Business Week lists its top 10 of innovation and design books for 2008, books that “had an original thesis, tapped into a trend that seemed clearly part of the zeitgeist, or simply provoked us, making us think differently about the world or how better to monetize, mix, or manage fresh ideas”. And Blown to Bits is now available for download under a Creative Commons license – get the book as a single PDF file (22MB) here.
Yahoo! is planning to shut down Brickhouse, the business unit I loved then and home to cool innovations like Yahoo! Pipes and FireEagle. Sad news, I always thought this to be an interesting innovation environment (think Allen curve , i.e. avoiding “the exponential drop of frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases.”). Well, enhancing collaboration and spreading of ideas will benefit from IT collaboration infrastructure, yet having functional areas designed into innovative work environments remains a good idea in my book.
Meanwhile Procter & Gamble and Google are doing a job-exchange program, where employees from the two companies spend weeks in each other’s staff training programs and meetings at the other company. Nice idea, this friendly (and cost-effective) consulting by people working in similar fields without being direct competitors (learning in best practices programs might achieve the same but is probably less flexible and somehow so old-school). And Clay Christensen argues in an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Martha Mangelsdorf (“How Hard Times Can Drive Innovation“) that the economic downturn will have a positive effect on the environment for innovation:
One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend. And, statistically, 93% of all innovations that ultimately become successful started off in the wrong direction; the probability that you’ll get it right the first time out of the gate is very low.
So, if you give people a lot of money, it gives them the privilege of pursuing the wrong strategy for a very long time. In an environment where you’ve got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you’ll be successful is actually much higher.
Time to Rethink Strategy? Here’s an Urgent Memo to the CEO by Paul Branstad, Bill Jackson, and Shumeet Banerji on how corporate leaders can move aggressively to seize new opportunities:
we are [...] entering a period during which the value of being able to act strategically and decisively for the long term will increase enormously. Preparing for this moment of opportunity is of paramount importance for your businesses’ position for years to come
Will life slow down in the future or will it continue to speed up? Interesting post on the ever-increasing speed of life by Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb. It’s titled:
“Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future”. Well, heard that before and I guess this meme won’t ever stop. So strategic innovators may do well to check out these tidbits:
Umair Haque says we need to rethink strategy itself:
A world of cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and what’s not.
Jeff Jarvis on how an edge strategy may be reached:
Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite: release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid.
Keith Sawyer on the emergent nature of worthwhile innovation efforts:
breakthrough innovation is improvisational – it emerges, unpredictably, from a long series of small sparks of ideas. No single one of those ideas determines the final form of the innovation that will later emerge
citing Peter Drucker:
“When a new venture does succeed, more often than not it is in a market other than the one it was originally intended to serve, with products and services not quite those with which it had set out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of when it started, and used for a host of purposes besides the ones for which the products were first designed.” (1985)
Simon Wardley has published a video of his talk at XTech (“Why open matters – from innovation to commoditisation.”) Main topics are:
- An introduction to commoditisation, creative destruction and competitive advantage.
- An introduction to innovation
- An introduction to the underlying processes.
- Why nothing in management is simple.
- How this impacts IT.
- Why open is essential for a service world.
And I really should spend more time with ‘Thingamy’, a “Business Model Builder with instant delivery of Business Processes, Accounts and Reports.”
Schöner Titel, stammt aber nicht von mir, sondern von Michael Ringier, gefallen in einem Interview in der FAZ mit dem Titel „In der digitalen Welt stochern wir alle im Nebel“.
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.
Via Philipp I learned of this video interview at CNN with Bret Taylor on his “present at Friendfeed and his past at Google” (Ex-Google Employee on Scaling an Organization):
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.
Interesting line-up at the upcoming World Innovation Forum, Gary Hamel, Amory Lovins, Eric von Hippel, Chris Anderson and more. They’re claiming that
[...] Over two days, the experts will guide you through the exploration of the latest innovation theory, strategy, and case studies. Learn from these resources how to successfully implement and refine innovation to leverage and grow your business.
They’ve got nice promotional videos, too – one’s on the site and can’t be embedded, another one’s here:
Some english podcasts of note, collected in the last few weeks, for all of you that got a little time on their hands …
For a start, Alex Osterwalder has published two more Arvetica podcasts of note (mp3), here he’s talking with Scott Anthony of Innosight, and here he’s talking with John Hagel. How cool is that.
Some notes from the talk with Scott:
a first simple recipe to avoid falling victim to disruptive innovation:
- we must keep looking a the world through our customer’s eyes not by the way our companies are organized internally
- we shouldn’t just focus on our best customers. We must keep looking at the fringes, because it is there that disruptive innovation occurs.
- we have to create the organizational space for innovation. Else, the importance of running the core business will crowed out any innovative activity
And here’s the gist from the talk with John:
The podcast is about three distinct topics John has worked on: first, his approach to strategy, second, a concept he developed called “unbundling the corporation”, and third, “IT as a tool for strategic differentiation”. [...]
IT as a differentiator: John points out that IT is today becoming even more strategically important as a foundation for rapid incremental business innovation than previously. He explains this through new and flexible architectures which allow companies to continuously achieve IT innovation and keep a constant head start. This contrasts with the past, when companies made heavy punctual investments in IT innovations every few years, but were then copied. Finally, John also refers to the innovation potential of newer technologies that help people come together, collaborate and create value rather than just create savings through automation.
Pretty much what I am recommending all the time, especially when consulting.
The same topic is dealt with here (mp3), in a new favourite podcast of mine called Spark, which is published by CBC. It’s an interview with Nicholas Carr who speaks about his new book (“The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google”):
[...] The Big Switch is about the massive changes this move to what’s called ‘cloud computing’ may have. For Carr, its effects go beyond the business of technology. Just as electrification changed North American life profoundly, the ‘big switch’ will change economics, culture, and society, raising questions about security, privacy and more.
Knowledge@ Wharton has excellent stuff too, see e.g. this podcast with Larry Huston, formerly of Procter & Gamble on their Connect + Develop program, and the challenges of making a company into a connected innovation company, i.e. building up the strategic capability to cooperate (here’s themp3). In the same direction here’s a short BBC In Business podcast called “Men In White”, asking if giant corporate research laboratories have outlived their usefulness (mp3):
Peter Day visits Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre in California, where the scientists hope their inventions will lead the next wave of technological innovation.
Then there’s an older interview (mp3) in the Knowledge@Wharton series on business model innovation that’s fueled by communities and social networks (“trying to harness communities to reshape their businesses”). John Spector of the Wharton School talks with Craig Newmark of Craigslist, more here.
I like Craigs approach to business, he disrupts and redesigns this media industry, while valuing corporate ethics and keeping “serving the community” at the center of business. More on him here.
