Design_at_the_edge

Where do ideas come from?

The Idea
Originally uploaded by manitou2121.

An interesting question! I spent several years sitting on a judging panel for packaging projects organised by the Royal Society for Arts and Manufactures (RSA). Amongst the other members on the panel was Flo Bayley, wife of Stephen, and a designer in her own right, who just happened to introduce an article on 50 great ideas for the 21st century published in the Independent on Sunday last August. I thought it worth just reproducing the opening sentences or so of each paragraph of Stephen's intro (You can read the whole article here):
What were the great ideas of the last century? A random list might include abstract art, behaviourism, corporate identity, automation, digital theory, futurism, the uncertainty principle, Gestalt psychology, industrial design, jet engines, fast food, television, the marginal productivity theory of wages, the hit parade, best-sellers, miniskirts, consumerism, modernism, cassette tapes, nudism, VAT, pop and linguistics.
These ideas grew in a world with fundamental economic convictions, namely the mass-production and mass-consumption of goods. But these assumptions are fast changing. Those goods are now coming from China and the great legacy manufacturing corporations of the West are mostly in a parlous state....
Things happen quickly and, with ideas, speed is a virtuous circle....
As a result, our flattened world is dematerialising. Production lines have been replaced by a satellite uplink; experiences are better than possessions......
But this is no bad thing since the value of manufactured goods is falling and the value of ideas is rising. The big question has become where do ideas come from and how can we get more of them?.....
To have any value, a new idea must be disconcerting. ......
The British, of course, have been specially resistant to new ideas, except in areas where native eccentrics proposed extraordinary innovations in answer to questions no one had asked.......
People with new ideas tend to be both illogical and contradictory. Explaining his discovery of relativity, Einstein said: "I just ignored an axiom." Nothing defines creativity better than the ability to defeat habit by originality. ......
The absurd element in the quest for a new idea was brilliantly described by Miles Davies as "don't play what's there, play what's not there". .......
New ideas are sometimes at odds with the stern disciplines of management. The 3M engineer responsible for the Post-it note absurdly recalled: "If I knew what I was doing, it would not be research." ......
The ICA (Institute of Chartered Accountants) publishes a Guide to Professional Ethics, but many of its requirements positively inhibit new ideas............
Here's a list of here-today gone-tomorrow ideas ruefully intended to revive moribund industries: just-in-time manufacturing, total quality management, supply-chain management, management by objectives, business process re-engineering, management by walking around, benchmarking, outsourcing, what if, gateway, downsizing, flattening, evaluation, strategic alliances and the fearfully significant brainstorming......
Brainstorming never works because ideas are not generated systematically, but absurdly; ideas do not respect or follow the dynamics of a formal meeting........
Is it ever going to be possible to quantify the value of ideas? There is an interesting precedent here. In 1948, Claude Shannon published his " Mathematical Theory of Communications" in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. Here Shannon laid the practical basis for our digital revolution..........
When it comes to generating ideas, the distinction between visionary genius and aberrant behaviour is not always clear. Cultures which encourage ideas must learn to tolerate error.......
Misunderstanding is a definition of a genuinely new idea. Only one thing is certain about new ideas: their patterns cannot be accurately predicted. .....
As soon as Thackeray had written something that pleased him, he asked himself (bemused), "How did I think of that?"......
The generation of ideas is now the most important economic objective. But unfortunately for conventional businesses, the people best able to generate them are unpredictable, quixotic and generally unsuited to a formal business environment. Someone asked Miles Davies what he was going to do. He said: " I'll play it first and tell you what it's about later." And then he had a new idea. It is all about unconventional wisdom.

Now when we've got some good or even great ideas we need to do something with them. The great push in the 1990's was to get some sort of Innovation funnel or stage-gate process into the organisation to improve the new product development activities. In fact, the mindset promoted by these processes is based on the principle of reductionism with much emphasis on the numbers driving teams towards less risky initiatives. Maybe that is a reason why the Financial Times reported that:

Picture from a workshop at Metanational

“In these [Pfizer, Merck, Unilever, Nestle] and other companies, the standard stage-gate approach to product development has become so ingrained that it has driven out the very innovative thinking that it was designed to encourage. And while the returns on innovation effort appear to be falling for large companies, it is often the unheralded start-up or new entrant that comes up with the latest hit product. … Thus, Coca-Cola, once celebrated for its innovation and vision, has been late to every new trend in the drinks industry in the past decade, from sports drinks to bottled water." -Julian Birkenshaw, Rick Delbridge & John Bessant, "A Leap into the Unknown," FT/09.17.04.

