consultaglobal

Few companies leverage innovation to their advantage. Many aren’t realizing with the returns from innovating and even those that succeed appear to generate a number of wasteful projects.

“The issue isn’t a lack of ideas. But many companies confuse ideas — or inventions — with innovation. True innovation must lead, directly or indirectly, to increased profits”.

The “four Ss”: Startup, Speed, Scale, and Support can help with measuring, understanding and managing the innovation process. 

Read James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin’s article on The Street.

This blog’s Long Tail: Turning ideas into dollars, Turning innovation into cash, Profit driven innovation, The myth of commoditization, Innovation in motion, Innovation must be managed, Value innovation, Lessons not learned, Powered by innovation, Spending less on R&D.

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“The Royal College of Art (RCA) and Imperial College London announce today a major strategic partnership with the creation of a world-class £5.8 million multidisciplinary centre called Design-London at RCA-Imperial”.

The so-called ‘innovation triangle’ will enable programs involving MA, MEng and MBA students from the RCA and Imperial. Research projects will address cross-functional work enabling design to be integrated with business and technology to deliver world class products.

Reference: Science Business.

This blog’s Long Tail: The innovation gap, The innovation gap 2, Innovation management is the most sought after skill,

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When talking about the “innovation gap” there are a few angles worth considering:

• Macroeconomics: innovation deficits impacting a given country’s competitiveness, e.g. low levels of entrepreneurship, unfavorable policy making, brain drain, etc.
• Microeconomics: research breakthroughs in a given industry failing to translate into commercial products.
• Educational system: business schools with either a non existing or a fairly weak “innovation” curriculum.
• Management: CEO’s willingness to innovate, but lacking a clear understanding on best practices.

With regards to the innovation gap in specific industries or verticals (e.g. healthcare) I suggest reading Ogan Gurel’s article: Who is minding the innovation gap, which pinpoints the following issues:

• Since 1995 the overall proportion of seed-stage deals as a percentage of total venture capital invested fell dramatically to just 4.5 percent in the U.S.:

Angel investors, corporations, and the public administration are mostly responsible for that steep decline. As far as venture capital firms, most have shifted from $1M to a $10M benchmark before considering spending any time in deal making. Many new ventures with innovative products and a need for seed funding do not meet that benchmark.

• VC’s favor experienced and, therefore, more expensive management teams:

This can severely tax a start-up’s financials by increasing their burn rate (cash spent by month) and it can also harm the motivation of the “fathers of the invention” in the process, e.g. when the founders end up being overruled by a leadership team formed by “outsiders”.

• While there is more capital available in today’s market than back in the nineties, lower interest rates promoted a preference for debt based financing:

This is an issue for start-ups with inventions that require a fair amount of business development time and efforts to create new markets. Regardless of the merits of their innovation, if there is no revenue in the sales funnel… it is hard to qualify for credit and to service debt.

Many start-ups seek to self-finance until they reach a point where they can credibly approach outside capital providers such as VCs or angels, sometimes drawing from personal savings, family and friends support, credit card debt and second mortgages, . This practice is called “financial bootstraping” and is aimed to mitigate any dependencies on external investors. By the same token, many look for any public or private grants and subsidized incubators. The following video talks about this practice:

References: Bootstrap Network, Liav’s early stage investment.
This blog’s Long Tail: The innovation gap, The innovation gap 2,

Innovation management is the most sought after skill, Profit driven innovation, The myth of commoditization, Innovation in motion, Innovation must be managed, Value innovation, Lessons not learned, Powered by innovation, Spending less on R&D, IBM’s Venture Capital Group.

EU catching up with US in innovation, Japan is the most innovative country, Denmark is now the innovation leader, Innovation and cultural differences.

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“IBM works with 120 of the world’s top VC firms to gain insights into emerging technologies, nurture small businesses and potential startup partners and drive open computing principles in the marketplace”.

IBM’s Venture Capital Group does not make direct investments in start-ups (e.g. cash), but provides valuable support to entrepreneurs as part of IBM’s ecosystem strategy:

• Access to research resource, such as IBM’s 33 innovations centers worldwide.
• Co-marketing and joint account planning to support the start-up’s business development efforts:
  • Creating new opportunities
  • Closing deals faster
  • Focusing on specific vertical markets
• Access to other IBM programs, e.g.:
  • IBM Partner World Industry Networks
  • IBM Global Financing
  • IBM Sales Connections

The qualification criteria might involve the following questions:

• Are they solving a problem that IBM customers care about?
• Can they provide one customer that can be used as a reference point?
• Is the enterprise an early stage start-up (e.g. Round A financing)?

Success stories:

• www.actuate.com
• www.miraclesoft.com
• www.rjssoftware.com

References:

Podtech’s Blog: Drew Clark on IBM Ventures Group > Podcast: listen to the mp3 file

This blog’s Long Tail: IBM EBOS: in-house new ventures, Made in IBM Labs, IBM on innovation, Greater IBM and SecondLife, 5 innovations for the next 5 years, Partnerships between companies and business schools, The Service Research and Innovation Initiative,

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In my previous blog I wrote about friendly mashup tools which do not require users to acquire any technical or programming expertise. My intro talked about Web 2.0. This current blog addresses the same subject with regards to Mobile 2.0:

“Consumers often take the lead, playing with user-generated content in myriad ways. They can seamlessly “mash up” or combine, say, music or video from various sources and integrate applications from their personal computers and printers with their handsets [...] In Korea, cell-phone subscribers have begun using their phones to write music, create new game characters, and design games by using simple software”. BusinessWeek.

ShoZu offers an easy way to upload videos and photos from a mobile phone to web sites, blogs, and email addresses.

