INNOBLOG

Humans are creatures of habit. We tend not to change our behavior unless the incentive to change is compelling. We prefer that things stay the same or change as little as possible, which makes it hard for us to break out of our set patterns and routines. 

Psychology shows us that breaking this status quo bias and developing new habits is one of the most difficult things to do. Yet companies develop innovative offerings and expect consumers to readily change existing habits and adopt new habits all the time!

Even if you have a solution that absolutely targets consumers’ problems dead-on and you know will delight them, consumers still need some help knowing when to turn to your solution and how to use it. You can use advertising and marketing to show them when and how to use your solution.

Consumer packaged goods companies do this particularly well. Just think of the Tide to Go commercial with the woman who is about to make a big presentation, spots a stain, quickly removes it with the handy Tide to Go pen that her coworker hands her, and confidently gives her presentation. To my mind this 30-second commercial is effective because it incorporates the following three key elements: 

1. Shows a circumstance where the job-to-be-done is acutely important and for which a solution either is not available or falls short.
   Removing a fresh juice stain on a blouse just minutes before a big presentation (yikes!)
2. Shows the consumer how the solution is used to effectively solve their job.
   Can be pulled out of a purse, quickly applied, and dry in the time span of an introduction
3. Makes it clear that your solution is the best out there for this job in this circumstance
   What else could this poor businesswoman have done? Go out there and make her big presentation with a stain on her shirt? Keep her audience waiting while she runs to the bathroom to apply cold water? With Tide to Go, she removes the stain and confidently delivers her presentation.

Remember, it is not enough to develop a great product, you need to crisply communicate when your solution can be used, how it works and why it’s the best solution to get the job done! 

This article is part of a 10-part series highlighting what companies need to do to transform uncertainty into opportunity. The full list will be posted on HarvardBusiness.org and SilverLiningPlaybook.com. launches June 1.The Silver Lining

5. Does your organization always asks, "How does the customer define 'more'?" before asking people to do more with less?

Doing more with less is important when times are tough. However, companies that aren't careful often end up doing less with less. The problem is companies don't stop to ask what "more" means. So they start cost-cutting efforts by looking for the largest line-item in a budget, or elements they think customers won't notice.

A far better approach is to develop a deep understanding of how the customer defines quality. There might actually be elements where a company is providing performance that actually overshoots a customer's needs — a natural target for cost cutting.

This thought applies to internal cost cutting efforts as well. For example, maybe internal stakeholders would prefer a simpler, more accessible IT system over one that has unusable bells and whistles.

A simple tool we call a "performance map" (detailed in Chapter 5 of The Innovator's Guide to Growth) can help to develop a thumbnail sketch of where you are over-delivering against a customer's key purchase criteria, pinpointing ways to deliver more with less.

Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

This article is part of a 10-part series highlighting what companies need to do to transform uncertainty into opportunity. The full list will be posted on HarvardBusiness.org and SilverLiningPlaybook.com. launches June 1.The Silver Lining

#4. Does your organization have clear consensus on the one to three top opportunities for innovation?

Growth rarely happens by accident. Companies should thoughtfully approach the creation of new markets or business models. A lack of consensus around high-potential opportunity areas can fracture innovation resources. Alignment on a few broad "innovation themes" can help to bring needed focus to innovation. Themes could be customer segments, geographies, revenue streams, or other areas that could provide the foundation for future growth.

Not sure where to start? A simple way to identify growth markets is to look for "nonconsumers" who lack the skills, wealth, access, or ability to consume your existing products or services. Nonconsumers can often be fertile grounds for disruptive innovation.

Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

Innosight President Scott Anthony has been a major contributor to Strategy & Innovation over the years, but now he's become a subject.  Scott's new book, The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, will be published by Harvard Business Press on June 1.  In this issue Scott talks with Strategy & Innovation Editor Renee Hopkins Callahan about where exactly is the silver lining in the current recession and why we will look back on this time and remember it as the moment when innovation came into its own.  Here's an excerpt from Scott's feature Q&A article "The Tipping Point for Innovation:" 

Q:  We're about 6 to 8 months past the start of what you've called the Great Disruption and officially more than a year into the actual recession.  Does the fact that this has gone on so long and there aren't many projections about how much longer it will last change anything about what you're saying in The Silver Lining?

