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February 24, 2006
The rise of the cafe start-up
In a guest blog post over at GigaOm, Jackson West of SFist writes about the continued emergence of an Internet start-up culture in Wi-Fi-equipped cafes around San Francisco. (While Jackson puts an "indie" spin on the trend by specifically NOT mentioning Starbucks, the overwhelming anecdotal evidence here in New York City and other cities suggests that the corner Starbucks - no matter how unhip - is also a potential hotspot of entrepreneurial activity.) Rather than work alone in lofts or garages, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs would rather seek out social interaction in "third places" like Internet cafes:
"Forget Palo Alto garages - San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your startup off the ground. Internet cafes are emerging as an important place to get work done, hold meetings and network. Since writers, designers, developers and anyone else who can work from their laptop are going to show up, you can even recruit talent, publicize your project and even demo your product for potential users and investors."
IFTF's Future Now blog then picks up this strand of thought with a post called "Cafes, the New Garages?":
I think this won't come as news to many, but the notion that cafes can legitimately be thought of as business places (and not just to sell coffee, but to conduct a wide variety of businesses) has a lovely early modern quality about it At the same time, it reinforces a point that many smart writers about the relationship between the Internet and physical places have made: Web access (and especially wireless access) doesn't make place irrelevant, it just changes the criteria people use for deciding which places they're going to work in. In an interview we conducted a couple months ago, MIT professor William Mitchell explained how unwiring Internet access and other facilities was changing both the ways users think about workspace, and the opportunities architects have to design interesting spaces. [...]
The shift from garages to cafes reflects not a sense that you can completely do away with offices or meeting-spaces, but a shift in preference away from spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions."
[NOTE: For anyone dropping by the San Francisco area, Jackson West also provides a short-list of the best Internet cafes for networking and meeting other like-minded individuals: "Any one of them will keep you fueled with caffeine, connected online and give you a chance to network with fellow travellers."]
Tags: cafe startup SanFrancisco innovation
[image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
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Matthew Pittinsky of Blackboard: e-Learning 2.0 and education's tipping point
In this exclusive Q&A for the FORTUNE Innovation Insider, Matthew Pittinsky, Chairman & Co-Founder of Blackboard, Inc., discusses some of the most important trends in the world of e-learning and online education. After launching in 1997, Blackboard has signed up more than 2,200 client institutions and engaged more than 12 million users. With approximately 500 employees, Blackboard is considered by many industry analysts to be one of the leading providers of online education systems around the world. Over the past six years, Matthew has received a number of innovation awards from the likes of Ernst & Young, Washington Techway, Washington Business Forward and the Northern Virginia Technology Council.
Q: For someone new to the world of e-learning and online education, what are the key trends and/or innovative product offerings to watch in 2006?
Matthew Pittinsky: e-Learning is moving out of its initial “1.0 phase” and into its second phase, e-Learning 2.0.
From 1997 until recently, the focus has been breadth and depth. We’ve seen widespread adoption of software by colleges and universities that want the Web to play a major role in campus-based and distance learning programs (breadth), and we’ve seen great traction on campus by faculty in terms of the percentage of courses that use eLearning systems to supplement or deliver instruction (depth).
Now, the focus is on going beyond putting courses online through a standardized system. It’s about personalizing the course environment to be discipline and pedagogically specific to the subject in question. This means selecting from thousands of add-on applications that are unique to sociology, or biology, or a constructivist approach to instruction. Its about going beyond the course, to integrate a true Networked Learning Environment, that connects scholarly systems, online library databases, remote campuses, local schools, study abroad programs, and more.
At Blackboard, we have been talking about the Networked Learning Environment concept for about 18 months now – and it’s really becoming a reality. It’s no longer simply an option for academic institutions to link the wide range of resources that support robust educational experiences – it’s expected and necessary.
Q: I read on Blackboard's new educate/innovate blog that Malcolm Gladwell will be giving the keynote speech at the upcoming Bb World '06 conference. What exactly does he mean by "Education's Tipping Point" and how is Blackboard part of this?
Matthew Pittinsky: Well, I think it's best to leave what he means to him. Gladwell has written about education before and our conference gives him the opportunity to link his thinking on education as a process and institution in society, with the insights about change and intuition he’s introduced in The Tipping Point and Blink.
