“the desire line — trails worn into a landscape that demonstrate the paths people want to take, not those that were laid down by the designer”

Peter Merholz lays out some great, yet small in volume, thoughts on emergence, the need for nimble design (and adptiveness – be it in terms of business model, technological foundations, user interfaces and “offers”).

And he has some nice closing questions too, food for thought and further analysis …

Posted via web from frogpond’s posterous

Barry Jaruzelski, a partner at Booz & Co., discusses the findings in the fourth annual Global Innovation 1000 survey of the world’s top spenders in corporate R&D, and why it’s important to invest in new products during a recession.

Yes, right, products but let’s not forget improved processes. I wonder thus why the cuts and lower spend expectations in IT hit there as well – check the most current CIO survey (page ):

Ringier glaubt nicht, dass irgendein Zeitungs- oder Zeitschriftenkonzern schon den Königsweg gefunden hat. „Mit unserem Unwissen bewegen wir uns im großen Tross aller Medienhäuser. Alle stochern noch etwas im Nebel“, lautet sein Befund, der selbst den Internetriesen Google einschließt.

Nun ja, ob die Diagnose stimmt? Weitsichtige Unternehmen und Unternehmer werden stets aus diesem Tross ausbrechen und Geschäftsmodellinnovationen anstoßen wollen. Und ja, auch die “Etablierten” sollten – aufbauend auf den noch dominanten Positionen in ihren Kerngeschäften – ihre Geschäftsmodelle erweitern, umbauen, redesignen. Auch intern, bspw. wenn sie die operativen Prozesse der Zusammenarbeit optimieren. Insofern ist Ringiers Beobachtung schon etwas fatalistisch (oder euphemistisch ausgedrückt: konservativ) – es wäre bedauerlich wenn das der Stand der strategischen Entwicklung von Medienunternehmen im Internet bliebe.

Reasons for this include a lack of experience with radical innovation projects at senior levels, a growing mismatch between R&D productivity and cost, and a disparity between how long innovation takes and the immediate demands for ROIs. Added to this are common excuses used to stonewall innovation, from the ever faithful tyranny of current strategy (“it’s not core”), to arbitrary financial hurdles (“it’s not worth our time”). Even if your innovation manages to navigate this minefield, it often receives the coup de grace from internal politics or simple fear.

Jeff Bezos talks about innovating under constraints, customer needs and fear of failure:

Amazon.com’s founder discusses his approach to innovation – both how to do it and how to stay focused when critics question high-risk projects

Via the Complexity and Social Networks Blog I learned of “Design and the Elastic Mind“, an exhibition at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. Impressive website, check it out, especially if you’re into neologisms (anyone care for Existenzmaximum XMX?) . Here’s the abstract:

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration (sic!). Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

OK, now back to business where Yahoo! has refused to Microsofts charms, we’ll see how this turns out for them, take a look at the cheat sheet to the aftermath. There’s no doubt that Yahoo! needs to (but maybe can’t …) unwind some innovative ideas soon to validate this decision. Maybe more “elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration” is needed …

As Google gets bigger, innovation becomes harder and more costly, says former engineer.

Philipp has made a transcript of the interview, I marked up some of the interesting stuff:

I had a number of accomplishments that I’m really proud of at Google. But I think for me I really wanted to sort of, you kow, forge my own path, if we can do it on our own. When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and say, “Hey, you think we should do this?” And then people say, yes, we should do it.

I haven’t made a single PowerPoint presentation. We don’t even use Microsoft Word documents; we just talk to each other.

It’s a really, really interesting dynamic environment. I think no matter how innovative a culture is at a large company, you can’t really reproduce it. And I think that’s what’s so infectious and wonderful about a startup environment, that I think draws a lot of people to it (…)

With 70 people the odds that two people are working on the same thing are probably pretty low. With 17,000, it’s almost a 100% that two or three people will be working on the same idea, or at least very similar ideas, at different parts of the organization. I think there is a certain amount of cost to just coordinating that activity. I’ve been really impressed with how Google has been able to scale, but inherently it has to change – just because there’s that coordination cost.