A:  If anything it makes the book even more important, and has led more and more companies to recognize that we're just never going back to the way it was before.  And I don't think the way it was before was as stable as people thought it was.  But I think it's very clear that for just about every company, success in the future is going to require acting very differently from the past.  And I think this is pretty healthy.  The length and severity of the recession has really helped make clear to people that, in the words of Jeff Immelt of General Electric, "This really is a reset."  This isn't just a little blip, this isn't just a little dip, this really is something that causes people to fundamentally change what they think and what they do.

In this weeks Innovator's Insight, Renee Hopkins Callahan discusses the importance of understanding how small businesses innovate even for corporate innovators.  Here's an excerpt:

Small businesses employ about half of the nation’s 144 million private sector workers, creating 60 to 80 percent of new private sector jobs, generating more than $6 trillion in annual revenue, and creating more than half of the country’s non-farm gross domestic product. Yet despite their influence and importance, relatively little is known about how small businesses innovate. Not surprisingly, small businesses are looking to innovation to help them through the recession, as are many larger corporations. Small businesses may be better positioned to do this, since they are able to react quickly to changing economic conditions and their owners already have the mindset of creating opportunity out of adversity.

Also in this weeks issue, Innosight Manager Josh Suskewicz, who has been writing thoughtfully on innovation in clean energy for years, posts on new business models that take advantage of the Smart Grid.  Here's an excerpt:

The modernization of our electricity infrastructure – the so called Smart Grid revolution – is underway, and not a moment too soon. As an interesting overview in a recent Wired made clear, the grid was cobbled together in ad hoc fashion over the last century, and is largely one-way, mechanical, and dumb. In short, our archaic patchwork of a grid is vulnerable, inefficient and unreliable. It is quite damaging economically and environmentally. Smart Grid – the application of computing and two way control to the electric infrastructure – is the solution, but it is a massive undertaking (the Obama administration has pledged upwards of $40 billion as part of the stimulus package alone). History has demonstrated that infrastructural shifts of this sort tend to be massively inefficient. Our research suggests that a great deal of this inefficiency stems from the widespread inability of incumbents and start-ups alike to create the new business models required by new markets.

As always, thanks for reading Strategy & Innovation! All issues are available and free with registration here.

The modernization of our electricity infrastructure – the so called Smart Grid revolution – is underway, and not a moment too soon. As an interesting overview in a recent Wired made clear, the grid was cobbled together in ad hoc fashion over the last century, and is largely one-way, mechanical, and dumb. That’s why a storm in Ohio can plunge New York City into darkness; why, as energy guru Amory Lovins preaches, every electron saved at the point of use offsets the production of three to four times that many electrons at the source (e.g. a coal fired power plant); and why the Department of Homeland Security is so concerned about terrorists targeting our power infrastructure.  In short, our archaic patchwork of a grid is vulnerable, inefficient and unreliable. It is quite damaging economically and environmentally.

Smart Grid – the application of computing and two way control to the electric infrastructure – is the solution, but it is a massive undertaking (the Obama administration has pledged upwards of $40 billion as part of the stimulus package alone). History has demonstrated that infrastructural shifts of this sort tend to be massively inefficient.  Our research suggests that a great deal of this inefficiency stems from the widespread inability of incumbents and start-ups alike to create the new business models required by new markets.

In short, grid modernization will yield immediate gains in control, efficiency, and security – at a considerable cost. We’d like to see that cost offset by the advent of new business models that open up new avenues of growth.

Indeed, Smart Grid promises to enable a number of new business model opportunities. It is widely considered the missing link that will make renewable energy work: the promise of decentralized renewables is blunted by our current grid, as it does little good to have solar panels on your roof if you can’t sell excess energy back to the system. Someone has to design a scalable system that enables widespread deployment.

Another Smart Grid development we’ve been monitoring is demand response. Companies like EnerNOC optimize energy use throughout an opt-in network of office parks and industrial plants. It turns out that as much as 10 percent of the overall cost of electricity – and a similarly outsize proportion of the pollution – comes from just 1 percent of electricity generation. This is because our grid functions in an incremental, as-needed fashion; we operate at just enough capacity at all times. The grid strains and sometimes breaks on hot summer days when everyone turns on their air conditioners at the same time. To meet the excess demand, power companies have to rev up old, dirty, and expensive backup generators. EnerNOC and its peers practice “peak shaving”; they reduce systemic load at critical times by coordinating lower energy usage across their network, which in turn enables power companies to avoid using their most expensive generators.  Everyone shares the savings that result.