Let me give you an example of what I think it means. We have a large client base today and so millions and millions of college students are learning with Blackboard as both a medium of instruction and a verb. In other words, they have a literacy in Blackboard and online learning and they understand what it can do (and its limitations). Large numbers of those students have already graduated as teachers who bring this literacy into K-12 and expect the Web to play a major role there. Partly for this reason, and partly thanks to the leadership of school districts on their own, we’ve now reached the point where Loyola College in Maryland reports that 10% of their incoming freshman class has learned with Blackboard in middle school or high school. So here you have this tipping point, where the interconnections of secondary and postsecondary education drive a reinforcing cycle of use, experience and literacy in online learning. It’s a powerful force.
Q: What else is new this year for Bb World 2006?
Matthew Pittinsky: Bb World is almost a misnomer. I say this because the event is really about our clients. They co-sponsor it, comprise the bulk of the presentations; it is in many ways an academic and professional conference that deals with academic computing, pedagogy, and more. So what I’m most excited about this year is the wide variety of client presentations – the success of our technology is really evidenced in the success of academic institutions and students around the world. There will be more than 150 client-led sessions at our conference ranging from assessment to accessibility issues, pedagogy to podcasting classes and data and network security to home-school connections in the K-12 market.
Of course we have to do our part too! So to have great product announcements, company initiatives to share, and to host speakers like Malcolm Gladwell will be a lot of fun too.
Q: How are Fortune 500 companies taking advantage of the convergence between technology and education?
Matthew Pittinsky: Well, this brings us back to the tipping point question. It doesn’t take a huge leap to see the connection between deep usage of systems like Blackboard in undergraduate and professional programs to a new generation of workers who bring to the Fortune 500 a literacy in eLearning. They are comfortable with the Internet as a medium for instruction, or at the very least, a supplementary environment.
A number of Fortune 500 companies are already using Blackboard to provide life long learning for their employees, and we expect to see this trend increase. We have also seen many Fortune 500 companies working directly with academic institutions to create executive MBA programs that their current or prospective employees can access online through Blackboard. This allows people who have full-time careers to extend their professional education and training. Examples include John Deere, Motorola and Intel.
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Nintendo's brain training game: Japanese innovation at work
Coming soon, to a cubicle near you: a new "brain training" game from Nintendo that's already a smash best-seller in Japan. The "Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day" game was featured in yesterday's Wall Street Journal as an example of how Nintendo is finding innovative new ways of attracting non-videogame players to the world of videogames. (We touched on this theme last week with a piece on Nintendogs, a puppy-training game that has gone over big with women videogame players). Anyway, what makes "Brain Age" so unique is that "it doesn't involve shooting or racing... Rather, it's a bunch of word and math problems with a distinctly no-thrills title." In Japan, nearly one-third of the people who purchased the game are over age 35. Even more fascinating, the game is based on the real-life lab findings of a Japanese neuroscientist (Ryuta Kawashima), who has studied how various brain games can stimulate different areas of the brain.
Even though the Wall Street Journal article on Nintendo is hidden behind a paid subscription wall, there's an even more compelling article from Cabel's blog LOL that goes further and deeper than the WSJ article, and even came a month earlier. (take that, Dow Jones!) In addition, Cabel breaks down the four reasons why "Brain Age" has even convinced Japanese grandmothers to take up videogaming:
1. There's an existing brain-training boom in Japan.
2. The Japanese don't necessarily attach stigmas to "childrens" activities.
3. It's priced really well.
4. It's a fiendish trojan horse. (i.e. parents who are buying the Nintendo gaming system "for their children" are actually buying it for themselves.)
The bottom line, according to Cabel: "There is a huge market for new styles of games and new game players, and the gap between "games" and "apps" is getting smaller." Anyway, if you're intrigued by Nintendo's innovative approach to the videogaming industry, the brain game goes on sale in the U.S. on April 17.
Tags: Nintendo braingame braintraining innovation videogame
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How to save Detroit: turn every car into a Lamborghini
Automotive insiders have offered countless suggestions on how to save struggling carmakers GM and Ford, ranging from the mainstream (make cars smaller and more fuel-efficient) to the slightly less mainstream (develop hybrid vehicles). Maybe all it will take to sell more cars is to make them more exciting. An article in the USA Today points out that car enthusiasts are going ga-ga over cars with vertical Lamborghini-style doors:
"There's something about swinging your car door skyward like a jackknife blade that announces you've arrived. At least arrived in the sense that you're making the latest cutting-edge auto fashion statement. Along with big wheels and blaring stereos, car customizers are finding that upward-swinging doors are the latest must-have. For those whose "ultimate accomplishment is to have a dream car," adding the door feature "definitely adds to the 'eye candy' of the vehicle."
