consultaglobal

“Thomas Jefferson advanced the concept of [public] libraries and the right to check out a book free of charge. But this great forefather never considered the likelihood that 20 million people might access a digital library electronically and withdraw its contents at no cost”. Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, 1996 edition.

By the way, do you know what the world will be like? Watch this:

Mixed feelings characterize today’s popular sentiment in a world showing both unprecedented opportunities and cumbersome threats. However, my take is that we are experiencing a cultural renaissance with all of the contradictions that apparently involves. To understand what’s going on, I suggest going beyond the obvious, as this is not just about Web 2.0. I created this table to illustrate this point:

• (1) The Industrial Revolution introduced a paradigm shift: manual labor was superseded by industrial grade technology and mass production. A number of socioeconomic and cultural changes took place in the late 18th century and early 19th century in Western societies. Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave” talks about demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change being the visible products of a post-industrial society, which started taking shape since the late 1950s. However, my view is that the internationalization of “industrialization” is a trademark of the 20th century and that the Modern Day Renaissance will be the flagship of this current century.
• (2) Reference to Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World Is Flat, A Brief History Of The Twenty-First Century”.

The Machine is US/ing US:

“Some people worry about the social divide between the information-rich and the information-poor, the haves and have-nots, the First and Third Worlds. But the real cultural divide is going to be generational [...] Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living”. Nicholas Negroponte.

Welcome to the Human Network:

In “The World Is Flat” Friedman describes the unplanned series of shifts leveling the economic world:

• “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors”;
• “individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.”

Friedman’s list of “flatteners” converging around the year 2000 include:

• the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable;
• the emergence of common software platforms and open source code enabling global collaboration;
• the rise of outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining and insourcing.

Now, just in case you still thought this was about Web 2.0:

To put an end to the narrow minded Middle Ages, scholars leveraged ancient Roman and Greek texts as well as more recent works in Arabic as their springboard for intellectual innovation. Leonardo da Vinci being one of the clearest exponents of that trend.

“Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man shows clearly the effect writers of antiquity had on Renaissance thinkers. Based on the specifications in Vitruvius’s De architectura, da Vinci tried to draw the perfectly proportioned man”. Wikiepedia.

“Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body [in 1490] he had produced through his anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). He believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe”. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

The Renaissance had wide-ranging consequences. This time around this is also about a cultural renascence, revivification, revitalization, revival, resurgence… it also involves certain degree of fictional nostalgia which sci-fi writers happen to project into the future instead of revising a past which we know was no better.

This will lead to a better understanding of ourselves and our environment, improving our way of living and how we relate and influence our context and our collective-selves. The bottom line is that the Industrial Revolution has been superseded by user centric “transparent” technologies, shifting the focus from industrial engineering to human factors and design in a new era of “davincian” innovation.

The implications of today’s renaissance happen to be of planetary proportions, showing an unprecedented order of magnitude. We just got ourselves started, so it might take some more time for the dust to settle, then showing a clearer picture of things to come. 

José de Francisco  Chicago, 29 July 07

Click here to display my most recent blogs or here for my newsfeed.

This blog’s Long Tail:

• Welcome to 2015
• Consultaglobal 2.0
• Mobile Applications 2
• My view of the world back in 1991: Project Ergofuturo + Ergotrans
• When people are not confident of science
• Uses, no innovation, drive human technology
• Democratizing innovation
• Innovation and cultural differences

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

When putting together a demo involving innovations there usually are three buckets worth considering:

1. Impact in today’s mainstream products
2. Impact in today’s emerging products
3. Unique products not available today

Impact in today’s mainstream product -> demo the product’s next gen performance:

• The customer is familiar with the product, which shows a proven business case in today’s market.
• The assumption is that the new technology will make it even better (or will address an existing challenge) delivering a sales uptake.
• The business case is often clear and the value prop shows how current assets evolve (e.g. future proof concept)
• In some cases, the business case might also show the revenue potential when addressing adjacent market opportunities.

