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The Fabulous Five and the Scramble for Territory

Published date: January 21, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, and Amazon are in a mad scramble to enter new territory and cover gaps in their strategies.  The one that gets ahead and stays ahead will earn bragging rights in what may be the most significant business battle of all time. These companies are the Fabulous Five.

Let's look at how each company is placed in the following domains: hardware design and manufacturing, software development and integration, consumer retailing, mobile, voice and digital communications, social, search, and entertainment.  Why these?  I believe the company that covers the biggest footprint across these domains and integrates them in a way that touches the most consumers will become the dominant lifestyle company.  Notice I did not call it B2B, B2C, or even the dominant tech company.  The battle being fought here is to become a part of the consumer's life in a way that allows the company to learn key insights that can be monetized.  It is the battle for the consumer subconscious in a way.

Here is where I see them today:

Slide1

No one should be surprised to see Google and Apple covering more territory than the others.  But notice the lack of coverage by Facebook. More than the others, the pressure on Facebook to enter new territories must be enormous.  That might explain its most recent announcement about Graph Search, a capability that will rival Google.  Here is an excerpt from CNET:

After nine years of colonizing the globe and corralling a billion people, Facebook has found a way to unlock the potential of its massive data collection — a basic semantic search engine that will let it build smarter services for travel, food, recruitment, dating and other verticals that will generate revenue that could rival Google's.  Graph Search is the beginning of the Enlightenment, the next major phase in Facebook's history, in which people gain the "power and tools to take any cut of the graph and make any query they want," as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the product launch event at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters earlier this week.

Graph Search is about providing answers, extracted from the data your friends feed into Facebook. It's not Web search, which typically generates a series of links for a query, with the exception of current stock prices, weather  and many other standard queries. But Graph Search is limited in scope and usefulness at this stage. It is in a beta phase that will last for many months.

Facebook will no doubt continue to enter new domains.  Its move into Communications with a Skype-like app is hardly enough, and one wonders whether it will make a move to acquire Blackberry.

Also notice the thin coverage in territory by Amazon.  Don't count them out just yet.  Amazon is also a viable contender for a Blackberry deal, and it has the resources to enter more domains.  The areas of Social and Search seem to be the most glarring ommissions.

Samsung has gaps, too.  It desparately needs its own operating system so it can break the chains with Google.  They are certainly headed in that direction given the announcment at CES about Tizen.

Pound for pound, Google has the others beat in terms of collecting monetizable insights.  But the price point for that data is low (for now) especially when you compare it to the premium prices (and margins) of Apple products.  High margins fund future projects.

The battle is far from over.

The Fabulous Five

Published date: January 7, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Five

companies are slugging it out in what may be the most competitive and
unique business battle of all time. It is larger in scale with more at
stake than battles in other industries including transportation, energy,
and finance.

More
remarkable is how different the combatants are from one another.
Instead of similar companies competing (Toyota versus General Motors,
for example), these companies hail from different business bases: an electronics manufacturer, a lifestyle computing company, an
online
retailer, a search engine, and a social network.  In order: Samsung,
Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.  I call them the Fabulous Five.

What
are they fighting for? They are fighting for the right to define what
they are fighting
for. It is a category yet to emerge.  The battle is about who can get
the largest numbers of customers that generate deep
and meaningful insights.  Each company wants a massive following of
human beings using their products
and services in a way that generates monetizable information twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  Each of the
Fabulous Five has a strong and growing foothold to do exactly that.

What
about traditional powerhouses like Microsoft?  Microsoft fell behind and is trying desperately to catch up with acquisitions
(think $8.5 billion for Skype).  Microsoft will regress into a word
processing, server, and gaming company.  Blackberry?  RIM lost one million
customers in the last three months of 2012.  Motorola? Sony? HP? Yahoo?  They
are watching the battle from the sidelines. PC’s
are becoming irrelevant as the tablet and smartphone takes hold.

That
said, there are some potential challengers to the Fabulous Five.
Twitter, for example, has an impressive subscriber base generating 500
million tweets a day that are being archived
by the US Library of Congress.  Despite the enormity of Twitter, it has
a serious gap.  Twitter (the company) lacks a way to own the insights
being generated.  Twitter is just an advertising portal.  More
concerning is the Fabulous Five can encroach this space fairly easily.
Some already have.

