INNOBLOG

Innosight's Scott Anthony will present a webinar as part of a series put on by the organizers of the BrandManageCamp conference. Scott will speak on "Leading Innovation in the Great Disruption" at 1 pm EDT, Friday, August 14. In the webinar Scott will discuss how you can learn how to:

• Spot and seize innovation opportunities
• Increase innovation productivity
• Reduce investment in organization initiatives through strategic experiments
• Build a common language of innovation
• Use innovation as a management tool to get the most out of your executive team   

The webinar is free to BrandmanageCamp resgitrants. For more information, go to this link — http://www.managecamp.com/events/ — and scroll to the bottom.

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

• 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."

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!

We often hear it: "Our innovation strategy is to be a fast follower." Too frequently, the person saying the phrase shakes her head as the words come out, oozing irony. The fast-follower approach has ended up pushing the company in many directions, with little strategic coherence. Worse, it has led the firm into competing head-on with entrenched incumbents rather than creating new markets.

Strategies like "fast follower" usually become popular for good reason. Oftentimes, however, they are transplanted from the industries where they emerged into settings where they are inappropriate. The challenge for firms is to distinguish which strategies fit their particular circumstances. We would suggest three settings in which a fast-follower approach makes good sense:

1. Local market power – Businesses with strong local economies of scale, such as grocery stores or newspapers, can easily look outside their home markets at how other firms are innovating for similar customers. The Philadelphia Inquirer may have much to learn from the Detroit Free Press, for example. Oftentimes companies in these industries will eagerly collaborate to share discoveries, and quickly copying successful experiments is sensible business practice.
2. Asymmetric capabilities – Big pharmaceutical companies have made excellent returns by being fast followers in drug categories, leveraging their sales capabilities to win market share even if their drugs’ effectiveness is no better than that of the firms who were first to market. By being somewhat later to launch, they can learn from the pioneers’ clinical trial results and avoid expensive failures. Yet this approach may have a limited shelf-life. In pharmaceuticals, insurers are increasingly pushing for cost-effective solutions, and they are not keen to subsidize large salesforces that may add little in terms of medical outcomes.
3. Ability to create new offerings based on synthesized learnings – Real-world experience is vastly preferable to countless hours spent brainstorming on a conference room whiteboard. The trick is to synthesize among a large number of experiments in-market, and to create a unique offering that draws from these lessons. Rising mobile phone manufacturers such as LG have done this well; they have closely observed how users interact with models currently in the marketplace, and they incorporate key features while adding new ones, such as a mirror to help with applying make-up.

Unfortunately, the fast-follower approach tends to be adopted in a fourth circumstance: as the lowest common denominator on which everyone in a company can agree. After all, few firms will state that their innovation strategy is to be a distant laggard. The result is a fractured portfolio in direct competition with motivated market leaders.

For the next couple of days (Wednesday and Thursday, March 25 and 26), I will be live-blogging and posting Twitter updates from The Business of Community Networking conference here in Boston. If you're interested, the conference will be at the Doubletree Guest Suites at 400 Soldiers Field Road. I'll be on the lookout for information and insights about the disruption that social media has caused in publishing, advertising, and marketing. How are companies making the best use in their innovation efforts of the direct conduit that online communities provide into customer needs and desires? If you're going to be around the conference, I'd love to meet you. Send me a tweet!

• How to Keep Innovating - BusinessWeek

  Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton outlines some tips to keep innovating, including "Always be bad at something that you are passionate about...always be a beginner at something, and always be in love with what you are beginning. [And] when you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are — yet again — bad."

• A World Transformed: What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years? - Knowledge@Wharton

  Audience members of the PBS business program Nightly Business Report  from around the country were asked to suggest innovations they think have shaped the world in the last three decades and a a panel of eight judges from Wharton reviewed and selected the top 30 of these innovations. Results include GPS systems and online shopping/ecommerce/auctions (e.g., eBay) as well as Internet, broadband, WWW (browser and html), PC/laptop computers and mobile phones.

• How to Leverage Technology and New Media to Grow Your Business, The Coolest College Start-Ups Article - Inc. Article

  Profiles 16 entrepreneurs following the Michael Dell "business start-up in a dorm room" model.

• JetBlue to refund airfares to laid off workers - News- msnbc.com

  Like Hyundai, JetBlue is tweaking its value proposition to match the reality of its recession-spooked customers' lives.