Impact in today’s emerging product -> demo the product’s becoming a mainstream offer:

• The customer is intrigued by an emerging product but the market is mostly formed by early adopters.
• The assumption is that the new technology will take the product’s adoption to the next level, thus becoming a mainstream source of revenue, delivering cost efficiencies from gaining economies of scale.
• The business case might leverage proxies, e.g. interpolating based on references delivered by other products.
• The business case would also reflect how the technology would help compete with vendors already in that new space and those likely to enter (e.g. fast followers). 

Unique product concept -> one which could not be possible offered without your innovation

• The new technology creates new markets, new opportunities.
• The assumption is that the innovation opens up a new product category which former or inferior technologies cannot possible address or compete with.
• The business case is based on launching a disruptive product and market strategy, gaining a clear competitive position, e.g. the so-called first entrant advantage.
• This implies a high risk – “high reward” strategy, which might need to be coupled with product features addressing risk mitigation.

In addition to the above three, there is a forth bucket which involves the so-called corporate or social responsibility. This means going the additional mile to showcase how the innovation improves people’s quality of life and their individual lifestyles. High tech products, specially in the Internet space, can be expected to point to examples on how to take down the “digital divide” as well as being “environmentally friendly” delivering value to the community and minimizing rejection from the markets. Intel, Cisco and Microsoft are some of the examples of high-tech companies running marketing campaigns addressing this subject.

Last but not least… make sure you establish a clear causality: a straight chain of cause and effect relationships, e.g. “my innovation” (the cause) is the source of “the improvement” (effect #1) which address the user’s “needs, expectations or novelty” (the second order effect which happens to be the key to the business case). 

How do you demo innovative products and technologies?

Please send me an email or share your comment below, which ever works best for you.

José de Francisco  New Jersey, 26 July 07

Click here to display my most recent blogs or here for my newsfeed.

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

“PPX” stands for “The PopSci Predictions Exchange,” a virtual stock market where the stocks are the future of science and technology.

• Think the iPhone will be the greatest hit since sliced silicon Buy!
• Think the International Space Station will never get built? Sell!

Prediction markets happen to be a very interesting research tool gathering speculative forecast. Other names for this type of crowdsourcing: information markets, decision markets, idea futures, event derivatives, and virtual markets. Hewlett Pakard, Google and General Electric are among the corporations leveraging this tool. At the bottom of this blog you will find the link to an earlier blog on how InnovationUS takes advantage of it.

“At PPX, each stock has a value in a virtual currency (Pop Dollars) of between POP$0 and POP$100, which serves as an indicator of the market’s opinion on the question posed-lower prices mean the market thinks the answer to the question is “no higher prices indicate “yes”.

Will Apple sell more than four million iPhones in 2007?

Stock symbol: IPSALES

Price: POP$ 69.75
Status: ACT

Change: POP$ -2.75 (-3.79%)
Volume: 10299

I just captured the above data from PPX. Basically, IPSALES is measuring the degree to which PPX participants think that Apple will meet its declared sales target. This virtual stock will pay off when Apple makes public its 2007 sales figures.

Interestingly enough, yesterday’s trading price was $72.5 meaning confidence is down a bit today. This might be a reaction to the fact that AT&T activated 146,000 iPhones on the weekend of June 30, while some market analysts were expecting 500,000.

José de Francisco Lopez  New Jersey, 24 July 07

Click here to display my most recent blogs or here for my newsfeed.

This blog’s Long Tail:

• Coolhunting
• InnovationUS and Prediction Markets
• Fellowforce: open for innovation

References and picture credits:

• Popular Science Predictions Exchange
• Wikipedia on prediction markets

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

“The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future…

…but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present”.

Paul Saffo, HBR July-August 2007

Wealth Year 2015:

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest, “wealth” in this case. Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide Gross Domestic Product measured in US$ equalized for purchasing power parity in 2015.