We’ve been excited about demand response for some time because it uses an innovative business model to solve a pressing problem. Rather than simply extending the old and expensive model by building a new power plant, we can now manage the grid in a more intelligent and much more cost-effective way.

The utilities analyst at a leading green mutual fund recently pointed me towards an innovation that makes demand response even more exciting. A company called Ice Energy is adding a relatively low-tech piece of capital equipment to the equation (pictured above); they attach a chiller to conventional air conditioning systems in the buildings they manage that freezes water at night when electricity is cheap (and relatively clean). They then use the ice to moderate temperatures during the day, when electricity is expensive. The company claims that air conditioning accounts for 40 to 50 percent of a building’s peak energy use, and that their system can cut air conditioning electricity requirements by 95 percent.

We like this approach because it wraps an innovative business model around existing technology to get a job done. This is akin to Netflix making DVD-by-mail work, rather than focusing on Blu-Ray or digital delivery, or, in another cleantech example, Better Place building a recharging and battery swapping infrastructure that enables electric mobility with today’s limited batteries. Innovative business models that make proven technologies work better are not at the whim of unpredictable technology development and uptake. They are, in other words, the most predictably efficient way to achieve transformation.

• Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships , by Stephen Baker - BusinessWeek

  Exploration of the innovation taking place as companies work to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they're beginning to have about our online friendships.

• A Real ROI from Twitter? The Start of Social Medical Networks, by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld - Between the Lines blog, ZDNet.com

  Tweeting to your doctor about the status of your health could revolutionize the treatment of chronic diseases.

• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, by Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody

  Participation in social networks represents the shift of "cognitive surplus" from billions of hours of TV watching to a more participatory culture.

• Getting Money from Readers Who Won't Pay for Online News, by Steve Outing - Editor & Publisher

  It's too late for newspaper publishers who are not already charging for content to start doing it, says Outing as he puts forth a business-model concept of multiple revenue streams and describes what some of those might be.

• TRIZ-enabled Mergers and Acquisitions, by Jim Belfiore - InnovationTools.com

  TRIZ, a well-established method used for product and process design evolution, has elements that can be successfully used as an early-stage M&A planning and research tool to help predict and identify potential evolutions of products, technologies and markets.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have patented a new acoustic shielding technology that will allow for private conversations in open office settings. The technology is reminiscent of the purpose, if not the look, of the "cone of silence" from the 1960s Get Smart television show. According to New Scientist, the solution includes a sensor network to work out where potential eavesdroppers are, and speakers to generate a subtle masking sound. Acoustic shielding is not a new concept, but workable solutions have been slow to emerge, perhaps because of the difficulty. Current solutions include portable devices that emit white noise and a device that masks certain speech frequencies within a specific range of distance. The MIT-developed technology, in contrast, is more complicated and meant to track people as they move around a space. The New Scientist article describes the technology this way: "The walls of the room must be peppered with light-switch-sized units that include a microphone, a speaker, an infrared location sensor and networking circuitry connected to a server. When somebody wants to activate what the MIT researchers call the 'sound shield', they do so on their desktop computer. Knowing the position of the computer, the sensors identify the person and map out the locations of people around them. Software assesses who is so close that they must be participants in the conversation, and who might be a potential eavesdropper. The array of speakers then aims a mix of white noise and randomised office hubbub at the eavesdroppers. The subtle, confusing sound makes the conversation unintelligible."

Yesterday I attended a conference on innovation that I would describe as an Official Business type of conference -- three days, trade show, well-known speakers, well-plotted session tracks. While there I chatted with a woman I have known for six years, a woman who chaired one of those well-plotted tracks, about a very different event -- the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI). My friend is a versatile and creative corporate innovator who is also leading a session at CPSI this year. CPSI is the place where she honed her creative skills and learned the approach to creative-skills training, as well as the leadership skills, that have seen her through a 25-plus-years career at a Fortune 500 company.