• Innovate Like Chris Rock - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

  Emergent strategy illustrated in Chris Rock's approach to comedy.
  

• Free Newspaper Venture Depends on Local Blogs - NYTimes.com

  More business model innovation in media.
  

• Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market - NYTimes.com

  Cisco plans to release a server equipped with virtualization software, a product that "threatens to shake up the technology industry and put the company on a collision course with traditional partners like Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M. ... [this] is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. ... Cisco’s push into the server market...could cause an all-out war among the tech titans for one another’s customers.
  

• Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org

  Wall Street's moral hazard has a mirror image.. The perverse irony of the collapse of industrial-era capitalism isn't just that Wall St ended up being massively risk seeking, taking bets it never should have. It's also that venture capitalists ended up being risk averse - never making the bets they should have. ... Venture investors have been free to take hidden action that maximizes their own near-term returns - underinvesting in radical innovation.
  

• The New Reality: Constant Disruption - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org

  John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison argue that "equilibrium is a thing of the past" because "Today's core technologies--computing, storage, and bandwidth--are not stabilizing. They continue to evolve at an exponential rate. And because the underlying technologies don't stabilize, the social and business practices that coalesce into our new digital infrastructure aren't stabilizing either. Businesses and, more broadly, social, educational, and economic institutions, are left racing to catch up with the steadily improving performance of the foundational technologies."

• A Water Landing? You’ve Got to Be Kidding - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

  Look down in the comments for some suggestions for innovation that were inspired by the Jan. 15 water landing in the Hudson: 1) Play instruction videos in a loop in the terminal while passengers wait; 2) Have a real exit window in the terminal that passengers could try out to see if they really are up to exit-row duty. Also, it's hard to argue with this observation: "in the ubiquitous photos of the passengers standing on the wings (the image here was taken by a survivor from an iPhone), almost none of them are wearing their life preservers! After listening to that song and dance every time you get on a plane, you finally crash in the water and still no one listens to the instructions!"
  

• Super-Efficient Fridge Among the Innovations at Builders Show - WSJ.com

  The housing industry, poster child for the recession, offers up green innovations at the annual Builder's Show. My favorite: Solar HVAC from Lennox, industry's first integrated solar-assisted heating, cooling, and ventilation system. Cost $2K to $3K more than regular systems.
  

• 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter

  "Doctors and nurses share medical information, often as short bursts of data (lab values, conditions, orders, etc.)." says blogger Phil Baumann. Understanding that privacy issues would have to be dealt with, he offers 140 suggestions for ways that micro-sharing service Twitter could be of use in healthcare. There are probably some ideas for new businesses represented there.
  

• Puzzling Over the Invisible Economy - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

  This economist has no economic explanation for his observation that people are more reluctant to give others electronic gifts (MP3 files, digital books) than they are to give analog books and CDs. I suspect it's because giving these "less real" gifts doesn't satisfy the emotional jobs-to-be-done of the gift-giver.

At campaign stop after campaign stop, Presdent-elect Barack Obama reiterated the notion that his White House would be open to ideas from Americans. A week ago, Change.org, an online hub and media network for social issues and collective action, took him up on it by launching Ideas for Change in America, a site where Americans can enter ideas about how to change America, and the ideas can be discussed with others and voted on. When all the voting is done, the "Top 10 Ideas for America" will be presented to the Obama administration on Inauguration Day. Change.org promises to then "build a national campaign to advance each idea in Congress, marshaling the resources of Change.org, MySpace, and our dozens of partner organizations and millions of combined members."

We've championed such idea-generation and voting efforts in past articles on collective and collaborative innovation. So it's no surprise that I have already put my two cents' worth of comment and vote in for the idea of establishing a Department of Innovation, an idea put forward by Alain Rostain of Creative Advantage. Comments on this idea have ranged from observations that some Scandinavian governments as well as the government of Australia have centralized government-led efforts to invest in and nurture innovation on a national level, to my own observation that I'd like to see such a department pull together the existing threads of this concept that are floating out there now. Two such threads are the National Innovation Initiative and the Senate bill S. 3078, introduced last June by Susan Collins (R Maine) and Hillary Clinton and proposing "to establish a National Innovation Council, to improve the coordination of innovation activities among industries in the United States, and for other purposes."

