Month / October 2006

by Roger Dennis

Grant McCracken on the need for scanning

Grant McCracken has a great post about the difficulties that corporations have with scanning for non-incremental innovation. His thoughts build on the recent HBS article about fringe scanning which I blogged about here.

In seeking a solution to stopping the organisation getting blinded, he suggests :

…the creation of an observation platform from which we can keep an eye out for the next new things. In keeping with our Tsunami references, let’s call it a wheelhouse, a conning tower, or a ship’s bridge.

The trick would be to find 5 or 6 really smart, well educated, well informed, well connected, deeply curious, utterly practical people. These qualifications create a tiny Venn intersection, but, hey, we only need 5 or 6 people.

I once worked as part of team for an online bank in London doing exactly what Grant suggested. It was fascinating work, but it was also the first place that the CFO looked for making cuts when the company went into a retrenchment phase. The people that left at that time went on to create some fascinating new business, like zopa.

In cutting back the team that looked for early signs of new business ideas, they also cut back their source of new revenue from potentially disruptive ideas.

Do the words “shot” and “foot” spring to mind?

Footnote – in the comments to Grants post, there’s an eye popping quote (by Tom Guarriello) from Chris Anderson (Wired editor) at Pop!Tech : “I do whatever my intern tells me. If s/he tells me to run a story about X, I do, even if I don’t get it.”

by Roger Dennis

Is this the current state for play for corporate innovation?

From the FastCompany blog, comes this interesting post about the difference between people talking about something, and actually doing something. This is a classic with innovation inititatives in many large organisations.

It’s trendy, it’s sexy, everyone likes to think they’re innovators, and the marketing department just put the word on the box of the latest widget (because it now comes in a range of trendy colours).

Lots of talk, little action.

I’ve often found a frequent offender to be the manager who’s gung-ho about a new management book. He likes the concepts. He talks about them often. He gets others to read the book. They like them too. The book’s jargon makes its way into their everyday language. Everyone’s excited to be on board with the latest management thinking. Amidst the excitement, everyone fails to realize a simple fact. They’re not actually putting the concepts into practice.

The post is written by an executive coach called Doug Sundheim. I’ve often read his column in the magazine itself, and he offers an interesting little exercise at the end of the post. If you are involved in an innovation scheme in your organisation, spend five minutes on the exercise, ponder the result, and then treat it as a call to action.

by Roger Dennis

The impact of digitalisation

I was listening to a podcast by Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder of Netscape) in which he discusses the history of programming.

He's smiling because he made a hell of a lot of money...

It’s a bit of a geek out, but he makes some interesting points :

1. Programming tools are no longer made for machines, they’re made for programmers. this makes them really easy to learn how to use.
2. Servers are now a commodity, and the number of servers sold has increased incredibly over the last five years
3. Bandwidth prices are still plummeting
4. Open source tools mean that the barriers to entry have disappeared (from a cost point of view) when it comes to building web applications

What does this mean?

In a world where many businesses are now becoming digitalised to some extent, and almost everyone is trying to interact in a cheaper and smarter way with their customers (usually online in some shape or form), the next disruption to your business might not be from your competitor.

It might come from a self-taught kid in Brazil who has unintentionally designed something which is going to kill your business.

Think of the barriers which were around when Andreessen formed Netscape. Or when Shawn Fanning wrote the code for Naptser.

Now think of how many of those barriers has gone. And then think about your business.

by Roger Dennis

“The interesting stuff happens on the edge” (in many sectors)

David Skilling, chief executive of The New Zealand Institute, is quoted in a Time Magazine article about the state of New Zealand as a country. Skilling is a very interesting person for a whole number of reasons, and very bright. In the article in makes some very topical points about the impact of geography on globalisation (which is outside the focus of this blog), but he also makes an interesting point about the fringes :

Just like in biology,
the interesting stuff
happens on the edge.

by Roger Dennis

Quote of the day

I was listening to a radio interview with Matthew Riley, an Australian writer of thrillers aimed primarily at teens. He was 19 when he wrote his first book, but he got rejected by every publisher in Australia. In the end he published a few copies of the book himself, and went door-to-door in Syndey asking bookshops if they would put his first book on the shelves.