Population Year 2015:

When comparing the above two pictures it is hard to miss the fact that some of the most populated areas might not benefit from the world’s economic growth. Alliance2015 is a partnership of six European non-government organizations working in the field of development cooperation.

Founded in 2000, the purpose of the Alliance is to fight poverty more effectively by cooperating on various levels, managing campaigns to rise awareness and to influence public and political opinion in Europe. This supports Millennium Development Goals:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
4. Reduce child mortality.
5. Improve maternal health.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability.

2015 has become the next immediate horizon for corporations and governments alike. As an example, Singapore’s iN2015, Intelligent Nation 2015, articulate’s the country’s willingness to become a global city with an enviable synthesis of technology, infrastructure, enterprise and manpower; “it is the new freedom to connect, innovate, personalize and create“. This plan involves both private and public investments to ensure Singapore a leading role in innovation.

The forecasters and marketers working for Singapore’s IDA have created three distinctive personas who are easy to relate with: David is a student, Nancy a entrepreneur and Toby and expatriate. Let’s have a quick look at Nancy’s storyboard as seen in iN2015’s website:

5:30am - Panoramic projection technology creates a unique ambience in Nancy’s bedroom by the time she wakes up, that morning starts with a calming sun rise at the beach.

6:05am - Nancy’s PDA has updated her schedule for the day while playing Beethoven’s Fur Elise, which also helps her remain calm while checking the latest on her personal finances.

6:45am - Family breakfast with her two kids. In the meantime, her avatar is already working around the clock, sharing available info with her peers in advance to her going to the office.

10:20am - Nancy is now in the office working with her team on a rich multimedia presentation to be delivered to a customer in the afternoon. Everything they need to get the job done is available online.

11:45am - During the lunch break, Nancy shows up at a store where the retailer immediately presents her with a menu of personalized products just for her. Her avatar is the one trying out the clothing until Nancy sees what she likes (instead of having to spent time in front of the mirror putting on all the clothes on to figure out if they fit).

01:25pm -Nancy is hosting a collaborative session leveraging 3D video conferencing.

04:00pm - Doctor’s appointment, her physician is also using video conferencing to engage a specialist in real time, being able to share medical charts in direct consultation with Nancy in real time.  

In addition to this “make believe exercise” portraying 2015, Singapore’s IDA provides a wide range of downloadable white papers and reports which aim to create 80,000 new jobs in the high-tech and information industries.

“In time to come, Singapore should aim to nurture its own Larry Page and Segey Brin, whose Internet search engine is making googling the norm; and Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who created the billion dollar Internet telephony company Skype”.

“Drive the future. Be a player. Go Infocomm”, a report by the iN2015 Infocomm Competency Council.

Speaking of information technologies, Compenion is the laptop from 2015. This concept laptop was designed by Felix Schmidberger, featuring an OLED touchscreen, which doubles as both monitor and keyboard. The thinking is that Compenion will adapt to the environment where you’re using it: the home dock might have a projector for viewing movies, while some other peripherals will be leveraged in office environments.

“The computer as we know it today will be an anachronism, a device consigned to museums, dumpsters and garages”.

“Instead, according to Gartner analysts, the digital information and services once delivered via conventional computers will be available through almost everything we touch-—kiosks, airplane seats, newspapers and a broad array of new devices”.

Dan Faber’s “In 2015: sensors everywhere, computers invisible”.

“Future Worker 2015 will individualize his or her work environment by assembling personally selected tools, information and learning resources, and by tapping into wide-ranging social networks to enhance performance, productivity and trust”.

Diane Morello and Betsy Burton of Garter

EPIC 2015 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson delivers an interesting and engaging visual narrative. Have a look at this video:

Note that ”Museum of Media History” is a fictional entity. This Internet film explores the implications of Web 2.0 services such as news aggregators like Google News and Newsbot as well as blogging, social networking and user generated content by 2015. Robin and Matt popularized the term Googlezon portraying the bright and the dark side of converging technologies as a cautionary tale.

