Sunday, 19 June 2011
Brand New: Solving the Innovation Paradox -- How Great Brands Invent and Launch New Products, Services, and Business Models
Brand New’s revolutionary innovation process is a proven road map you can put to work immediately to create successful new products, services, and business models. Written by leading innovation practitioners, and the coauthor of the bestseller Customers for Life, the authors of this tightly focused, highly entertaining book have nailed the issue perfectly when it comes to successfully introducing anything new.Research shows people like new products and services. Indeed they go out of their way to try to find them. Yet companies are truly terrible at providing new products and services that meet these customers’ needs.
Why are companies so bad at giving customers what they want? Because they lack a simple proven process that makes sure innovation occurs efficiently time after time.
No one knows this better than Mike Maddock and his team at Maddock Douglas, the Agency of Innovation,™ which has worked closely with more than a quarter of Fortune 100.
To solve the innovation paradox, Maddock explains the process his team has used to help the world’s best companies and shows you how to
- Find needs and opportunity in the marketplace
- Come up with significant market insights
- Create compelling communication (using the actual words your customers use) to convince people to try your new creation
What has worked for some of the world’s most successful companies, when it comes to innovation, will work for you. Start putting the lessons of Brand New to work for you…before the competition does.
Price: $29.95
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
Named one of the "Best Books on Innovation, 2008" by BusinessWeek magazine
From the greatest minds in business today comes a groundbreaking new blueprint for executing the next stage of customer-created value. C.K. Prahalad, the world's premier business thinker, and IT scholar M.S. Krishnan unveil the critical missing link in connecting strategy to execution--building organizational capabilities that allow companies to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation.
The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage.
In this landmark work, Prahalad and Krishnan explain how to accomplish this shift--one where IT and the management architecture form the corporation's fundamental foundation. This book provides strategies for
- Redesigning systems to co-create value with customers and connect all parts of a firm to this process
- Measuring individual behavior through smart analytics
- Ceaselessly improving the flexibility and efficiency in all customer-facing and back-end processes
- Treating all involved individuals--customers, employees, investors, suppliers--as unique
- Working across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global network
- Building teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly
To successfully compete on the battlefields of 21st-century business, companies must reinvent their processes and culture in order to sustain innovative solutions. The New Age of Innovation is a complete program for achieving this transformation to meet the needs of the end consumer of the future.
Price: $29.95
Saturday, 18 June 2011
How Apple Feeds Its Army of App Makers
Illustration by Kelly Blair
As he has for each of the past 14 years, Andrew Stone woke at 3:45 on the morning of Apple's (AAPL) annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6 in San Francisco, grabbed his yoga mat, and joined the queue of techies waiting to be let in for Steve Jobs's 10 a.m. presentation. The gangly Stone, a former architect who has written software for Jobs's machines since the 1980s, revels in talking tech with fellow Apple geeks, particularly the Europeans and Asians who often save a night's hotel fare by spending the night in line.
This year, more than ever, the good mood was powered by something other than camaraderie: Developers are making money, getting lots of contract work. "You have no idea how many people around here are overjoyed," says Stone, 55, who flew up from his home in Albuquerque the day before. He recalls far leaner years, when many struggled to come up with the $3,000 or so for the conference fee and travel. "Now, good developers can make almost as much money as they want."
The scene outside the conference hall is a snapshot of the war Apple is waging for the hearts and minds of developers. The scale and diversity of Apple's app universe—425,000, roughly twice as many as Android's—is a big reason consumers have purchased more than 200 million iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. In his WWDC talk, Jobs laid out a post-PC vision of online services that will open up vast opportunities for programmers to come up with new kinds of software. "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just another device," Jobs told the crowd. "We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." He announced a new service, iCloud, that will ensure any photo, music, or other file that is downloaded or changed on your iPhone is automatically, wirelessly synched to any of your other Apple devices and vice versa. A new iMessage will make it simpler to communicate via text, voice, and video. The basic iOS operating system has been improved, which will make it easier to snap pictures, share files, or find an article. To the extent that Jobs can persuade consumers not to bother with non-Apple products, his pull with developers may increase as well.
Freelance developers such as Stone tend to be an idealistic, egalitarian bunch, suspicious of big companies intent on telling them, or consumers, what to do. And yet Apple has expertly played on their pragmatism—programming tools are slick and simple to use, for example. The main reason there are so many more apps available for Apple products is that there are more ways for developers to make money on them. Consumers have paid more than $4.3 billion for apps sold on Apple's App Store. That includes the original purchase, plus upgrades and ads that appear within the apps. Eddie Marks and his college roommate haven't even bothered to count up the winnings from the ads that appear on their free app, which lets iPhone users simulate the sound of cocking and firing a shotgun. "We've made more than $1 million," says Marks, whose initial goal was simply to raise rent and beer money until he could find a job after graduation in 2008. "It could be $2 million, but I doubt it."
Apple hasn't monopolized developers' attention. According to a survey by market research firm Evans Data, the percentage of developers writing apps for Android (43.5 percent) just passed the share working in iOS (39.7 percent). While Apple dominates a certain high-end niche, Android has been adopted by almost every other phone maker and wireless carrier. Throw in the hundreds of millions of devices running BlackBerry, Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Phone, or Nokia's (NOK) Symbian, and "there's very little exclusivity in the mobile development space," says Evans Data Chief Executive Officer Janel Garvin.
