Category Archives: Technology

Where Does Value Come From?

Where does value come from?

What makes people willing to pay $50 for a t-shirt that’s just like the one that ten other people are wearing in the club?

What makes people pay a premium for Apple products with features introduced by other companies months or years before?

If you are truly trying to be innovative, instead of creative or inventive, you MUST understand how your prospective customers assign value for the new solution you are about to introduce. This may require lots of customer interviews, ethnography, forced choices, and other upfront research, but it’s worth it, because if you don’t build your potential innovation on a new, unique insight then it has no chance of succeeding in the marketplace. And as I’ve said before, to achieve innovation you have to focus not just on creating value in the product or service itself, but all three sources of value:

Value Creation
Value Translation
Value Access

So, let’s get back to the $50 t-shirt…

Here in Seattle we are proud of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, who became a chart topping rap music music act by choosing not to follow the traditional way of making it in the music business so they could not only maintain their creative freedom, but also to make more money. Their mega-hit “Thrift Shop” pokes fun at fashionistas and has helped to make thrift shopping cool instead of embarrassing. Thank you to their combination of skills, they’ve been able to do a lot of the hard work themselves to promote their music, including making this video:

By remaining independent, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are free to collaborate with whomever they want, when they want, and with sponsors who add value in specific ways consistent with the current project they are working on, instead of a record company extracting a rent from all the artist’s activities (whether they are adding value or not). Here is one such project they undertook with another local artist, Fences, and sponsorship from a company headquartered here locally – T-Mobile USA. It’s a great song and a pretty cool video if you haven’t heard or seen it before:

I for one am grateful that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis didn’t sign a record deal, and record executives have candidly admitted that they would have totally ruined the act by forcing them to change to be more “marketable.” The success of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (and others) serve to highlight the disruption in the music industry value chain that continues to occur, creating discontinuities that artists like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis can take advantage of. This is of course as long as they have the digital and social skills to get the word out and help their music spread.

Is there disruption happening in your industry’s value chain?

How can you take advantage of the discontinuities?

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to https://bradenkelley.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button	3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button

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Are you competing at cloud speed?

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We live in an era of constant, accelerating change, and the only organizations that are equipped to keep pace are those that are capable of competing at cloud speed. Does trading out packaged software installed on your own servers for the cloud-based versions offered by your vendor accelerate your organization to cloud speed?

Sorry, no.

So what the heck is cloud speed anyways?

Competing at cloud speed is a goal that every organization should have, and it requires learning fast not failing fast, it involves creating the flexibility to adapt to trends that spread globally faster than ever before, to respond to competition from unexpected sources, and provides a potential antidote to decreasing corporate lifespans.

Accelerating to cloud speed requires your organization to operate under a series of principles that make it both FAST and agile.

Going FAST (the Right Way)

In the experience of Gordon Tredgold, creator of the FAST Approach to Leadership, we usually end up doing either the wrong job or a poor job in an organization because of a lack of focus or accountability, as a result of work has that’s been made overly complex, or because transparency doesn’t exist across the organization.

The FAST Approach to Leadership attempts to address these concerns by answering the What, Who, How and How Far questions related to the task, service or project that is to be delivered (or goal to be achieved). The following four areas make up the letters of the FAST Approach to Leadership and its FAST acronym:

FOCUS is about the WHAT, what we’re doing, what is our objective, and what does success look like.

ACCOUNTABILITY is about the WHO, who is going to do the work, who will be accountable and how will we hold them accountable.

SIMPLICITY is about the HOW, what is the solution, how are we planning to deliver success. Is our solution simple or have we over complicated it.

TRANSPARENCY is about How Far, How Far we have come and How Far we have to go in order to be successful, it’s also about our honesty about our progress and capability.

Focus and Accountability help to ensure that we are getting the right job done, increasing our effectiveness.

Simplicity and Transparency help to ensure that we do a good job.

The objective of FAST Leadership is to ensure that we do the right job, well, each and every time.

