Archive for September 2008
Innovator’s dilemmas: game changing technologies vs. time
“The things that really change our lives broadly, they take a long time,” Mundie said, noting that Windows and Office “took at least a decade” of initial development and many versions before they could displace existing systems or ways of doing things.”
Read Darryl K. Taft’s article, “Microsoft, Xerox invest in innovation“, on eWeek.
Craig Mundie is Microsoft’s Chief Research & Strategy Officer. He made the above comment at MIT’s Emerging Technologies event just this past week. That made me think of Pip Coburn’s book, “The Change Function“, which states that the commercial failure rate of great new technologies is quite high as technologists do not usually have a good understanding of human factors and consumer behavior.
Pip’s “change function” correlates variables such as “perceived crisis” and “perceived pain of adoption“. Basically, this translates into answering “how critical is the problem are you addressing” and whether the benefits of your solution approach happen to be perceived to make “enough of a difference” for end users to value the trade off. In this context, success means adopting the new product, process and behavior while giving up whatever else was there before and were accustomed to.
Assuming you thought Pip’s model was a good start point and that your innovation met his change function, the next immediate questions are how much time and resources you would need to make things happen and what kind of innovation class are you actually delivering. By the way, is innovation just about problem solving? Click on the link to find out what the above quadrants are about.
Related links: MIT video: Craig Mundie’s Cloud Vision
WIRED NextFest: experience the future
“Products come and go. Ideas, rooted in creativity and the human capacity to solve problems change the way we live. WIRED NextFest is a showcase of these transformational ideas, a forum for inspiration and dialogue, where innovators can share the building blocks of the future (…) some of the exhibits at NextFest aim at vexing problems. Others simply delight.”
Visit WIRED NextFest site.
See more pictures on my Facebook page.
NextFest is hosted in Chicago’s Millennium Park and will remain open to the public until October 12. This and Design for the Elastic Mind, which was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier in the year, happen to be two of the most interesting innovation events of 2008.
The technologies displayed at NextFest relate to emerging trends in art, entertainment, exploration, robotics, design, transportation and green technologies. The following video captures part of Chris Anderson’s opening talk focusing on the so-called “freemium” business model.
Related links:
EIU’s report on corporate innovation
“Rather than adopting a defensive stance, market leaders like Google and Amazon are vocal about plans to increase investment in their firms’ innovation capabilities in the current downturn”.
“Forced into a corner by the combination of a tougher trading environment and rising competition in both developed and emerging markets, executives today increasingly see innovation as the only way to protect profit margins”.
Read The Economist Intelligence Unit’s report “The innovators. How successful companies drive business transformation“.
EIU conducted an online global survey of 261 executives on corporate innovation early this year. After reading the resulting report it is clear that a company’s own doing has more to do with hampering or freeing innovation than whatever market conditions the business might be exposed to. As a matter of fact, Google and Amazon state that they will actually increase investment in innovation despite of the current downturn. Applying the same recipe Apple managed to make a U-turn ending the company’s dark age not so long ago.
My take is that what actually matters is to figure out whether a rich ideation process delivers serial innovation. This means a steady flow of few and timely good concepts that talented teams can elevate, energize and implement in a fast paced environment without reinventing the wheel. Diversifying one’s sources and involving others certainly helps.
Intel’s collaborative research programs are one of the examples you will find in EIU’s report. To foster mutual innovation, the company develops “lab to lab” engagements looking for mutual research programs with customers and partners some of who might be competitors.
Most would acknowledge that coming up with a whole bunch of ideas is not the most challenging thing about being in business. Some other claim that by being buried in day to day stuff they have lost sight of the larger picture and what it takes to innovate. EIU’s report makes a point about necessary being delivered by a “burning platform”, a wake up call triggered by having lost customers, revenue, market share, good employees, etc.
Both new product innovation and business processes are featured as critical to corporate success. The analysts also point to short term focus, moving targets and shifting priorities not allowing enough room to maneuver for staff to do things differently in many companies.