The new fad has spawned companies such as Vertical Doors, started by some buddies who say they saw the trend emerging. The founders say that the 3-year-old business, located in an industrial park here east of Los Angeles, is on track for sales of $6 million this year. Several competitors are vying for auto enthusiasts, as well. All receive their inspiration from the front-hinged, upward-lifting doors of the Lamborghini sports car. They call them Lambo doors."
Anyway, if you check out the Vertical Doors Website, you'll see numerous examples of "Lambo doors" appearing in the unlikeliest of places. For $1,899 it's possible to trick out your Ford Ranger with vertical doors that will drive your neighbors mad with envy.
Tags: Lamborghini automobile Lambodoors VerticalDoors
[image: UK-Car-Store.com]
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What modern conceptual art can teach you about creativity
One of the best ways to start the creative juices flowing is by checking out modern conceptual art. For the next few weeks, the best place to find out what's new in the world of art is at New York City's Whitney Biennial, which opens on March 2. Browsing through the latest issue of New York magazine, I came across a feature piece on 10 up-and-coming innovative artists who will be exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial.
One of those exhibiting is Josephine Meckseper, a German installation artist who enjoys antagonizing the corporate world: "Like some bizarre hybrid of Lucky and Mother Jones, Josephine Meckseper’s installations place protest imagery and artifacts into mock magalog layouts and boutique displays. In her recent show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Constructivist manifestos mingled with Palestinian head scarves and homemade Super-8 footage of the September 2005 antiwar rally in Washington." The piece above from Meckseper is called "Der Spiesser und die Agonie des Realen" ("The Bourgeois and the Agony of the Real").
In case you can't read it clearly, the text from the installation reads: "Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are."
[artwork: ArtNet.com]
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February 23, 2006
Feb 23 innovation linkage
Tiny little workers [Very Live Journal: A Blog in the Style of Jujitsu]
Does innovation really start with the customer? [How to Save the World]
Library 2.0: the challenge of disruptive innovation [Panlibus]
How they named companies [Day2Day Activities]
Coefficient of flatness [Joyce Wycoff's ThinkSmart blog]
One billion customers served [Apple iTunes store]
The moment of innovation [Joshua Porter of UIE Brain Sparks]
Employee headcounts for Google, Yahoo & Microsoft [Gabor's blog]
Discovery Channel to showcase miracles of innovation in India [The Hindu]
Who needs humans to sell tacos or fried chicken? [maju6406 on Flickr]
[image: Very Live Journal: A Blog in the Style of Jujitsu]
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America's "Most Innovative" companies: Apple edges out Google
According to this year's list of "Most Admired Companies" from FORTUNE magazine, Apple edged out Google as America's "most innovative" company. (On the flip side of the coin, US Airways outpolled United Airlines as America's "least innovative" company)
Anyway, here's the full list of FORTUNE's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in America:
(1) Apple
(2) Google
(3) UnitedHealth Group
(4) P&G
(5) Walt Disney
(6) FedEx
(7) Genentech
(8) Nike
(9) Advanced Micro Devices
(10) Target
Any other companies you would add to the short list of America's most innovative companies? In December 2004, for example, Fast Company named W.L. Gore & Associates (i.e. Gore-Tex) as the "most innovative company in America," so there's obviously room to dispute what exactly makes a company "innovative."
Tags: Apple Google innovative Fortune
[image: -sou- on Flickr]
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Laurence Haughton and the art of follow-through
Just a reminder that best-selling author Laurence Haughton will be conducting a free Microsoft LiveMeeting on February 28 on "The Art of Follow-Through." Already, more than 600 people have signed up to hear Laurence discuss how leaders can make sure that teams at every level execute successfully. If you've read his book It's Not What You Say... It's What You Do, then you know that Laurence will have a number of practical, real-world examples of how companies can follow-through on their business strategies. In other words, how does a company go from talking about an innovation strategy to actually executing on that innovation strategy?
For more insights from Laurence about the art of follow-through, check out his latest post on the Emory Leadership blog about the never-ending problems at Ford Motor Company. The problem at Ford, writes Laurence, is not the lack of a great strategy - the problem is the inability to execute on that strategy:
"I have great misgivings about Ford’s recently announced “Way Forward” restructuring initiative. It assumes that what has been lacking at Ford is a good strategy. That just doesn’t make sense. How can a company have all those bright people collecting intricate performance data and participating in serious discussions about any shortfalls year after year without them getting lots of really good problem solving ideas and breakthrough strategies?
