Nov 21, 2012 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“The harder I work the luckier I get”
I’m not sure who said that first, but it is certainly widely agreed, absolutely true, and therefore almost a cliché.
The more ideas, the more the variation in the background, training, and attitudes of those exposed and asked to think about problems and opportunities, the greater the chance someone will see something new. It makes sense therefore to increase the diversity of people thinking about any problem or challenge, as their diversity brings different experience, perspective and understanding to bear, and can create connections not seen by others.
Discussion needs to be stimulated and encouraged, curated if you like, a hothouse for ideas and experiments, where every trial that does not work is one more way that we know does not work. “Edison’s law.”
The new collaboration tools of the web are fantastic, a breakthrough for innovation, but they still do not come close to the potential of motivated individuals exchanging ideas and views in a relaxing, but stimulating face to face environment.
Serendipity happens after the work has been put in, not before.
Nov 14, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
The interesting and fun bits of our world are driven by the vision, imagination, and execution capabilities of people. Much of the capital and technical capabilities required to enable these great things to happen are tied up in our corporations, governed by the legislative, and community demands for absolute compliance to an established norm.
Almost by definition, the norm is boring, ordinary, “so yesterday” as my beautiful daughter would say. How is it then that the boards of those same companies, the people with the ultimate responsibility to determine the long term priorities of the business, and allocate the resources to deliver them for stakeholders make the necessary choices. They have to make choices between the creative, the risky, and the new stuff that will cannabilise their existing position, whilst being tied down to processes that demand short term, conservative, risk averse, and ultimately boring behaviours.
The Corporations Act and various accounting standards, domestic and International, require many things of directors, almost all are quantitative, take great time and energy, and deplete resources, when the real value is added by the qualitative.
As a community, we demand probity from directors, and largely we get it, but the few who play fast and loose, who feed self interest at the expense of the interests of those who are footing the bill, ensures that there are rules crafted to catch the 1%, but that hamstring the 99% in the process.
The few truly great leaders around in charge of our large corporations that manage to make those choices are the exception. Jack Welch at GE made six sigma the manufacturing standard of the west by driving GE along a path invisible to most, and his successor, Jeffrey Immelt followed by a pivot of GE into green power, and has created an 18 $billion manufacturing division in just a few years that promises to be hugely profitable whilst delivering enormous value to the planet. There are a few others, the oft cited Apple, FedEx, Disney, add your own, but it is a short list.
Perhaps it is happening again as the suppliers of the milling and moulding equipment used in manufacturing, are about to be made at least partially redundant by a few outliers who are putting manufacturing equipment on desktops.
Just a pity there appears to be so few in Australia.
Nov 9, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Marketing
Much effort, particularly by public bodies, is focused on invention, in the mistaken belief that by inventing, patenting, and just being first to do something new, will lead to some great outcome.
Not so.
It is a bit like supply side economics, make the rich richer, and some will trickle down to the less well off, not a great outcome there.
Innovation is driven by different things, a perceived need in the market, an opportunity to improve something, two bits of existing technology combined in a different way, something from one market applied to another unrelated market, and many more. Invention is generally driven by curiosity more than anything else.
Don’t confuse the two, the technologies that have changed the world have largely been commercialised by entrepreneurs, or innovators who saw the opportunities, not by the inventors who conceived the technology.
Invention and innovation are not the same thing.
Oct 30, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Operations
Remember when there was a market for only 5 computers in the world, then a few thousand appeared in governments, huge corporations, and a few big R&D labs, then suddenly along came the PC, and there were millions of them in our homes, then hundreds of millions of “devices” in our pockets, seemingly almost overnight?
It is happening again.
Coming to a desk near you is the personal machinist, the 3-D printer that will do for small scale manufacturing what the PC did for personal information management and communication.
This post from Mitch Joel has a link to a video interview of Chris Anderson on his new book “Makers – The new industrial revolution” which should blow away a few intellectual cobwebs.
Theo Jansen whose Kinetic models have been a youtube hit has had miniatures produced, working models of astonishing intricacy produced by Shapeways technology, one of the revolutionaries.
This stuff is coming to a desk near you, soon, and the only limitation is your imagination.
Sep 20, 2012 | Innovation, Marketing, Small business
“Big data” appears to be the coming cliché amongst my propeller-headed friends, as it gets cheaper to gather, store, and mine data, they are like excited 21st century versions of Oliver Twist, “more petabytes please sir”!
Surely at some point diminishing returns occur, more and more of the same data cannot to my mind possibly lead to the insights that make a difference. What is needed is different data, meaningful insights generated from the data, better assembly of data into project plans and performance measures, curation of key bits of data to those who can use it to solve a problem or provide insight into a circumstance.
Imagine if you will, a black and white photo taken with a 10 megapixel camera, compared to the same photo taken with a 100 megapixel camera (does this exist?) same photo, better definition although hard to distinguish, you can blow the one taken with the 100 up to the size of the opera house and still be recognisable, but it is still the same photo, just more data of the same sort. Now consider the same picture taken in colour, at 5 megapixels, same photo, less data, but what a change is wrought by a bit of different data, even if it is just an added bit of small data.
More of the same is never as good as a little bit of different.
Sep 14, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
The shape of Apple after Steve Jobs has been a source of much scribbling, and the launch on Friday of the newest version of its golden goose, the iPhone 5 has given us a peek.
The razzamatazz has been huge, Apple all over, but they delivered what the pundits view as a pretty limp offering. Nothing new, apart from a different case, and behind current offerings from Samsung and HTC on a number of parameters.
However, what Apple does deliver that nobody can get close to is profits. On $150 billion forecast revenues this year, Apple is delivering an astounding 28% EBIT, double a year ago, and considerably more on phones according to Creative Strategies Tim Bajarin. All this as their sales in a market growing at 42% are increasing at only 27%.
Apple has its own ecosystem, so to some extent is protected from commodity type comparisons that erode price, but how much of a premium can they sustain, and for how long? Googles Android operating system now has around four times the share of Apple, from “even-stevens” just a year ago, and Google spends 14% of revenue on R&D, to Apples 2%. In dollar terms, they are about the same, and Apple has less of a product portfolio to manage, but the tide of initiative is now with Google, and the momentum is really hard to break.
It seems to me that Apple is mortgaging their future, putting the dough in the bank, much as Microsoft did in its halcyon days, and not continuing the drive that got them where they are today. In a sharp reminder of priorities, Apple is spending big on protecting its current position by suing everyone standing in the tech space, which must be a huge distraction from the disruptive innovations created almost yesterday that put them where they are now.
