware of what the technology can do. Reading about the Journalism AI collaboration between Polis  and the Google News Initiative which is tackling a similar problem led us to the  Quartz AI Studio – Helping journalists use machine learning. We would be interested in putting together an academic publishing version of this. Please get in touch if interested.
• Ian Mulvany thinks more broadly about case for ROI for investment in the technology, and more specifically investing in making data actionable in key questions about AI in the publishing knowledge industry.

Health Technology

• KQ Labs, an intensive accelerator programme offered to high growth potential startup teams in the area of data-driven biomedical science, has opened up applications. Apply by 15 September.

User experience

• Yu-kai Chou’s  Octalysis Gamification Framework is pretty neat summary of how behavioral design can be used to improve products.

 

Innovation

• Harvard Business Review on How to know which ideas your company should pursue. Summary “Evaluate the benefits an idea promises relative to the cost of developing it. A concept that offers only incremental benefit but requires little investment might be more profitable than a fantastic idea that requires a lot of investment.”
• More tangibly the The New York Times list the five things they look for when coming up with a new product:
  1. “We anticipate but don’t require that the ultimate product will blend utility with editorial value and stand alone as a business”
  2. “Global potential”
  3. “A model that maximizes frequency through utility and habit building”
  4. “A model that has organic growth potential”
  5. “A product that leverages the brand, authority, personality and assets of the Times”
• Jeremy Liew on why Product innovation is not enough to beat a competitor’s network effects. “Unfortunately, the leaders in industries with strong network effects cannot be overcome through product innovation alone.” On a similar theme Greg Satell writes about How To Build An Ecosystem Strategy. “You can’t simply seek to build a better mousetrap, you need to relentlessly connect to build a better ecosystem. Today, that’s becoming less a matter of competitive strategy and more a basic requirement of survival.”
• MIT Technology Review have published a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
• The EdTech podcast ask JISC “Who can help embed new technologies and working practices?” to create change in education.

And finally…

A new approach to copyright – copying allowed providing you only write it out in green crayon :-):

You know that I’d be using this to go beyond our 10% scanning allowance.

You’re ok with it written out in green crayon right?

[Image in RT: a book with a general copyright statement that finishes with “unless you want to write it out in green crayon, in which case feel free”] https://t.co/lKo9eUJJaV

— Tom Peach 🌈📖 (@ThomasPeachLib) July 30, 2019