So Feeding the funnel with good ideas can be fraught with difficulty too!  There is something about a stage-gate process that encourages teams to prepare their projects for an encounter with the gate-keepers rather than the consumer (who will ultimately decide whether the innovation is useful) and risk taking can be a no-no. After all if several projects are being "gated" then the same questions will be asked and inability to answer can cause a project to be rejected. So the more radical it is the more likely it is to be "gated".   Gatekeeper’s have to be aware that gate meetings are an opportunity for learning by all participants and the objective should be to find what has been learned on the project, and what needs to be learned in the next phase; eventually enough knowledge is created about the product, its consumer potential and resolution  of marketing and manufacturing challenges that the project can be deployed into the supply chain.

I was struck by something I saw on the televised BAFTA award show 

“Success comes from a lot of innovative offerings. .....it comes from an idea and a lot of people who gathered round that idea and turned it into what you see on screen......” said Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner ,Managing Partners of “Working Title”  receiving the award for “Talking Heads” at the BAFTA Awards 1999.

So it is the idea itself that can catalyse the creation of new things! Serious Play?

Enabling tools for the kitchen

kitchen12
Originally uploaded by S Baker.

Following on from the last post, part of the secret of a successful restaurant is getting the enabling technologies and the process of food and beverage delivery right, as well as the intangibles like ambience, menu, wine list, etc.

My father, in setting up the catering supplies business (in the 1950's), made sure we had a large area in the warehouse where we could chalk out the client's premises and layout the (mainly) stainless steel equipment to make sure that the workflow of food preparation and assembly  was

1) fitted in available space

2) contained the right tools for the menu, and

3) enabled flow of the staff

This rapid prototyping soon highlighted any basic flaws in the client's thinking and our matching solution and rapid iteration could take place, with much moving of equipment as the ideas bubbled up. I can just remember as a seven-year old seeing waitress's in their civvies dashing about with old plates, etc. that we kept as props, laughing as they collided at the pinchpoints and the heavies moving the serving equipment back and forth to ease the situation... a veritable theatre of food!

Photo courtesy of Haxxah and KraZug

Michael Schrage defined, in Here comes Hyperinnovation, what was going on in that theatre-

"Call it Iterative Capital: It is a resource that gives companies the ability to play seriously with more and more versions of various ideas in less and less time," he wrote.

In the 1970's when we were changing from wrought to cast turbine blade designs, and the aerodynamic and thermal performance rdemands increased fairly dramatically on the big-fan aero-engines the need to understand the problems early led us to an early prototyping approach. In the wax shop where the sprues were assembled for the lost wax process we found someone who was an amateur sculptur. We got him to lay layers of wax onto the existing blade design and then hot knife an outside form roughly like the preliminary aerodynamic results. This was used to produce a plaster of paris mould for making further waxes. A second model built-up in the same way was carved to leave the internal passages of the first go at the cooling channels. This was used to create another plaster mould from which ceramic cores were made.

The foundry could then cast some blades and by cutting them up we could determine the amount of core shift and any reinforcement needs for the  cores. Also we could check internal flows and pressure losses, enabling the experts to confirm their assumptions (or not!).... all before the design- anaysis iterations had got too many. People also got used to the new design before it existed so the transition did not seem as big.

The arrival of Stereo Lithography Apparatus prototyping machines in the early nineties opened up the possibilities for a wealth of Iterative Capital, first of all from bureaux and as the equipment costs fell and the benefits became more obvious actually owning one (see also TCT magazine).To quote Schrage's article again... 