Despite of best intentions, leaders contradict themselves when embracing iterative innovation and continuous improvement while telling their product teams that they have only one shot to get it right. As seen in EIU’s report, as companies expand, hierarchies emerge, comboluted organizational charts make an appearance and management level consciousness follows.
All of that is detrimental to more decisive flatter and agile decision making. The report also states that companies that innovate successfully have made it a top corporate priority and have enabled a supportive organizational culture.
Searchme’s visual search
“Searchme employs Adobe Flash and Flex to create a user interface that displays results as web page screenshots. the effect is similar to the Cover Flow feature in iTunes, where users “flip through” album cover art (…) The perk of this technology is the ability to see a page before visiting it.”
Read Nathania Johnson’s post, “Visual Search Engine Searchme Launches Private Beta,” on Searchenginewatch.
Searchme’s beta version was released in March of this year. The company’s developers have worked closely with Adobe’s team to deliver a user experience resembling Apple’s cover flow UI. As a result, you can conduct a pleasant and fast visual search without having to click back and forth through links and pages. Once you see the page for the site you are interested in, then click on it for a new browser tab to take you directly to that site. This gets even better when searching long tail content. Give it a try, videos play instantaneously on the center of the screen as you browse.
The more user friendly your browsing experience becomes, the more able you are to comfortably process and enjoy more and more content. By the same token, when applied to enterprise class applications the expected outcome is higher productivity levels.
When thinking of what’s next, eventually we might experience this kind of visual search combined with multitouch interfaces to be able to quickly browse through the stack of pages as well as to zoom in and out as needed. This UI paradigm has been made popular by Apple’s iPhone and HP has already launched a multitouch desktop available at consumer electronic stores this year.
One would think that mulitouch does not make much sense if you are not really close enough to touch the screen, think of a TV set in a living room. So, there is research being done out there on mid air interface technologies which can leverage the same set of gestures without making you physically touch a screen.
Related links:
- The next generation browsing at your finger tips
- New search engine: CUIL
- Multitouch, TouchSmart, Lucid Touch
Plastic Logic’s electronic reading device
“Plastic Logic wins the award for best hardware offering for its prototype device that (…) thinner than a pad of paper, the electronic reading device is designed to bring a high quality reading experience to the world of business documents, such as magazines, newspapers, presentations and business plans.”
Read Keith Shaw’s article, “What was cool at DEMOfall08?” on Network World.
As shown in the above video transistors and screens are build on plastic instead of using silicon and glass. The outcome is a fairly robust and thin mobile device which can be switched on instantly. Additionally, Plastic Logic’s electronic reader features a touch screen interface and USB connectivity. The first units will hit the market in the first have of 2009 and will be shipped from a new manufacturing facility located in Germany.
It is safe to assume that at some point users will be able to wirelessly hook it up smartphones to benefit from mobile broadband connectivity, thus competing head to head with Amazon’s Kindle. We will be also seeing a new class of Internet enabled devices with rollable screens, Polymer Vision’s product as an example (click on the first of the related links below) and, eventually, color electronic displays and multi-touch user interfaces.
Related links:
- USA: “Amazon’s Kindle & Sprint”; EU: “Polymer Vision & TIM”
- Sony’s Flexible Full Color OLED
- Design and the elastic mind: “Nokia’s Morph concept”
- NTT DoCoMo’s mobile future
Pixar’s innovation recipe
“Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.”
“Executives have to resist the the natural tendency to to avoid or minimize risks (…) this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new.”
Read Ed Catmull’s article, “How Pixar fosters collective creativity,” on Harvard Business Review.
Ed Catmull is a cofounder of Pixar and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. Pixar is known to employ talented people who are able to blend and deliver technological and artistic innovations. When I take the time to think about art, I often equate an artist’s passion for reflecting and understanding human nature, communicating and stimulating our senses to key skills needed in most research and development projects addressing the needs, desires and expectations of end users.