Becoming Agile

According to a recent Forrester report titled Business Agility Starts With Your People, a digital business requires an organization to be able to both sense and execute on change, and Craig Le Clair of Forrester outlined a set of ten dimensions that define the digital business, grouped by market, organization and process:

Market Dimensions

1. Channel Integration – Information sharing and cross-channel experiences

2. Market Responsiveness – Customer knowledge and rapid access to resources

Organization Dimensions

3. Knowledge Dissemination – Broader sharing and flatter organizations

4. Digital Psychology – Trend awareness and digital skill sets

5. Change Management – Embracing change and embedded change management

Process Dimensions

6. Business Intelligence – Information management and distributed analytics

7. Infrastructure Elasticity – Cloud awareness and the embrace of cloud options

8. Process Architecture – Process skills and core system independence

9. Software Innovation – Real-time experience and incremental development

10. Sourcing and Supply Chain – Agile sourcing processes and supply chain flexing skills

People looking for a shortcut might hone in on the Process Dimension named Infrastructure Elasticity because it contains a mention of the word cloud and think that this dimension is the secret to competing at cloud speed, but by itself it is not. Forrester’s research showed that the relative performance of an organization along the Infrastructure Elasticity dimension was not a predictor of organizational success, but instead an enabler of improved performance along other dimensions. Craig Le Clair found that greater business agility comes not just from increased Infrastructure Elasticity, but from consciously utilizing that increase to achieve other improvements, such as an improved Digital Psychology or increased Knowledge Dissemination.

Competing at Cloud Speed

When we think about the cloud, what makes it incredibly powerful for organizations is that it breaks down walls. The cloud makes it possible to quickly get people in different departments, geographies, and even organizations collaborating together using a range of cloud-based tools to achieve business goals. When the cloud is viewed not as a solution, but as an enabler of multiple business agility improvements, and a foundation for the principles of FAST Leadership (focus, accountability, simplicity and transparency), we can finally begin competing at cloud speed.

Competing at cloud speed will help improve the velocity of:

Information flow inside and outside the organization
Decision making and commitment
Resource re-deployment
Channel and customer feedback on course corrections

Competing at cloud speed means putting systems in place that quickly capture the voice of the customer, and broadcast it widely and deeply enough into the organization. It means putting the processes and decision-making tools in place to allow leadership to adapt their strategy, redeploy resources and spin up new cross-border and cross-boundary project teams to full productivity faster than the competition in order to capitalize on changes in customer wants and needs.

Are you competing at cloud speed?

Join Inc. 100 and #1 Leadership Expert, Gordon Tredgold, formerly Head of Service Delivery at Henkel, for a simple approach to improve your operational performance live during our expert webinar on October 8 or register for the OnDemand recording.

Sources:

http://www.theleadershiphub.com/blogs/fast-leadership-0
http://solutions.forrester.com/business-agility/improve-your-business-agility-187UW-2434YQ.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140914015150-649711-don-t-fail-fast-learn-fast
http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/Voice-of-the-Customer-White-Paper.pdf

NOTE: This article was written for Intuit Quickbase’s The Fast Track but disappeared off the web so I brought it back here

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The Challenge of Autonomous Teaching Methods

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An estimated 250 million children around the world cannot read, write, or demonstrate basic arithmetic skills. Many of these children are in developing countries without regular access to quality schools or teachers. While programs exist to build schools and train teachers, traditional models of education are not able to scale fast enough to meet demand. We simply cannot build enough schools or train enough teachers to meet the need. We are at a pivotal moment where an innovative approach is necessary to eliminate existing barriers to learning, enabling the seeds of innovation to be imparted to every child, regardless of geographic location or economic status.

XPRIZE Chairman and CEO, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis announced the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE today to help solve these challenges. The Global Learning XPRIZE is a five-year competition challenging teams to develop an open source solution that can be iterated upon, scaled and deployed around the world, bringing quality learning experiences to children no matter where they live. Enabling children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

At the same time, XPRIZE will launch an online crowdfunding campaign to mobilize a global street team of supporters to get involved with the Global Learning XPRIZE. Every dollar pledged will go towards optimizing the success of the prize, specifically focusing on supporting team recruitment globally and expanding field testing.

The Global Learning XPRIZE will launch with a six-month team registration period followed by 18 months of solution development. A panel of third-party expert judges will then evaluate and select the top five teams to proceed in the competition, and award each of them a $1M award. Solutions will be tested in the field with thousands of children in the developing world, over an 18-month period. The $10M top prize will ultimately be awarded to the team that develops a technology solution demonstrating the greatest levels of proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic.