I think some bloggers call it “strategy tax.” You know, when you grow, your strategy becomes more and more important, and it taxes sort of everything you do a little bit… because everything you do, it strays from that strategy. You know, there’s a huge cost to that. Whereas I think for smaller companies, the strategy is less well-defined, or certainly the impact of straying from it is much lower.

I don’t know if the conclusions are right, and I especially don’t like the idea of a strategy “tax” somehow distracting and hindering innovative ideas and people. To me, this just shows a poor understanding of strategy, strategic thinking and strategy making. But the perspectives and views into Google are worth noting anyway (“look Ma, no powerpoint”), add this to my other Googley posts.

Der Kontext ist es IT-gestützte Geschäftsprozesse schnell wandelbar zu machen, d.h. flexibel an geänderte Gegebenheiten anzupassen.

[...] Service-Orientierten Architekturen stellen Software-Funktionen als Dienste bereit. [...] Komplexe Geschäftsabläufe werden als Verkettungen von Diensten und Interaktionen modelliert.

[...] ad hoc IT-basierte Geschäftsprozesse werden fachlich modelliert und in der Ablaufumgebung ausgeführt.

Vorgestellt wird BPEL bzw. die Erweiterungen, die Tarent umgesetzt hat. Angestrebt wird eine Lösung für den IT-Business-Gap: Die Modellierung soll unabhängig von der technischen Realisierung erfolgen, d.h. auf einer hohen Abstraktionsebene. Die eigentliche Modellierung von Geschäftsprozessen kann dabei mit verschiedenen Tools erfolgen, bspw. mit dem ARIS Toolset.

Der Vortrag war mir etwas zu technisch, ist ja auch nicht direkt mein Kernbusiness und auch nicht meine Kernkompetenz, insofern vertröste ich Interessierte und Insider vorerst auf die Folien (die ich hier verlinken werde, hier sind sie).

Interessant ist die Webseite von tarent, u.a. mit einer Art Glossar, das verschiedene Begriffe aufgreift die mir auch nahe sind …

Ameisen, Archytas von Tarent, Business Process Management, Cluetrain Manifest, Community, Diskurs, Elefant, Emergenz, Evolution, Freeware, Freibier, Freie Software, Freiheit, GNU/Linux, Growing by Reusing, Herrschaftswissen, Interoperabilität, Kommunikation, Lego, Lizenzen, Membran, Metaphysik, Mobile Business, Nachhaltigkeit, Netzwerk, Offene Standards, offene Systeme, Open Business Strategie, OpenOffice, Open Source, Orchestrierung, Passgenauigkeit, Plattform, Qualitätsmanagement, Schwarmintelligenz, Serviceorientierte Architektur, Transparenz, Verantwortung, Verknüpfen, Wissenseffizienz, Quelltext, Zukunftsfähigkeit

Tonight I participated in a book presentation by Rod A. Beckström on The Starfish and the Spider (side event at the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin). He started off with his motivation for writing this book, 9/11. Yes, Al-Quaida is an archetypical network, and mapping this decentralized network is quite a task.

Social Network Analysis shows us that the network of Al-Quaida is really well designed. And the point is that this isn’t an organization, it is an ideology streamlining and leveraging different and distributed islamic terror cells. The strength is in the shared ideas, not in the structure (i.e. processes).

Now an interesting slide, what do Geronimo, Wikipedia, myspace, craigslist, Alcoholics Anonymous, YouTube (and Bin Laden) have in common? They are all decentralized networks, these are not chaos, but a very singular structure.

Starfish can regrow – even from on single leg. It is self-sustaining, it has all it needs in one leg, so if you cut one leg off, it can work out to a starfish again.