Ford, like every other company, needs to face facts. Half of all the problem-solving ideas and breakthrough strategies across all industries fail to make it from the conference table to the front lines. In other words, the problem isn’t that Ford or any other organization needs a great new strategy. The problem is that every great new strategy needs an equally great plan to make sure everyone at every level follows through."
Tags: LaurenceHaughton leadership management follow-through
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In six months, Rupert Murdoch will rule the Internet world
According to a feature piece in the February 13 issue of Newsweek, Rupert Murdoch has quickly emerged as one of the most innovative thinkers in the global media industry. In fact, thanks to a series of daring strategic moves over the past 12 months, Murdoch now sits in the driver's seat of the next-generation Internet:
Keith Rupert Murdoch may be 74 years old, but the way he sees it, he's got a young man's fingertips for what's cool. Last year the News Corp. chairman acquired MySpace.com, the wildly popular social-networking site, for $580 million. He then spent almost $1 billion to snap up two more Internet businesses for college sports and videogaming. Those sites, plus others in his media empire, now give him bragging rights as the Internet's fourth biggest purveyor of online media and networking sites in terms of page views, and sixth in unique users. And by the end of the month, he'll announce a $1 billion plan for adding broadband to DirecTV, the satellite-TV service he controls. All this, he says, will add up to "a conservative $1 billion" in his Internet revenues by 2010, not counting any more acquisitions.
Of these moves, the MySpace.com acquisition stands as the most important - and daring - move that Murdoch has taken to re-claim his title as the king of the media world. How important was the MySpace.com acquisition? Well, on his Ensight blog, Jeremy Wright says that MySpace.com is the new blogosphere. Consider these three reasons why MySpace.com is a more important trend than blogging:
MySpace is Bigger Than Blogging: There are more nearly as many MySpace accounts as blogs (about 30M vs about 100M. More of them are started every day than blogs (about 250,000 vs about 100,000). There are more posts per day being made on MySpace than on all blogs combined (about 1.5M vs about 1.4M).
MySpace is Accelerating Faster Than Blogging: Considering it is much newer than blogging, this should be obvious. While it is currently smaller than blogs, at the current rate of growth and acceleration, it will be larger than blogging by this summer. That is ALL of blogging.
MySpace’ers Network. Fast: It isn’t that unusual to find MySpace accounts with thousands of connections. While many (outside of MySpace) might think that these connections are useless, the truth is that they represent the ability for networks to form quickly, and when graphed they do show that certain people are more likely to connect nodes and groups of nodes than others.
Maybe all those projections will not pan out, but it still looks like Rupert Murdoch has changed the playing field for everyone in the world of digital media.
Tags: RupertMurdoch MySpace Web2.0 innovation
[image: MSNBC]
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The Wikiversity: the latest disruption in online learning
You may already use the Wikipedia the same way you once used an encyclopedia, but did you know that there are now plans in the works for a Wikiversity as well? The Wikiversity project is still in the formative stages, but the ultimate goal of the Wikiversity is to become a trusted online resource chock-full of free online courses in almost every discipline imaginable, including business:
"The Wikiversity's School of Business is the online community's center of business education that is committed to teach and educate the online community in all matters related to business. The school aims to harness the community in writing Wikibooks, a free tool for the educational benefit of all, as well as to teach the curious about any particular field regarding business. Currently the School of Business is composed of 14 departments..."
In addition to the links for the 14 different departments, there's also a link for an MBA. Right now, there are just empty pages and stubs for most of the courses and departments in the Wikiversity, but it's easy to see how this initiative could really disrupt the world of online education.
Tags: Wikiversity education innovation
[image: chrys via Flickr]
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February 22, 2006
Meet Al Gore, the innovation celebrity
This year's four-day TED conference kicks off today with a great lineup of speakers, including Nicholas Negroponte, Bill Joy and, yes, former Vice President Al Gore. He'll be speaking tonight from 7:00 - 8:00 pm as part of a "bonus session" at TED. The topic of his presentation has not yet been made public (or, at least, posted on the TED Web site), but it's most likely that he'll be campaigning against the dangers of global warming. I wasn't aware of it until now, but apparently Al Gore emerged as a big celebrity star at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival for his starring role in a documentary on global warming. For more on Al Gore's speech, be sure to tune into the TED blog over the next few days.
Anyway, Al Gore is also the major force behind an innovative cable news channel called Current TV, which has been positioned as a play for the 18-to-34 TV-watching demographic. (The tagline: "The TV network created by the people who watch it") Last October, Al Gore predicted that the Current TV cable channel would be available in more than 50 million homes within five years.