A lot of people told him it could not be done. This was his response :

When people tell you that it can’t be done, it usually means that they can’t do it themselves

How much of that can you apply in your professional (and personal) life?

by Roger Dennis

The value of fringe scanning (HBS article)

Something I had been meaning to read for a while was the excellent HBS article called Scanning the Periphery (it’s a PDF). The article – which in the HBS tradition – has become a book, examines the value of fringe scanning and suggests methods for doing so. Interestingly there is also a “Peripheral Vision” blog which is suffering from neglect with a mere three entries.

This quote goes some way to encapsulating the value of fringe scaning :

Buckminster Fuller developed a very personal and systematic approach to scanning the periphery. Whenever he was at an airport, he would randomly select a magazine from the stands in the bookstore and read it on his plane ride from cover to cover. On one trip the magazine might be about gardening, on another about fashion or airplane design. With each trip, Fuller learned something new and saw the world in a different way. Many managers could benefit from adding such vicarious reading discipline to their travel routines, especially now that we customize our computer screens and newsletters to report only what we deem relevant. Undirected searches may offer answers to questions that we do not even recognize or know how to formulate.

There’s also some interesting validation for harnessing the fringes inside an organisation :

Most organizations have maverick employees with insights about the periphery,but they rarely tap these individuals. Find informed people, either inside or out, who reject the conventional wisdom about your businesses. Maybe they are congenitally unhappy with the direction of the business, or maybe they are talented outliers with insights into new customers and technologies that give them an idea for a new business. What shifting winds are they feeling that the rest of the organization is missing? As Andy Grove notes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive, these mavericks usually have a difficult time explaining their visceral feelings to top management, who are usually the last to know.

by Roger Dennis

Teaching Systematic Innovation

The Business Innovation Insider reports that two US business school professors are starting an MBA course focussing on systematic innovation.

Glenn MacDonald (you should see his house)

One of the tutors, Glenn MacDonald, professor of economics and strategy at Washington University’s business school, describes innovation as :

a fairly analytical process, an ongoing management activity—not going out into the forest and thinking up crazy new ideas.

I wonder : as companies tire of pouring money into non-repeatable blue sky innovation iniatives, is the move into systematic and repeatable innovation the start of a trend?

by Roger Dennis

Banking First Class at the airport

While in transit at Singapore’s Changi airport I noticed what looked like a private art exhibition hosted by the Singaporean bank DBS. Being partial to modern art, I dropped in only to find it was not a gallery, but a private lounge for invited customers of DBS. While it has a full range of very personal banking services, it also had a relaxation lounge complete with massage chairs, an orchid garden, iMacs and iPods for use while in the facility and a private meeting room.

Oh, and let’s not forget the artwork.

After a quick tour it was apparent that the facilites were well above the Singapore Air Business Class lounge. And for the mere sum of SIN$5000/year membership they should be.

The other way to become a member is by invitation from the bank – i.e. to have a lot of business with DBS.

It’s an interesting way of reaching out to your most valuable customers in a way that would be valued. High net worth individuals tend to fly a lot, and when you are at an airport inevitably there’s some unavoidable waiting time. By providing this facility DBS has the potential to further cement the relationship with a very profitable customer group.

There’s a very dry press release here. I’d have liked to post some photos but they weren’t very keen on the idea of me taking pictures.

by Roger Dennis

Netflix and crowdsourcing

Netflix is entering the crowd sourcing game with the ‘Netflix Prize.’ It’s all very Web 2.0 , and links into previous thoughts about the trend. With Netflix, innovation via crowd sourcing is possible because it’s dealing with software. This lowers the barriers for potential innovations, much in the same way that open APIs have opened the floodgates for a huge range of mashups with sites like Google Maps.

The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.

Thanks to PSFK