The learning solutions developed by this prize will enable a child to learn autonomously. And, those created by the finalists will be open-sourced for all to access, iterate and share. This technology could be deployed around the world, bringing learning experiences to children otherwise thought unreachable, who do not have access to quality education, and supplementing the learning experiences of children who do.

The impact will be exponential. Children with basic literacy skills have the potential to lift themselves out of poverty. And that’s not all. By enabling a child to learn how to learn, that child has opportunity – to live a healthy and productive life, to provide for their family and their community, as well as to contribute toward a peaceful, prosperous and abundant world.

XPRIZE believes that innovation can come from anywhere and that many of the greatest minds remain untapped.

What might the future look like with hundreds of millions of additional young minds unleashed to tackle the world’s Grand Challenges?

The Global Learning XPRIZE is funded by a group of donors, including the Dick & Betsy DeVos Foundation, the Anthony Robbins Foundation, the Econet Foundation, the Merkin Family Foundation, Scott Hassan, John Raymonds and Suzanne West.

For more information, visit http://learning.xprize.org.

COMMENTARY

I am very excited about this new effort, as I am a big believer that we should live in a world where the next Einstein could come from anywhere, but I have a few of concerns:

It seems to be focused on the use of technology
Five years is a long time (will they get a five-year-old solution?)
It doesn’t engage the target users in co-creation throughout the whole process (it’s outside in)
It seems to ignore the infrastructure in place in areas of the greatest need (where students don’t even have desks)
The most capable solutions may be too expensive to implement in the target areas
The goal should be to build an autonomous learning system that can be used for reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also extended to do much more
Teaching students skills autonomously is fine as long as there is social practice as part of the curriculum
An over-reliance on autonomous teaching will lead to less innovation not more
We are already seeing negative effects in first-world society from too much reliance on technology
If we want more innovation, we need to be teaching our kids ICE skills not just STEM, ICE being Invention, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurship – these are all social skills that don’t need technology (but can use it)

For more on my views on improving education (which doesn’t require education reform or new technology), please see my article Stop Praying for Education Reform.

For those of you who are going to enter a team, I look forward to seeing what you come up with and I hope that you’ll keep some of the above in mind!

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Is there a market for Smartwatches? Can Apple create one?

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Stikkee 3 - Apple Watch

Okay, it’s been a week since the Apple Watch was announced, and do you know what the world’s most popular wearable is likely to be for 2014/2015?

It’s not the iWatch, but the iPhone 6, which is breaking the pre-sales records of the iPhone 5.

No, it’s not an iWatch. Don’t you dare call it that!

We’re Apple and we’ve decided that it’s far too sophisticated and exclusive to be an iWatch.

Oh, and we’ve also decided that you must own at least an iPhone 5 to be privileged enough to wear an Apple Watch.

Okay, so instantly Apple has reduced the potential market size for the Apple Watch from 6 Billion people to about 100 million people (based on statisticbrain’s numbers).

Now, layer on top of this the fact that in a YPulse survey of millenials, only 32% stated that they wear a watch regularly.

$96 million of smartwatches were sold between October and July according to CNet at an average price of $189 (and dropping fast) – often bundled with a phone – and with Samsung wrapping up 78% of the market. If you do the math, that’s just over 500,000 units, less than 1% of the likely iPhone 5 sales over the same period.

The Apple Watch starts at $349.

But wait, we’re not done yet.

Consider that Samsung has become a faster, nimbler innovator in some ways than Apple and are shipping a new version of their smartwatch next month, up to six months before the Apple Watch is expected to be available – oh, and you’ll be able to use their new watch to make phone calls and run lots of wellness apps (including some from Nike). Plus Samsung will probably launch an even more capable version shortly after the Apple Watch starts shipping.

Apple’s already playing catchup in the smartphone market and they haven’t even shipped their first unit.

So if Apple is entering a small market with a declining average unit price against a more nimble competitor, what rabbit do they have up their sleeve to grow the market and increase their stock price?

What will make the Apple Watch a must have?

The iPod was a must have because it allowed you to carry your entire music library around with you after easily organizing it on your PC and syncing it to the iPod. After that you could then easily navigate thousands of songs on the device with the handy click wheel.

The iPhone was a must have because it became the world’s most widely adopted personal, wearable computer. The iPhone disrupted the balance of power in the mobile phone industry and allowed device makers to start offering whatever applications they wanted (unencumbered by the carriers). The iPhone also disrupted the digital camera market, the Flip (super portable, simple video cameras), and the dedicated GPS market.