Chrome: Google's Other Operating System Debuts
Google's (GOOG) executives have long enjoyed ribbing Microsoft (MSFT) as bloated, slow, and out of touch with computer trends. So there must be a few smirks at Microsoft's headquarters: Google's first, long-delayed Chromebooks are about to arrive in a world that's moved on without them.
Google laid out its Chromebook vision two years ago: a new type of laptop that revolved around the Web. It would run on a stripped-down operating system known as Chrome—imagine a Web browser that isn't on your computer's desktop, it is your computer's desktop. Chromebooks would turn on in seconds and would let users flit around the Web and store things such as photos and documents via Flickr, Dropbox, and other online services. The idea was to wean people away from storing files directly on their computers and managing files and applications on the desktop screen so familiar to anyone who's used a PC or a Mac. The cloud had arrived and deserved its own computer.
The initial batch of Chromebooks, which are shipping on June 15, lives up to that vision. These machines start up fast (eight seconds). Once people log in with their Google credentials—the same used for Gmail—they arrive at a home page on the Chrome Web browser and off they go. That's the gist of the Chromebook experience.
Samsung and Acer have built the first models, which will sell for about $430 for Wi-Fi-only systems and $500 for versions that can also connect to Verizon's 3G wireless network. (As with its mobile operating system, Android, Google doesn't charge a licensing fee for Chrome.) Consumers in the U.S. can buy them through Amazon.com (AMZN) and BestBuy.com (BBY); Europeans will be able to get them in the coming months. Google also has a monthly subscription program for businesses and schools, leasing Chromebooks for $28 per employee and $20 per student.
Like smartphone sellers, Google has created an online app store for Chrome—both for Chromebooks and Chrome browsers on regular PCs. Users won't see familiar desktop software like TurboTax, Photoshop, or Microsoft Office, but they'll be able to get H&R Block At Home, BeFunky Photo Editor, and Google Docs.
On a Chromebook, you need to be online to run any of these applications. "That really is the big problem," says Tim Bajarin, president of analyst firm Creative Strategies. "The reality is that you're not always going to be in a place where you're connected." Later this summer, Google plans to offer versions of Gmail and Google Calendar that will work on a Chromebook even when it's offline. The company will also help developers similarly adjust their apps, says Google spokesperson Lily Lin.
Google has decided to add more traditional file management tools as well. For example, users will be able to open and save music, photos, and other files on SD cards and USB sticks, just not on the laptops' hard drives.
Google once planned to ship the Chromebooks in 2010. They would have seemed like a breath of fresh air then. Over the past year, though, tablets and smartphones have continued to surge. These devices deliver the same basic experience as the Chromebooks since they too tend to revolve around the Web. But there's more device variety in the tablet and smartphone markets, and they tend to have livelier app stores, including Google's own Android marketplace.
In the past couple of weeks, Microsoft and Apple (AAPL) have shown off revamped versions of their computing operating systems. Microsoft's Windows 8 (due next year) has a radical interface that resembles its smartphone software and is integrated with Facebook and other Web services. Apple's new Lion version of OS X will link to iPhones and iPads through cloud-based services. Both these operating systems will provide access to the cloud without the big tradeoffs of Chrome, says IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "It seems to me that the Chromebooks are more of a concept," he says. "Google is trying to showcase an ideal of what life might be like if everything depended on the cloud."
The bottom line: Google's simple, inexpensive Chromebook showcases cloud computing—but may be too stripped-down, and late, to go mainstream.
Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.Inkling Publishes Textbooks for iPads
Timothy Archibald for Bloomberg Businessweek
Many college science students lug around Brooker Biology, a 1,438-page tome published by McGraw-Hill (MHP) that costs up to $150 and weighs close to five pounds. This fall they'll have a new option: Brooker Biology for iPad, a touchscreen textbook that runs on Apple's (AAPL) svelte tablet computer.
It's one of dozens of digital textbooks created by Inkling, a two-year-old San Francisco company founded by Matt MacInnis. Although some digital textbooks already exist—CourseSmart, a joint venture between major publishing companies, has a fairly comprehensive selection—most are basically scanned copies of print products. Inkling's offerings are more interactive. In its Brooker Biology, a 3D diagram of the human heart can be rotated with the flick of a finger, complicated processes such as cell co-transport are explained with videos, and dynamic quizzes reinforce lessons. It's social, too: Students can connect with one another to share marginalia or passages they've highlighted. The book's 60 chapters can be bought individually for $3 apiece, so professors can assign just the sections they want to teach.
Inkling expects to have 100 iPad titles ready by fall. This year's crop of 108 first-year students at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University will be required to buy iPads and use Inkling e-books for their anatomy and clinical medicine classes. "This ability to have it be interactive and test yourself is unbelievable," says Luba Dumenco, a course director at the school.
