Dec 8, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation
The formula for risk analysis of innovation could be written as:
Likelihood of failure X Cost of failure.
Therefore, in a traditional hierarchical organisation, there is an ingrained reluctance to take risks and perhaps fail because of the financial cost, whereas in an open system where there is no apparent cost of failure, the restriction of the usual organisational and transaction costs are largely absent.
This does not reduce the incidence of failure, but it removes the financial costs, leaving the personal incentive to succeed, rather than focusing attention on the financial ones.
It is the personal drive to succeed, to do something useful, that makes lives easier, richer, more fulfilling, which is the source of most really original innovations.
Dec 6, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation
An idea is the outcome of all that has gone before, resulting in the “eureka” moment, the equivalent of the singers overnight success after 10 years of work in obscurity, playing smokey bars, gaining experience and honing skills.
Usually, ideas emerge from relative chaos of all the commercial equivalents of those smokey bars, places where problems, experiments, stories, left field solutions and all the richness of human interaction meet.
Makes you think that perhaps all this time around the water cooler is not really wasted, so long as the culture is tolerant of the ideas that will be thrown up, and enables something to be done with them.
Nov 15, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
Most acknowledge that the future will be different from the past, so why is it that we seem determined to manage our way to the future by repeating the recipes of success from the past.
Future success relies on doing things differently, and this is uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unnerving, so avoided by most.
Kodak missed the development of the digital camera, despite inventing it, Nokia missed the development of the “smartphone” while a runaway market leader, all the large PC companies missed the development of the direct sales model until Dell had tied it up, Detroit missed the consumers cry for smaller, fuel efficient cars that were reliable until bankruptcy loomed, and Apple continues to clean up by reinventing categories, and everyone else just follows them into the mobile consumer markets that they pioneer.
It is the equivalent of driving along a bush track by looking through the rear vision mirror, eventually you will crash. Only by looking ahead, and navigating a path less well marked can you take a leadership position, and that requires some “Unlearning”.
Nov 9, 2011 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Every product manager I have ever seen sees his/her pack change, flavor extension, or new size as an innovation, and every marketing manager who lets this mediocre stuff take up valuable time, the only resource that is really irreplaceable, is culpable.
Sometimes, just sometimes, a genuine innovation emerges, and the common feature is that they almost always emerge from a culture that values their own resources, and that of their customers to the exclusion of all the usual puffery. What is left is the genuine hyping of something new, that needs at least some explanation, as it does not fit into any existing, neat categories.
Apple, Ideo, Cisco, Toyota, and a few others do it, others try and copy, change the look, but the value proposition is a copy. There is a new calculus of innovation easy enough to see if you know what to look for, really hard to do.
Oct 8, 2011 | Innovation
Of all the eulogising about Apple and Steve Jobs that has been published since his death a couple of days ago, almost predictably, the best one in my humble view comes from Gary Hamel who looks at Apple through his lens of Strategy.
Hamel thinks about the development and execution of the sources of competitive advantage, and he applies these thoughts to Apple and the legacy of Jobs.
Oct 6, 2011 | Innovation
Innovating a business model usually is about finding ways to put elements of a service delivery together differently, these days it is usually also about combining technologies to deliver an outcome that would have been impossible without both the technology and the new combination.
In the US there is a new car sharing (as distinct from rental) service, Zipcar, growing very rapidly by delivering a car-share service without the frustrating paperwork, queues, and uncertainty that is present currently in car rentals.
Simply join, and receive a “Zipcard” which activates a reader on the windshield of a Zipcar, updates your account, records mileage and location of the car, and opens the doors so you can get in and drive away. You can just turn up at a depot, or reserve over the net or mobile app, no paperwork, no hassle.
Suddenly, inner city living just got a whole lot easier!