However, after getting hyped for months, it appears that Current is having a difficult time gaining any traction: "Six months into Al Gore’s experiment to turn twentysomethings into TV news junkies, the former vice president’s San Francisco-based cable channel - Current TV - appears to have hit a snag. Prospective viewers, even those who’ve heard of the youth-oriented news and information channel, are having a hard time finding it on cable systems, either because cable providers aren’t carrying Current or because they’ve relegated it to more expensive - and therefore less purchased - cable packages."
There were a number of innovative features that were supposed to make Current TV stand out: viewer-created content; the ability to watch and then vote on videos; a feature called Google Current; and seven-minute news segments called pods (not iPods, but pods). If anyone has watched it, what do you think?
[image: Al Gore, via TED Blog]
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Innovative products that are 50% alive, 50% dead
Kathy Sierra, who writes the consistently excellent Creating Passionate Users blog, discusses what she calls the Schrodinger's Product thought experiment (it's based loosely on the famous quantum physics puzzle called Schrodinger's Cat): "If a company makes a high-quality product, but users don't find it sexy or appealing, does that product exist?" The answer: "You have nothing until a user wants it." Luckily, there are a number of ways to maximize the chances that users will find your product desirable, sexy and appealing. Here's a quick hint: "Chemistry matters. Looks matter. Sexiness matters..."
With that in mind, Creating Passionate Users provides a list of ten ways to make your product desirable:
(1) Pay attention to style.
(2) Pay attention to the emotional appeal.
(3) Show it in action... with real people.
(4) Don't use pictures of generic shiny happy people that have become cliches.
(5) Make sure it's clear to prospective users how this helps them kick @$$
(6) Appeal to as many senses as possible.
(7) Make it meaningful.
(8) Make it justifiable, so the user doesn't have to feel guilty
(9) Support a community of users
(10) Never underestimate the power of fun.
Anyway, be sure to check out the Schrodinger's Product graphic that accompanies the piece. There's also a surprisingly rich collection of Schrodinger's Cats over at Google Images.
Tags: productdevelopment innovation
[image: The Tragic Story of Schrodinger's Cat]
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Design 2.0 and Google minimalism
Just a reminder that there's less than a week to go before the Design 2.0 conference in New York City. The event, arranged by design supersite Core77, has assembled an all-star panel of design thinkers to discuss the intersection of design, innovation and strategy. What exactly is Design 2.0? Well, strategic designer Emily Chang has a great blog post describing the key elements of the Design 2.0 philosophy, which can be summarized by words such as intuitive, social, minimal, transparent, useful and fun. Google, of course, is one company that knowingly or unknowingly has embraced many of these Design 2.0 ideas. After all, the company's search products are intuitive, social, minimal, useful and fun.
That's why it's interesting to see that one of the panelists at the Design 2.0 event will be Marissa Mayer of Google, who leads the product management efforts on the company's primary search products. According to Emily Chang, the Design 2.0 minimalism embraced by Google is part of a larger trend on the Internet:
"Perhaps it’s the success of Google’s search page, or our collective reaction against the flashing banner ads and intrusive popups of the last decade, or the Jonathan Ives effect, but it’s as though web users, designers, and developers alike have all agreed to a new de facto standard of Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more.”
In the arts, minimalism can be defined as “reducing the concept or idea to its simplest form.” Minimalism strips away our concerns for the superfluous and let’s us focus on what’s important. It also let’s us imagine the possibilities by giving us the environmental freedom to feel in control and comfortable - a psychological state that makes it easy to explore and to create. Minimalism in design allows patterns to emerge because people are comfortable with the experience...
Natural. Expressive. It sounds simple, almost elementary, but how do you achieve an experience that’s both intuitive and exploratory to your audience, particularly when all of us have such subjective and unique perspectives? First, by focusing on designing experiences and then, by providing areas for people to express themselves."
Tags: Design 2.0 Google
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An Old School innovator gets a New School blog
There are a handful of Old School innovators like Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) that are legendary for their R&D contributions to the modern world. Even if you've never read Dealers of Lightning : Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, you've probably heard the story of how a bunch of renegade thinkers housed together in a ramshackle building next to the Stanford campus relentlessly developed some of the most important breakthroughs of the computer age, such as the concept of the desktop PC and the graphical user interface. For the past 30 years, Xerox PARC has become one of the de facto templates for how a company should conduct its R&D operations: Identify your most innovative thinkers; split them into a separate R&D unit free of corporate bureaucracy; and give them full rein to develop whatever they want to develop.