I first encountered CPSI in 2003, falling happily into what I called then the two-step dance of divergence to convergence and back again. I was blogging then too, and you can read my CPSI posts here. I haven't been to every CPSI since then, but I can unequivocally say that CPSI offers a mind-opening experience and the opportunity to pick up creative-thinking and leadership skills that will serve not just your career but your life. Who wouldn't benefit from being able to focus in on a specific problem statement, explore a dozen analogically based idea-generation techniques, learn tools for evaluating choices? So when asked to participate in this blog party for CPSI, which this year is being held in my current hometown of Boston, I readily accepted. I wholeheartedly recommend CPSI experience. CPSI is the un-conference, a place to open your mind and tend to its inner workings, rather than stuffing it full of information.

You can read the other posts in the blog party at these blogs:

New and Improved
Segami
Gregg Fraley
Filed Under Missylaneous
Maternal Dementia
The Artist Within

This article is part of a 10-part series highlighting what companies need to do to transform uncertainty into opportunity. The full list will be posted on HarvardBusiness.org and SilverLiningPlaybook.com. launches June 1.The Silver Lining

#3: Does your organization have a process to prudently prune its innovation portfolio on a regular basis?

Companies that complain about a lack of resources for innovation need to make sure scarce talent and dollars aren't being drained by "zombie projects" that are limping along with no hope of long-term success. Making regular decisions about which projects to accelerate and which to shut down helps to make sure innovation resources flow in the right direction

More broadly, Innosight Director Richard Foster has long argued that to outperform the market, companies have to change at the pace of market, without losing control. That means building new business lines, and disposing of declining businesses.

Companies should ideally be dispassionate about the disposal part of the equation, which means evaluating existing businesses on a regular basis (instead of when their backs are against the wall).

Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

From FASTForward blog: 

Yesterday the FASTforward Blog hosted a great discussion between Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR, and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book: The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan and sponsored by Microsoft, the discussion touched on topics ranging from:

• the challenges of today’s news business, NPR’s particular “business” and its need to “be its own disruptor”
• the “misalignment” of business models with real value in some of today’s media companies
• the role of technology in enhancing the user experience
• the importance of good editors and harnessing the collective intelligence of informed human beings
• framing disruption as not just a threat, but also as an opportunity
• the viability of charging for content and other forms of monetizing content
• the need to experiment *and* be willing to fail often
• the importance of innovation even, sometimes, in the absence of a clear business model

You can listen to the recording of the event here.

This article is part of a 10-part series highlighting what companies need to do to transform uncertainty into opportunity. The full list will be posted on HarvardBusiness.org and SilverLiningPlaybook.com. The Silver Lining launches June 1.

#2: Does your organization have a handle on the future potential of innovation projects and existing businesses?

Like it or not, most companies are going to have to trim their innovation investments. In many cases, this means shutting down some ideas in the development pipeline. In other cases, it might mean shutting down or selling off a product line or a business unit.

Companies shouldn't make these decisions haphazardly. A simple inventory detailing the potential of existing efforts and businesses can help companies make the right strategic decisions.

When making decisions about in-development ideas, look beyond short-term financial projections. Focus instead on upside potential, residual risk, and the cost of testing the most critical assumptions. The degree to which the consumer has an important, unsatisfied job-to-be-done should play a critical role in the process. For existing businesses, look at unexploited potential in existing markets and to-be-created potential in new markets.

Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

• Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas, Allison Arieff, NYTimes.com

  Whimsical, absurd, multi-functional idea mashups by artist Steven M. Johnson who describes his work as “Mix-’N-Match, outrageous extrapolation, speeded-up thinking, random/lateral thinking (which comes close to the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep where some claim inspired inventions and scientific inventions come through), and so forth.”

• How to build a bigger brain, Mark Wheeler, UCLA Newsroom

  Meditation could be the way to safely grow your brain, according to a study by UCLA researchers.

• An Invention That Could Change the Internet For Ever, Andrew Johnson, The Independent

  Background on the WolframAlpha "knowledge engine, scheduled to launch tonight (8 EDT). This software will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before. Google is reportedly working on a competitor.