Digital textbooks will "have an appreciable impact on how well we educate the next generation of learners," says MacInnis, 31, who founded Inkling in 2009 after an eight-year gig running various education initiatives at Apple. He's assembled a team of more than 50 programmers and pedagogy experts and partnered with some of the country's largest textbook publishers. Two of them, McGraw-Hill and Pearson (PSO), invested millions in Inkling earlier this year. On each sale, Inkling shares the revenue with the publisher of the book.
Inkling has built software that speeds up the process of turning a print textbook into a digital one, says MacInnis, a Nova Scotia native and Harvard grad. "A 1,400-page textbook is way more complex than most people care to notice," he says. "We turn it into a formula." Ink-ling's computers scan through files provided by the publisher and automatically arrange text, images, and audiovisual elements in an intuitive interface.
MacInnis says digital textbooks are a new and welcome source of income for educational publishers worried about the expansion of the secondhand market, especially online book rental sites such as Chegg. "That future is scary," he says. "This future is actually welcoming and exciting."
The Harvard grad spent eight years at Apple.
Interactive, feature-rich textbooks for the tablet era.
Inkling is required for new med students at Brown.
Bitcoins: Currency of the Geeks
Mike Caldwell, the founder of a small company in Salt Lake City that makes timekeeping software, considers himself financially conservative. He's also a geek, and couldn't help but get excited late last year when he heard about bitcoin, a new virtual currency. In February, on one of the handful of online exchanges that have appeared over the past year, he bought about $20,000 worth at less than a dollar per bitcoin. "I felt that maybe I would get a 20 or 50 percent return," says Caldwell, 33. By early June, when he sold the last of his stake, a bitcoin was worth around $30. Caldwell says his total return was well over 1,000 percent. "That magnitude was totally unexpected," he says.
For those who got in early, it's a gold rush. In the last few months this online cash has exploded in usage, notoriety, and value. Like dollars or yen, a bitcoin's worth fluctuates with demand, but in its short history it's gone mostly up. About $130 million worth of bitcoins are now in existence, and the value of that stash has grown more than 6,000 percent this year. Bitcoin partisans are breathless: "This is the biggest invention since the Internet," says Bruce Wagner, an entrepreneur who hosts a monthly bitcoin meet-up group in Manhattan.
The project was started in 2009 by an enigmatic programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto. He always communicated electronically, never answered personal questions, and disappeared from online forums in December. The conspiracy-minded speculate that Nakamoto was actually a group of people, or a government cryptographer, or a pseudonym for Gavin Andresen, the Amherst (Mass.) programmer who took over the project after Nakamoto vanished. "I spoke to one guy who thought aliens might have come to earth to bring us this technology, it's so perfect," says Wagner.
Digital transactions normally require a trusted intermediary such as PayPal to credit and debit accounts properly and prevent cheating. With bitcoins, "there is no middleman, says Andresen or," more accurately, there's a distributed middleman. Individual transactions are encrypted, logged by a decentralized network running on thousands of home computers, and recorded in a public ledger. The system works similarly to peer-to-peer music-sharing networks in that files are shared among swarms of users, rather than downloaded from a central server.
Suppose you're in the market for alpaca socks, one of the few consumer items you can buy with bitcoins. Step one: Get some BTC—that's the symbol—at a currency exchange site such as Mt.Gox. Then download a desktop app from bitcoin.org, which will store your lucre (some use an online service such as Instawallet.org instead) and connect you to the decentralized bitcoin network. Next, find the alpaca farms bitcoin address, a string of characters also known as a public key. Click the send coins button.
The purchase is unconfirmed until a miner certifies it. Miners are power users who crunch numbers on behalf of the network, and some have racks of computers dedicated to the task. They're called miners because, just as gold miners increase the supply of gold, they create new bitcoins, at an algorithmically controlled rate. The greater their computing power, the more they generate for themselves. Once a miner's computer has processed a transaction, the alpaca farm gets bitcoins and you get socks. It's complex but fast: The bitcoin network has handled as many as 87 quadrillion calculations per second, 35 times more than the top supercomputer.
Bitcoins have all the advantages of cash—free to use, very hard to trace—as well as its disadvantages. That digital wallet is a file on a hard drive or online, and if it's lost or stolen there's no recourse. The currency is backed only by the faith and credit of its participants and outside the scope of any banker, politician, or the Federal Reserve. To a certain breed of libertarian nerd who grew up on cyberpunk, it's the Digital Rapture.
Keenwash: A Waterless Car Wash from the Middle East
Salah Malkawi for Bloomberg Businessweek
Water is precious in Jordan, where shortages have prompted decades of rationing and exacerbated tensions with Israel. Nader Atmeh and his sons, Hassan and Moutaz, want to do their part by eliminating the traditional car wash in the Middle East. They say their waterless washing business, Keenwash, is saving Jordan hundreds of thousands of gallons a year.