Speaking of museums, as a side note, the next large-scale exposition after Shanghai’s Expo 2010 would be held in 2015. Two cities met the deadline to bid for Expo 2015: Izmir, Turkey and Milan, Italy.

Nokia collaborated with Industrial Design students from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London to come up with product concepts forecasting how people will use mobile technologies in 2015.

1 & 2 Ik-Soo Shin: “The aim was a user friendly product that gave an emotional relationship, like a friend. A new generation of mobiles with Artificial Intelligence will be able to express a user’s feelings, such as anger. The phone will also automatically recognize the voice of the user, allowing communication between them and their mobile”.

3 - Hannah Nuttal: “This phone is for those who do a blog and provides a fast, easy and more advanced blogging device. The phone has four layers, allowing for a multitude of functions and different methods of use. It can also be treated like a photo album, with images easily retreived, tagged and published on the blog”.

4 - Daniel Meyer: “The device was inspired both by the advent of video calling and the traditional practice of carrying pictures of family and friends with you. The handset is designed to sit as a picture frame wherever the user is, serving the dual purpose of communications device and a comforting familiar focal point at home, at work or when away”.

5 - Will Gurley: “Design your own phone. This is about stripping away technology and making your mobile phone more personal. You can chose a clear perspex case and put in it items that are individual and personal. Alternatively, you can buy attachments that say something about you, like a harmonica or a chess game”.

6 - Nicola Reed: “It aims to get people to be more green. It collects information on how much electricity and gas you use, how you get about, the type of products you buy and how you dispose of waste. It works on a reward system and you can earn free calls and texts by being environmentally friendly, like walking to work instead of driving”.

7 - Kimberly Hu: “The device works with the sense of smell, sight, hearing and touch. The user experiences communication on a multi-sensory level. It can detect, transmit and emit smell. It can also radiate colours, light and temperature from a caller’s environment”.

8 - Sung-Joo Kim: “People constantly upgrade mobiles and discard their old ones. In the future new mobiles will have to exist alongside older models that have become redundant in their primary role. This project proposes an afterlife for them, using secondary functions like the camera. This model allows old phones to become part of a CCTV network”.

9 -Jack Godfrey Wood: “Small, representational beads are exchanged instead of numbers. These are threaded on a necklace and to make a call you squeeze the bead of the person you want to call. Their bead will glow or vibrate. The electronics are in the clasp of the necklace, a microphone is worn as a ring and there’s a wireless earpiece”.

(In case you missed this other blog, click here see what the mobile phone will become…)

Hope this blog was of interest to you. Please let me know if you have come across other visions involving high-tech products for 2015. I will appreciate your leaving a comment below or sending me an email. Thanks!

José de Francisco Lopez Chicago, 22 July 07

Click here to display my most recent blogs or here for my newsfeed.

This blog’s Long Tail:

• Nokia’s design research for everyone
• Ergofuturo: Project Cosm
• Innovation and boundariless design
• QoE - immersive scenarios and experiential marketing
• QoE - defining and studying personas
• 3G-4G LivingLab
• PC Phones
• Mobile phone concepts
• Augmented reality, now mobile
• Innovative mobile phones: objects of desire
• Siggraph 2007
• Philip’s simplicity led designs
• Microsoft’s Innovation Day (and Microsoft’s Robit)
• IBM: 5 innovations for the next 5 years
• Minority Report’s GUI
• Sci-Fi based scenarios
• Toyota’s personal mobility
• NextFest
• Ergotrans
• Google & BMW
• Visual Futurist
• Design concepts: future cars
• Next gen Prius
• Audi Design Foundation
• CNN’s Future Summit
• Microsoft’s Innovation Day (and Microsoft’s Robit)

References and picture credits:

• Intel: Microprocessor architecture in 2015
• In 2015: sensors everywhere, computers invisible
• Compenion: The laptop from 2015
• BBC’s In Pictures: the future of mobile
• IBM healthcare 2015
• Museum of Media History - Robin Sloan
• Robots in 2015
• The search engine scene in 2015
• Gartner: Future Worker 2015: Extreme Individualization
• Defining the designer of 2015
• Dow’s 2015 sustainability goals
• ExpoMuseum 2015
• Worldmapper: wealth year 2015
• IN2015
• Vision 2015 Delaware
• New York State: Project 2015
• West Virginia 2015 Vision
• United Nations: Capacity 2015
• FAO’s World Agriculture 2015-2030
• ESA’s Cosmic Vision: 2015-2025
• National Intelligence Council: global trends 2015
• BBC World Service: 2015 Where will we be?
• Nationmaster’s figured for 2015 population
• Greenlight 2015

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

In Mobile Applications (1) I listed and shared screenshots of the 40+ apps currently running on my phone, a Samsung Blackjack, ranging from the usual PIM (personal information management) to multimedia and productivity tools.

This one blog though, Mobile Applications (2), starts from a fairly different angle. Most people would figure that only “privileged corporate citizens” in wealthy economies can afford smart phones and their sophisticated mobile apps. It does not need to be that way. Let me first share what motivated me to write about this:

“The world’s poorest nations must place more emphasis on using scientific knowledge and technological innovation if they wish to escape the poverty and growing unemployment they currently face”.

“The warning comes in a major report — ‘The Least Developed Countries Report 2007: Knowledge, Technology Learning and Innovation for Development’ — published on July 19th by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), based in Geneva”.

Read David Dickson’s article on Science and Development Network.

LDCs, otherwise known as “least developed countries”, would benefit from what the report calls “knowledge-aid“. The issue being: donor nations focus on managing financial aid and monitoring governance without allocating enough resources to local human capital to create and sustain much of the needed growth. 

This goes back to the saying about ”give a man a fish, and you’ve given him a meal; teach him to fish, and he’ll have food for a lifetime” which, to be frank, I thought of being the guiding principle behind most aid programs.

The problem is that LDC’s educational systems have not achieved critical mass and, in any case, brain-drain impacts their chances to get any better as professionals and people with higher education emigrate to wealthier economies.

I would like to take this chance to bring back my blog on Gartner’s report about how emerging markets happen to be innovating and leapfrogging western economies. This is not just India and China, but some African countries happen to be using wireless technologies to their people’s advantage.

The World Bank’s definition of an emerging economy includes countries with low-to-middle per capita income, Tunisia being another example. These are no LCDs though, but countries which have embarked on economic development and comprehensive reform programs, opening up their markets and “emerging” onto the global scene. These are fast growing economies by any standards.

In any case, Mobility is often seen as one way to provide Internet access in countries were fixed infrastructure is not widespread. Motorola’s Zander has stated that developing economies have forced new directions in handset and application design, including screen technology that can be read in bright sunlight and voice activated commands for illiterate users. He is also quoted saying:

“The first fallacy is that people buy low price devices as many people in India are buying high price devices… You have to design for that market. People don’t just want cheap devices”.

Nonetheless, the OLPC program, one laptop per child, will deliver sub $100 laptops to take down today’s digital divide. I will get back to this further down in this blog.

Admittedly, I’m with Bill Gates view on the fact that some of these efforts (referring to the OLPC) could be far more effective by leveraging the growing computer power, storage capacity, wireless connectivity and affordability (e.g. economies of scale) provided by mobile phones.

Earlier in the year, at Davos, Gates and Microsoft CTO Craig J. Mundie talked up the idea of a specially designed smartphone, one which would be connected to a TV and keyboard, thus becoming a fully functional personal computer since “Everyone is going to have a cellphone“. By the way, as a side note, Nokia is already positioning the N95 as “what personal computers have become”.

At the end of the day, this might not be a matter of choosing between one or the other (e.g. phone vs. laptop) but about making them work together. As a reference I would suggest having a look at my blog on how my mobile phone happens to be my 3G modem. Furthermore, lets have a look at MojoPac. This product was the recipient of a DemoGod award last year and an Always On award just a couple of weeks ago (among some other). This is what it does:

“MojoPac empowers you to turn any computer into your personal computer, regardless of what applications are installed on that PC”.