What we learn from client projects enables us to continue to build on the basic theories of disruptive innovation on which Innosight was founded. In particular, the foundational concepts of jobs-to-be-done have been built on over the years. In this issue we feature another such build by Innosight associates Rebecca Waber and Curtis Chan, who describe the ways in which customers’ awareness of the jobs they are trying to get done impacts the jobs a company’s marketing department has to do. Here’s an excerpt (for full story click here):

A recent headline in the online magazine Slate read, “The mind-boggling growth of Hulu.” Mind-boggling? Really? If you’re a frequent reader of Strategy & Innovation or the Innoblog, you’ll know that at Innosight we have been following the online video site Hulu for some time, so an article on its growth is not particularly shocking. Many observers have commented on the success of Hulu, referencing the user-friendliness of the interface, the leadership of the company, and the diversity of the content. One aspect of Hulu that tends not to be discussed, however, is that part of its success owes to the fact that consumers were already aware of the need for a product that offers readily available television content.

Also in this issue's Innovator's Insight, Innosight senior associate, Kathleen Poe, uncovers the NBA’s potential for disruption by focusing on a jobs-based approach. Here’s an excerpt (for full article click here):

I recently attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (affectionately dubbed “Dorkapalooza” by panelist and ESPN columnist Bill Simons) and came away with my head a-twitter. The business model of the sports industry was on display first-hand. As we in the audience fawned over panelist and Celtics guard Ray Allen, Ray batted his eyelashes at the head of sports marketing for Gillette in hopes of landing an endorsement deal. Meanwhile, the GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs recognized that he’s in the entertainment business and can generate more revenue based on star players and action (read: fights) than by winning games. Former NBA coach Jeff Van Gundy agreed, opining that basketball needs more rabid fans and fewer players hugging after the game, as Simmons observed that fans may opt to stay home more given high ticket/parking/food prices at the stadium and better angles and replays in one’s living room. The most fun of the day, however, was talking with the COO of the NBA, Adam Silver, about new growth opportunities in professional sports. As a fan of both athletics and innovation, I inevitably apply the questions we ponder at Innosight to the world of the NBA, MLS, MLB, and NFL. Do the models of disruption apply in an industry full of near-monopolies?

As always, thanks for reading Strategy & Innovation! All issues are available and free with registration here.

On June 1, the new book by Innosight's Scott Anthony, The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, will be released. As Scott says in a post on his Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights, "the book's central theme is that today's turbulent times make mastering innovation a competitive necessity. I hope that the book provides corporate innovators and entrepreneurs with practical guidance to seize the ample opportunities that still exist in today's markets."

To help leaders do just that, beginning today Scott is running a 10-part series on his blog, each part describing a piece of a checklist of actions for innovation leaders looking to realize those opportunities. In each post, Scott will describe why each item is important, provide an example of a company that has put the concept into action, and describe "Monday morning" actions to implement the item. We will continue to run excerpts from these on InnoBlog, but you may want to bookmark Innovation Insights now so you won't miss any of this series.

Here's an excerpt from the first checklist item:

In today's tough times, companies may feel like they have a choice: focus on innovation or survival. It is a false choice. Innovation has gone from a nicety to a corporate necessity. After all, remember what legendary trial lawyer Clarence Darrow — clearly channeling Charles Darwin — said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change."

It's tough to get started unless there's a common understanding of the challenge. As such, the first item on the Seizing the Silver Lining Checklist is: Does your organization recognize today's transformation imperative?

In today's hyper-competitive world, competitive advantage that takes years to build disappears seemingly overnight. Constant change is the new normal. Companies can't win through operational excellence alone. They have to master the ability to fundamentally transform what they do and how they do it.

However, a lack of common understanding around the transformation imperative can doom well-intentioned efforts. One of the biggest innovation killers is the "sucking sound of the core." Common understanding of the need to change can help to ward off this sucking sound.

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

Innosight president Scott Anthony and NPR president and CEO VIvian Schiller will discuss Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry in a free webinar from 11 to 12 EST this Thursday, May 14. I will be moderating the event, during which Scott and Vivian discuss the challenges faced by media companies and the possibilities for how they can navigate through truly disruptive times.

Scott is, of course, president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. Vivian was previously the senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com and was recently tapped to head NPR.

Among the topics Vivian and Scott will address:

• The dynamics of the media industry and the reality of the disruption it faces
• The expectations of empowered consumers about how they derive, and increasingly drive, value from their interactions and experience with media
• How technology is helping media companies engage their customers and connect them to the content and community they care about
• Where the media is headed, citing interesting experiments and innovative models that are emerging

Go here to register.

This webinar is part of the FASTforward Insight Series, sponsored by Fast Forward and Microsoft.

