Month / July 2006

by Roger Dennis

Take a Risk. Create a hit.

Slight mad, slightly gay and slighty drunk.

From This Blog Sits at the is this great post about Disney’s approach to risk taking, and Johnny Depps response.

[T]he eccentricity of Depp’s approach sent ripples of panic through Disney’s executive suites. Frantic phone calls were placed to Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Depp’s agent: Why is he walking funny? Why is he talking like that? Is he gay? Is he drunk?

And it wasn’t only the suits who were concerned: ”The first scene I did with Johnny, I was like, What the fuck are you doing?” Knightley says. ”None of us knew if it was going to work.”

Depp was not to be deterred. ”It was just fuel to go further,” he says. ”Not because I wanted to piss Disney off, but because I believed it was the right thing to do. Finally, I said, ‘Look, you hired me to do the gig. If you can’t trust me, you can fire me. But I can’t change it.’ It was a hard thing to say, but fuck it.” (Rottenburg)

Sticking to the safe ground only produces more blandness.

It’s the edgy, different and risky stuff which makes life interesting.

by Roger Dennis

When crowd sourcing works

HBS Working Knowledge has an article on user led innovation / crowdsourcing. There has been a lot of discussion about the trend, and I maintain that for a small-medium company the process is generally expensive and time consuming.

However this article – which focusses on white water kayaking – makes an excellent point about the concept :

For user innovation to be a force, the cost of creating a new design must be within the reach of a single user, whose reward is solely the improvement of his or her own experience.

This is an extremely important point which is missing from much of the conversation about crowdsourcing.

Airtime

by Roger Dennis

In defence of the most expensive pram/stroller

Bugaboo is getting a lot of media attention about it’s stroller. If you are not familiar with it, then you might have seen it referenced in articles about how much money people spend on their children. Or what things celebrities buy for their babies. Or in a photo shoot with Gwyneth Paltrow.

That’s because it’s one of the most expensive prams on the market. The safe money says that this also means that it has seriously good profit margins for Bugaboo.

Now it’s confession time. My wife and I bought one for our child.

At first it was a hard decision, but the more we looked at the design, the easier the decision became. New Zealand has a couple of great pram manufacturers (Phil and Teds, Mountain Buggy) and I really wanted to support them. In London these prams are almost as expensive as Bugaboo.

However what won in the end came down to one thing. The innovative design. It’s important to note that I’m not using the word “innovative” lightly. Once you start using a Bugaboo pram it’s immediately clear that someone spent a hell of a lot of time doing some serious thinking about how people use prams.

And once you start talking to people who have purchased a Bugaboo pram, it’s clear that this thinking paid off.

I have rarely encountered such a rabid group of fans in such an unlikely arena. When we were looking at a Bugaboo in the store, complete strangers would appear out of the blue and start raving about how good they were.

One guy told me that the cost made his eyes water, but he did not regret it. He came from a large extended family which meant that he had personally road tested over twenty prams in actual use, and the Bugaboo won hands down.

After eighteen months of use in towns, parks, cafes and on the beach, the Bugaboo is still one of the best things we bought for our voyage into parenthood. The design not only means that it’s great to use, but also that I’d buy one again in a flash. What’s more, I’ve become one of those rabid fans.

Advertising cannot buy you that sort of loyalty. But good innovative design can.

Bugaboo frog

by Roger Dennis

Cross sector collaboration

I was talking to the Vice Chancellor of a large university yesterday. The conversation got around to innovation which occurs when two unrelated disciplines collide. He mentioned that the problem with university departments is that they are great at forming relationships with their counterparts on the other side of the world, but terrible at forging new relationships with completely different departments on their own campus.

Failure to look outside your immediate field only serves to foster group think within a body of knowledge. What you really want is lots of little fires which are born from the friction sparks that happen when two sectors crash together.

This is what I call idea arbitrage – taking ideas from one field and dropping them into another. It can start entire new directions of thinking and generate great outcomes.