Other wearables are on the decline.

iPod sales in Q4 2013 were down 52% from Q4 2012.

Google Glasses got a lot of buzz early on, but interest has fizzled.

Fitbits and Nike Fuelbands have lost their luster and momentum.

Even the iPad, which became a must have after Apple solved the Value Translation riddle and properly highlighted its benefits as a more relaxing and accessible computing device, has seen sales fall the past two quarters as the large screen phones have started to become big enough to begin decreasing the need for a separate tablet. If you’re keeping score the iPad disrupted the gaming industry and challenged people to think deeply about their computing device preferences.

Now back to the Apple Watch…

Can a smartwatch really unseat the mother of all wearables, the smartphone?

In an era of declining interest in watches, can Apple change people’s behavior and lead a resurgence in watch wearing?

These are all very tough questions, but they are not tough challenges that Apple hasn’t faced before.

It’s easy to forget that the iPod didn’t become a runaway success until two years after its launch (with the launch of the PC version of iTunes), and that it took a year for Apple to really ramp up sales of the iPhone (after the launch of the App Store), or that Apple got killed in the press after the announcement of the iPad but figured out how to translate its value by the time they started shipping it.

So, is Apple up to the challenge this time?

After their recent string of game-changing innovations the pressure is on!

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to https://bradenkelley.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button	3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button

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Will Health Sensors Make iWatch the Must Have Wearable?

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iWatch Concept with Health Sensors Back in the 1990’s NBC referred to Thursday night as must watch television, and when it comes to making the transformation from invention to innovation, an innovation often needs a ‘Must Have’ feature.

So, with rumors swirling about the potential introduction today of an Apple iWatch, will Health Sensors make the iWatch a ‘Must Have’ or a ‘Must Wear’?

Will the iWatch do to the Fitbit and Nike Fuelband what the iPhone did to the Flip video camera?

If so, it will be yet another example of how it is more important to build a product or service that moves people. Move them not in a spiritual way (although creating something akin to a spiritual experience can help), but in an emotional way where the product or service (through value creation, value access, and value translation) provides enough ‘Must Have’ (or at least ‘Must Try’) to move people to abandon their existing solution (even if it is the ‘Do Nothing’ solution) to try and ultimately adopt your new solution in large numbers.

Moving people in this way is what moves your product or service from being an invention, to being an innovation.

Will the purported ten sensors of the iWatch provide enough entertainment, functionality, and actionable information to make the iWatch a ‘Must Wear’, make it a device that you won’t want to take it off?

If Apple can pull that off, then they will have a huge hit on their hands.

Are they too early like Samsung?

Have they seeded an ecosystem to grow after the launch of the iWatch?

After all it was the ecosystem created around the App Store that turned the iPhone into the market leader, it was the ecosystem created around the iTunes Store (and a Windows version of the software to access it) that turned the iPod into the market leader.

Or is it too early for Apple to launch an iWatch?

What ten sensors would make an iWatch a ‘Must Wear’?

Accelerometer
Pulse monitor
NFC
Blood pressure monitor?
Temperature sensor?
Barometric pressure sensor?
?
?
?
?

I guess we’ll find out next year.

Image Credit: techradar

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Apple iPhone 6 Killer App Revealed

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Apple iPhone 6 Killer App Revealed While most people are focused on what the new Apple iPhone 6 hardware might look like and what new gizmos it might have, the real killer app for Apple’s latest refresh of their flagship mobile device will be an App and a little tiny NFC chipset.

Rumored for the iPhone 5 (rumors which were heightened by Apple’s acquisition and subsequent inclusion of fingerprint sensor technology), mobile payments may finally be a built-in feature of the Apple’s newest handset, the iPhone 6.

Apple has been reportedly out talking to the likes of Visa, American Express, Nordstrom and others, and if that is all true then expect part of Apple’s Tuesday September 9th announcement to be focused on the new mobile payment capabilities of the iPhone 6.

I was one of those who thought that mobile payments might launch as part of the iPhone 5’s capabilities, but obviously the technology, or more likely the relationships and contracts, were not ready for prime time a year ago.

Will mobile payments authenticated by your fingerprint finally appear in the iPhone 6?