Keenwash uses a nontoxic, almost entirely biodegradable spray-on liquid. Mixed and bottled at the Atmehs' factory on the outskirts of Amman, the water-based blend of surfactants and polymers softens and emulsifies dirt so it can easily be wiped off a vehicle's exterior with a cloth. Cleaning a midsize sedan such as a Toyota (TM) Camry or BMW 3 Series uses about 5 ounces of the liquid and takes 15 minutes or so. (A typical drive-through wash uses about 50 gallons of water.) Keenwash operates three cleaning stations in mall parking lots and sends cleaners to homes and businesses. It doesn't plan to sell its line of cleaners in stores; its business model is to sell franchises to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Waterless car washes have been around in the U.S. for a few decades. Nader, 65, first saw one on a visit with his brother in Dallas in 2003. While testing U.S. products in Jordan, he found the results mediocre—not clean enough, not shiny enough. And pricey: One 16.9-ounce bottle cost $16. A pharmacist who studied at Alexandria University in Cairo and founded cosmetics and household cleaning product manufacturers, Nader spent three years working on a cheaper formula calibrated for the hot, sandy Mideast environment, with a higher percentage of natural wax and ultraviolet ray-blocking agents. Since Nader and his sons founded the company in 2008, Keenwash has cleaned about 35,000 cars, including the U.S. and British Embassy fleets. It expects $500,000 in revenue this year.
This kind of car wash is still a rarity in the U.S., says Eric Wulf, who heads the International Carwash Assn. in Chicago. "It's no surprise the waterless thing has also raised its head [in the Middle East]," he says, adding that U.S. and European manufacturers install at least 50 car wash systems annually. Keenwash's basic service is cheaper than it is in the U.S.: about $7 per cleaning in Amman, vs. the $20 to $30 that franchise consultant Manish Adhiya in San Diego recommends that local shops charge.
Despite the recent political turmoil in nearby countries, Keenwash is expanding. Saudi Arabia has five franchises; Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the West Bank each have one. Hassan is negotiating a deal in Egypt, where he hopes to sell 250 franchises to a group fighting youth unemployment. "These revolutions and changes in the political situations will help," says Hassan, 30. "Maybe they did hurt a little in the first few months, but I think that we will benefit eventually."
Nader Atmeh has a BS in pharmaceutical chemistry
He saw his first waterless car wash on a trip to the U.S. in 2003
Uses 5 ounces of liquid vs. regular washes' 50 gallons of water
Brookfield Plans $250 Million World Financial Center Upgrade
(Updates with quote from chief executive officer in second paragraph.)
June 16 (Bloomberg) -- Brookfield Office Properties plans to spend about $250 million to upgrade and expand the retail portion of lower Manhattan’s World Financial Center.The plan calls for a “dramatic” glass pavilion along West Street, across from the World Trade Center, which will link the 8 million-square-foot (743,000-square-meter) complex with downtown’s two new mass transit hubs, Brookfield said in a statement. It also includes a dining concourse overlooking the Hudson River, and would save the Winter Garden staircase, which had been slated for elimination in earlier proposals.“These improvements to the World Financial Center are coming at the perfect time, given the $20 billion private and public investment in lower Manhattan,” Richard “Ric” Clark, New York-based Brookfield’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. “We are pleased to be moving forward with a plan that incorporates the existing Winter Garden staircase and repositions the World Financial Center for decades to come.”Brookfield is facing the 2013 expiration of rental agreements on 4.6 million square feet of offices -- more than half the financial center -- originally leased to Merrill Lynch & Co., now controlled by Bank of America Corp. The landlord is working to make the complex more attractive to help it attract and retain tenants.Construction is scheduled to start in October and will conclude in 2013, the company said. The architect for the glass pavilion is Pelli Clarke Pelli, the firm that designed the financial center.Fashion, Gourmet FoodPlans call for more than 40 high-end fashion shops and a 25,000-square-foot gourmet food marketplace. The entire retail complex will be 177,000 square feet, according to Brookfield.Brookfield this year has signed more than 600,000 square feet of new leases at the center with companies including OppenheimerFunds Inc. and Commerzbank AG, both of whom were sub- tenants of Merrill, the company said.Proposals to replace the circular stairway were opposed by many residents who associate its post-9/11 restoration with the community’s recovery from the 2001 terrorist attacks. Brookfield wanted to eliminate the marble staircase to open up the Winter Garden’s eastern entrance and prevent bottlenecks of pedestrians coming up from the trade center’s PATH train terminal across the street.Manhattan Community Board 1, which represents neighborhood residents, passed a resolution last July urging Brookfield to “carefully explore all options that will permit retention of the grand staircase.”--Editors: Christine Maurus, Kara Wetzel
To contact the reporter on this story: David M. Levitt in New York at dlevitt@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel in New York at kwetzel@bloomberg.net
Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back
Not long ago, Americans could rightfully feel confident in our preeminence in the world economy. The United States set the pace as the world's leading innovator: from the personal computer to the internet, from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the decoding of the genome to the emergence of Web 2.0, we led the way and the future was ours. So how is it, bestselling author and leading expert on innovation John Kao asks, that today Finland is the world's most competitive economy? That U.S. students rank twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy and twenty-sixth in problem-solving ability? That in 2005 and 2006 combined, in a reverse brain drain, 30,000 highly trained professionals left the United States to return to their native India?Even as the United States has lost standing in the world community because of the war in Iraq, Kao warns, the country is losing its edge in economic leadership as well. The future of our prosperity, and of our national security, is at serious risk. But it doesn't have to be this way. Based on his in-depth experience advising many of the world's leading companies and studying cutting-edge innovation "best practices" in the most dynamic hot spots of innovation both in the United States and around the world, Kao argues that the United States still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century. We must, though, take serious and concerted action fast.
