Aug 31, 2011 | Innovation, Marketing, Personal Rant
The retirement of Steve Jobs last week has prompted a blizzard of comment, even a cartoon, from my favorite Tom Fishburne, and at the risk of just adding to it, it seems appropriate to simply state that a bloke I have never met, who has never even heard of me, about whom I know nothing more than has been published over the 30 years of his extraordinary career, has changed the way my life is lived. His commencement speech at Stanford is now one of the web classics, with millions of views.
We all have ipods, or their substitutes, connected phones have revolutionised the way we communicate, tablet computing has just been changed forever, and my kids insist on a Mac at double the price of a technically comparable PC, and that is not to mention the huge impact the original Toy Story movie had during Job’s forced sabbatical from Apple.
It will be truly fascinating to observe the transition of power at Apple, can the innovation and marketing machine he built survive in its current form without Jobs?
Aug 30, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
I was amazed to realise that the recent dog fight to buy Nortel, was really driven by the patents they had, rather than the value of the operational parts of the business.
After an opener bid by Google of $900mill, Nortel eventually was sold to a consortium that included Apple, Microsoft, (ironic partnership that) Ericcson and Sony for $4.5 billion, outbidding Google and Intel who had teamed up. The winners will share the patent bank of Nortel, some 30,000 of them covering all sorts of electronic ideas and gizmos. The Nortel sale then prompted the sale of Motorola to Google for 12.5 billion, as it put a value on their patent bank.
A new business has emerged from the development of the last 20 years, “patent troll” someone who buys up patents, and then launches litigation to extract royalties. Given the hazy boundaries of patents in the digital space, the ideas that patent applications address in the first instance often have potential applications in applications never dreamed of in the original form. Enter the patent troll, who chases the royalities, potentially ensuring innovation driven startups may make never get off the ground, as the threat of litigation is enough to smother the commercialisation process.
The giant of Patent Trolls appears to be Intellectual Ventures, started by Nathan Myhrvold, a brilliant bloke whose contribution to Microsoft was a key to their success, and who since has made heaps by effectively greenmailing tech companies with lawsuits and threats suits for patent infringement.
Long intro. This cost of insuring against greenmailing ends up in the cost of the stuff we buy, and virtually all of it is just risk management, avoiding the risk of litigation that adds no value to the innovation process at all. The patent process was developed to protect ideas in a simpler time, and seems to me to have lived beyond its useful life, at least in the digital arena. Ideas scale, they get better with use, and the evolution of patent trolling acts as a disincentive to use, a tax.
Aug 29, 2011 | Innovation, Operations
Global sourcing, whilst offering benefits to customers in the county doing the outsourcing, has the long term effect of reducing the relative innovative capacity of the “outsourcer.”
As innovators seek the lowest cost for the product of their innovative output, the location of that resulting manufacturing acquires the capability to improve on the original from the proximity of daily interaction with the production, so are in a better position than the original innovator to build on the knowledge emerging from operational implementation.
What do you think the chances are that the next iteration of mobile technology will come from Chinese subcontractors to Apple? Following the example of chip manufacturing, formerly located in the US where the development was located, and now concentrated in Taiwan, I would think pretty good!
In the Australian food industry, manufacturing has been gutted, significantly driven by the twin impacts of the power of the retailers, and high Australian dollar making packaged goods imports cheaper.
We all understand sustainable innovation is the lifeblood of industry, and are increasingly understanding that sustainable innovation also requires the proximity of the manufacturing operations to the R&D and commercialisation activities that feed the process. That virtuous circle has been broken in the Australian food industry, amongst others, and I despair that it is so far gone that there will be no coming back, no matter how much the SME sector points out the obvious to the wallies who make the short term decisions with such dire long term impacts.
Aug 19, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media
The astonishing explosion of creativity that occurred in Florence in the 1500’s was precipitated when the Medici family brought together creative people from a range of disciplines, painters, sculptors, writers, philosophers, mathematicians, architects, engineers, and sparked the renaissance by creating and facilitating the connections and cross fertilisation between these creators.
The common denominator amongst all these creative people the Medici’s brought together was curiosity, a willingness to see solutions to their problems, and ideas they can use in the work of others, and a willingness to experiment, question, learn, and collaborate.
To a considerable degree, the Medici effect also impacted the UK midlands after the steam engine was utilised in cotton and woollen mills, and it is happening again now in the manner in which the internet is being used to connect people, and transform just about everything in our daily lives.
Perhaps the only thing not being altered is the same thing that remained unaltered in previous incarnations of the Medici’s impact, the necessity for people to trust, and engage with each other on a personal level, and the role of genuine leadership in determining how resources will be assembled and allocated.
Aug 10, 2011 | Change, Innovation
The cult of failure, the belief that by failing we succeed, has some very real and adverse consequences if taken literally. It gives excuses to those who would choose to be sloppy in their consideration and preparation of an experiment, behaviour that would get you thrown out of Edisons labs, but in management can now get you accolades.
Giving permission to fail without allocating any consequences sounds fine, but can lead to sloppy thinking. This guest post by Steven Parker on the Businessgrow blog republished on Stevens untimely death says it all.
My Dad used to say “every-one makes mistakes, but only a fool makes the same one twice”. This has implicit in it the value of the learning, but now so often see the “learning” part dismissed as too hard, ego driven dills seem to think they now have a licence to stuff up repeatedly, and avoid doing the hard post stuff-up analysis to understand why something went wrong, did not deliver the expected results, had “unexpected consequences”.
Often those consequences are because no sensible forward thinking was done, no basic risk assessment was in place, because “to experiment” has become a cliche, not a discipline.
Aug 1, 2011 | Change, Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
There is a powerful new analytical tool on the block, “social network cartography” for lack of a better term. The masses of data now becoming available are able to be analysed with respect to the networks that exist amongst people. If your friends are obese, the your chances of being obese are greater, if your friends smoke, there is a greater chance you will. This can all be mapped.
Much of the pioneering work has been done by Nicholas Christakis and colleagues from Harvard Medical school over a 30 year period, starting with data generated by the Framington Heart Study, which is being reported increasingly widely, such as this piece on smoking in the Boston area, reported in Kelso’s Corner blog, as a tool for change.
Christakis presents his ideas in this TED presentation, along with more examples. This data cartography is a tool that is evolving rapidly, but appears to me to have an amazing capacity to create graphics that will demonstrate all sorts of complex arguments, and as you know, a picture tells a thousand words.