If so, soon we will finally be able to stop carrying around wallets and switch to money clips and mobile phones, as such a feature will not only replace credit cards, but loyalty cards, insurance cards, and more.

Yes, Samsung may have done it first with the Galaxy S5, but you know Apple will do it bigger (and better).

I guess we’ll find out next week.

Image credit: Ricardo Del Toro

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Launching an iPhone before Apple

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Launching an iPhone before Apple We live in an amazing age. An era when barriers to entry and barriers to scale sometimes seem to decreasing faster than the size of semiconductors. If Moore’s law states that the number of transistors per square inch doubles approximately every two years, what would you call the similar increase in speed to scale that has emerged over the past decade?

Two weeks ago I came across a couple of videos showing not one, but two different companies who are already shipping clones of Apple’s iPhone 6, a phone that Apple hasn’t yet been able to announce and get out the door?

Do we live in an amazing era or what?

The first video is of the iPhone 6 clone called the Wico i6:

The second video is of an iPhone 6 clone called the Goophone:

Now, people are very loyal to Apple (at least outside of China) and so this is likely to impact their business very little. But would the same be true in your business?

What would the impact be to your business if a competitor launched your new flagship product before you could?

Are you creating an overall solution that is more valuable than every existing alternative and likely to be widely adopted when you launch it?

If not, shouldn’t you be?

After all if you’ve been following me for any length of time you’ll know that my definition of innovation is the following:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”

By this very definition, these clones may attempt to copy the inventions contained in the iPhone 6, but if Apple has truly packed any innovation into their forthcoming handset, it will take more than copying the look and feel of their hardware and GUI to steal any of their innovation thunder.

Innovation is of course all about value, and so any true innovation will not only excel at Value Creation, but the creators will also have put a lot of effort into Value Access AND Value Translation. Follow the link for more on my value innovation framework.

So, if you link my value innovation framework together with my definition of innovation and work to satisfy the conditions of both, you’ll see it doesn’t really matter what the competition does as long as you focus on creating value in all three areas and launching a solution truly valued above every existing alternative (including copycats, clones, or pre-emptive launches), you can still have a wildly successful launch.

So, keep innovating!

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Innovation Best Practices from Microsoft

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Innovation Best Practices from Microsoft

“Industries are being commoditized at a faster rate and you have to look for ways to create more value and set yourself apart,” says Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation. “Innovation is one of the few ways to do that because people use the same best practices for operational excellence. The way they innovate and the culture they build are the ways they can differentiate.”

To help companies with their quest to sustain their innovation efforts, Microsoft has reached out to collect a number of innovation best practices into an evolving framework, that I’ve provided a preview of below.

Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework

Every company serious about innovation should anchor their pursuit in a vision, strategy and goals for innovation. These core innovation components should address not just enabling technology but processes and culture too. Microsoft has published this Innovation Management Framework as the culmination of a collaboration with a consortium of visionaries and practitioners to ensure that it includes thought leadership on innovation from Microsoft and its broader ecosystem, including current charter members and contributors to the framework:

3M
Avanade
Capgemini
Ericsson
Business Strategy Innovation
Microsoft
Pcubed
PTC
Quantum PM
Siemens PLM
Sopheon
Tech-Clarity
UMT
United Healthcare
Wolters Kluwer

“Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework is designed to help companies develop a comprehensive, integrated approach to implement and support an innovation management strategy. This framework is a repeatable reference architecture for innovation and is intended to allow companies to share and learn about innovation management best practices and enabling technologies as a starting point for strategic discussions for their company’s innovation management strategy.

The framework includes best practice processes and solutions that offer a strategic roadmap. The roadmap offers techniques that are proven through experience to improve innovation and innovation management performance. For example, the framework shares lessons learned from Microsoft’s own innovation strategies and processes that help fuel innovation across the Microsoft enterprise. These processes are used within Microsoft, enabling teams to quickly implement innovation programs that are fit for purpose.”

At its core the framework focuses on five main innovation sub-processes that we’ll give you a very brief preview of here:

1. Envision

Innovation is critical to achieving the goals of the modern business strategy. The Envision process should put in place the strategy and plan to achieve the innovation goals in the business strategy.

2. Engage

At the front end of innovation where ideas are generated, sometimes referred to as “ideation,” is where Engage occurs.