According to Anil Dash of the official Six Apart blog, a group at Xerox PARC (now known only as PARC) recently launched a MovableType blog called PlayOn, which will research the social impacts of massively multiplayer online games. According to Anil, even if you don't play massively multiplayer online games, the new blog is worth checking out:
"The work the PlayOn team does in understanding community, social architecture, interactions and culture makes them a natural fit for participating in the blogosphere, where conversation is focused around feedback and interaction. A look at the profiles of the blog’s authors shows a very diverse list of influences and experiences have informed their current work. It’s eye-opening to see how their research into games that seem simple at first glance can reveal some very telling information about how people relate to each other in general, especially online."
Recently, for example, the PlayOn blog tackled the issue of making character avatars in massively multiplayer online games more realistic and life-like. After all, "whether avatars appear stiff or lively certainly impacts our ability to mistake them willingly for living beings and lose ourselves in the fiction of the game world." Game developers are now experimenting with "idles" - animations of autonomic behaviors, such as breathing, blinking and swaying that are activated when the avatar is idle. The next step for game developers is to capture a whole host of other "idle" behaviors that will make the avatars even more life-like, such as glancing at a watch every few minutes while waiting for a bus.
Tags: PARC Xerox gaming innovation
[image: Player-hosted rave screenshot, via PlayOn]
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February 21, 2006
February 21 Innovation linkage
Patents as currency in the IP marketplace [Irving Wladawsky-Berger]
John Hagel dissects Gary Hamel [Edge Perspectives]
Compelling reasons for investing in design [Niti Bhan]
PCs are the Model T Fords of their generation [The Observer]
Video presentations of the world's hottest new technologies [DEMO 2006 Phoenix]
Creating an innovation culture in the Netherlands [Quantum-Playshuns]
Brain death by dull cubicle [Creating Passionate Users]
I want to make a mashup too! [MashUp Camp wiki]
NASA's plans for "Apollo on steroids" [Popular Science]
Life inside the Googleplex: photoessay [TIME}
[image: The Flying Carpet, via Cool Business Ideas]
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Innovation smackdown: MIT vs. Harvard
For any MBA graduate or long-time business practitioner, the Harvard Business Review is often considered the touchstone of business excellence. By comparison, the MIT Sloan Management Review languishes in relative obscurity, eclipsed by its better-known sister publication, the MIT Technology Review. While doing a routine "business innovation" search on Yahoo!, I noticed that both the Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review were purchasing sponsored search links, so I thought it might be interesting to see how the two publications stack up in terms of business innovation articles, especially since MIT and Harvard are blood rivals capable of some mean-spirited pranks located just across the river from each other in Cambridge. If this were a Friday night WWE Smackdown and these two schools were professional wrestlers, can you imagine the mayhem that would result by putting the Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review in the same ring together?
Somewhat surprisingly, the quality and depth of the business innovation thinking in the MIT publication surpassed that of the Harvard publication...
Business innovation articles in the current issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review: (1) Improving capabilities through industry peer neworks (2) Capturing the real value of innovation tools (3) Creating new markets through service innovation and (4) Reducing the risks of new product development.
Business innovation articles in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review: (1) The Why, What and How of Management Innovation by Gary Hamel and (2) Breakthrough Ideas for 2006.
The winner of this innovation smackdown by an easy margin: The MIT Sloan Management Review.
Tags: MIT Harvard innovation smackdown
[image: World Wrestling Entertainment: SmackDown]
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India as a hotbed of innovation and invention
Over the past few months, the notion of India as a potential "innovation hotbed" is starting to take hold in the mainstream press. Over at Rediff.com, for example, Atul Khekade (the COO of BrainReactions LLC) has written an op-ed piece called India: The Next Innovation Giant. Khekade, who recently launched the seven-day InnovationTrip for Indian business execs interested in learning more about U.S.-style innovation, explains the steps necessary for India to create a culture of innovation. After analyzing the key components of an innovative ecosystem and the requirements for a country to be considered "innovative," Atul considers whether India is on the right path for creating a Silicon Valley-like innovation juggernaut. (A big hat tip to Atul for mentioning the FORTUNE Innovation Insider as one of his favorite innovation blogs at the end of the op-ed piece)
A few weeks earlier, in January, Information Week ran an excellent three-part series on business and innovation in India, culminating with a piece called "Invented in India." Thanks to the decison of many multinational companies to establish R&D operations in India, it appears that the innovation ecosystem in India is starting to flourish:
"Already known for providing low-cost engineering services to U.S. and European IT organizations and tech vendors, India is ramping up original research and product development. IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are developing technologies at their Indian subsidiaries, while at the same time outsourcing the development of ancillary products and features to Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro Technologies, and others. Researchers in Microsoft's Bangalore lab, for example, work on cryptography problems, applying their strong mathematics skills, says Rick Rashid, a Microsoft Research senior VP. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and others also are developing new technologies that can be sold in India to the country's expanding commercial sector and consumer class. And startups are incorporating Indian development teams into their plans from the outset."