First offering a stunning, troubling portrait of just how serious is the erosion in recent years of U.S. competitiveness in innovation, Kao then takes readers on a fascinating tour of the leading innovation centers, such as those in Singapore, Denmark, and Finland, which are trumping us in their more focused and creative approaches to fueling innovation. He then lays out a groundbreaking plan for a national innovation strategy that would empower the United States to actually innovate the process of innovation: to marshal our vast resources of talent and infrastructure in the particular ways that his studies of innovation have shown lead to transformative results.
Innovation Nation is vital reading for all those Americans who are troubled by the great challenges the United States faces in the ever-more-competitive economy of our twenty-first-century world.
Price: $26.00
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Creating Innovation Using the IDEA System - Generate New Product Ideas
A common question asked by many business leaders and entrepreneurs is "How do I create innovations in my business?" Most people asking this question are looking to expand an existing business or launch a new product or service. I have created the acronym IDEA to describe a system for creating and applying innovation in any business.
I - Identify All Innovations. Understand where and how to create innovations - through brainstorming sessions, problem solving exercises, creating an innovation mindset and other techniques. You also need a system to record these innovations. Even if the recording system merely captures the title or a one sentence description of the innovation - you must capture this information. Provide a simple way for everyone in the company to record or submit their creative ideas. By keeping the innovation submission process simple, you will not "lose" innovative ideas because the submission process is perceived as a burden.
D - Develop An Innovation Culture. Get people throughout your organization (including yourself) to make innovation part of their daily thought process. By providing examples of other innovations and encouraging the submission of creative ideas, your business develops a culture of innovation. When people understand the value of innovations and look for innovations throughout the company, you produce a steady stream of valuable ideas. Teach people to look for innovations when solving problems, and think of ways to use that solution to avoid future problems.
E - Evaluate All Innovations. Create an Innovation Review Group to evaluate innovations submitted by company personnel. This Innovation Review Group should include people with different job functions, such as sales, marketing, product development, customer support, etc. People with different job functions will have different perspectives on the innovations and can help evaluate creative ideas by applying a cost-benefit analysis. Also, innovations may have an impact on a particular department that is not anticipated by personnel in other departments.
A - Action. Don't just create lists of innovations - Take Action to implement the innovations that have the most potential value to the company. Track the results, such as increased income, reduced expenses and customer growth, and share the positive results throughout the company. These positive results will encourage further innovative thinking and provide wonderful examples of successful innovation.
Start applying the IDEA system today to position your business as an innovator in your market. This system does not need to be complicated or time-consuming. But, you must get started.
I invite you to download my Free report at http://www.InnovationStrategyReport.com to take your first step in developing an innovation strategy in your business.
From Steve Sponseller - Innovation Strategist
Need Innovation? Hire an Entrepreneur
Twenty years ago, "entrepreneur" was spelled "L-O-S-E-R." If you were a bright, talented college grad, the only road to success was by working your way up the corporate ladder.
Today that's not the case. Recently we spoke at an event in Charlotte, N.C., called the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, a series of conferences for aspiring young entrepreneurs. In the audience were hundreds of high school and college kids, feverishly taking notes. The tour, which is only five years old, will attract an estimated 20,000 students this year.
A high percentage of those students will pursue their entrepreneurial passion in college. The number of entrepreneurship courses nationally has grown from 250 in 1985 to more than 5,000. This is now the hottest degree for the ambitious with dreams of becoming billionaires before age 29. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg.
If you lead a large corporation, you may think none of this matters. You're probably getting plenty of well-qualified, new management applicants, especially given the weak economy.
What you do not realize is you're losing access to a certain type of individual—the kind who makes things happen, the risk-takers who drive change and help create disruptive innovation.
We studied sources of innovation in 25 consumer product categories over 50 years. From the 1960s to the 1980s, 64 percent of all major new innovations came from large corporations (more than $1 billion in revenue). During the past two decades, only 16 percent of innovations came from large companies, while 84 percent of them came from startups or small companies.
In corporations, disruptive innovation has always been somewhat serendipitous. Great corporate innovations are rarely planned by senior managers or chief executive officers, unless your name happens to be Steve Jobs.
To have any chance of finding that next "New Thing," you need entrepreneurial-minded people in the lower- to middle-management ranks pushing the boundaries and challenging the organization. Only now those people are opting out of the corporate experience altogether and getting venture capital funding to compete with the large firms they shun.
Many people mistakenly think this trend is all about technology; it's not. Take the most mundane category: cleaning products. During the past decade, it was reinvented by two young entrepreneurs, Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, who bypassed corporate careers to start their own cleaning products company called Method. They built an innovative product line, raised several million dollars from VCs, and created a $100 million-plus new business that is now one of the leading cleaning lines at Target (TGT) stores.
Method transformed household cleaning, replacing harsh chemicals and utilitarian bottles with elegant packages and unique fragrances that make the drudgery of the task more pleasant.
Their company (now more than 100 strong) has attracted top talent from some of the best schools. These entrepreneurial-minded people prefer a "cool" startup over a traditional corporation (sorry, P&G).
