Month / September 2006

by Roger Dennis

Old banking vs new banking

Compare and contrast the two stories :

1. I needed a new debit card for my UK bank account. I called the customer service number for this relatively simple request, only to be told that I did not meet “the criteria” for getting a new card over the phone. Bear in mind that I have always ordered my cards this way before and have been with the bank for about ten years. They would not tell me which criteria I did not meet. I’m not the most patient person when it comes to poor service like this, so I had to go through four layers of call centre management before someone had the initiative to solve the problem. Total length of my call : 45 minutes.
2. I needed to transfer some money from a UK account to a NZ account. After some research I decided to use a service called Tranzfers which offers much better rates than commercial banks and with cheaper fees. I registered with them at about 11pm (New Zealand time). Barely five minutes had passed before my phone rang. It was a Tranzfers customer service rep asking if I had any questions about the service.

In the first example I was so totally annoyed with the whole process that if someone had given me the option to change banks on the spot, I would have done so without hesitation.

In the second example, I’m sure as hell going to use Tranzfers. If this is the service it provides when I sign up, then I’m pretty sure I won’t be kept on hold for 45 minutes for a simple query.

Why is this relevant?

Innovation can sometimes be time consuming and expensive. When it comes to service innovation, it can be doubly so. However a business can make a huge impression on a customer not through massive innovation programmes, but by simply treating people right from the outset.

The moral of the story : Get the basics right before embarking on innovation journeys.

by Roger Dennis

Crowdsourcing (of a type) at Royal Bank of Canada

In the banking industry innovation is usually limited to printing customised pictures on credit cards. The most significant paradigm change in the industry in the last few years has come not from the mainstream banks, but from Zopa.

However The Royal Bank of Canada has started a fascinating competition called “The Next Great Innovator Challenge.” It is offering a CAN$20,000 purse for teams of Canadian students to tell the bank how teens will influence the banking environment in the next few years.

It's only for Canadians....

It’s interesting on several fronts. Firstly it taps into crowdsourcing – it’s likely that a plethora of ideas will flood into the organisation as a result of the competition. Even if the ideas will not fly, they will start people thinking in whole new directions. When you are encouraging innovation, divergent thinking is a necessary base for the process. From a company point of view, exploring ideas submitted via the competition also gives people in the organisation permission to explore thoughts that would otherwise be considered too fringe and therefore ‘off limits.’

Secondly the competition acknowledges that there’s a generation gap in technology use, and that teens now technology multi-task without a second thought. Contrast this approach to most C-level executives in the banking world who have yet to come to grips with T9 dictionaries to speed up texting.

Lastly because of the conservative nature of banks, and speaking from personal experience, getting a competition of this nature off the ground is damn hard, so I have to tip my hat to the Applied Innovation Team at RBC.

I’ll be watching the competition with interest.

by Roger Dennis

“Limited to the size of a matchbox”

From the BBC today comes news of a new type of projector developed in Germany. The big thing about this projector is that it’s not big at all. It’s under 16mm wide and 9mm deep.

Quite tiny really

While that’s news in itself, the most interesting thing about this article is the closing comment :

Other laser-based video projectors have been created, but have been limited to the size of a matchbox.

It’s an indication of the pace of change when people refer to a highly advanced and extremely complicated piece of technology as ‘limited’ to the size of a matchbox.

by Roger Dennis

Innovation at the fringes of science

As I’ve mentioned before, the really interesting innovations don’t usually come from the core of a sector or industry, they come from the edges. The edges are places where people either don’t know or don’t care about the rules and paradigms at the core.

Next week at Duke (in the States) there’s a symposium where thirteen of the USAs “top scientists” will share their thoughts on emerging great ideas in science and how today’s discoveries might change medicine.

How does this relate to the fringes?

“I think science’s next great idea will come from a youngster who stumbles upon it by asking interesting questions,” says Thomas Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University

Read the article here.

by Roger Dennis

Harnessing the ‘lunatic’ fringes inside a corporation

They look like lunatics - but they make millions (errr..they don't work for TI)
They look like lunatics – but they make millions (errr..they don’t work for TI)

Fortune Magazine has a great article about how Texas Instrument harnesses the power of the fringes to generate new ideas, and explore opoortunities that would otherwise be ignored.

It reveals how a senior TI manager – Gene Frantz – has an interesting role : “searching for and encouraging all manner of lunatics and visionaries.”

The article goes on :

Frantz is the dean of an informal and amorphous group of TI engineers (and their peers and contacts outside the company) who call themselves the Lunatic Fringe. They are senior people who have been given free rein to follow their curiosity wherever it goes.

“There’s this continuum between total chaos and total order,” Frantz explains. “About 95% of the people in TI are total order, and I thank God for them every day, because they create the products that allow me to spend money. I’m down here in total chaos, that total chaos of innovation. As a company we recognize the difference between those two and encourage both to occur.”