In this process, companies engage employees, customers, and partners in an innovation community to capture and share new ideas. Formalizing engagement transforms it from a passive, unfocused, ineffective “suggestion box” to a proactive approach that effectively produces targeted ideas. The goal is to generate ideas that will drive new business value. As Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation explains, “The key in the engage processes is to get closer to the customer, what they desire, how they will make their lives better, and how your product will displace something.”

3. Evolve

The third process, “Evolve,” takes the output of the Engage process to the next level. In this process, companies evolve ideas – as individuals or as teams – to increase their quality and value. Soliciting and capturing ideas is not enough. Early feedback allows great ideas to be improved upon and issues to be raised so they can be resolved (if possible).

4. Evaluate

Simply discussing ideas is not enough. “It’s important to be able to organize, de-duplicate, and merge ideas and take them to the next step in order to turn ideas into money,” offers Newsgator’s Markus von Aschoff. At some point companies must identify the innovations they believe are candidates for further investment. Unfortunately, many companies are drowning in too many ideas.

5. Execute

Of course all of the best ideas, proposals and business plans in the world are of no value unless they can be turned into a reality. The “Execute” sub-process takes the input from the previous processes and executes a formal project to further develop the idea or commercialize it.

The Microsoft DIRA Framework

This Innovation Management Framework is tightly aligned with Microsoft’s Discrete Industry Reference Architecture for the discrete manufacturing industry. The DIRA framework covers three primary business imperatives that are critical to the growth and profitability of a manufacturing enterprise. These imperatives are:

Innovate – Manage cross-boundary innovation and accelerate time-to-market

Perform – Deliver operational excellence with reliable business continuity

Grow – “Observe & serve” customers globally to drive growth with profitable proximity

This framework represents the “Innovation Management” portion of the “Innovate” imperative (see diagram). This framework will also align with the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Framework, which also falls under the Innovate imperative of DIRA.

I’m sure you can tell by now, or at least I hope you can tell, that this has just been a teaser of some of the great content that exists in the full document.

For more detail on Microsoft’s DIRA Framework and to see the complete Microsoft Innovation Framework, be sure and download it as a PDF.

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Is Jack White’s Lazaretto Ultra LP a Vinyl Innovation?

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Is Jack White's Lazaretto Ultra LP a Vinyl Innovation? Video may have killed the radio star, but the mp3 and even the CD have failed to kill the lovable vinyl LP record. In fact, they are making a resurgence and if anything have probably grown in popularity over the last decade.

So, you might be thinking what kind of innovation could someone possibly pull off on a vinyl album?

Well, here is a list of the new things they’ve done on the album:

Hidden track under the label of Side A
Hidden track under the label of Side B
One of the hidden tracks plays at 45rpm and the other plays at 78rpm, while the rest of the album plays at the normal 33rpm
Side A plays from the inside out
Side A plays into a locked track on the outside edge that loops continuously
Side B plays the normal way – outside in, but depending on where you place the needle, you’ll either get and electric or an acoustic intro to the first song on the side
Last, but not least, on a 1-inch band near the label of Side A, if you look at just the right angle while playing the record you’ll see holograms of two spinning angels (one right side up, one upside down)

Jack White walks you through the new things they’ve tried to include on this piece of vinyl in this video:

And if you’re not familiar with Jack White’s music (he started the White Stripes by the way), then check out the video below of one of the songs from the album

Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks?

So, pull your turntable or record player out from under your bed and check out this groundbreaking new album.

Ultimately whether this album is an innovation or not is up to you…

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Innovation Debt

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Innovation Debt

GUEST POST from Jeff Rubingh

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” – William Pollard

Do you ever get the sense that things are getting a little stale? That, while you’re personally doing great work, it’s just not as compelling, as rewarding, as forward-thinking as you wished? It’s not that you’re not delivering quality, it’s not that you’re not being effective in the solutions you’re building, it’s just that you’ve been doing it that way for a long while and there’s this nagging idea that you’re missing out. It’s not that you just want to jump on the latest fad so you’ll feel “cool.” It’s just that you’re getting the sense that your organization is missing the boat, that there’s something coming in the future that really needs the groundwork laid now. You and your organization may be suffering from Innovation Debt.