This trend is not likely to change. The resources available to budding entrepreneurs are growing each day. Twenty years ago, there were few role models and fewer resources. Today there is a growing ecosystem of support. A number of other successful entrepreneurs, like Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) and Dave McClure (PayPal) have become active investors in startups.
Social Media: The End or Start of a Golden Age?
In the late eighteenth century, advances in steam-powered presses and machine-made paper and ink made books affordable for the masses. Before that, a family might have a Bible, but only the clergy and aristocrats owned books. According to technology historian Cathy Davidson, the sudden flood of cheap, popular books alarmed preachers, teachers, parents, and our Founding Fathers. They feared that wild tales of anarchy and romance would corrupt girls and workmen; that "novels" would ruin democracy, cause youth to lose their ability to concentrate on serious subjects, and would forever corrupt American morals. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both wrote impassioned denunciations of the horrors of reading fiction.
What did the young people do? They read more novels. They secretly sewed little pockets into dresses and trousers to hide the novels from nervous parents. History is repeating itself. Today's alarm is about social media. I witnessed the intensity of the debate first-hand in April, at the Milken Institute Global Conference.
Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains noted that research in neuroscience shows that everything we do changes our brains. He fears that our increasing use of computers is making our brain operate like the Internet itself—with faster, ever-more distracted multitasking. He predicts that mankind will lose its ability to perform "deep thinking;" that we will become as shallow as the websites we visit.
Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor, went further. He talked about how multitasking—walking and talking, eating and reading, texting while watching TV—is making us inefficient, distracted, and hurting our memory. He cited experiments in which people who said they were proficient multitaskers were unable to successfully carry information from one task to the next. Nass believes that multitasking is bad for just about everything, including memory, awareness, and personal relationships. In other words, multitasking is ruining the U.S. economy.
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle opined that the way our children communicate through SMS, Twitter, and Facebook is damaging their social skills. They prefer to communicate electronically, rather than face-to-face. They have no time alone because they're always connected. "Unless we teach our kids to be alone, they will always be lonely," she said. Turkle blames parents for introducing their children to texting. She says children watch their parents use cellular devices, stirring jealous feelings. Desperately craving attention, they start using these devices and become addicted to them, destroying relationships.
Listening to these people, I felt like we were back in the 1800s debating the evils of novels. Yes, the Internet and social media have made life more complicated; I get far too many e-mails and have to respond to hundreds of messages on Twitter and Facebook. Still, these tools have opened new worlds. They offer new sources of information, expand my thinking, and connect me to millions of people worldwide. They have allowed me to make a greater impact than was imaginable even a decade ago. And I can reach my family from anywhere at any time. I love the photos and videos they send. These have helped my spiritual evolution, not hindered it.
I was glad to hear what my Duke University colleague Cathy Davidson said on stage and in our lengthy conversations that followed. She dismissed the doomsday scenarios. She says we don't need new research to prove that the Internet has changed how we live. It is not only our children who have mastered texting and social media; so have grandma and grandpa, who use Facebook, Kindles, iPads, and iPhones. They exchange e-mails with their grandchildren.
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Wiley Desktop Editions)
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!" The Power of “What If” Questions
Content from authors Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
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…furniture buyers picked up components in flat pack form from a large warehouse and assembled the products themselves in their homes? What is common practice today was unthinkable until IKEA introduced the concept in the 1960’s. …airlines didn’t buy engines for their airplanes, but paid for every hour an engine runs? That is how Rolls-Royce transformed itself from a money-losing British manufacturer into a service firm that today is the world’s second biggest provider of large jet engines. …voice calls were free worldwide? In 2003 Skype launched a service that allowed free voice calling via the internet. After five years, Skype had acquired 400 million registered users who collectively had made 100 billion free phone calls.
Price: $34.95
Understanding Innovation at All Levels of Your Business
Innovation is a powerful tool in any business. However, many businesses fail to identify and leverage creative ideas that can grow the company.
Education is an important step in developing an innovation strategy for any company. This innovation education is necessary at all levels in the organizational chart. Creative thinking is not just for the research department or for a select few people within the company. Everyone should be involved with innovative thinking to help grow the company. This means that the company leaders and managers must also understand the importance of creative ideas to encourage others in the company to develop an innovation culture.
Unfortunately, many business leaders do not fully leverage innovation in their companies for a variety of reasons. These reasons include:
Continuing to do things "the same old way" - Many business leaders are afraid of change. They stick with products and policies that are already in place instead of taking a risk with an innovative idea.
Focusing on short-term results - Business leaders are often focused on the immediate results - looking for activities or solutions that will benefit the results of the current quarter. Innovations often require a longer-term outlook - beyond the current quarter.
Not measured - Many companies do not measure innovative activities by employees, and these activities are not part of an employee's performance evaluation. Thus, neither the employee nor the managers/company leaders are focused on the results generated by innovative thinking.
Lack of education - Innovation is not often taught to business leaders. Many people believe innovation is time-consuming, expensive, and boring. But, with a little education and studying some examples, people quickly learn that innovation can be valuable, relatively inexpensive (especially when compared to the potential results), and fun!