"The world's most innovative firms have in fact invested billions of dollars in tools and technologies that let them virtually model, prototype, and simulate their proposed innovations. Once these models are in the machines, the economics of iteration implode. The cost of making changes becomes essentially marginal. Want to alter a mission-critical assumption or test a pet hypothesis? Tap a key to do another iteration. Want to simulate the impact of a requirements change? Iterate, iterate, iterate. Digital media inherently makes iteration faster, cheaper, and easier. The fusion of Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of circuits that can be etched onto a silicon chip doubles every 18 months, and Metcalfe's Law — that the value of a network is the square of the sum of its nodes — ensures that the computational and network costs of doing iteration after iteration of a target model, prototype, or simulation will shrink to near-nothingness. Networked iterative capital is like networked financial capital: Its velocity and impact increase as it hurtles toward opportunity."

He goes on to write

"As quickly and easily as word-processing programs alter text and spreadsheet software manipulates numbers, these "design processors" enable instant iteration in the pursuit of innovation. As networks link previously disparate parts of the organization with each other, with key suppliers, and with customers, "design processing networks" create new opportunities for collaborative iteration both between firms and within them. Iterative capital becomes an essential investment for firms managing strategic alliances and supply chains."

Although I am only discussing physical prototyping here, Schrage is referring to digital models, simulations, visualisations, etc as the total Iterative Capital at one's disposal but more of that in another post.

Having obtained access to a Rapid Prototyping Machine, through a bureau, leasing time or creating an in-house facility we can then decide how to use the Iterative Capital (IC). A typical model we make might mean that we have an IC of 5,000 models per year- about 100 a week. How shall we deploy these models? We can explore more concepts with consumers to ensure validity of what we want to do; we can send some models to the factory to check the assembly line compatibility; we can show to ad agency; etc, etc. The ability to prototype whenever we want means we can explore Design Space much earlier in the project to ensure we are getting the Quality and quality right.

Image within Design Space is from the RCA.

How we spend our IC will depend on why we are doing a particular project. For instance, an Incremental project might require IC to confirm changes and ensure factory efficiency is kept at previous levels; new to company will need models for internal selling; new to world innovation will need models to explore where it fits in -externally and internally; etc.

Quality or quantity?

Originally uploaded by amyrod.

Reading the Tim O'Reilly post "If Google were a restaurant"  which included the paragraph

"Jon noted that one of the most fascinating things he's learned since starting at Google is its pervasive culture of measurement. He illustrated this graphically by saying something like this: "When I go to a restaurant, and look at leftovers on my plate, I don't see food, I see information. If the restaurant were Google, they wouldn't just take that plate and scrape it off into the trash. There would be a camera in the kitchen, photographing every plate coming back, with analysis of what people liked and disliked, and what portions were too big, helping to optimize future servings."

reminded me of my father's constant monitoring of the returned food in our restaurant.. he did it because food was still rationed and if we ran out we couldn't serve our customers. When food rationing finished he sold the business and moved into supplying catering equipment, his logic being that many people would realise they could meet the unmet needs of potential consumers by opening a restaurant resulting in over supply but every place has to have the enabling technology... cooking and serving equipment!
Much later we realised that there are (at least) two views of every situation:- a hard measurement view and a context based soft understanding view. We developed a view of the Design Journey from an insight to a solution as moving along two paths:
Validity- does someone like it?
Viability- Do enough people like it and are willing to pay for it?

This diagram encapsulates the two paths, which can often be in tension...

If a balanced approach to the project goals is not maintained the validity path may lead to a product or service that doesn't sell to enough people unless the price is too low to make money. If the viability path is too well trodden the product tend to become incremental as quant. feedback is more positive if the people being asked are not stretched out of their comfort zone.
So,
what price measurement and interpretation?
what price inspiration and insight?
Enjoy the journey.... to Where 2.0?

degree of fascinating

degree of fascinating
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

The blog "The Real Clue to Innovation that Matters" by Oren Harari. January 19, 2007 has reminded me of a model that we used to test whether our ideas, concepts, models, etc had legs or whether it was our misplaced enthusiasm that was carrying them along. The degree of “fascinating” is an internal measurement of how the idea advocates feel about the idea not the ultimate customer, consumer or end-user!
The matrix quadrants are:

BLI-H, DOF-L (Bottom line impact- High, Degree of fascinating- low)
Where rethinking what exists and connecting a technological solution to a great consumer story delivers useful and relatively sustainable Bottom line impact- e.g.
Round, square, pyramid, drawstring? Behind the bag debate lies serious marketing manoeuvres. Tetley was the perpetual number two in UK tea bags to Brooke Bond until it launched the round bag in 1989. The popular innovation pushed Tetley's volumes up 25% and gave it market leadership from 1991 onward. Brooke Bond responded in 1996 with the pyramid teabag which began to recover lost market share. Tetley maintained their grip by quickly responding, in 1997, with the “no drip, no mess” drawstring bag.