What was interesting to note was the Vice Chancellors approach to overcoming the problem of insular departments. He said that the problem rests mainly with the academic staff. He had a great quote – “nobody has told the students that they should not interact with other departments.”

He’s working to create an inter-disciplinary institute where conversations freely flow between students in different departments.

It promises to be a very different approach for universities in New Zealand. And that can only be a good thing.

by Roger Dennis

When a corporation gets serious about innovation

They do things like this…

How to make Samsung more innovative? One key initiative is the VIP Center.

The center, at Suwon, Samsung’s main manufacturing site, 20 miles from Seoul, is open 24 hours a day. Housed in a five-story former dormitory, it has 20 project rooms, 38 bedrooms for those who need to spend the night, a kitchen, a gym, traditional baths, and Ping-Pong and pool tables. Last year some 2,000 employees cycled through.

The VIP Center specialist guide teams in discussions exploring ideas and concepts from entirely different industries.

Samsung at work

Read the full article here.

by Roger Dennis

Crowd Sourcing is Expensive

The excellent BusinessWeek Innovation blog has another posting about crowdsourcing. It’s bang-on in so much as it identifies that making the customer the starting point of the design process can yield significant and high margin returns.

Companies that “get it” and begin to integrate consumer input into the actual making of stuff and experiences will find enormous opportunites.

What is important – and what is missing – in the whole crowdsourcing idea, is a structured and methodical process. The use of ethnography coupled with the harnessing of customer generated product ideas sounds great and gets people excited, but in practise it’s expensive and time-consuming.

So how do you really use customer input to get a leap over your competitors? You start by reading “What Customers Want”

It outlines a very clear process for unleashing customer insights in such a way that the innovation process generates a set of very specific and very focussed design goals.

After being a part of many innovation exercises across a range of sectors, and designing innovation processes for design shops, Ulwicks approach is the only way I have seen which outlines an extremely clever way of demystifying the development of successful products.

If you want to be part of a wildly successful product design team, take a little trip to Amazon with your credit card and spend a couple of weeks digesting “What Customers Want.” It will be the best money you’ll spend.

What Customers Want

by Roger Dennis

The book publishing model (and how it works in New Zealand)

I was listening to an interview this morning on RDU with a new author called Rachel King who has written a book called the Sound of Butterfly Wings. She mentioned that in New Zealand – a country of around four million people – you have to sell five thousand copies of a book in order for it to be classified as a best seller.

Five thousand.

That’s using the traditional methods of using a publisher and distributing via retail outlets. What would happen if she changed the model?

How many books would be downloaded if she wrote it online, gave away some teaser chapters free and blogged about it? How viral would it become? What would it take to change the model and exceed five thousand sales? There’s an increasing number of very successful musicians which launched via MySpace and completely ignored the old industrial-powerhouse-centralised business model.

There’s a challenge here, and I’m going to rise to it. If I write a book – admittedly not a novel – and place it online – how many will get downloaded?

Watch this space. I’m sharpening my pencil. Or should that be “cleaning my keyboard”?

by Roger Dennis

Creating positive conversations

I was at “The Cup” cafe in Christchurch at the weekend trying to enjoy some brunch. I say ‘trying’ because they were piping in diabolical music from a surf-punk-alt-rock station called “The Edge.” We asked the waitress to change the music, but she said that their music server was down.

Seventy years ago she would have said that the pianist was ill.
Fifty years ago she would have said that wireless wasn’t working.
Twenty years ago she would have said that the record was stuck.
Five years ago she would have said that the CD jukebox was skipping.

Rather than drive customers away, they could have turned it to their advantage by ringing around and finding a sax player, a violinist – in fact any professional who could play an instrument without needing the space of a piano. Then when people asked why they had live music, they could say the server was down but they didn’t want to radio on.

It would have created positive conversations among their customers, not negative ones.