Tag Archives: innovation

Product Management

How to tell if design thinking has taken hold in your organisation

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I am now on the fifth week of my Design Thinking course being run online by Dr Jeanne Liedtka. She summed up with some great advice for implementing design thinking:

  1. Pick the right challenge. Figure out who in the organisation cares about the problem you are thinking about. Pick a problem with urgency behind it. Frame your goals so they gel with what the organisation cares about.
  2. Think small. It’s easier to start small and scale over time that start big and risk a big failure
  3. Select and manage your team carefully. Diversity is the key. What you are after is collective wisdom and the more points of view you have, the better. You need all kinds of people – you need starters and you need finishers. 
  4. Manage your momentum. Speed is the number one momentum builder. Momentum runs on emotional highs. Speed doesn’t mean rushing a solution to the market before it is ready. What you are after is speed of learning – shortening the cycle times. 
  5. Be ready to ride the roller coaster of emotion (see above)
After all that, how can you tell if you have succeeded in creating a successful design thinking organisation? This was her answer…..
How to tell in design thinking has taken hold in your organisation
People talking about envisioning new possibilities together
or
 Still debating their individual recommendations
Listening to understand other people’s perspectives and build on them
or
 Listening for weaknesses in their opponents’ arguments
Sharing deep primary data gathered from those they wish to serve and mining this for new insights together
or
 Compiling web-based surveys that reveal only superficial attitudes and opinions
Spending time in meetings figuring out how to start small and learn as they go
or
 Trying to create the perfect plan before any action can be taken
Talking about designing marketplace experiments
or
 Arguing theory in conference rooms
Actively searching for disconfirming data
or
 Latching on to whatever data points supports their point of view
Internet Economy, Product Management

The boom in innovation

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I’ve spent the past couple of hours going through my feed reader catching up on all the stories I’ve missed over the past week or so and I was struck by the enormous number and inventiveness of the new apps and hardware being reported on.

It strikes me there are several things happening at once which have come together to create this explosion of creativity:

  • The emergence and ubiquity of powerful smartphone platforms – mainly IOS and Android at the moment, it has to be said – packed with sensors
  • Cheap and scaleable cloud computing platforms which makes initial costs low and encourages experimentation and lowers the financial bar
  • The coming of age of funding platforms like Kickstarter which combine easy access to crowd-sourced funding coupled with the rapid feedback of a social network (if you don’t get to the target amount, it’s a powerful message from the market)
  • The emergence of cheap 3D printing which makes prototyping much, much simpler and cheaper. (You can buy 3D printers in Maplin, a sure sign the technology has arrived!)
It may feel a bit like the bubble in 2000, but these enablers make things very, very different this time.
Internet Economy

Why large organisations find it hard to innovate

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Large organisations find it so hard to innovate, according to Dr. Jeanne M. Liedtka, because of the “physics of growth”. Dr Liedtka, who is currently running an MOOC on Design Thinking which I am taking, says there are critical differences in the way VCs and large corporates approach innovation. VCs understand that their ability to predict success is poor (success rates of one or two ventures in 10 are typical). Therefore they adopt some key practices to improve their odds:

  1. Betting heavily on individuals with good experience of both success and failure 
  2. Keeping bets small and affordable until they have better data
  3. Making sure if they don’t succeed that they fail quickly
In contrast large organisations are optimised for execution. This means, she says, they love big ideas which makes sense from their perspective: focus and control are key and concentrating on one or two big things is much easier than on many small things.
But there are some terrible side-effects with this approach when in comes to encouraging genuine innovation:
  1. Big ideas, by their nature, tend to have been found by other competitors already
  2. Customers are terrible at envisioning things which don’t exist
  3. “If you insist on home runs you won’t get many singles, let alone home runs”
  4. When the ratio of resources invested gets too far ahead of knowledge possessed “bad things happen”
All of this discourages learning in managers – and learning is the key mindset for innovation. After all, she says, you don’t learn to juggle with flaming torches but with bean bags!
Large companies also thrive on analysis. But we don’t have enough data on genuinely new things to do any coherent analysis on. When managers are challenged to support a new big idea with past data the temptation is to make it up. 
All this leads, she says, to trapped managers in a kind of growth gridlock. 
The chart below summarises the two approaches. “Geoff’s” cycle (the VC or entrepreneur perspective) starts from an open mindset and is strong on varied experience and customer empathy – which means being deeply interested in the lives of customers are people. 
In contrast “George’s” cycle (the large corporate perspective) starts from a fixed mindset (aka deep expertise which is so successful in an execution setting) and relies on customer data. You can read the results for yourselves. 
This is one of the best descriptions of the fundamental mechanics of the innovation process that I have yet seen. The good news, according the Dr Liedtka, is that all of this can be taught and there are many examples of large corporates making innovation work in exactly this way. I’m looking forward to the rest of the syllabus. 
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Has Apple lost its innovation mojo?

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Has Apple has lost its innovation mojo? Yes, according to many pundits who weighed in immediately following last Tuesday’s announcements of the iPhone 5S and 5C. 