BLI-L, DOF-L
Incremental refreshment of the product to give a story about some benefit of the product, e.g.
Daz recently launched “a new improved formulation and a brand new look, to give you the whites you've always dreamed of”.
Procter & Gamble's also launched a new fragrance variant of Daz laundry powder supported by an innovative promotional campaign featuring the fragrance.
“The household name brand will be available in a limited edition 'Citrus Blast' fragrance. The fragranced promotional campaign is being delivered by The Aroma Company using their AromaRelease™ technology.”

BLI-L, DOF-H
Where the technological solution outruns the consumer story and “dark” incidents reveal themselves, e.g.
When it was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1985, the Sinclair C5 was the last word in futuristic transport. Ten months, and £6m of investment, later it was consigned to the commercial scrapheap.
The fabled C5 electric tricycle was rumoured to be powered by a washing machine motor, was lusted after by pre-adolescent schoolboys and risked vanishing under a heavy goods vehicle without the driver noticing.
Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the C5 is seen here in 2003 road testing the revolutionary Segway scooter... has announced secret plans for another pioneering new personal transporter.

BLI- H, DOF-H
The enthusiasm of the team is very high as they prepare “to make a dent in the (music) universe”. The public agree with them and tens of millions are sold, e.g.
In 2003 CNET published the following “…in truth, while the iPod rocks, it's not now, nor has it ever been, perfect for everyone.

We too have run our fair share of iPod-centric headlines--for a good reason. With about 1.5 million units sold, the iPod is the most popular MP3 player in the world, and it still makes other players look and feel inelegant in comparison.
Five reasons not to buy an iPod
1. Six-plus hours of battery life is not always enough.
2. Jogging with a hard drive-based player is not cool.
3. The iPod is expensive.
4. You want to make high-quality digital recordings.
5. You want a choice in online music stores.

Apple, their network of add-on suppliers, and their consumers responded by living with the minuses, because the pluses are emotional and outweigh the functional (maybe?), or by introducing new models of the iPod and its accessories to mitigate or eliminate them… so point 2. is eliminated by the flash based iPod nano and then the nano+Nike shoes takes the experience beyond the listening to music!

So by debating the quadrants within and outside the core team we can test our ideas etc. for efficacy remembering what Michael Schrage says about innovation:-
"Innovation' isn't what innovators do....it's what customers and clients adopt."

Or to put it another way "avoid the bottom-right square!"

Designing interactions- creativity at our fingertips

Designing interactions- creativity at our fingertips
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

I read a post today about the iPhone and its innovative technologies that have a long lineage.

Whilst at ALIAS Bill Buxton led the creation of an interesting step along the way to gesture control which became known as PortfolioWall and is now part of Autodesk's suite of applications.
I led a team that was acted as an early adopter of the technology to support Q,S,I of packaging for global product teams. I was trained as an engineering designer in the era of pencil and drawing boards and often I would be surrounded by people all discussing my particular design challenge in its wider context with everyone eagerly sketching on the design scheme laid on the board itself and anything else handy. This group creativity was instrumental in forging the innovative design of the RB211 big fan engine that has been a platform of success for Rolls-Royce Aeroengines.
This "creativity by wandering about the drawing office" was in the DNA of the company as one of the more elderly designers explained to me (a 20-year old). He told me "When I was a young draftsman, I was lucky enough to join the personal team working for Sir Henry [Royce] we would go home after a hard day's work and next morning return to find sketches and notes that he had pencilled on our schemes as he went round the office before he left. Next morning several of us would gather round each note/sketch in turn to discuss their significance and interaction so that we could learn and build that learning in to our next iteration."
The adoption of CAD actually interrupted the creative flow as the screen in the 1970's was not that big and fitting half a dozen people round it to have a useful conversation was challenging. This meant running off large prints to have at that discussion which meant the spontaneity of chance encounters was all but eliminated. Maybe this is why the widespread adoption of CAD at first led to great improvements in efficiency with little or no improvement in effectiveness.
Michael Schrage sums it up when he said “I wrote a book on collaboration about a decade ago. I thought that I was going to discover issues regarding the collaborative temperament and find personality traits that make collaborators effective. But my key finding was that the real necessity for effective collaboration is the existence of a shared space. Shared space is the dominant medium for collaboration; it takes shared space to create shared understandings. Indeed, the properties of the shared space shape the quality of that understanding. And models, prototypes, and simulations are shared spaces.”
So the drawing board is a effective shared space but a screen is not much use for more than a couple or three people.
Bill Buxton researchers worked on an idea of an electronic drawing board where the drawing surface was the projection screen and reinvented the A0 drawing board of my youth. A commercial manifestation was the Visonmaker.