A good first step in leveraging innovation in your business is to begin educating everyone in your company about the benefits of innovation. Teach employees at all levels how to identify innovations and how creative ideas can expand the business. Providing specific examples of valuable innovations (in your business or other businesses) helps people better understand the innovation process.
To further encourage innovation and creative thinking, managers and executives must appreciate the value of spending time brainstorming or performing other creative thinking exercises. Even though the results of these activities may not generate revenue in the upcoming quarter, they can support the long-term growth of the company by identifying new products and new product features. Innovative activities must be encouraged and valued by company management even if the activities cannot be measured as easily as meeting project deadlines or sales goals.
CEOs and other executives should set the tone for the company's innovation strategy. Without a company-wide understanding of innovation and support of innovative activities by company leaders, many companies will merely talk about innovation without actually experiencing it.
Business leaders can start the process of innovation today by downloading a Free copy my report "Innovation Excellence - Unleash the Power of Innovation to Boost Your Bottom Line" by visiting http://www.InnovationStrategyReport.com
From Steve Sponseller - Innovation Strategist
Innovator: WindTronics' Imad Mahawili
Mathew Scott for Bloomberg Businessweek
By Antone GonsalvesIn December 2004, Imad Mahawili was vacationing with his family in Florida when an earthquake near Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people. Watching the destruction of poor villages in Asia and Africa on TV, Mahawili was reminded of the poverty he experienced as a child growing up in Baghdad in the 1950s. "It was heartbreaking," he says.
Mahawili, 62, was then executive director of the Michigan Alternative & Renewable Energy Center (Marec), a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs launch green startups. But the tsunami had given Mahawili, a serial entrepreneur who holds a PhD in chemical engineering and had sold two technology companies, an urge to build something that could benefit the poor. In 2006 he started working on an idea for a small, inexpensive wind turbine that could provide electricity to rural communities. Three years later he left Marec to found WindTronics in Muskegon, Mich.
In most turbines, wind spins a three-blade system, which turns a vertical shaft that connects to an electrical generator at its base. In contrast, Mahawili's design looks like a giant bicycle wheel with 20 nylon spokes. At the outer end of each spoke is a magnet and stationary coil, which generate electricity. Because the electricity is created in the blades themselves and not by spinning a heavy shaft, Mahawili's design can capture two to three times as much energy as traditional models, according to Honeywell International (HON). The conglomerate tested Mahawili's design as part of a worldwide search for energy-efficient turbines, and it "really stood out," says Tony Uttley, a Honeywell vice-president. The turbine is small and light enough to sit on a roof; five could power an average U.S. household.
C.P. van Dam, director of the California Wind Energy Collaborative research center at the University of California at Davis, has studied the design and says he doubts it captures as much energy as advertised, "at least as it's presented to us right now." The marketplace will get a chance to decide when Honeywell begins selling the device under its own brand later this year. Each turbine costs $5,795 plus installation, and Mahawili hopes Honeywell's global reach will help persuade governments to purchase it for rural towns.
The youngest of eight children of an Iraqi bureaucrat, Mahawili scored high enough on national exams in 1960 to enter an exclusive Baghdad high school run by Boston College Jesuits. He excelled at the school and in 1968 left to study in England, where he earned his doctorate at Imperial College London. He came to the U.S. in 1974 to work for DuPont (DD). His guiding principle through it all: "survival through education and performance."
Son of an Iraqi bereaucrat; grew up in Baghdad
The "heartbreaking" 2004 tsunami
A small wind turbine that Honeywell will sell for $5,795
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Overcoming Barriers to Innovation
Many companies run into "innovation road blocks" that stifle creativity throughout the business. Common road blocks include lack of knowledge regarding how to innovate, fear of change ("We have always done things this way") and lack of confidence ("I'm not an innovator"). In the information below, I discuss several ways to overcome these road blocks and stimulate innovative thinking in your business.
Encourage Creative Thinking. A first step to leveraging innovation in your business includes learning how to encourage creative thinking throughout your company. This begins by teaching the importance of innovation to the business leaders in your organization. Once they understand the business growth opportunities provided by an innovation strategy, they can share this knowledge with other employees in the company. This approach leverages the creative thinking of people in all parts of the company and builds a valuable innovation culture.
Education and Examples. As part of the education process, show people how simple (yet valuable) innovation can be to the business. Provide examples of successful innovations that produced dramatic growth to the company - whether it's your company or other companies. Also, show examples of valuable ideas that were developed by people without any special training or advanced science degrees. Show that anyone can generate creative ideas, even if they don't have the skills or training to actually implement the ideas. I have attended meetings where a person had an idea for a new software application that created new sales for the company. The person with the idea did not know how to write software applications, but she had a great idea. The software development group in the company developed her idea into a valuable new software product.
Encourage and Reward Innovation. Encourage innovative thinking by rewarding individuals and groups that submit new business innovations. These may include new product ideas, new product features, or modifications to internal business procedures that streamline operations. Encourage brainstorming sessions and innovation contests to make the innovation process fun. Celebrate the successful application of innovations in your business and show the positive results these innovations provide to the company.
Capture Innovative Ideas. To fully benefit from creative innovations, identify and evaluate all innovations developed in your company. Provide a system for employees to easily submit innovative ideas and create a review committee to evaluate ideas and determine which innovations to implement.