Which of the Fabulous Five will win is not a matter of financial resources.  What matters is their core competencies and their ability to stretch those into other domains.  More important is what each company learns about consumers to stretch further.

Who has the advantage?  Let’s look at sheer size and scope of each.

Google averages
nearly five billion searches per day.  Insights about keywords used to
search the Internet are extremely valuable.  Google learns what it takes
to make websites search engine friendly.  It sells that to companies
who want their websites optimized.  Google’s Droid operating system
gives it presence in smartphones.  Now they seek ways to stretch into
consumer electronics.

Amazon leads the nearly $300 billion online retail space.  It had nearly 8 million unique visitors on one day
(Black Friday).  Amazon learns how people shop, how they compare, and
what they are willing to pay across a wide range of consumer products.
It is stretching itself into the smartphone arena.  Amazon will continue to make bold moves.

Facebook
has over one billion users.  Despite all the criticism about its
privacy policies, Facebook has an enormous advantage in learning how
people socialize, communicate, and visualize their relationships.  But
it lacks a smartphone, entertainment platform, and shopping presence
that others have.

Samsung leads in technology development the way that Apple leads in design.  Samsung is well managed and aggressive.  It has massive resources
to put hundreds of millions of handheld units into any region of the
world.  The question is what they do with it – how much of the
information stream will come from the unit versus the operating system
within that unit.  Samsung knows it needs its own smartphone operating system to compete with Google.

Apple
is the most valuable company on the planet with a fiercely loyal base of
customers across every demographic.  It wins on design, integration,
and service.  More than the other combatants, Apple cuts across a wider
swath of a person’s daily life. Its next strategic move will likely set
the tone for the next wave of battles.  Fierce patent skirmishes with Samsung and others will subside so they can all focus on with the real battle – earning loyalty and staying relevant.

The
common theme for all five is innovation – the ability to stretch
into other domains and create new value systematically.  The choices they make to compete will be topics of future blog posts here.  2013 is
sure to be a milestone for this epic battle.

10 New Year Resolutions for Innovation Leaders

Published date: December 31, 2012 в 2:00 am

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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

and next year’s words await another voice.”

                                                                                     T.S. Eliot

In 2013, think inside the box and give your staff these precious gifts to drive innovation forward:

1. Give them Hope: Hope is defined as a positive motivational belief in one’s future; the feeling that what is wanted can be had; that events will turn out for the best. Without hope, tasks such as innovating become difficult if not impossible. Researcher Armenio Rego says, “Hope is important for innovation at work because creativity requires challenging the status quo and a willingness to try and possibly fail.  It requires some level of internal, sustaining force that pushes individuals to persevere in the face of challenges inherent to creative work.”

2. Give them Voice: Giving your employees a voice in matters boosts their creativity. Research shows that, over time, procedural fairness (giving people the opportunity to express their views) has a positive maintaining effect on creativity whereas stifling their views decreases creativity. Be consistent over time.  Don’t let distractions or a crisis cause you to change the rules. Give them a chance to speak about anything related to the innovation challenges you face – focus, methodology, budget allocation, team formation, and so on.  Most importantly, let them speak about the nature and value of their own ideas.

3. Give them a chance to Get Even: When managing individuals or teams, the time will come when you have to say ‘no’.  In that moment immediately after rejecting a person’s viewpoint, you want to let it sink.  Don’t try to minimize the impact by rationalizing the decision or by other means of making the person feel better.  Assign the rejected person right away to a new and important task.  Put them on a project where they can prove themselves and “get even.”  Let their creative juices flow.

4. Give them Accountability: Hold people accountable for what they do to improve innovation activities.  It is tempting to judge employee performance and reward them for innovation output.  This leads to the unwanted rivalry between employees.  Avoid this trap by looking at how managers set up “cockpit indicators” and use those indicators to make changes.  Have they created a closed loop feedback process to improve innovation continuously?

5. Give them a Method: For thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations. Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) is an effective, repeatable, and trainable innovation process for organic growth.