This meant that the shared space became more effective.

The next step was PortfolioWall (see heading picture), which is in the best tradition of usable and useful technology, a very large touch sensitive screen and interface software that becomes a shared space for a group of people who after a 5-minute training session can use their fingers to interact with whatever is on the screen, capturing comments on visualisations of digital models, or sketching ideas on top of them. A creative environment for all team members (The way of using the finger gives it away!). It is a first-generation device and did not fully emulate a pin board but is better than not having anything in the electronic repertoire.
So the next stage maybe to have a WiFi iPhone that interacts with the content on a big screen which could be on the other sde of the planet making virtual creative sessions across timezones and space even more potent. Connect to a "TiVo-like device" and we have a play-again facility for those who are dispalced in time as well as geography. They can rerun the sessions and interact and capture their sketches and comments too!

What do your shared spaces look like, I wonder?

The above illustrations have been extracted from my paper given at The Future of Packaging Conference organised in Rome June 2003, by PIRA

"Visionmaker PS," a computerized drawing board was manufactured by Input Technologies Inc. of Toronto, . It is basically a big, flat, touch-sensitive computer screen that allows designers to create drawings on the computer much like they would on an artist's sketchpad, with big, sweeping motions. Another benefit: The big format allows a group of designers to easily gather and discuss a design as they work - as they used to do in the "olden" days.

To Jump the chasm? -Apple designs a way

apple and the chasm00
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

I have been observing the emergence of thoughts surrounding the announcement of the AppleTV and iPhone last week with great interest, especially when I read and refresh my memorys of the reaction to the iPod when that was first released.
John Maeda sketched [his interpretation of Moore's development of] the technology adoption curve [based on Everett Roger's original bell-shaped Innovation Adoption Curve.] to illustrate the chasm of simplicity that suppliers of new products and services must address in order to get their consumers to cross with them. John Maeda wrote:
"Today I was wondering whether the simplest solution to help consumers make the jump across the chasm is to just focus on ensuring that your product embodies simplicity. This may seem like a simplistic answer, but it does help to explain why products with simple operation, simple concept, simple marketing message do manage to succeed."
Brady Forrest writes in O'Reilly Radar:
"Last week Apple didn't just release the iPhone. They also released Apple TV, a single use appliance that allows you to play music, watch movies and view your pictures from your home PCs or Macs. When I saw it my first thought was how this would stack up compared to the Mac Mini as a multimedia device. Both are small, both have iTunes -- what are the exact trade-offs?"

I wonder if the trade-off is about who the consumer isand where they sit on the adoption curve. In John Maeda's picture above I have postulated three stages of TV connectivity development:

Starting with TIVO-iPod and TV-Mac connectivity where there is a lot of bits (software) and pieces(boxes and cables) to fiddle with. Ideal for innovators who are confident about their Macs.

The second stage is where people buy a Mac mini to use as a device, so they are happy to put together a connectivity solution that require some thinking out but is fairly straightforward.The third stage is plug and play and is we hope the AppleTV solution. Yes it has restrictions but over time as familiarity and user base builds up no doubt versions will address emerging early majority needs.
So maybe Apple have got their thinking right...
When collaborating ing with Chris Thompson at Viadynamics we adopted Innovation and design goals called the 4S's:
Simplicity: To reduce unnecessary complexity and to focus on delivering excellent consumer experiences.
Space: To expand the range of opportunities and to nurture great ideas
Speed: of decision making and of time to market
and Self-confidence: To believe in our insights about consumers and to lead the market
Maybe Apple have too?