Take a first step toward developing an innovation action plan by learning for yourself how innovation can boost your bottom line.
To help you get started, I'm offering you Free instant access to my report "Innovation Excellence - Unleash the Power of Innovation to Boost Your Bottom Line" when you visit http://www.InnovationStrategyReport.com.
From Steve Sponseller - Innovation Strategist
Bringing Innovation to Your Organization
Managers often struggle with bringing innovation into their organization. Part of the struggle begins with understanding what defines innovation. Managers simply equate innovation to change. In other words, if they do the usual task in a different way, they are innovative. However, my goal is to show you, an ordinary manager, how to foster innovation and bring it to your organizational leaders.
The first step in fostering innovation is to recognize that innovation requires creativity. Creativity allows innovators to dream the impossible. Without a creative approach to innovation, you and your company is doomed to come up with the same solutions time and time again. So to foster creativity you must remove restrictions. Allow your team to come up with ideas based only on a simple goal. How they achieve that goal is up to them. Do not force unreasonable time restrictions. The more radical the innovation; the longer the deadline. Other ways to foster creativity is through encouragement and challenges. Encourage your team as the ideas develop. Make your team feel comfortable with the direction they are going. Saying things like, "that will never work" is a nail in the coffin of innovation. Challenge them to think outside the box, and do not accept any status quo solutions.
Another key component to innovation is to embrace diversity. Create a task force comprised of a cross section of the company. This would include people from different departments, different backgrounds, and various skill sets. When you get a diverse group sharing ideas, innovation just happens. Allow them to interact naturally to get the creative juices flowing. The natural tension between diverse individuals will spark some interesting "what-if" scenarios followed by some devils advocating. You will need to place a mediator to make sure that the team stays on track and helps work towards a solution.
Once you have assembled the team, you have to sell the idea of innovation to your team. You and your team are undertaking a task that is not "sponsored" by the organization...yet. Your innovation may take place after hours, during lunch breaks, and during business downtime. You need to be honest but explain the rewards. This is a chance to make your mark on the organization and jumpstart your career. Innovation needs passion, so build your team out of people who are looking for recognition and responsibility, not those simply seeking monetary compensation.
Give your team the resources they need. This would include redistributing current responsibilities so they can focus on the innovation. The task force may need market research or access to emerging technologies within the organization. Larger organizations may have business alliances that might want to pursue a joint venture and offer extended resources. Small businesses may have investors looking to expand the company scope. Either way, you need to give them what they need and eliminate anything that prevents them from producing innovation.
Now that you have been able to establish how to create something innovative, selling the idea to your organization is generally the biggest roadblock. Many organizations want to feel innovative but lack the commitment or the vision. Before you approach your organizational leaders make sure you have done your homework. Assess whether or not the innovation is attainable in a reasonable amount of time. Develop a prototype when possible. Identify any concerns the leaders may have and have concrete solutions in place. Figure out how this innovation will not only set the company apart from the competition, but how it will fill a need for consumers. Be confident in your innovation and your team. Show the leaders you can deliver this innovation with the support of the organization. Remember, companies are looking for innovation and if you have followed the steps and developed something truly innovative, the innovation will sell itself.
Jason E. Ernst
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoneernst
Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy
Named one of the "Best Books on Innovation, 2008" by BusinessWeek magazine
Does innovation come about by luck or hard work? Is it a flash of inspiration or the result of careful management? Are innovators born or taught? In Closing the Innovation Gap, Judith Estrin provides the answers to these and other questions critical to our future. A technology pioneer and business leader, Estrin describes what will be required to reignite the spark of innovation in business, education, and government--ensuring our long-term success in the global economy.
Innovation does not occur in a vacuum. It grows from the interplay of three drivers of creative change--research, development, and application. Estrin calls this dynamic the “Innovation Ecosystem,” explaining how these communities work together to create sustainable innovation.
Closing the Innovation Gap covers:
- America's role as the primary driver of global innovation after World War II--explaining what worked, the subsequent decline, and how to regain traction
- The fundamentals required to nurture innovation, including five simple but important values for transforming your organization into a force for productive change
- How you can ensure that your business benefits from a thriving “Innovation Ecosystem”
- Examples from both established companies, start-ups, and research labs that illustrate the power of innovation in providing a decisive business advantage and foundation for growth
Leaders in business and public service “must think beyond short-term financial results and understand the impact of globalization and an accelerated pace of change on future economic growth,” says Estrin. With Closing the Innovation Gap as your guide, business leaders will gain key insights into identifying their needs, asking the right questions, testing new ideas, and successfully leading their organization to the frontiers of twenty-first-century innovation.
Price: $27.95
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change Series)
In this revolutionary bestseller, Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.
Focusing on "disruptive technology" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss "the next great wave." Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, The Innovator's Dilemma presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
Find out:
- When it is right not to listen to customers.
- When to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins.
- When to pursue small markets at the expense of seemingly
- larger and more lucrative ones.
Sharp, cogent, and provocative, The Innovator's Dilemma is one of the most talked-about books of our time -- and one no savvy manager or entrepreneur should be without.
Price: $35.00