Month / January 2009

by Roger Dennis

Corning is the new 3M of innovation

More from my very backdated pile of Fast Company magazines:

Seventy percent of Corning’s revenue today comes from products that did not exist five years ago.

Corning must have a very robust innovation process in place for making this happen. What’s the advantage of such a process?

By bringing out new products constantly, and killing off older ones, your margins remain high. By the time a competing product makes it onto the market (usually at a lower price) you’ve got a whole new set of high margin products coming out.

by Roger Dennis

Breaking groupthink helps decision making

From a recent McKinsey Quarterly comes this interesting tidbit:

A recent survey by McKinsey asked about decision-making practices and compared them with decision outcomes. Decisions that were made after a company’s executives sought out contradictory evidence and opinion were more likely to turn out well.

By getting away from the groupthink that pervades many decision making processes – and seeking out opinions from a diverse range of people – you get better outcomes. The takeway from this?  Broaden your thinking, embrace different mindsets and seek out fresh trains of thought.

by Roger Dennis

The Future of Futurists

Over at Relevant History  Alex Soojung-Kim Pang of the IFTF has one of the most interesting things I’ve read for a while about foresight and futures thinking.  It’s a work in progress as he admits, but there were two paragraphs that immediately caught my attention:

…This could have profound implications for futures. It would shift the profession from one that communicates through texts, mainly influences leaders and elites, and influences strategic processes, to one that communicates through things, influences large number of people, and informs everyday decision-making. But this is an essential transformation, as it would give us the ability to help solve the critical problems of the 21st century– problems that, I contend, futures as it currently is practiced is ill-equipped to confront.

This is something that resonates with me.  I’ve always maintained that black and white documents composed on A4 paper are generally useful only for a small subset of people who love having an office full of filing cabinets.  For the rest of us, they’re about as useful as a rubber cheesegrater.

Give people a document and they’ll file it (a few – if you’re lucky – might read it)

Give people an experience and they will live it.

However I don’t entirely agree with the second paragraph that caught my attention :

To make the consequences of specific actions immediately visible, we will communicate primarily through things rather than texts, through interfaces rather than scenarios or stories. Finally, our work will need to be crafted to continuously reshape small behaviors, rather than grand strategy.

Good storytelling is something that has been proven to work throughout history.  You can tell stories through interfaces, but the stories are the key.

I look forward to seeing how the discussion develops…

by Roger Dennis

GE and “white spaces”

Over the holiday break I caught up on some very long overdue reading.  Quite a bit of it in fact.

One issue of FastCompany magazine had a fascinating article about GE and how the company uncovers new opportunities. It appears to be very much in the vein of the work that we do at Innovaro:

Immelt and other top GE strategists love to talk about the opportunities presented by “white spaces” and “adjacencies” — corporate-speak for untapped markets that the company wants to develop, and for expansion opportunities that one GE business unit can pass along to another.

Given the article was written in the middle of 2008, in the current economic climate it would be very revealing to see if this type of strategic foresight is still going ahead at GE, or if it has been cut back.

by Roger Dennis

Disruption from the edges

Catching up on some long overdue reading, I came across this quote in a FastCompany article about Joss Whedon, creator of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  He makes reference to the fact the next next disruption to his industry is not going to be from within:

“There’s someone out there who will figure out how to relate the Internet and narrative beyond my old-fashioned notions,” Whedon says. “But I think whoever cracks that is not going to be someone who’s made it huge in television. It’s going to be some guy we just don’t know about yet.”