For more on trends within the Indian innovation-sphere, check out Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld. It's an excellent Indiblog with regular posts about the innovation scene in India.
NOTE: Information Week, in collaboration with Mahesh Bhat/Getty Images, has prepared a great slideshow of images from India: Inside India photo journal. At the risk of getting a nasty letter from the folks at Getty Images, I've included one of the photos above from this series. I thought the photo really captured the mood in India -- even where there are Third World-like dirt roads, signs from Yahoo and Cisco are popping up.
Tags: India innovation
[image: Mahesh Bhat/Getty Images for InformationWeek]
Posted by dominic at 7:34 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack
Blue Ocean blogging: how to make the blog competition irrelevant
Anyone who read Clive Thompson's article "Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom" in last week's New York Magazine could be excused for thinking that it's near-impossible for a newbie blog to move from the C-list to the A-list without the help of an experienced PR handler. Sure, it's theoretically possible to go it alone and rely on word-of-mouth approval, but a mathematical reality known as the Power Law Distribution makes it highly unlikely. According to the dynamics of the Power Law Distribution, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:
"If you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course) - yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs - then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work."
However, using a Blue Ocean Strategy, it may not be as hard as you think to move to the B-list, if not the A-list. (more on that below) For those who may not be familiar with it, Blue Ocean Strategy is a value innovation strategy pioneered by two French business school professors at INSEAD (W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne). Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, was ranked as one of the Top 10 business books of 2005 by Amazon and has already been printed in 30 different languages by Harvard Business School Press. The book has been a runaway hit in the business community since it answers the one question all CEOs want to answer: How do I break out of my competitive niche to become an undisputed market leader? Many of the most innovative companies in the world - including Samsung, Apple, Swatch, Callaway Golf, and Southwest Airlines - have become market leaders as the result of executing on blue ocean strategies. According to the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, even in a highly-competitive and over-saturated marketplace, it's possible to pull away from your competitors and make the competition irrelevant. This is called moving from the Red Oceans of cut-throat competition to the Blue Oceans of uncontested market space. In doing so, it's possible to gain customers (i.e. readers) and become an undisputed market leader (i.e. an A-list blog). Below, I've sketched out the five basic steps for creating a Blue Ocean blogging strategy.
Step #1 is to draw a strategy canvas of the industry. This is easier than it sounds. Just think about the 5-10 key factors that influence the ultimate success of any blog, and rank each of these factors on a continuum from high to low. In the case of blogging, there are several obvious factors that influence success (defined here as either # of inbound links or # of visitors), such as "frequency of posting," "writing style" and "ability to generate word-of-mouth buzz." Not surprisingly, most A-list blogs execute well on each of these factors. If you re-read Clive Thompson's article, it's possible to isolate approximately 10 success factors that jump off the page, such as "distinctive online style," "speed and frequency of posting," "news nuggets, trivia and photos you can't find anywhere else," "first-mover advantage," "relationships with other A-listers," and "sexy niche."
After determining the 5-10 most important success factors for blogging success, Step #2 is to draw your value curve for the blogging industry. In other words, how do you compare vs. what the A-listers do? Are you low or high in all of these factors - or just in a few categories? In some categories ("frequency of posting"), it's possible to equal or out-compete the A-listers. In other categories, however, the A-listers are untouchable (e.g. "relationships with other A-listers"). In short, it is impossible for a C-list blogger to outcompete an A-lister along every single success factor. Otherwise, of course, the C-lister would be an A-lister and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Either that, or you've completely screwed up when it comes to mapping the industry success factors: having an extra blog widget on your blog (Look! I have a Technorati profile!) isn't a key success factor.
Step #3 is to think about ways to REDUCE, INCREASE, ELIMINATE or ADD to each of the industry success factors so that your value curve no longer resembles that of your blog competitors. For example,you might want to INCREASE your relationships with other A-listers and ADD daily blog postings that generate conversation. But what do you ELIMINATE or REDUCE? (Hint: this is the hard part, since the traditional way of competing in any industry is adding to the cost structure by adding and increasing things instead of thinking about a more elegant solution that reduces things). The key is to reduce costs (i.e. time at the PC), while simultaneously increasing buyer utility (i.e. making the site more interesting for users).
