Category / Fringe scanning / peripheral vision

by Roger Dennis

Hacking and innovation (HBR)

Umair Haque has a nice – very unHBR – conversation started over at HBR (of all places).

He has a thought-provoking post about hacking and innovation, of which one paragraph resonated with me:

Big problems aren’t solved overnight, and they often can’t be solved in a tightly structured way. Hacking goes (way) beyond the limits of structured, rigid thinking.

It’s another way of looking at how people beyond your own industry, own networks and own paradigms, can blindside your business. It also ties into my thinking about the speed of disruptive innovation today – as your business becomes digitalised, the barriers to innovation fall. Hackers have always been on the edges, the fringes and the periphery, and Umair follows this thread well.

What business model would you like to hack?

Banking? Too late – Zopa and Prosper are already there.

Airlines? Too late – Ryanair did it.

Top of my list – until lately – was roaming charges on GSM mobile networks. Who hacked that business model? Skype via Fring via Symbian (read Nokia N95)

by Roger Dennis

HBR – excellent article on strategy as a complex problem

Over at HBR, there’s a great article entitled “Strategy as a wicked problem.” This month (May) is a good time to read it, because HBR has a limited time offer of free access this month.

The summary reads:


Many corporations […] have replaced the annual top-down planning ritual, based on macroeconomic forecasts, with more sophisticated processes. They crunch vast amounts of consumer data, hold planning sessions frequently, and use techniques such as competency modeling and real-options analysis to develop strategy. This type of approach is an improvement because it is customer- and capability-focused and enables companies to modify their strategies quickly, but it still misses the mark a lot of the time. Companies tend to ignore one complication along the way: They can’t develop models of the increasingly complex environment in which they operate. As a result, contemporary strategic-planning processes don’t help enterprises cope with the big problems they face. Several CEOs admit that they are confronted with issues that cannot be resolved merely by gathering additional data, defining issues more clearly, or breaking them down into small problems. Their planning techniques don’t generate fresh ideas, and implementing the solutions those processes come up with is fraught with political peril. That’s because, […] many strategy issues aren’t just tough or persistent—they’re “wicked.”

The article goes on to explore the characteristics of a wicked problem, and how complexity is one of the key definers.

It also reinforces the need for constant scanning:

Companies must constantly scan the environment for weak signals rather than conduct periodic analyses of the business landscape. (See, for example, George S. Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker, “Scanning the Periphery,” HBR November 2005.) It’s increasingly difficult to identify the boundaries of the arenas companies should watch. Changes in one industry or segment often affect companies in others. For instance, who could have imagined that changes brought about by the computer industry and the internet would affect the music industry so radically? Businesses should scan sources of regulatory and technological change in addition to monitoring suppliers, competitors, potential entrants, and customers all over the world.

Increasingly a lot of the work I am doing encompasses not only strategic innovation, but innovative ways of developing strategy. For example during a three day health sector strategy event last year for a multi-billion dollar organisation , I had the attendees examine a massive diversity of learning – from complex marine ecosystems to award winning hotels.

The resulting strategy map – one of the key outputs – delivered an entirely new level of understanding about the future direction of the organisation and the path it needed to take.

It’s interesting to see this sort of different approach to strategy development make it into HBR.

by Roger Dennis

Interesting South – Sydney Conference highlights

Last night in Sydney I presented at Interesting South. Modelled on the event of a similar name in London, it was, as the name suggests, damn interesting.

The organisers aimed to capture the feeling of jumping from blog to blog – but in a face-to-face context. They succeeded.

I cried twice – once when listening to Zoe Horton – a genetic counseller – talking about a baby called Ruby being born with an incurable genetic disorder, and the tale of her short three month life.

The second time was for polar opposite reasons when listening to the tale of the Viral Waistcoat. There was a degree of unitentional hilarity when the Powerpoint failed to perform, but in the context I actualy thought this was intentional. Crying with laughter was the best way to mark the end of the evening.

The highlights? Tales of diving with humpback whales in Tonga (now on my to-do-in-the-very-near-future list), Tim Noonan celebrating being different (he has a huge potential as a stand-up comedian) and Michael Lister on how to design bus routes.

The videos should be online soon linked from the site, and if you were one of the many who could not get into the soldout event, I’d recommend a look.

I’m already marking next years event in my diary – it’s worth catching a plane for…

by Roger Dennis

Non-core innovation

Via a very circuitous route, I stumbled across a year old blog posting about innovation at EMC (a disk drive manufacturer). It is by Bob Buderi (of MIT Technology Review) about the EMC Innovation Conference he attended in 2007. This quote caught my attention :

Mark Lewis, president of EMC’s Content Management and Archiving Division, said in his conference keynote, the innovation landscape had changed dramatically for companies like EMC in recent years. It used to be, he said, that big corporations had the advantage over smaller companies and entrepreneurs because they were organized for R&D. Now, Lewis said, given the Internet, the global nature of competition, social networking, mashups, and more, it’s not unusual to find “the edge out-innovating the core.” As a result, he said, “we not only have to compete with companies, now we have to compete with non-companies.”