Comments from The Guardian were typical: “Once a company renowned for breaking new ground, Apple is turning into a typical American corporation” says the sub-head. 

treading water is what Apple has done ever since, sadly, it lost Jobs. Under the turtlenecked-one, we got the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, one after another. Since Cook took over as boss in 2011, there has been reiteration rather than innovation. The iPad, except smaller. Now with a sharper screen. In pink. Ho hum. 

Tech site CNET took a very similar line. The “5 disappointing things about hte iPhone 5S” are listed out: the screen remains the same; a faster processor – it’s only just a phone!; no improvement in battery life; still no 128GB model; a little catch up, no innovation.

The iPhone 5S has exactly what was expected: a faster processor and a better camera (one that merely catches up to the cameras in some other phones). Those features aren’t “wow” — they’re “meh.”

And news network CNN concurred. “Underwhelmed. That, in a word, was the response in many quarters to Apple’s rollout of two new iPhones on Tuesday,” its piece began. However, what followed was a more balanced round up of views. On the one hand: 

“Much-hyped iPhone announcements from the tech giant did little to stop (Apple’s) year-long descent into stagnation,” wrote Marcus Wohlsen in Wired, a CNN.com content partner. “Though the faster, sleeker, more powerful phone is unarguably cool, the steps forward are still incremental. And incremental isn’t what the world expects from Apple.”

One the other, however, 

“In most cases Apple does not walk on others’ paths,” she said. “They create their own and stick to it. This is not necessarily the easy way to do it in the short term, but assures that they remain in control.”,

quoting Carolina Milanesi, a tech analyst with Gartner Research.

And there were still others with a more subtle interpretation of innovation, such as the Innovation Excellence blog which wrote: 

I truly believe that the kinds of things that will come out of the BLE technology built into the new iPhone 5S in combination with the new fingerprint authentication will represent a quantum leap in the value we extract from our smartphones in much the same way that the AppStore that came along a year after the launch of the original iPhone.

And another Wired article with a more positive take:

The bottom line is that there’s a lot more to the iPhone switching to a 64-bit processor than hype. While the applications for it might be limited right now, Apple is paving the way for improvements that we’ll see trickle into the iPhone over the next few years. 

Forbes summed it up best for me with “7 reasons the new iPhones are starting to look good” (5 plays 7!). The bottom line for Forbes:

Innovation is unquestionably becoming less glitzy but that’s because Cook is updating Apple at the platform level. In place of Jobs’ charismatic feature, design and miniaturization-led innovation, he is giving his team space to build the boat: a device platform that is powerful enough to integrate many more services, gives developers more scope; allows the iPhone to interact with more devices around the body and in nearby locations. 

In the end this more subtle interpretation of the Apple strategy sounds to me more convincing. 

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What is Innovation?

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What is innovation? The Oxford English Dictionarydefines it, somewhat unhelpfully, as: “the action or process of innovating”; but, then elaborates: “a new method, idea, product, etc.”  It then goes on to note: “innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organization.”
As innovation is so important, I thought I would unpack the idea a bit. Many people think that “true” innovation is the invention of genuinely novel things which have never before been seen in the world. However, this is a very high bar at which virtually everyone would fail. Humans have been around for over 200,000 years and there are billions of us, so most things, one way or another, have been thought of before.  In my view, this strict definition isn’t particularly helpful.
I think a more useful definition is something like this: “The recognition and implementation of an idea or combination of ideas which brings a unique utility not before seen or used which adds value by fulfilling a consumer need.”
I spent Christmas 2011 reading Steve Job’s biography by Walter Isaacson. I have always thought of Steve Jobs as intrinsically innovative; but, what was special about him was not that he came up with entirely new ideas – the graphical user interface on the Macintosh, for example, had been invented by Xerox Parc and there had been many MP3 players before the iPod – but, that he came up with unique combinations; which, taken together, added real, never-before-seen value to the consumer.
Take the iPod: As a music player, it was certainly very elegantly designed; but, its capacity was well below the best that was available–at the same price–on the market at the time. What Apple did was combine the player with the web (in the form of iTunes) in such a way as the combination was unique. Suddenly, tasks that were really difficult, or close to impossible to do on the player, could be done on the Mac, thus freeing the player to do what it did best: play music. And, by deconstructing the album into songs–and miraculously persuading the music industry to play ball–it created a huge new market for legal downloads. The rest, as they say, is history.
Or take the iPhone: There were smartphones before the iPhone; but, they weren’t very smart. The iPhone’s unique advantage, apart from the legendary great design, was the App Store. Suddenly, the phone could become whatever you wanted it to be; thus, the real revolution in smartphones that we are living through today was born.
Google provides another good example: Google’s revolutionary idea, apart from its blisteringly good search, was AdWords. But, Google didn’t invent key word advertising; that honour went to Idealab that spun-out GoTo.com which was later renamed Overture and was then bought by Yahoo!. However, it was Google who hit the jackpot with search advertising, and it did so by reinventing the model. Overture had ordered ads by whoever bid the most that quite often resulted in the top advertisement not being the most appropriate.  It was simply the one with the deepest pockets.
Google changed the rules. It ordered results partly by the bidding and partly by the success of the ad which was measured by how many people clicked on it and on the quality of the ultimate landing page. And, it also limited the power of those with the deepest pockets by charging only one cent above the amount of the second highest bidder. These innovations revolutionised the medium.
So my argument is innovation comes from  the real innovators who can be—and often are–those that take ideas already out there and reinvent and recombine them in ways which create real utility for the user. As Steve Jobs said, paraphrasing Picasso*: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
In the innovation process at RBI Data Solutions, we always try to think as broadly as we can about customer problems. Of course, we would love to invent some genuinely and completely novel services that the world has never seen; but, we are just as happy if we construct combinations of already-existing components, provided we produce an elegant solution in the end. We are not yet as good as Steve Jobs at this process, but we are working on it.