As an example of how to do this right: in the construction of its Blue Ocean Strategy, Cirque du Soleil ELIMINATED circus animals, ELIMINATED the three-ring circus structure, ELIMINATED aisle concessions, ELIMINATED star circus performers, ADDED "a unifying theme to the performance" and ADDED "artistic music and dance." The result was something that might sound like a circus but, in actuality, was something very different... (If you've never seen Cirque du Soleil live in performance, it's worth ordering a DVD like "Alegria" or "Varekai" from Netflix)
Step #4 is to create a Blue Ocean strategy that reconstructs existing market boundaries. Thankfully, the Blue Ocean Strategy book provides six classic ways to reconstruct a market boundary. The easiest way is to "Look Across Alternative Industries" for answers. In other words, look at products or services that have different forms or functions but the same purpose. For example, NetJets (which offers fractional ownership in corporate jets) looked at its two basic alternatives in the world of business travel: commercial air travel ("business class") and full ownership of private jets. Both options can be costly, and NetJets solved the problem by blending the two alternatives into fractional jet ownership. So, take a lesson from NetJets and consider what the blog alternatives are... if you write a gadget blog, what can you learn from the alternatives to gadget blogs, such as newsstand magazines and Walt Mossberg's weekly gadget column in the Wall Street Journal?
Step #5 is to fine-tune this value innovation strategy to make sure that you actually have a Blue Ocean strategy,and not just a "me-too" strategy. It might be the case that you have arrived at an "incremental" tactical improvement, but not a breakthrough strategic move, in which case you'd have to go back to the beginning of the process. For example, deciding to post 10 times a day instead of 5 times a day is not a Blue Ocean strategy. It may improve buyer utility marginally, but it will probably raise your costs (time spent at the keyboard) to an unsustainable level. There are three key questions to ask when constructing a Blue Ocean strategy: Is the strategy focused? Is the strategy divergent? (in other words, Is it obvious that what you are doing is different from what everyone else is doing?) Are you able to create a compelling tagline that speaks to users? (Hint: if the tagline includes a lot of Web 2.0 jargon, it's probably not a compelling tagline).
Anyway, that's the basic framework for understanding Blue Ocean Strategy. It's tough to boil down a 200-page book into a concise blog posting, but I've tried to provide a flavor of what it takes to move from the C-list to the A-list. It's hard work to come up with a viable strategy, but it's well worth the payoff...
To guide you on your efforts, there was one case study in the Blue Ocean Strategy book that is a dead-ringer comparison for the blogosphere: the $20 billion U.S. wine industry. California wines dominate the domestic market, capturing two-thirds of all U.S. wine sales. Not only that, but the top 8 companies produce more than 75% of the wine in the U.S., and the remaining 1,600 other wineries produce the remaining 25%. The dominance of a few big companies allows them to leverage distributors to gain shelf space and keep their costs down. Not only that, but their profitability allows them the benefit of huge marketing budgets, further increasing their built-in advantage. Competitors are left to create micro-niches. Wines from France, Italy and Spain compete with wines from Argentina, Australia and Chile, and these in turn, compete with wines from domestic vineyards in Oregon, Washington and Long Island. But nobody can beat the California winemakers, who are entrenched, dominant, and only getting stronger. Sound like a situation you've heard of?
Against this backdrop, one tiny Australian winemaker (Casella Wines) broke out of the pack by executing on a Blue Ocean strategy. Instead of trying to win over U.S. wine drinkers by poaching wine drinkers from other wines, the company tried to win over "non-customers" -- people who normally drink beer or other alcohol. For many beer drinkers, the wine industry is hopelessly complex (is that a hint of citrus I detect?) and even walking into a wine store can be an intimidating experience. Thus, for its yellow tail wines, Casella decided to remove all technical jargon from the bottles. Instead of including a chateau or classy-looking vineyard on the bottle, the company put a striking, simple and non-traditional image on its label: a yellow-tail kangaroo! Instead of appealing to wine snobs, the company simplified the wine, making it bolder, fruitier -- almost like a cocktail or wine cooler. Then, the company played on its Australian outback image to further differentiate itself from the pack (this is the cool Aussie kangaroo wine!) and priced its wine affordably (less than $7 a bottle).
The result of this Blue Ocean strategy? In less than two years, yellow tail emerged as the #1 imported wine into the U.S., surpassing the wines of Italy and France. It was also the #1 red wine in a 750-ml bottle sold in the U.S., outranking every single California brand.
Tags: blog blogging blueoceanstrategy A-list
Posted by dominic at 6:03 AM |