Next one is cool, man in red tights, Hernando Cortez, burning the boats after landing. But that’s only the start: He invades the centralized Aztec empire, kills the whole royal family and eradicated the whole capital. Worked quite well, but here’s the catch: This didn’t work with the decentralized Apache society. Even when the Spanish managed to catch the leader it didn’t help – as there was just another leader ready.

if you attack a decentralized network you make it more decentralized and more vicious

Then Rod took us back into today, Napster vs. Big 5-music industry. Really good slide here, showing both the centralization of the industry into the big 5 music companies, and the post napster atomization of P2P-filesharing into KaZaa and even more decentralized networks.

Napster was an easy kill for the music industry, as it relied on central servers. KaZaa, eMule and BitTorrent they don’t rely on this, so it is really hard to get a grip.

Next up is Eric S. Raymond (The cathedral and the bazaar), the hybrid car (Combo special) Toyota Prius. Even when Toyota is a classic centralized company, they managed to put out this car – looks like a spider, acts like a starfish.

Next example: the Tesla electrical sports car (built by geeks). Wholly outsourced production, only R&D+design rests in the middle.

Now we’re going into wiki stuff, he’s introducing TWiki.net, his company that relies on the Twiki open source wiki project. While the company has to be somewhat more centralized than the community, it has got to collaborate with it.

Last, he’s offering some insights into different roles in this coopetitive setting, particularly catalysts (like e.g. Craig Newmark, see my posts here)

A Catalyst’s Tools
Genuine interest in others
Loose connections
Mapping
Desire to help
Passion
Meet people where they are [...]
Emotional intelligence
Trust
Inspiration
Tolerance for ambiguity
Hands off approach
Receding

(via here, there are some excellent notes too)

And even more material and links on these ideas:

Book website
Book review by Ben Casnocha

I encourage you to drop by their site and have a look at this nicely done interview, which btw also sheds light on some of the issues that govern business model innovation:

In the webcast Bill reminds us that innovation is not a goal in itself [...] there must be a reason to innovate, for example, driven by clients, or driven by revelations about how an organization operates inside. He also underlines that innovation won’t happen on its own and that it is based on a strong leadership commitment.

Fischers program Driving Strategic Innovation (DSI) (“faster innovation across the value chain”) looks certainly interesting. Yet I am not sure whether starting with value chains is the right thing to do, when value nets and “business ecosystems” provide a more concise perspective of these complex contexts we call “competitive landscapes”, where adaptivity and connectivity rules business model innovation and design.

[...] industrial designer Dirk Dieter has a tiny house. It’s 250 square feet. The process of renovating and making the place what he wants has even led to a side business selling the furniture he designed for his own “streamlined living.”

Both Ralf Beuker and Alex Osterwalder pointed me to this video interview with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman Business School (publishing a fine journal as well, see e.g. here, for BMID-design-coverage see more here or here).

… where he talks about innovation, management, strategy and holistic, integrative thinking.

Then, today Victor Lombardi announces some new courses he’s planning this summer, like e.g. this one “Using Internet Business Strategy“:

Business strategy for the Internet can be radically different from other industries, as well as more fun and inventive. And creating a sustainable competitive advantage on the Internet can rely more on what we do tactically in design, marketing, and technology. This class will introduce the topic of business strategy and illustrate how Internet strategy is practiced by online and traditional companies. In class we’ll discuss how Internet strategy applies to our particular situations and create our own fictional business by applying a particular strategic method.

While I am all for applying design thinking to business I am reserved about discriminating strategy and “internet strategy”, because I don’t think that there are many offline businesses left. Today all businesses have to cope with contexts that are rapidly shifting, need to adapt continuously, employ innovative ways of innovating etc. …

And that’s not all. Supporting and enhancing productivity with internet-based instruments is both a challenge and an opportunity (as is enterprise 2.0, knowledge management 2.0, etc.). Combining both design thinking and complexity management approaches (building on the principles of connectivity, adaptivity and emergence), is the theoretical underpinning of my consulting work.

Besides, I like Victors approach to teaching and tutoring. Letting participants not only discuss different business models (or particular strategies, structures or capabilities) but helping and coaching them in designing fictional (or real-life case based) business models is in my experience both a cool and a smart way of doing a workshop.