First published on the internal Reed Elsevier Innovation website, February 2012
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Phone becomes wallet

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I have been reading an interesting post from Springwise (one of my sources of innovation inspiration, by the way) which points the way to an ever greater role for the smartphone in our lives. Navigo is shortly going to be trialling a service in Paris which will allow travellers with NFC enabled smartphones to pay for their tickets with their phones. NFC is already in some Android phones and the chances are the iPhone 5 will incorporate the technology too. Is this the beginning of the end for the wallet.

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Innovation and big companies

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I watched an interesting video interview with Tim Weller of Incisive Media yesterday in which Tim explained one of his top priorities was returning the company to the innovative, risk-taking culture of its early years. I think most big companies spend a lot of time puzzling over how to increase agility and innovative spirt in their organisations, and most don’t really make much of a fist of it.

One reason, I believe, is that as companies grow complexity increases. In a start-up mode everybody does everything (more or less) but later specialisms emerge and so getting things done involve large groups of “experts”.They are already busy, so co-ordination becomes a real challenge and progress slows, a process Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37 Signals, offer an antidote to in their book Rework.

Another reason is IT complexity; multiple systems are “upgraded” and added to over long periods of time so that integrating with them becomes a mammoth task, and doing so only increases the complexity and inter-dependency.

So is there a way to cut through this? I don’t really know, but I do believe that the recent developments of cloud computing which allow small pieces loosely joined but running on other people’s infrastructure do offer real hope here. If you are renting computing cycle time and storage from Amazon for a few dollars, it is much more easy to imagine lots more innovative small projects getting off the ground outside of the corporate spaghetti. It is (relatively) easy for start-ups like 37 Signals to keep the agility and simplicity in their businesses – it’s much harder for corporates who have spent years building up complexity and the organistional structures which keep things complex.

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

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The Long Nose of Innovation

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I came across a very insightful article by Bill Buxton in Business Week called The Long Nose of Innovation which basically argued that innovations which make a difference are in fact based on technologies which have been around for a while. Buxton argues that innovation is really about the application of things already in existence as much as it is about inventing entirely new things.

This resonated with me as I thought about something Ray Kurzweil, the futurologist, said in a recent lecture (which I can’t now find!). He argued that since technology is growing exponentially, if you are building something (in his case computer translation software) you should design for what computers will be able to do by the time you are ready, now what they can do now.

It seems to me you could distill some good advice from these two: look for technologies and capabilities that are around now, but which have failed to reach their potential because computers or mobiles aren’t powerful enough – then design something which will be truly impressive once the power catches up – which it will.

Augmented reality – likely to be all the rage in 2010 – falls into this category. The technologies have been around for ages (camera, compass, GPS), but it wasn’t until they were combined into relatively cheap, powerful phones like the iPhone and Android that they could take off.

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Is bootstrapping killing innovation?

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A lot has been made of the game-changing way new start ups can now test their ideas with very little money using free, online tools and pay-as-you-go computing like Amazon’s EC2 and S3. But now Clive Thompson, writing the latest issue of Wired, has challenged that idea, suggesting that this bootstrapping fashion is limiting the vision of new start-ups.

These days, Valley entrepreneurs tend to pick a cool (but niche) idea; bootstrap it with minimal staff, open source code, and rented server space; and then build a user base until some lumbering technosaur buys them up……This system is more fiscally responsible than the con-job IPOs of the dotcom boom — but it favors entrepreneurs with modest ambitions.

 However, says Thompson, maybe it’s just that truly revolutionary ideas are just plain hard to spot.

People sniffed at Google because they thought AltaVista and Infoseek had already “solved” search. Microsoft, too, was seen as a joke: Real men built hardware, not software. And as for eBay — dude, who’s gonna buy someone else’s cast-off Weebles?

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Twitter the platform

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The innovations around Twitter just keep on coming, proving, if nothing else, that an open platform is the best spur to innovation there is.

Yesterday I noticed a couple of posts like this one which point to a simple discussion thread created by an application called Tiny Thread. It’s a simple but powerful add-on to the Twitter platform.

Meanwhile, the energetic Dave Winer posted about his mash-up with Disqus which allow you to start a discussion from a single thread.

And yesterday I also read about the latest iPhone app to take advantage of the open Twitter APIs, Twuner, which will read you your tweets on your iPhone.

Twitter may be struggling for a business model, but it is a beacon for innovation in the tech space second to none at the moment. Keep your fingers crossed they remain independent.