The train now boarding but at which platform?

The train now boarding
Originally uploaded by dipfan.

(Watched another Harry Potter movie on the tele last night!)

If we have created some alternative futures and thought one of them more attractive we need to think about which platform(s) might be a great place to start from... if we think Chris and Nick's ideas are compelling... let's assume they are!
So, if we are going to use a platform strategy upon which we can build a range of products and services that will deliver excellent experiences to our customers/consumers/users we have just one problem:

Which platform do we choose?

Strategic Platforms come in many forms, including brand, an insightful consumer understanding, technology knowledge and Intellectual Property , capability in the form of a unique blend of skills and competence, etc. We can map them like this:

Strategy: Choices into actions (Not activity!) is a framework with axes of business- leadership and vision to delivery.
Thinking about our strategy, portfolio of projects (product, service, process, training, etc.), the project itself (innovation or enabling innovation) and our internal capabilities enable us to think through the interelationships between these four topics and ensure that our actions are related to our strategic choices.

Where are we going?

and

How do we get there?

What shall we do?

and How shall we do it?

Can we do it ourselves?

or

Who do we work with?

The SPPC diagram above is a powerful framework for reframing our dialogue and subsequent actions.

The future is now.

It's the future now.
Originally uploaded by OiMax.

Today's Independent on Sunday has an article "The future is now" 'Will the iPhone catch on? Will any of the other technologies being hailed today change the world tomorrow? We assess them here - and in a fact-inspired short story imagine their impact by 2017'
The short story starts
"Listen, have you seen my son? He's lost. I can't find him. Blond. Ten years old. It's nearly his birthday. He was born in January 2007, just after the launch of the iPhone. I'm not a geek, new tech is my business and it was big news back then, trust me: a phone, a camera, a movie and music player and a computer all in one. We all got so excited. Seems hysterical now. Not funny though. Nothing's funny. I've lost my son. Have you seen him?"
includes...
"The police were great. They sent out a message as soon as they heard, straight to the iPhones of anyone within 30 miles of here. They're still pretty much the same gadget, those things. That's my business, you see: new tech. Actually it wasn't new, as such, but Apple put everything together in one sleek package. America had been left behind until then, concentrating on computers while mobiles took over the world, but then Apple put the two together and became even more huge."
and ends...
"Hang on, this thing's buzzing. Text. Ellie, my wife.
"David safe!"
What? Oh God! They've found him. He's safe.
"Ran away to see Nada, girl he met online. They are IN LOVE!!! Got him here. Coming home."
Home? They're coming here, my boy's coming back. He's alive. Look, I've got to get home, gotta go, yeah? Thanks, you know, for helping. Thank you. Thank you! Love, eh? Bloody love! Old as the wind. That's one thing they will never replace with a chip."

Scenarios (stories) are very powerful ways of postulating alternative futures.. helping innovative organisations (e.g. Shell) think through what they want to be known for (Mission). We can match our ambitions, capabilities and our project portfolio to a meaningful Vision that informs our strategy and behaviour. A powerful vision means that strategic choices of innovation platforms can be tested against our chosen vision which can be modified by informed observation of the unfolding reality enabling us to respond to exhortation in Nicola Phillips book E-MOTIONAL BUSINESS

"IT'S ONLY THE FUTURE..."
TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING FASTER THAN MARKETS,
MARKETS ARE CHANGING FASTER THAN CUSTOMERS,
CUSTOMERS ARE CHANGING FASTER THAN ORGANIZATIONS,
AND ORGANIZATIONS ARE CHANGING FASTER THAN THE PEOPLE WHO RUN THEM.

CATCH UP.

So we have Scenarios that can inform us of where we might go but our stratgy, portfolios of projects and our own capabilities are the determinants of how we will actually be successful in reaching our dream...  but remember that in the words of Alan Kay, the father of personal computing

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Darn my muggleness!

darn my muggleness!
Originally uploaded by genvessel.