This mobile application supports the leading popular video and photosharing sites (e.g. Flickr), blogs, citizen journalism sites and other internet destinations.

You can actually add a description and tags from your phone anytime. ShoZu will also forward to your phone any comments left by people on your blog. With certain sites you can even reply to them.

MobileGlu would be another example, currently supportting del.icio.us, Flickr, moblogUK, upcoming.org, Blogger, and RSS feeds to name a few.

BonesInMotion has developed a fitness mobile client which uses location data from online services, e.g. tapping into Google Maps to display your runs. Exercise information is uploaded to your web portal on bimactive.com.

In Japan, DoCoMo works on new “open-domain technology”, which would eventually allow mobile users to create their own operating systems and browser menus.

References:

• BusinessWeek: Asia’s mobile mashup free for all
• RF Design: Development tool enables advanced mobile applications
• Mobuser: What is a mobile mashup?

This blog’s Long Tail: Mashup tools: blending and personalizing, Congratulations WordPress, Customers are helping to develop products, iCommons: share the past, create the future, Google Apps, Outside Innovation.

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When we think of the Web 2.0 the user experience the terms that come to mind are: social networking, online communities, user generated content, on demand multimedia content, really simple syndication, viral distribution, online collaboration tools and hosted services which users can leverage by means of a web browser.

Then we hear about Generation C being the ones making the most of it. By the way, did you notice the Wikipedia window that opens up when hoovering the cursor over that hyperlink… Interestingly enough, new applications come about by just blending what’s already available out there: a mashup is a website or application that blends content from more than one source into an integrated experience. This actually gets even more fascinating when noting that some of these new creations do not require technical and/or programming skills. Let me give you a few examples.

#1 Platial. I added the Platial widget to the right column of my blog a while ago. Please feel free to enter the name and address of an innovation event anywhere in the world. The widget will add your input to my current list and will display the corresponding location by using Google Maps. The below picture is just a screenshot.

#2 Yahoo Pipes: Today, I made some improvements to my “innovation newsfeed”. It aggregates content on innovation from a variety of sources, so I can keep current on this subject. These are the sources I’m combining:

• Google News on innovation, which already combines items from a variety of news outlets
  
• Findory’s search for news and podcasts on innovation
• RSS feeds from the innovation sections of BusinessWeek and Corante (innovation hub)
• User created presentations focusing on innovation posted at SlideShare
• And Core77, the design magazine

Here is the result, click on this link: consultaglobal’s innovation newsfeed. Just in case, once you are on that web page, if you didn’t happen to see the news listing after a few seconds, then click on “Run this pipe” and wait for Pipes to populate the page.

Below you can see Pipe’s graphic user interface. The metaphore being about “pipes” interconnecting different kinds of blocks (e.g. input, operations, output). While user friendly, Pipes is not necessarily intuitive and self-explanatory at first. If interested, you can get started by watching a couple of 2 minute tutorials from Usefulvideos.

#3 Teqlo is another interesting mashup tool. Yesterday, I put together a market research portal which shows (see screenshot below):

• News feeds, listing a variety sources (top left)
• The actual news feed from one of them (middle), note embedded YouTube video
• The daily Venture Capital activity in the Silicon Valley (right top)
• A “Post-it” type of widget for me to capture notes as I read the news (bottom right).

The resulting application is a mashup of widgets that talk to one another, e.g. the top left box (news source) talks to the one in the middle (news display).

#4 Popfly is being advertised as Microsoft’s mashup tool for the masses. I requested an invitation to be able to use the alpha version, which I hope I will get soon:

“[Microsoft's] Non-Professional tools team builds software to enable new, hobbyist, and other non-professional programmers - as well as complete non-programmers - to build and share their work. Our team’s vision is to democratize development by making it approachable to an entire class of people that want to “create” without necessarily having to write code. We believe that if you can send an email, you should be able to build and personalize your own website, mashup, social networking site, or blog.

Please feel free to leave your comment below. Admittedly, I’m particularly interested in any other user friendly mashup tools you might happen to know about. In any case all kinds comments are more than welcome.

References: Mashable, Programmableweb.

This blog’s Long Tail: Congratulations WordPress, Customers are helping to develop products, iCommons: share the past, create the future, Google Apps, Outside Innovation.

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References:

PBS & Scientific American’s “Future Car“
Popular Science’s “Future Of The Car: Visions 2007“
Discovery Channel’s “Future Car“, “Meet Professor Luigi Colani“
Supercars’ “Audi RSQ Concept“
Car Design News’ “GM Hy-wire“
Art Center College of Design’s “Transportation Program“

This blog’s Long Tail: Next Gen Prius?, Innovation and cultural differences, BWM & Google, Sci-Fi based scenarios, Innovative mobile phones, Sony’s Flexible OLED.

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OLED, Organic light emitting diode based screens.
Sony uses plastic instead of glass as the basis of the screen.
2.5-inch prototype display
Supports 16.8 million colors at a 120 x 169 pixel resolution
0.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 grams

The competition: LG Philips, Universal Display Corporation.

References: OLED Blog.

This blog’s Long Tail: Next Gen Prius?, Innovation and cultural differences, BWM & Google, Sci-Fi based scenarios, Innovative mobile phones

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• 400 HP, via a 3.5-liter DOHC V6, mated to an assumed 650V, water-cooled electric motor.
• Extensive use of carbon fiber and aluminum.
• Mid-four-second 0-60 sprint.
• Price tag in the mid-$30,000… the FT-HS is a concept car at this point.

References: CNET, Autoblog.

This blog’s Long Tail: Innovation and cultural differences, BWM & Google, Sci-Fi based scenarios,  Innovative mobile phones.

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