Of course there are those commenting who think it's a bad idea, but so far the idea has 89 votes and needs only 28 more by Dec. 31 to make it to the second round.

So what do you think? Go to http://www.change.org/ideas/view/department_of_innovation and weigh in.

Leafing through this weeks BusinessWeek with the disruptive hat on

Cell Phones for the Sandlot on page 20 Chris Carter has been tracking developments in the kid-focused handset market. It is interesting to see how different companies are going after the space. From a jobs-to-be-done perspective, neither the Firefly nor the TicTalk have it quite right. The Firefly seems to have approached it from a kids-job perspective (easy to use) while the TicTalk comes at it from a parents job perspective (easy to program). It sure would be good to have the best of both worlds

Dark Days at Daimler on page 31 The cover story. Remember what has happened with this merger the next type you see hype about how the next mega-merger is going to help company X + Y do something interesting.

Drugmakers are Changing Channels on page 44 One of my favorite sayings is I know half of my marketing budget is wasted. I just dont know which half. Believe it or not, pharmaceutical companies are discovering that spending huge amounts of money on consumer-direct advertising doesnt work. Thankfully, this might mean fewer Cialis, Viagra, etc. ads. If one of these companies could take 50 percent of the brain power they focus on coming up with clever but meaningless ads and think about the broader value chain issues that might inhibit consumption, they could find themselves with an interesting business on their hands. As a teaser, Clayton Christensens next Harvard Business Review article is going to take on brand-building. The last version I saw was titled Marketing Malpractice: Its Causes and Cures. Coming later this year.

Podcast: David vs. Goliath on page 47. An interesting thing is happening in the Podcast space. Existing giants are racing into the space. Once Apple incorporated Podcasts onto its iTunes platform, existing media companies realized that a Podcast could be a great way to increase the distribution of existing content. Emerging, fringe players seem to be getting pushed aside. As is always the case, where the individual will triumph is in doing the things the media giants arent interested in doing. Trying to out-Epert Epert just isnt going to do it.

From the Brink to the Big Leagues on page 60. Data storage giant EMC has set its sites on moving up market to compete more directly against IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Can it disrupt the goliaths? Or will it be swatted back down into its niche?

"The Right Stuff for GIs of the Future on page 74 Another article asking whether it really makes sense for the Army to be spending $125 billion for a system predicated on the assumption that future wars will be fought on open battlefields against conventional enemies. Hmmm seems to be some evidence against that assumption. Weve written about this issue before, a couple of times. Mastering the resource-allocation process is one of the biggest challenges facing companies encountering disruptive threats.

A colleague pointed out an article in The Boston Globe ("Like Coke machine for DVDs") describing a new way to rent DVDs. The service is provided by a company called Redbox, which is a subsidiary of McDonald's. The concept is simple. Go to a kiosk, swipe your credit card, and receive a DVD. You don't have to be a member and are charged a dollar a day for each day you have the DVD. You can return the DVD to any Redbox kiosk.

Color me a bit skeptical about the viability of this approach. What are the potential benefits? Ultimately more convenience because kiosks might be everywhere (of course, having a DVD arrive in the mail is pretty darn convenient as well, but you have to pay monthly fees for that convenience). Lower prices, although if you keep a movie for a couple of days prices can add up. The downside? A limited selection of movies, and no guarantee that the kiosk you spot will have the movie you want.

To me, it just feels like Netflix can get the movie rental job done better than Redbox can.
Sure, there are some nice applications. If you are a business traveler, you could pick up a movie in your home city, watch it on the plane and drop it off when you stop by McDonald's to get breakfast. But it seems like the company's claim that it is "paradigm-shifting, business model crushing" might be a bit much.

Thoughts?

BusinessWeek has a special section this week on innovation. Lots of interesting stuff in the section to discuss. My quick take: I thought there were some provocative thoughts in the article, but as always, a lot of unanswered questions.

It is clear that innovation is a hot topic right now. Some of the fundamental premises in the article -- it's more than just technology, getting inside the consumers head is key, finding new paths requires new tools -- are hard to argue with. Left unanswered are questions such as: Which market space has the highest potential for growth? When does it NOT make sense to focus on design? How can a company maximize the potential of a particular strategy? How can a company develop a process that makes the pursuit of new growth more systematic?

Of course, innovation is a complicated discipline and providing a comprehensive guide in 20 pages is pretty darn hard. I would love to hear people's reaction to the article.