6. Give them Constraints: Research in cognitive psychology confirms that creativity is enhanced by constraints, not freedom.  By limiting the number of variables under consideration from infinity to a finite number, we amplify our potential to come up with a creative solution. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking. It may sound counterintuitive, but giving employees too much freedom of thought leads to “idea anarchy” and a poor level of inventiveness.

7. Give them Skills:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone regardless of where they are on the creativity scale.  If you want a more innovative company, you must have more innovative employees.  Train them in innovation as you would train other skill such as leadership, six sigma, or business ethics.

8. Give them Teams: Innovating takes teamwork.  Properly selected teams using a facilitated systematic method will outperform ad hoc teams using divergent, less structured methods such as brainstorming.  Create innovation “dream teams” with diverse talent from the commercial, technical, and customer-oriented parts of your business.

9. Give them Strategy: Innovation that is linked to strategy is seen as more realistic and supportable.  Innovating is efficient because you avoid creating ideas that are out of scope.  Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places.

10. Give them an Innovation Culture:  An innovative corporate culture is one that supports the creation of new ideas and the implementation of those ideas.  Leaders need to help employees see innovation in the right light and create support systems to make it stick.  As fellow blogger Jeffrey Phillips notes, “A culture that sustains and supports innovation is one that encourages reasonable risk and uncertainty in the goal of larger, more profitable products and services.”

Let Me Speak!

Published date: December 27, 2012 в 4:11 pm

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Giving your employees a voice in matters boosts their
creativity.  New research shows that,
over time, procedural fairness (giving people the opportunity to express their
views) has a positive maintaining effect on creativity whereas stifling their views
decreases creativity.

Bernhard
Streicher* and his colleagues assigned twenty three University students randomly to one of two groups: treated fairly (getting a chance to voice their ideas) or treated unfairly (not given a chance to express themselves).  Students were given a different creativity task over four successive weeks.  They were told that a committee would rate their results.  After the completing each of the tasks, the students in the “fair group” were given the opportunity to explain their ideas and that the committee would consider this information in the evaluation.  The “unfair group” was not given this opportunity.  Ideas from both groups were evaluated and scored (blinded) using standard assessment techniques.

Over the four weeks of the study, students in the fair group maintained their creative output while students in the unfair group declined.  Interestingly, there was no difference in creativity between the groups in week one.  Over time, however, the effect of fairness kicked in.

For leaders of innovation teams, letting your employees express themselves helps maintain a culture of innovation.  But the key is to be consistent over time.  Don’t let distractions or a crisis cause you to change the rules. Give them a chance to speak about anything related to the innovation challenges you face: focus, methodology, budget allocation, team formation, and so on.  But most importantly, as the study points out, let them speak about the nature and value of their own ideas.

 
*Berhard Streicher, Eva Jones, Günter W. Maier, Dieter Frey, and Anneliese Spießberger, “Procedural Fairness and Creativity: Does Voice Maintain People’s Creative Vein Over Time?” Creativity Research Journal, 24(4) (2012): 358-363.

Innovation in Practice: Five Year Anniversary

Published date: December 21, 2012 в 8:46 am

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This month marks the five year anniversary for Innovation in Practice,
and I want to thank my readers and supporters who follow it.  Blogging is rewarding, but challenging.  Most bloggers quit within two years for a variety of reasons: lack of motivation, lack of strategy, no one is reading, nothing to write about, or not enough time.  Fortunately, I have yet to be hit by any of these except perhaps the last one – time constraints – which will never go away.

My goal is to make this blog different from other innovation blogs and websites.  Instead of focusing on why innovation is important, I focus on how innovation happens.  My sense is corporate leaders realize already the importance of innovation, but they struggle with how to put it motion.  Calling a consultant is not the answer.  Learning the skill of innovation to be self sufficient is the answer.

The themes of this blog are:

  • Innovation can be learned like any other skill such as marketing, leadership, or playing the guitar.  To be an innovator, learn a method.  Teach it to others.
  • Innovation must be linked to strategy.  Innovation for innovation’s sake
    doesn’t matter.  Innovation that is guided by strategy or helps guide
    strategy yields the most opportunity for corporate growth.
  • Innovation is a two-way phenomena.  We can start with a problem and innovate solutions.  Or we can generate hypothetical solutions and explore problems that they solve.  To be a great innovator, you need to be a two-way innovator.
  • The corporate perspective, where innovation is practiced day-to-day, is what must be understood and kept at the center of attention.  This is where truth is separated from hype.