“With MojoPac consumers can carry the contents of an entire PC on any portable storage device, such as an iPod, cell phone or USB flash drive, and connect to any PC worldwide to access and work with the contents”.

“MojoPac supports all applications, including iTunes, PC games like World of Warcraft and work applications like Microsoft Office”.

Note that a new software category is now emerging, the so-called “portable apps“, which have been optimized to be run from USB keys or flash memory cards in phones for that matter.

One example would be the complete OpenOffice.org office suite compatible with Microsoft’s Office, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database.

Packaged as a portable app, you can also take all your documents and everything you need without carrying anything that would not fit in your pocket.

My point being we can get our smartphones to free us from carry our laptops around and to get them to become a tool leveraged by educators and students. See my thinking on reconditioning used smartphones further down.

Going back to the OLPC initiative: obviously, affordability is a critical factor (e.g. the laptop’s hardware and software cost, power consumption, distribution, etc).

These computers run on open source software (Linux) and have been designed to network on location. A thousand of them could share just a couple of land based Internet connections to begin with. As far as power consumption, they can be powered up manually if needed:

“The yellow crank, while cute, in the end proved impractical; it migrated to the AC adapter as it also morphed into one or more other types of human-power devices. Its status as an icon for OLPC would be supplanted by the mesh-network antennas, or “ears.” OLPC blog.

As far as using a phone instead… would OpenMoko be the answer?

This is an an Open Source project to create the world’s first free mobile phone operating system: the OpenMoko Linux.

Alternatively, should these phones leverage an open source version of Windows CE, as Bill Gates advocates? Personally, I don’t know the answer, I’m just glad to see that there is no lack of options.

In any case, the developer’s version of FIC’s Neo Base retails for $300 (a consumer model will be made available in October): GPRS/GMS (2.5G wireless data), A-GPS (location) Bluetooth (personal area network, about 100 meters), and a USB port. This phone will also feature a 2.8 inch VGA touchscreen.

Back in May, Popular Science, the magazine, calls it the iPhone’s open source rival, more explicitly on page 6 you can read “the smartphone that makes the iPhone look dump”.

This first version of the OpenMoko phone is missing broadband connectivity though. Nonetheless, Bluetooth can be leveraged to tap into other devices connected to the Internet. In my view, it does show the potential to evolve into affordable smart phone for the mass market, as well as a tool worth considering in the scope of this discussion.

After having written about what I think is possible and within reach, I need to remind myself that I started this blog talking about LCDs (e.g. Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia) which the United Nations define as follows:

• low-income criterion: gross national income (GNI) per capita under $900;
• human resource weakness criterion: involving a composite Human Assets Index (HAI) based on indicators of: (a) nutrition; (b) health; (c) education; and (d) adult literacy;
• economic vulnerability criterion: involving a composite Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI) based on indicators of: (a) the instability of agricultural production; (b) the instability of exports of goods and services; (c) the economic importance of non-traditional activities (share of manufacturing and modern services in GDP); (d) merchandise export concentration; and (e) the handicap of economic smallness (as measured through the population in logarithm); and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters.

OLPC’s mission starts by sharing that “most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade”.

The Least Developed Countries Report 2007 corroborates this view by focusing on knowledge accumulation, technological learning and the ability to innovate as “vital processes toward genuine productive capacity development in these countries”.

I was ready to post this blog (meaning finishing it) while thinking of the value of reconditioning used smartphones (e.g. placing them in small rugged cases and adding some drivers and software such as Soonr) which might also be of help.

They can be used to create an add hoc local network via Bluetooth interacting with the classroom’s computer as well as with peripherals such as keyboards and monitors. They can get the power to keep goingfrom the same kind of human-powered devices used by OLPC if need to.