My friends at Viadynamics, published about a year ago, a whitepaper on 'Driving growth in global markets: An integrated approach to business strategy and capability development that links innovation and operational excellence'. Its theme is that platform building is a powerful way of value creation. The authors, Chris Thompson and Nicholas Duggan, talk of
‘Successful global businesses and industries avoid the shortcut to a quick return. Instead they focus on the creation and exploitation of assets by identifying and building defendable platforms and leveraging their own and other organisations’ access to scale.'

They also talk about Apple's approach to innovation in the past and today-
'The contrast between the way Apple chose to exploit its operating system in the late 1980s versus how it is approaching the iPod and iTunes today illustrates the point. There was no doubt among early adopters that the fi rst Apple computers were easier to use and more appealing, and were in line with the company’s compelling vision of a Personal Computer being “a bicycle for the mind”. Apple decided to take a vertically integrated approach, in effect aiming to own every aspect of the total product: from hardware to operating system, applications and design. In hindsight it is easy to conjecture what would have happened if instead they had identifi ed that their operating system was the most defendable, ownable and valuable of their assets. It would then have been logical to license the Mac OS to other hardware manufacturers and to concentrate their energies on making it even better. Of course they didn’t, and Microsoft and Intel were given an easier run as a result.
Apple’s approach today is very different. The iPod is certainly seen as an extremely successful product but it is also the vanguard for an even bigger win. iTunes was initially launched as a new feature within the Mac operating system available on Apple’s PCs and laptops. It then underpinned the success of the iPod platform and is now provided across many platforms as a revenue generating service. It is the anticipation of Apple becoming a global maximiser in the international music publishing market that gets analysts most excited. In turn, we can now expect the iTunes platform to be used by Apple to try to access other global markets from movies to soaps (the TV kind).
The maximisation of value created by an organisation across the innovation cycle is a representation of the art of “judicious sacrifice”: the acknowledgement of the platforms that we must build, own and fi ght for to achieve growth, versus those we must let go and leverage through others. Without making this sacrifice, managers risk shortcutting the value creation process and short-changing their stakeholders. In the global economy there is a need to invest in the full innovation lifecycle to develop the platforms that create sustainable growth, and not default to quick wins.'

Chris and Nick are saying that the way ahead in a global arena is not to adopt a fast track approach of "business creation" then "market optimisation" but to take a more robust path from "bc" through "platform building" onto "global maximisation" then "market optimisation".
Whilst the attention is on the iPhone announcement the AppleTV announcement is also very important as it shows that Apple is moving on from global maximisation of iPod on the iTunes platform to market optimisation of the iTunes platform for the home media experience- as postulated from Chris and Nick's paper (see page 5).
In the meantime the Apple innovation pipeline discharges another strategic thrust as the OSX paltform (?) enables yet another iteration of Apple Inc's growth building strategy.
An article By Hamish McRae in the Independent , 'Apple's iPhone won't change the world. But the innovation it unleashes just might' says
'If this is right, and you do have to take everything that is said about the iPhone with a pinch of salt, this will stimulate a global quest for new mobile services. There will certainly be a barrage of new phones doing similar things and they too will provoke the development of new services.
What will these services be? We cannot know and in any case they will take months, years indeed, to be developed. Americans don't get the phone for another six months and we won't get it until the end of the year. We can however say a few things.
One is that the services could come from anywhere, since the iPhone will be a global product - apparently it will be a GSM quad-band - and that they won't come just from large companies but from small start-ups too.
A second is that some of these start-ups will be in sheds in Mumbai and Shanghai as well as offices in Palo Alto, though the interaction between finance and entrepreneurs in California remains one of the great strengths of the US hi-tech industry.
A third is that while as a general rule the software is more interesting than the hardware, this may be another example, like the iPod, where the hardware matters too. Don't underrate the power of fashion, which matters just as much as functionality.
Fourth, this will give a big boost to the broadband revolution, which itself is encouraging the development of new services, the promotion of e-commerce and so on. The final graph shows the way in which broadband has swept across the developed world. But large parts of the developing world have yet to get it because the fixed-line network is inadequate. Broadband mobile will be given a kick-start not just in the developed world, where it is not really necessary, but in the developing world. So a side- effect of the iPhone will be to further level the global playing field.
This leads to a final point. This is how a stylish chunk of American innovation sharpens our perception of a world where competitive advantage is a much more fluid concept than it has even been before. The US can still out- innovate the rest of the world. We often forget that. Where these phones, and their competitors, end up being made is less important than the ability of the US (or indeed other developed countries) to conceive, design and market them. Design matters. Culture matters. And for the moment at least, the US - and in a rather different way, Europe - still seems able to create the products and services that retain our economic leadership and to some extent at least, justify our standard of living.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to watch for in the coming 18 months will be not so much the commercial success or otherwise of the iPhone, though that will be fascinating. It will be the social consequences of the product. What services will be winners? Will there be at last real convergence between the computer and the mobile phone? What new business opportunities will emerge in, say, sub-Saharan Africa as a result? So is the platform OSX or is it the iPhone itself? Or does it matter?