2012 was a special year for me.  My co-author, Jacob Goldenberg, and I completed our first book together (Simon & Schuster, June 2013), and we have two more in progress.  I am more engaged in innovation research and technology at the University of Cincinnati, and I continue to teach the SIT method there.  I am fortunate to continue working with various multi-nationals on their innovation programs.

2013 will be a year of change.  I plan to take this blog to the next level with a number of initiatives.  I plan to offer more resources for readers so they can learn the SIT method.  I hope to have resources for teachers and professors who want to include the SIT method in their creativity courses.  I plan to highlight and recognize the practitioners who put SIT to work in their organizations.

I want to thank Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at S.I.T..  Also, Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning Network, the Washington Speakers Bureau, and my fellow faculty at the UC Lindner College of Business.

A special thanks to my family.

Rejection Breeds Creativity

Published date: December 10, 2012 в 10:38 am

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New research from Johns Hopkins University suggests that having our ideas rejected tends to boost our creativity output.  Sharon Kim and her colleagues found that when most of us experience rejection, it can actually enhance our creativity, depending on how we respond to it.  The paper, titled “Outside Advantage: Can Social Rejection Fuel Creative Thought?” was recently accepted
for publication by the Journal of Experimental Psychology. It also
received a best-paper award at the Academy of Management (AOM)
conference held this month in Boston.

As reported by Behance:

In the first experiment, participants were given a series of personality questions and told they would be considered for participation in several group exercises in the future. When the participants returned to the laboratory a week later, some of them were asked to complete a few tasks before joining their group (inclusion), others were told that none of the groups had chosen them and they would need to complete their tasks independently (rejection).  When they calculated the results, the researchers found that “rejected” participants significantly outperformed those that were included in a group. Consider the difference between those who respond to rejection by sulking versus those who respond by rolling up their sleeves and thinking “I’ll show them.”

The results were conclusive: rejection breeds creativity, especially for those who consider themselves highly independent. In final a follow-up study, the researchers found the same trend using a different measurement of creativity.

For practitioners, how can this phenomena work to your advantage?  When
managing individuals or teams, the time will come when you have to say
‘no’.  In that moment immediately after rejecting a person’s viewpoint,
you want to let it sink.  Don’t try to minimize the impact by rationalizing the decision or by other means of making the person feel better.  But the key is to assign the rejected person right away to a
new and important task.  Put them on a project where they can prove themselves and
“get even.”  You want to let their creative juices flow.

“While it is never a comfortable experience, the feelings of rejection can actually help us access our more creative selves. Free from the expectations of group norms, we can push the limits of novelty. Moreover, we can enhance that ability by changing the way we respond to rejection. Instead of dwelling too much on the pain of being turned down or turned aside, consider the freedom you now have to explore new possibilities and less mainstream options.”

Marketing Innovation: The Activation Tool in Advertising

Published date: December 3, 2012 в 3:00 am

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Through a sea of clutter in the world of advertising, how do you get your message across?  One technique is to actively engage the viewer.  The Activation Tool invites the prospect to make an immediate action during the encounter with the ad, either in a physical way or mental way.  It is particularly useful when you want to: 1. make the target audience aware of a problem, or 2. make the target audience aware of the solution.  Consider this print example from the advertising agency Saatchi:


When recipients of this postcard place a hand over the image, their body heat changes the image to reveal a helpless animal covered in oil.

The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” and provide a step-by-step approach to using them.  The tools are:
1. Unification
2. Activation
3. Metaphor
4. Subtraction
5. Extreme Consequence
6. Absurd Alternative
7. Inversion
8. Extreme Effort

Here is another example of the Activation Tool.  Students in my Innovation Tools course at the University of CIncinnati learn how to use these tools.  Students must develop an advertisement that conveys the value proposition of a product or service. This example conveys new features of a suitcase. Shown here is a mock-up of a print ad created by my students.  It requires the viewer to pull the luggage handle only to reveal the text inside.  Very clever.