More from last week’s World Innovation Forum on what turned out to be a key theme: flexibility. Talks by both C.K. Prahalad and Vijay Govindarajan touched on this theme. (At left, a Flexible Flyer sled.)

C.K. Prahalad talked to us about innovating in volatile times. The global economic crisis, he said, will cause everything to be restructured. Volatility is everywhere: governments, financial markets, politics, consumer sentiment, global trade, environment. Companies dealing with this kind of volatility often seek a "zone of comfort,” such as relying continuously on cost-cutting, that won’t work. The key is to be able to scale your business up or down in very short amounts of time. Scaling up and down rapidly conserves cash and reduces capital intensity, reducing enterprise risk. This is also key to being able to change business models quickly.

Prahalad offered some advice on how to choose innovation initiatives that included one thing he said not to do: Don't start from where you are, because you’ll only get an extrapolation of the present, not true innovation. The way to avoid this is to always have a point of view of what your industry will look like in the future. Industries are re-setting globally right now, so this may not be easy to do. But, said Prahalad, “Strategy is about folding the future in, not extrapolating the past. Position yourself in 2015, then work backward from there.”

Prahalad’s other innovation suggestions: start with a customer experience. For example, what if you were a tire company that charged not for tires themselves, but had more of a leasing model where you charged usage fees instead? You could also set up systems where you gather information about the performance of the tires and the way the customers use them — information that can be used to sell more things to people. This places the basis of the business on the relationship, not the transaction.

Again, the key is flexibility. According to Prahalad, the main impediment to innovation is legacy business processes and IT systems that aren't flexible. You can't innovate to take advantage of customers' value shifts unless you have flexible business processes and analytics.

And you can’t get there by analyzing. You have to imagine this world first, then be flexible enough to get there. Every person has the right to make a choice for their own experience and companies must help them create it.

Vijay Govindarajan’s talk also touched on flexibility as well, as he made the point that only non-linear thinking can result in breakthrough innovation. He discussed the three “boxes” that represent ways of mananging: 1) manage the present; 2) selectively forget the past; 3) create the future. Box two and box three are where non-linear thinking happens.

Linear thinking, improving on what you already have, is about incremental, continuous improvement — changing shape and size, building on the past to create the future. In order to create fundamental, breakthrough innovation, you have to jump away from the past. His example: the “Fosbury flop,” the high-jump approach in which the jumper twists over the bar so that the head clears first, rather than the feet. The reason why this approach worked so well is that it addressed the limiting factor that kept jumpers from going higher — the effect of gravity when jumpers used the more traditional scissors-roll position.

Govindarajan’s advice for breakthrough innovation: find the limiting factor and address it. This requires nonlinear change — which requires flexible thinking.
 

• World Innovation Forum Twitter Feed

  Displays all Twitter posts tagged #wif09, which is the tag used by the dozen-plus bloggers who attended the May 5-6 event in New York. Still being updated with post-conference blog posts, and if you read back you can see the real-time posts that went up while the conference was going on.

• Malcolm Gladwell: How David Beats Goliath (New Yorker)

  Echoing Clay Christensen's theories of how low-end disruptions take down large, well-established incumbents, Gladwell explores cases in which small competitors beat stronger opponents. The "Davids" win a large percentage of the time when they manage to change the rules of the game to mask their weaknesses and render their larger opponent's strengths irrelevant.

• Innovation: How your search queries can predict the future (New Scientist)

  A look at the predictive nature of search queries.

• Tom Morris: Adaptation and The Art of Change (The Huffington Post)

  Apt advice for these times on how to personally adapt to change.

•  A Crash Course in Emerging Technologies (FT.com)

  A new, pseudo-academic institution called Singularity ­University, established on Nasa's Silicon Valley campus, is going to "solve our grand challenges: poverty, hunger, energy scarcity and climate change."

Change, recession, failure, silver linings. All of these and more were touched on by the major speakers at Day 1 of the World Innovation Forum. The day kicked off with futurist and Stanford professor Paul Saffo, who shared a framework for thinking about the context in which innovation is going to happen over the next decade.