Exploring beyond the core is the central tenant of the Futures programmes that we run at Innovaro. If you are in a business that is already digitalised – such as EMC – the innovation timeframes are much shorter, and you have a much higher susceptibility to disruption from the fringes.

(Mark Lewis – who is quoted above – blogs here.)

by Roger Dennis

Your next online competitor won’t be a corporation

TradeMe is New Zealands version of eBay. It rules the roost for online auctions, has jaw-dropping margins for the company and is used by millions of New Zealanders (that is even more impressive when you consider that there’s only a population of around 4 million).

To date it has had an unassailable lead over any competitor. However the founder, Sam Morgan, knows where his possible threat would come from, and, surprise surprise, it won’t be from a corporate boardroom. It will be from the fringes where people are free to experiment with ideas and business models free from big business paradigm constraints. In a recent interview he noted:


Any future rival to the site will probably come not from the likes of eBay, he says, but from “two students in a scungy flat” with new ideas on how to do it better.

The entrance to a

by Roger Dennis

Medici Effect – the book

From the book called The Medici Effect (link takes you a free PDF of the book), comes several interesting quotes. Firstly, there’s Thomas Kuhn – from his highly recommended book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – comes this :

“…almost always the men who achieve…fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.”

Also, on the subject of breaking paradigms and new idea creation :

“One of the earliest creativity researchers, Sarnoff Mednick, wrote, “The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution.” In other words if the concepts combined are very different, the more creative the process or the solution”

Finally, a great quote from someone who came from the edges to challenge a profession. Deepak Chopra started from a institutional medical background, but began to look beyond the standard answers for more understanding of the complexities of mind-body health.

“When I started out people thought I was on some fringe. They thought I was certifiably insane.”

Years later he gave the keynote at the Harvard Medical School conference and Time Magazine named him as one of the top one hundred heroes and icons of the twentieth century.

by Roger Dennis

Art meets Science

A recent edition of Wired had a fascinating interview with Jonah Lehrer on how science can benefit from the arts.

Jonah Lehrer wants scientists to bone up on the classics. A former neuroscience lab drone, the 26-year-old Rhodes scholar would devour pages of Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way” whenever he wasn’t spinning down DNA. In the process, he made a discovery: Artists have something to teach researchers. In his new book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, Lehrer argues that many artists have foretold the scientific future — Proust revealed the inaccuracy of memory, chef Auguste Escoffier anticipated the fifth taste sensation we now call umami, and post-impressionist Paul Cézanne proved that the brain fills in what a painting doesn’t show.

This is a lovely illustration of what happens when two sectors collide. Another example is the programme in New Zealand which resulted in a book called “Are Angels OK?” One review of this book by David Clark summed it up thus :

Scientists and musicians, and scientists and artists have worked well together in the past. Thus a successful alliance between scientists and fiction writers is not perhaps as strange as it might first appear. Both science and writing are creative endeavours. Both require considerable imagination, and the courage to “think the unthinkable” (although scientists are denied the luxury afforded writers of fiction of “thinking the impossible”). After this successful experiment, perhaps we will see more examples of the coming together of creative individuals from different fields of human endeavour.

by Roger Dennis

Unevenly distributed futures

William Gibson once insightfully observed that “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

As if you needed more proof, the BBC reports that a neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

Bike helmets will never be the same again

Still not convinced of Mr Gibsons forsight? I recommend you read this article in MIT Tech Review from August 2007 entitled Second Earth (free registration required), which details real world data being used in Second Life.

The photo below gives a glimpse of what is possible – this is real time weather inside Second Life.

Real weather, real time but virtual world

by Roger Dennis

Second Life avatars made real

From the very edges of the fringes comes Fabjectory

It’s 3-D printing from the virtual world. Their blurb : Have your electronic characters made into incredibly detailed, full color, real-life statuettes.

The whole bits to atoms industry is gaining momentum, with players like Ponoko developing some interesting business models (theirs is make it, and then sell it online too).

(via Fast Company)

by Roger Dennis

Adjacent sector insights

The Spring 07 issue of Ambidextrous Magazine was damn interesting. In addition to the snippet mentioned below, it also had a couple of great pieces from Bill Cockayne. The first was called “A Primer for Budding Futurists.” (not available online)

The second was an article about the development of the Aeron chair from Herman Miller (should I do a disclaimer here? Both my cheeks are well supported in one of these wonderful chairs as I type). You can read the full article online (PDF), but I’ve summarised the relevant extracts:

For Herman Miller Inc (HMI), design is a way to solve problems…..a long standing philosophy of the company is to particularly focus on the future. If you could thoroughly understand a problem, in the context of now and the future, it would take the competition years to figure out the design and replicate it.

HMI often employs leading thinkers whose outside expertise can provide insight into the issues relevant for designing for the edge of tomorrow.

One particularly influential foray was a multi-million dollar research project on the future of aging in the 1980s. It combined the fields of gerontology, architecture, public policy and the field of aging. The study then focussed on the issues of long-term sitting for these populations.

This is very similar to the Futures programmes that we run at Innovaro, where we draw upon a diverse group of experts from adjacent sectors to map out future business opportunities.