One could even argue that not only product designers, but also those focused on market research, human factors engineering and any one studying the user experience should be exposed to the creativeness of the art world to be better able to innovate. As stated in Ed’s article: technology enables art while art challenges technology. Pixar’s success being an example of this virtuous circle.
Pixar’s culture prioritizes hiring and enabling talent over ideation. Note that this is not a chicken and egg dilemma for them. Having smart people around is more important than just championing an excellent idea without the right people to make it happen. Creative types and fluid communication can elevate a team’s discussion to a point at which basic and even mediocre concepts can become the seeds of iterative innovation as part of a continuous improvement process.
Therefore, Pixar’s culture makes it safe for everyone to share thoughts and inspire teams. Additionally, the company motivates people to be in touch with the outside world by encouraging the participation in industry conferences, academic research and even publishing the findings coming from Pixar’s own work.
They also rely on leaders who can make sense of a wide range of ideas under a unifying vision, one that people can act upon. By harnessing everyone’s analytical and operational skills, leaders can save themselves from spending unnecessary time on micromanaging, hence, their efforts can be directed to productive contributions.
The next generation browsing at your finger tips
“Many phones, most famously Apple’s iPhone, now have touch-screen interfaces, as do satellite-navigation systems and portable games consoles. Confusingly, however, most computers do not – so far (…) That is whay the iPhone matters: its use of the touch screen is seamless, intuitive and visually appealing.”
Read “Touching the Future” on The Economist.
“The user interface will appropriately render your web to fit the device, everything from tiny screen on a watch to a wall-sized touch-screen. A critical concept is that while most users will have personal devices on which they interface with the browser, your web can be accessed via any device.”
Read about Adaptive Path’s Aurora browser concept.
Touch screens and user interfaces leveraging them have been around for years. Those of you who got early Palm Pilots in the 90s know what I mean. But, multitouch capabilities happen to be a newer mass market development which I’ve been blogging about for a couple of years, see related links below.
They allow gestures that involve more than one finger. This goes beyond mimicking the pressing a graphic button on a screen, pulling and navigating a menu, scrolling and tapping here and there on a monitor. We are now experiencing new user interfaces allowing us to use two fingers to zoom in and out, rotate images and other items and swipe with three fingers, even when using mobile devices that fit in one’s pocket.
As a result, we cannot only better manage whatever we do with our computers today, but we also become more productive and end up pulling more content and processing far more information than ever before. Couple that with the fact that your Internet browser’s runtime environment can handle multiple browser based applications, which Google’s Chrome has been designed to excel at.
Cloud computing relies on the browser being the user’s gateway to a pervasive cloud hosting all kinds of 2.0 network based services. Many of these are RIA, rich Internet apps, these are browser based online multimedia apps. So, you’d better get yourself a fast and reliable broadband connection to enjoy this stuff without hiccups.
More sophisticated interfaces require the development of a richer “gesture language” whose success will be measured by the degree to which they deliver a more natural, fluid and user friendly interaction. They will fail if things become unnecessarily complex. Additionally, extending multi-touch gestures to any program will soon become a critical success factor.
At some point, improvements in haptic technology will get the screens to provide tactile feedback so you can feel different textures and pressure levels. It should be noted that flat screens and interactive displays are growing in size, so your body language, eye movement and facial expressions will be part of this picture sooner or later.
Admittedly, I cannot help wondering how much of this computer interface driven language will eventually end up being adopted by our culture’s body language when just naturally communicating face to face with others.
Related consultaglobal posts:
- Obscura Digital’s VisionAire: gestural holographic interface.
- Heliodisplay: interactive video projected in free space.
- Multitouch, TouchSmart, Lucid Touch.
- Minority report GUI.
- The trouble with computers.
- Microsoft’s Lucid Touch.
- Siggraph 2007: emerging technologies.
- NxtFest 2007.
Innovator’s dilemmas:
“It can be argued that the devil is in the details, and that good judgment is needed to obtain the proper balance.”