The key to this moment in time, he said, is appreciating how profound the uncertainty is and not allowing our anxieties to arbitrarily narrow possibilities. Uncertainty is also opportunity. Step back and get context, and things start to make sense. At Innosight we often say that innovators should look for patterns when looking for where new innovationsmight come from. Saffo quoted Mark Twain in saying we should “look for things that ‘rhyme.’ ”

Echoing some of Scott Anthony’s thinking from The Silver Lining, Saffo told us that we should cherish failure because of its silver lining — the fact that progress is built on previous failures. Take a look at the S curve that describes innovation adoption, he said. The flat spot in the S curve is paved with the corpses of early innovation failures. “You’ll stand at the start of the curve and be convinced that takeoff is just around the corner,” but you should “never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

So, if you are looking for success, he said, find something that’s been failing for 20 years. The first web companies were founded by refugees from failed interactive TV companies. We must not be afraid to fail.

Economies are done in by their successes, he said. They do themselves in because they do things so well. We moved from a producing economy to a consuming economy in the 1950s, when the time clock was surpassed by the credit card. The Consumer Economy ended on Sept. 14, 2008, with the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers.

Saffo called our current economy the Creator Economy, whose participants consume and create simultaneously. This is not a new thought, but he took it some interesting places. Google is the real indicator of the Creator Economy, he said, because it taps the smallest unit of a creator act: the search string.

Don’t fear change, embrace it, he urged. The new thing will not support the weight of the old thing. Better to start a lightweight small thing and build on it.

Amazon.com took the next step in its disruptive journey when it announced its larger format Kindle DX yesterday.The blogosphere lit up with mixed views of the device's potential. While I found the Kindle 2 to be blase, I think the DX has significant growth potential.

The device is significantly bigger than Amazon's previous devices. It also has new features, like an accelerometer that rotates the screen when users turn the device 90 degrees and the ability to read PDFs.

Amazon is clearly targeting three user groups:

1. College students who pay exorbitant fees to lug around heavy textbooks. While highlighting and making notes near text in a Kindle is a hassle, I am willing to wager that many students do fast skims - at best. They'll happily gravitate towards a simpler model, and colleges could subsidize the price tag of the device.
2. Newspaper and magazine readers. The larger format makes browsing and discovery much easier than previous e-readers, making it an increasingly viable option for consumers who continue to enjoy those aspects of traditional media.
3. Corporate consumers. The Kindle DX supports PDF and Word documents, making it easy for road warriors to review documents on the go.

Despite the hefty price tag (the DX costs close to $500), the move into these three spaces feels like an important step for Amazon.

As an aside, one thing that I love about the Kindle's development is that Amazon is learning in market. Other emerging e-reader providers, like the FirstPaper reader (backed by Hearst) and PlasticLogic's reader could be phenomenal devices, but by the time they hit the market, Amazon will have the benefit of all the knowledge it has gleaned from being in market for a couple of years.

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

You may have noticed mentions in Strategy & Innovation of the World Innovation Forum, which is next week (May 5 and 6) at the Nokia Theater in New York City. Among the stellar speakers will be Innosight co-founder Clay Christensen and Innosight senior fellow Vijay Govindarajan. I was invited to attend as well, along with a stellar group on bloggers who regularly post on innovation and business in general. We will be both blogging and posting Twitter updates on the conference.

If you're not going to be there, but want to follow remotely, you might want to check out the "Remote Guide to the World Innovation Forum" on posted on Slideshare ny one ff the blogger participants, Stuart Miniman. In general, though, you'll be able to see all of the Twitter updates for the conference if you go to search.twitter.com and enter #wif09. Here's the specific link.

You can also follow the individual writers. Here's the list, including links to blogs. Names preceded by the @ sign are Twitter usernames:

@ReneeCallahan

@michaelstallard (http://www.michaelleestallard.com/)

@andreaMeyer (www.workingknowledge.com/blog)

@chrisflanagan (http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/weblog)

@hsmamericas (George Levy - conference organizer)

Howard Wright (http://www.howardwright.com/)

Idris Mootee (http://mootee.typepad.com/)

@innovate (Braden Kelley, http://blogginginnovation.com)

@katiekonrath (www.getFreshMinds.com)

@pauldunay (http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/)

@pinnovation (Jeff De Cagna, http://www.principledinnovation.com/blog/ )

@robyngreenspan (http://www.rgreenspan.com/)

@stevetodd (http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/)

@stu (http://nohype.tumblr.com/)

@yourboot (Julie Lenzer Kirk, http://www.JulieLenzerKirk.com/ )

@helenwalters http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/

Hope to see you there!