By embracing the fringes TI has had some notable successes that it would have otherwise have missed on. As the article points out :

…today’s wacky idea can turn out to be tomorrow’s billion-dollar industry. (…) Think of this virtuous cycle – curious, open-minded engineers finding pockets of innovation around the world, which in turn inspires further innovation back at HQ – as an extremely effective opportunity-detection system.

This is a type of loose and free open innovation, the sort of which P&G is currently embracing. TI finds ideas in a myriad of places and showcases the good ones, whether internal or external. It would only work for a large organisation, but when it works, and it’s ingrained in the culture, it works well.

(via The Business Innovation Insider) and Corante

Update : Gene Frantz also blogs for TI. His latest posting is here

by Roger Dennis

Technology at escape velocity?

Wave Crest

I was listening to an interesting podcast from Supernova 2005 about Reinventing Media (if you want a partial transcipt check out the Strange Attractor blog)

While the panel discussion was interesting, the bit that raised my interest was a question from the floor from a guy called Greg Allen. Part of his query involved the notion that technology has now reached escape velocity.

That’s a powerful idea, and a concise way of summing up the rate of exponential change that Ray Kurzweil talks about. It seems that we’re about to reach critical mass with the convergence of many technologies.

I’m currently working on a large project for a massive global European company looking at how the world is going to look in twenty years based upon where technology is taking us. Almost every field I look at – from transport to healthcare – there are massive advances happening every couple of years. It’s no longer a doubling rate of change.

One of the key themes is the massively increased understanding of the nano world. It’s easy to think that nano relates simply to pure technology, but it seems that the further you delve into a field the more the key advances are at the molecular level.

However to anchor this post, and to stop it hitting an all time high on the breathless hype meter, consider the following quote :

We live, as it were, upon the front
edge of an advancing wave-crest

Now try and guess the date of that quote. It’s very relevant becuase it reflects the idea that this is not the first itme in history that people have felt this way. It’s not from the 90s, not even the 60’s. But 1904. The author is William James.

by Roger Dennis

Graffiti innovation

Graffiti in itself is an interesting art form. Free from the unspoken rules that govern many artforms, graffiti artists have a unique license to express themselves. Good graffiti can be beautiful as a quick look at Google images reveals

With that level of freedom you’d think it’d be hard to make a splash in the graffiti world and to push some boundaries. How would you innovate in a area where it’s always the creative season?

Here’s a guy who breaks the mould (so to speak).

Mould breaking

A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels

There’s more about the story here and the artists site can be found at this link

Thanks to Boing Boing (interestingly the original story is over two years old, but it surfaced on BB yesterday.)

by Roger Dennis

McKinsey talks about capitalising on customer insights

McKinsey graphic

The latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly has an article which discusses how to get an understanding of your customers in order to develop new markets and better understand existing ones.

It makes a few good points, and the sentiment is certainly correct. It’s a new world out there, and building markets based on assumptions, hunches and bad data won’t get a company very far.

However I take issue with the section on product development. As with much that is written about this area, it talks in general about observing customers being one avenue leading to new product design. Although it is clearly outside the scope of the article to go into details, ethnography, even when undertaken by experts, can give hazy guidance at the best of times.

The article states :

“A cell phone manufacturer looking for promising offerings in several profitable markets, for example, established customer segment panels, whose members were asked to maintain diaries detailing where and how they used PDAs and wireless devices. With this information in hand, the company’s brand and segment managers could ensure, at key stage-gate points in product development, that the teams of developers were truly meeting the needs of target customer segments in critical markets by proposing appropriate new-product and packaged-service ideas, such as business- or entertainment-oriented browser interface designs.”

I’d love to know how McKinsey proposes that these insights are ranked and quantified in order to provide some sort of priority for the design process. Also, exactly how did the brand and segment manager ‘ensure’ they met the needs of customers. Oh, and how much the customer panel process cost.

As a sideline, here’s my customer insight about McKinsey : It’s ironic that an organisation which preaches about customer insights and open innovation does not have a facility on it’s own site for people to leave comments or trackbacks. The tag-line for the Quarterly is “Required reading for the business elite.” Wake up guys.

by Roger Dennis

BusinessWeek talks about the fringes

The ever interesting Andrew Zolli writes in BusinessWeek about the importance of the fringes for spotting innovations. I’m a great believer in the potential of innovation that happens outside the core. Indeed most interesting developments are increasingly happening as far away from the core as you could imagine. Think Shawn Fanning, Marc Andressen and the iPod (after all, it wasn’t Apples idea).

Great ideas also pop out of the fringes when sectors collide. Creating an environment to achieve this is damn tricky, and not well understood.

What niche fields will contribute to tomorrow’s great innovations? Ecology, gaming, and social networking, for starters

Although the article appears to have been trimmed down to make it digestable for people who still believe that wearing suits and ties leads to better decision making, it’s worth a read, if only to confirm that yes, interesting things can happen in online virtual worlds.

Shopping in Second Life anyone?

Here’s the article.