“The entrepreneur is responsible for having the skills to walk a tightrope with a blindfold on. Contradictory criticism (…) is always just around the corner and there is always a way to point a finger for events beyond the grasp of his/her actual ability to control.”
Read Gary Silver’s post, “Entrepreneurs’ paradox,” on Vator News.
Last year, when I started writing posts about “innovator’s dilemmas” my intent was to showcase that there aren’t unequivocal rules one could follow to guarantee a start-up’s success. We can certainly agree on best practices, which I capture in another series of posts under the title “innovation recipes” but, at the end of the day, it really comes down to understanding:
- a guiding vision that delivers clear benefits to customers and the value chain;
- how success is actually defined and the pros and cons of one’s options to get there;
- moving targets and the specifics of the competitive context.
At times it is best to launch a product quickly, exposing it early enough to early adopters whose prompt feedback will help iterate necessary improvements. Some other times, it pays off to hold on until the new product meets certain requirements that ensure a good and lasting first impression. Google and Apple happen to be reference models for these two different new product development practices.
At some point, many entrepreneurs and investors face more difficult decisions when trying to figure out if their effort has reached a dead end and, therefore, if the venture should be terminated before wasting any more cash and resources. In the same situation, some would look for additional time to keep going. “Elusive success” can mean either just that or that we have failed & learned what it takes to get it right, so one more chance is in order.
In any case, one side arguments risk becoming logical fallacies, mistakenly justifying a given decision without having considered, compared and ranked alternative strategies. Often times, innovative products require innovative entrepreneurial skills.
Related links:
- The problem with budgeting (4)
- Innovator’s dilemmas: revenue vs. value (4)
- About innovator’s mistakes
- Best of breed vs. end to end?
- Organizational antibodies
- Today vs. tomorrow
- For ever beta version vs. commercial grade
Picture credits: Hemera Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Jupiter Images Corporation.
OTOY’s cinematic rendering on your browser
“A mobile phone may have to rescale and halftone the image to display it properly on a small screen. A digital camera, with more memory and a better display, could pan and zoom a portion of the full image on its screen. A modern PC could render the image completely, without cropping or scaling it.”
“With OTOY, the same runtime and content will scale from a cell phone to a PlayStation 3 without the need for developers to make different versions of the application (…) The content will run on any device and scale itself accordingly (…) without having to worry about repackaging the content for different mediums.”
Read OTOY’s white paper.
I became aware of OTOY’s capabilities when reading Gizmodo’s posting about LivePlace, a three dimensional virtual world leveraging this platform’s photorealistic rendering. What stands out about OTOY is that the company claims the following benefits:
- these realistic 3D environments happen to be rendered by servers in real time;
- end users with a broadband connection can experience them by just opening up their Internet browsers;
- addressing multi-screen requirements means that developers do not need to work on transcoding content to different media formats.
If interested, there is some more information available on OTOY’s website.
Professional development and new ventures
“Even though there’s doom and gloom in the overall economy, there’s so much vibrancy in the area of new ventures. By new ventures, Citrin means startups, spinoffs and combinations of existing companies.”
“Advice to CEO wannabes: just as companies are looking for new ways to exploit their assets to generate growth, if you’re a senior executive, look for new ways to apply your experiences.”
Read Patricia Seller’s article, “CEOs are taking the new-venture route,” on Fortune.
New ventures and innovation go hand in hand. Moreover, a venture’s success relies on an entrepreneurial environment transcending traditional corporate boundaries. This explains why many managers working for large businesses end up at start-ups when failing to get internal support for innovative products and services.
In a study conducted in New Zealand researchers concluded that those closely involved in taking an enterprise off the ground can better relate to potential applications for emerging technologies than mature companies driven by processes and policies.Ventures deliver opportunities to assume broader responsibilities, exercise decision making and the kind of direct accountability that gives meaning to the job of business management.
Related posts: innovator’s dilemmas: are organizational antibodies good or bad?