So, I spent just a couple of minutes figuring out how much it would cost to get the smart phone I used to carry with me a few years ago. It is not longer manufactured. I went to eBay where it can be purchased for $20-$50 from various sellers. Originally, the SMT 5600 retailed for $300+ (that was the price tag without the applicable discount when signing for a two year plan).

I still have this GPRS - Bluetooth device, which is fully functional. It is running Windows Mobile 5.0, the Microsoft’s PIM apps and DocumentsToGo (a mobile office suite compatible with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), plus a 512Mb swappable flash memory card and featuring a USB port. In “flight mode” (switches off the radio, meaning no cellular service) I could still use it as a handy PDA and music player.

Long story short, it makes me wonder if someone has already started a program to put this kind of “handy computing devices” to work for those who might actually need them the most. Please let me know if you were aware of anything to that effect by leaving your comment below. Thanks in advance.

José de Francisco Lopez Chicago, 21 July 07

Click here to display my most recent blogs or here for my newsfeed.

This blog’s Long Tail:

• Mobile Applications (1)
• Emerging markets are driving innovation
• PC phones in education and everywhere else
• Use your phone as a 3G modem
• Ergofuturo: Project Cosm

References and picture credits:

• Science Development
• Your Next Computer on MSNBC
• 8 Ways to use camera phones in education
• One Laptop Per Child
• Intel’s Classmate PC
• Microsoft would put poor online by cellphone
• Openmoko.org and Openmoko.com
• MojoPack demo and MojoPack.com
• Portable OpenOffice for USB
• Portableapps.com
• Soonr

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

”As it is, the Danish companies are good at user driven innovation. Now we will try to be even better in the innovation area so that it will be an absolute peak competence for both private and public companies in the international competition”

Finn Lauritzen of the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency.

The Danish government will grant EUR 50 million over the next four years to strengthen innovation. This program is fully dedicated to user driven innovation. Companies can applied up to four times a year.

http://www.copcap.com/composite-10443.htm

“The Stanford Summit is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries”.

“The Stanford Summit features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases”.

“The Stanford Summit’s goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global tech industry”.

http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/12264.

“Some venture capitalists do not do any financial modeling because they think it is useless for what they do. Other VCs would like to use more finance, but they do not do so because the tools are not easily accessible”.

“When asked, most VCs will rank “finance” far down the list of important VC skills. Instead, successful VCs tend to think of themselves as company builders (…) which is certainly more art than science”.

Andrew Metrick. Department of Finance at Wharton. Author of “Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation”.

Back in the late nineties, after getting an MBA in marketing and finance I really thought that no project would succeed without putting together a business model showing some compelling ratios. About ten years later, I must confess I have developed a more flexible approach to this matter.

It should be noted that there are great ideas out there which do not receive the support they deserve because the innovators cannot properly communicate the value of their product or enterprise.

Most VCs are financial intermediaries as a VC fund takes money from its investors. So you will be expected to provide qualitative and quantitative insights helping the VC rationalize the fitness of the investment.

Needless to say that going through the exercise of crafting a business case helps entrepreneurs think through implications which, in turn, can be a source of innovation. 

• “The process creates a common starting point for the entire team”.
• “The process sets the goals and vision for the team”.
• “The process sets the path and identifies required resources”.
• “Writing the plan forces analysis”.
• “The process can help the team feel more confident about their ideas and strategy”.

Sean Wise’s Wise Words for the Toronto Globe

Some other times, good projects happen to be dramatically slowed down due to the so-called “paralysis by analysis” while some other get through the chain of approvals in spite of being based on ”garbage in - garbage out” exercises. Well intended complex models can end up being unmanageable, thus defeating the purpose which they were created for.

In the past few years, all of us have become aware of financial shenanigans involving well known corporations. As Karen Berman and Joe Knight point out in their book, “Financial Intelligence”, you can’t always trust the numbers.

