Aug 30, 2012 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Strategy
Apple has beaten Samsung in the US court, protecting a raft of patents that apply to mobile devices, acquiring a pile of cash, and the probable withdrawal of a number of Samsung products from the market. Competitive nirvana.
Whilst it is understandable that Apple protect its commercial position through the courts, it is nevertheless a hypocrisy of vast proportions, and breaks the cycle of innovation that has characterised the mobile space over the last 5 years, and changed, if not enriched our lives, and is now turning into a legal quicksand that can only hamper innovation, whilst embedding incumbents into our wallets.
Tim Cook, Apple’s MD released a note describing the win thus: “For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth.”
Excuse me whilst I throw up.
This contrasts to Steve Jobs 1994 statement that Apple had been “Shameless about stealing great ideas” then later reversing that position by saying Apple would go “thermo-nuclear to protect its position” when others sought to build on their innovations.
Copy, Transform, Combine.
This is the thesis articulated by Kirby Ferguson, that everything is a remix of what has gone before, creativity emerges from and builds on the efforts of others. In his TED talk, and outstanding series of short videos which expand on the ideas, he traces the source of our patent and copyright laws pointing out the purpose of the laws is no longer what they are used for, competitive forces have fundamentally changed them into something not intended.
Apple built on the ideas of others, adding remarkable creativity to them to bring us a series of innovations perhaps unequalled in their immediate impact on our lives, but now is using outdated legal interpretations of patent law to protect its position from others seeking to do exactly what they have done so shamelessly.
Hypocrisy for the sake of money, undermining innovation. Understandable, but very costly to the consumer, and to the march of innovation.
Aug 29, 2012 | Innovation, Management
Innovation is not a marketing term, it is much wider than that, it is a mind-set.
It remains however, an eternal question, often used to open another boring workshop, “What is innovation?”
Usually those who ponder this question are the marketing bods, and the very senior management of an enterprise, but they do not usually do the work of innovation, their task is to create the environment where it can flourish. The work is done by hands on people, leveraging the resources made available to make change, and often working in quiet corners away from the scrutiny of the accountants.
So, again, What is innovation?
- Product, obviously, we change products all the time, occasionally it can be classed as innovation, but not often. The first iPod was an innovation, the second just a range extension.
- Business model. Ebay was a business model innovation that broke the mould for single item sales by individuals, as is the current move to cloud services from desktop applications.
- Business process. Old Henry made the best known process innovation when he adapted the production line from earlier examples, and applied it to automobiles.
- Perception of value to a user, demonstrated again by Apple, whose retail outlets are now the most successful retailers on a sales/sq meter basis in the world. Suddenly, bricks and mortar retailing has a place? Or is it a remake of the notion of how value is delivered that all retailers need to absorb.
Aug 22, 2012 | Branding, Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
People are always looking for answers in their lives, whilst mostly not being in a position to frame the question sufficiently to enable a search as specific as one on Google. It is a factor in our lives that contributes to the context in which we live where we go, who we interact with, what we buy and where, what we think of our jobs, partners, and future for our kids.
It is not too much of a stretch to think that a picture of these things can be built over time by a personalised version of the search and browse capabilities now available to us. It has been called the semantic web, web 3.0, and a bunch of other things, but it is really a bank of information about us, evolved by emerging AI that reflects out lives.
Imagine you were walking down a street, near a car dealership with a new French model, your semantic web planted in your device knows you like French wine, your current car is due to be changed, you favor sweeping lines in design, your kids have left home, so there is some money in the bank, you always hankered for sporty, a bit “left field” experiences, and you have a bit of time before the appointment that brings you to this location. Bingo, a personalised invitation for a cup of coffee, and a chat about the new model comes to you from someone in the dealership vaguely linked to you via a social network.
It is only a small jump away from where we are now, but changes the way the marketing process will work.
Aug 16, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Management, Marketing
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change.
They have a structure that is often 5 layers from the CMO to the assistant brand manager, organised along brand lines, and recently supplemented with category analysts, social media experts, and other service roles. All this at a time when consumer brands are under huge threat from retailer owned brands, global marketing, fragile demand, the erosion of the ability to differentiate by the ubiquity of information, and agile low cost competitors.
Just getting rid of every third head makes little sense, all you do is lose corporate memory, so you need to reorganise to deliver productivity from the investment in marketing overhead, although inevitably there will be personnel losses. Three questions to consider:
- Is marketing activity aligned to corporate priorities?. Many times I have seen lower levels in marketing departments beavering away at projects that bear little resemblance to the strategic priorities held in the corner office.
- Are project portfolios run alongside brand initiatives to ensure that the silos that evolve when brand groups are relatively autonomous are removed?.
- Have you made the hard choices about what projects will proceed, and which will be relegated to the car-park?. This is sometimes very hard, but is a crucial circuit breaker for innovation, with the caveat that those projects left are appropriately resourced.
This is not easy stuff, and most fail the test, which results in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions.
Aug 14, 2012 | Innovation, Management
Just as we manufacture antibodies in our blood to combat infection, so do enterprises construct antibodies in their cultures to combat risk, change, and therefore innovation.
This antibody construction normally happens by default, after all, why change things that have given us what we have? (This resistance to change when all is well is why the best time to change anything is when the poo poo has really hit the fan).
The management task is to administer the innovation drug to enterprises in order to change the culture that exists to enable innovation to occur.
Here is a list of innovation antibodies I have seen at their deadly work, in no particular order:
Ego
Hubris
Disciplined processes replacing thought
Old habits
“NIH”
Not listening
Concentration on narrow data sets
Happy to be a follower
Group-think
Believing managers are innovators
Weeding out the deviates, outliers and heretics
Ambition trumping capability
Rampant self interest
Believing the old adage that information is power, and holding it all close
Ignoring what is happening on the fringes of a market and technology
Not understanding who the customer is
Not listening to demanding customers
Not understanding why you are losing customers
Believing doing something well is good enough, instead of it being the price of entry
Failing to make intuitive connections
Believing the financial statements tell you all you need to know
Autocracy and fear as a management tool
Non investment in the intangible assets of a business
The list just seems to go on and on…………….
Aug 13, 2012 | Innovation, Leadership
Being different is the guts of innovation, no matter how good, how big (or small) how effective, how cheap, if it is not different, none of the rest will matter a whit.
Why is it then, that we have processes and disciplines that weed out the deviances from the norm?
Who is to say the norm is right?
The bloke who always disagrees, has an odd view of the world, irritates, and creates discord is usually the first to go when times are tough, and when the boss needs to demonstrate his machismo, but sometimes, just sometimes, the deviate is right.
Those who see the world differently to most are usually those who have the potential to come up with something new, something that disrupts the status quo, they may also just be a pain in the arse, so the management task is to balance the odds, moderating the risk while cultivating the environment in which the whackos will flourish.
As George Bernard Shaw said, “all great things start as blasphemies”