Bag1
Bag2
 
 

Innovation Sighting: Music That Morphs Using Attribute Dependency

Published date: November 26, 2012 в 8:33 am

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The Attribute Dependency Technique tends to produce innovations that are smart.  They seemingly know when to adjust or change in response to a change in something else.  It is one of five techniques of the SIT innovation method, and it accounts for a majority of new product innovations.  Attribute Dependency differs from the other techniques in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components. Start with an attribute list, then construct a matrix of these, pairing each against the others. Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product. Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.

Consider this unique example of Attribute Dependency: music that changes in relation to another variable.  As reported by Springwise:

Since the advent of digital music we’ve seen a number of artists trying to offer something different to their fans.  UK musician Gwilym Gold’s Tender Metal is a downloadable piece that mutates each time the listener plays it.  The album is being released solely for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  When using the app, the components of the tracks of Tender Metal are seamlessly and subtly reconfigured each time they are played, meaning that each listening experience is different from the last. Users can choose to loop tracks in order to hear it constantly shift, or shake the phone to ‘regenerate’ the piece from its current permutation.  The innovation allows for endless reinterpretations of the music without it being performed live, ultimately offering a more immersive experience for fans.

Smartphones and tablets have become an important platform for these types of innovations because of their ability to track two important variables: location and time.  For example, the musical band, Bluebrain, created an album called National Mall that responds to the listener’s location as they journey down the Mall in Washington DC. “As users approach tagged locations, the audio content of the album will alter to interact with the environment, thus creating a unique listening experience every time the album is played en-route.”  According to Springwise:

For Bluebrain, this album is simply the start, with plans to release similar location-aware works for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York in the summer, followed by an album to be experienced whilst journeying along California’s Highway 1. Location-based technology is increasingly incorporated into products and services far and wide. If you haven’t already, this is one to try for yourself!

The combinations of time-based or location-based linkages to a smartphone are endless.  To get you started creating your own versions of these innovations, following the instructions located here.

Photo from http://www.lucreid.com

Will You Help Me?

Published date: November 19, 2012 в 3:00 am

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Asking for help may be the most powerful yet underutilized resource available for innovators.  Researchers Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns found that people grossly underestimate the rate that others are willing to help when asked.  As a result, we more often fail to ask for help when the likelihood was very high the other person would have said ‘yes.’  Consider this study they conducted at Columbia University:

“Participants in the study were positioned in the middle of the campus and instructed to approach random strangers for an escort to the university gym, which is located at the edge of campus (the Columbia University gym is subterranean and therefore difficult to find).  Before completing the task, participants were asked to estimate how many they would have to approach in order to get one to say “yes.”  On average, people estimated they would have to ask 7.2 people to get just one to agree.  In fact, they needed to approach just 2.3 strangers, on average. While people presumed that about 6 out of 7 of the individuals they approached would refuse to assist them, the reality was that approximately every other person was willing to agree to their request.
Why are we reluctant to ask for help?  The researchers suggest we focus too much on the other person’s cost of saying “yes” (in the form of their time and resources expended to comply with the request) versus their heavier social costs of saying “no.”  They also suggest we may be letting a time when someone said “no” weigh too heavily in our memory.  The fear of rejection looms large, keeping us from risking another bad experience.”

We also tend to overestimate how harshly others will judge us if we ask for help.  We fear asking for help may be seen as a sign of weakness.  The other person has power over you in that awkward moment when they can say yes or no to your request.  However, taking another view of the situation turns the tables.  When we view power and strength as the capacity to influence others to access their resources, help-seeking is not weak, but rather a “powerful act.”

Asking for help has many benefits as the researches point out.  First and foremost is you are highly likely to get the help you seek.   Second, you are giving the other person a “gift” in the form of an opportunity to feel helpful and valued.  Third, you will likely strengthen the relationship with the other person.  Finally, you avoid the life-long feeling of regret of not asking help.  Research suggests, in the long run, we regret more not asking for help than having a request rejected.
Successful innovation practitioners need help in many forms, including:
•    Advice and direction – where are the fertile areas for innovation
•    Participation in innovation programs and workshops
•    Evaluation of ideas and feedback about results
•    Support with both tangible and intangible resources

Need to innovate? Ask for help!

 

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