In the software development world, there is an important concept called “technical debt.” As I mentioned earlier in this post, there’s a similar concept at a company level I’ve termed “innovation debt.” It’s far more than just a technical issue and it’s certainly not just about software development. It’s about your organization as a whole and where they stand on the innovation continuum. If you’re not innovating, you will be incurring innovation debt. Essentially, Innovation Debt is the cost you’ll be accumulating if you’re not investing in creating and building compelling and distinct solutions and competencies that don’t just tap into existing best practices but that are constantly looking ahead for what’s next, for the emerging technologies, techniques and practices that will have your company on the front edge of growth and innovation.

Companies are sometimes fearful of “innovation” because the tangible benefits can be hard to quantify. Too often they ask the question, “What’s the cost of investing in new and distinctive (innovation) practices and competencies?” But they should be asking, “What’s the cost of not investing in new and distinctive (innovation) practices and competencies?” If you’re not innovating, the cost is the innovation debt you’ll be accumulating. And like any debt, you’ll have to start making interest payments. Rather than paying that interest and then paying that debt, you can make an investment in innovation and start reaping the rewards in the following fifteen ways:

People; innovation is all about your people; it says to all your employees, “we’re engaged and ahead of the curve, this is a company you want to invest your time and talents in, we provide the tools and the technology that make you effective in your job and turns us into a market leader.”
Mindset; transforming the culture of the company to an innovation mindset builds automatic behaviors into every initiative, every strategy, every program, making it an assumption that all activities of the company prepare for future markets, impact the existing market and improve the position of the company relative to its competitors
Compete; competitive companies are serial innovators that get ahead and stay ahead of the competition; to compete in the global marketplace, it’s vital to use tools and practices that are fueled by innovation; your competitors are aggressively targeting your piece of the pie and they undoubtedly will be creative and innovative to gain an advantage
Keeping Pace; if markets were static, if competitors didn’t come up with new products and services, if customers were predictable, and if technology never changed, there would be no need for innovation; the business landscape is constantly changing, and with it, the methods, processes, tools and common business practices; innovative tools ensure emerging business processes can be effectively practiced
Productivity; effective organizations are primarily based on the productivity of the people which is primarily based on the tools they have; great people with great tools = great productivity
Execution; results matter, innovative use of technology delivers results faster and with more effectiveness, innovative organizations foster a culture of execution, of delivering, of discipline
Enthusiasm; innovation drives enthusiasm, enthusiasm drives participation and engagement, engagement drives customer service and profit
ROI; innovative technology pays for itself through increased efficiency, improved accuracy and radically effective process improvement
Process; innovative approaches to the use of technology provide process improvement where people and systems are seamlessly integrated to deliver results far more effectively
Growth; innovation fuels growth, the business becomes more productive, responsive, even fun; new and effective methods and tools provide an edge in entering new markets; people want to be part of growth, not cost-cutting
Proactive; the choices are, “make change” or “be changed”; you can either affect change and shape the future of your company and your industry which is hugely positive OR be changed by and respond to trends and events which is hugely negative
Vision; innovative tools, when properly applied, enable you to see markets and opportunities through a different lens, allowing you to position yourself effectively before your competition and lead with vision.
Creativity; building a culture of innovation fosters creativity which leads to solving problems in new and exponentially more effective ways that goes far beyond building new tools but also leads to innovating your functions, logistics, business models and processes
Position; Market leaders are always market innovators; Apple, Google, Coca Cola, Cisco, Amazon, Starbucks, Disney, BMW, UPS, Intel, GE, Nike, PG&E, Samsung, eBay. Add your company to that list!
Skills; innovative companies and leaders develop unique skills

Look at the companies that are devoted to innovation. It’s a pretty impressive list; Apple, Google, Coca Cola, Cisco, Amazon, Starbucks, Disney, BMW, UPS, Intel, GE, Nike, PG&E, Samsung, eBay. Read the histories of these companies. You can’t help but be overwhelmed by the breadth of their research, their innovation, the wide range of their explorations, the kinds of things that naturally recur from these efforts; conversations, ideas, excitement, growth, passion, success. It’s overwhelming. They deliberately nurture their corporate intellect through true education and innovation; a constant commitment to experimentation, and not just light and peripheral experiments but substantive experiments, purposefully setting their course on a culture of innovation. Compromising on Innovation may compromise everything your organization hopes to build for your owners, your employees and your customers.

Are you investing in innovation or incurring innovation debt?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Keynote Speaker & Futurist – Braden Kelley

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