“Unfortunately, the structure and design of most models have evolved without reference to an effective business-modeling methodology (…) the business models that provide the commercial justification for the idea are often poorly structured and, in some cases, simply inaccurate. The result is a misleading view of the financial strength of the idea”.

John Tennent and Graham Friend. Guide to Business Modeling. The Economist Books.

Quite a few entrepreneurs wonder how much of an effort they would really need to allocate to business modeling and if that will actually pay off, opposed to dedicating the company’s limited resources to develop the foundation of the business. In some cases, they chose financial bootstrapping allowing them to remain focused.

So, what’s your take? As usual I will appreciate your comments and emails.

José de Francisco López Chicago, 19 July 07

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This blog’s Long Tail:

• Innovator’s dilemmas and paradoxes
• Is innovation just about problem solving?
• The innovation gap 1
• The innovation gap 2
• The innovation gap 3
• The innovation gap 4

References and picture credits:

• Susan Wu’s “Do entrepreneurs still need to write business plans?”
• Sean Wise’s “Wise Words“

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

Innovation can be both approachable and elusive. Most people I talk to have come up with an interesting idea or an exciting product concept at some time in their lives. In many cases, they draw from personal experiences (e.g. something they use which can be improved or done differently). However, taking the necessary steps to make things happen can become an overwhelming challenge:

“Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it”.

Scott Berkun, author of “The Myths of Innovation”.

Then there is the notion of “innovation antibodies” which can either be based on perfectly logical reasoning (e.g. business priorities) or conflict of interest (e.g. competing budgets and priorities). So, one real life dilemma for some innovators to entertain is whether to focus one’s work and efforts on research or on marketing, or both.

There are quite a few books out there discussing innovation dilemmas, most of them focus on a given and very specific subject (e.g. Clayton’s classic studies on the challenges faced by incumbents threatened by disruptive innovations led by small and more agile companies). I think it is worth outlining and discussing a taxonomy of the most relevant dilemmas and paradoxes faced by innovators, instead of just focusing on “the fashionable one” that makes people buy books.

So far I have outlined about 50 as part of a presentation I have not yet released, all of them involving specific decision points on “alternative valid options” for innovators to consider, if there was a straight answer… that would not be a dilemma.

I will be blogging about them and, as usual, will count on your feedback to figure out what makes the most sense. Cheers.

José de Francisco López Chicago, 18 July 07

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References and picture credits:

• Guy Kawasaky’s “Ten Questions with Scott Berkun, Author of “The Myths of Innovation”

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine

In the business section of last week’s issue of The Economist magazine you will find a playful article under the title “Piecing Things Together. What companies can learn from playing with Lego“.

“Lego Serious Play, an official product of the Lego Group, is a form of business consultancy fostering creative thinking, in which team members build metaphors of their organizational identities and experiences using Lego bricks. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, imaginatively exploring possibilities in a ’serious’ form of ‘play’”. Wikipedia.

Companies playing with Lego include: PricewaterhouseCoopers, Google, Nokia, Orange, Daimler Chrysler, Roche Pharmaceutical, SABMiller, Tupperware, Novo Nordisk, Harco, Blue Ridge Bank & Trust.

Lego workshops appear to be effective thanks to their child-like play, which turns out to be a form of instinctive, gut feeling type of behavior, delivering “Eureka moments” by using metaphoric abstractions.

This is about exploration and story making. Lego claims that SeriousPlay leads to: cognitive development, constructive competition, emotional expression and social bonding.

“LEGO SERIOUS PLAY uses LEGO bricks and elements and a unique method where people are empowered to “think through their fingers” - unleashing insight, inspiration and imagination. In a very direct way, you will be able to see what everyone knows inside the company – and what they don’t know they know! Within a surprisingly short time, an organization can have a clear, shared direction with people who are confidently aligned and committed to a course of action”. Lego’s website.

José de Francisco López Chicago, 17 July 07

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References and picture credits:

• Lego SeriousPlay
• Wikipedia
• The Economist

Consultaglobal’s Innovation Search Engine