Chris and Nick also talk about the "Harry Potter" franchise based on the stories written by J. K. Rowling. Rowling created a manuscript which her literary agent Chistopher Little recognised as a potential opportunity and began the task of tuning the manuscript into a platform. This has eventually become multiple revenue streams across global markets, delivering value from books, films games and even sweets with some pretty challenging flavours!

So like the Hogwarts the question for you could be

Which platform will your new product/service leave from? Will it create a transport of delight for the people who buy into the dream and will it be a gravy train for you- a train which creates lasting value for customers and the business?

The choice of platform is crucial! More on this soon!!

Wrestling with pyramids

tillich-maslow
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

Abraham Maslow researched and created his hierarchy of needs using his observations of work practice. He said until we had sufficient of a layer we did not ascend to the next level of the hierarchy. As Virginia Postrel has shown this is not actually true in our modern day (and non-USA) circumstances. There seems to be something much richer driving us especially at the higher levels.

Paul Tillich, existential philosopher postulates that an Individual has three options in life……...

1.Participation

Primary Focus:

Submerges self into social group

Positive by-products: 

Sense of personal security & social comfort

Danger: 

Dissolution of one's own sense of self

Over-conformance to norms and fads

"keeping up with the Jones's"

Weakening of one's belief in your impact on world

[Maslow refers to self-realisation as self-actualisation.]

2.Individualisation

Primary Focus: 

Reach ones potential and improve one's lot in life

(financial, familial or social)

Positive outcomes:

Personal heroism to successful entrepreneurship

Potential by-products:

Loneliness, alienation

Frustration, wariness of others

Other outcomes:

Restless, desire for more,

Need to prove oneself

Have to win to maintain self-respect

Driven belief: greater self-realisation is round corner.

3.Self-Realisation

Primary Focus:

Iinterdependence

Spirit maintained and enhanced by integrating into a world that exists

Holistic rather than mechanistic

[Niels Bohrs said properties of particles can only be defined as they interact with other systems]

As we move up Maslow's Hierarchy we are moving from utilitarian functions to symbolic ones enabling us to make meaning of our artefacts within our cultural contexts. Paul du Gay's circuit of culture model, explained in "Doing Cultural Studies", helps us towards understanding the role of artefacts in making meaning.

Maslow's hierarchy has been "improved" by additional layers over the years since his death. First a Cognitive layer was added below Self-actualisation and then more layers were added and these extras were used to inform the DoCoMo's i-mode (Japan) innovation process. This leads to:

The layers are defined as:

Transcendence: To help others find self-fulfillment and realise their potential

Self-actualisation: To find self-fulfillment, realise one’s potential

Aesthetic: Symmetry, order, beauty

Cognitive: To know, understand, explore

Esteem: To achieve, be competent, gain approval, recognition

Belonging and love: To affiliate with others, be accepted

Safety/security: Out of danger

Physiological: Hunger, thirst, bodily comforts

Whilst very useful in interpreting our motivation and behaviour I have erred on the simple side keeping to the original 5 layers as the newer layers tend to be enabled by a product or a service rather than being feature specific , i.e. I don't know how someone will actually make meaning of the features I provide but I hope that they will enable emergent behaviour. At the functional end I can make sure the user benefits from more efficient stain removal, cooler drinks, smoother acceleration, clearer menus, etc.