innovation playground Idris Mootee

Innovation, Strategy And Leadership? It Means Leading With Purpose And Imagination.

Innovation, strategy and leadership are so closely interrelated and to succeed you need all those three. Innovation is the ability to different options in the future and develop a set of perspectives to guide them into the future. Strategy is the ability to connect customer needs and wants to the corporation’s core capability. Leadership is the ability to instill a sense of purpose for the organization and to mobilized those to work towards the goal.

What is the difference between leadership and management? Leadership is setting a new direction, creating a purpose and/or vision for everyone in an organization to follow. Management develops, controls or directs human and capital resources according to the policies, principles or values that have already been established.

What about “accountability”?, is that part of leadership or management? Well the answer is both. Warren Bennis once defined vision as "a target that beckons." Or we referred to it as “a shared destiny” or "a preferred future." It is that powerful and compelling dream about where we want to go that mobilizes people to help us get there.

Every organization needs a clearly articulated vision and purpose and it is the responsibility of leadership to provide it. Deborah Ancona, Professor of Management, MIT Sloan, outlines a framework for leadership under uncertainty that includes the following components:

First it’s “Sensemaking” which is a term coined by Karl Weick. It is about making sense of everything happening. In the very process of mapping the new terrain, you are creating it. Building on the work of Sutcliffe and Weick here are some tips for Sensemaking:

• Seek many types and sources of data;
• Involve others in your sensemaking;
• Do not simply apply your existing frameworks and overlay them on the situation;
• Move beyond stereotypes; Learn from small experiments; and Use images, metaphors, or stories to try to capture and communicate critical elements of your map.

The second one is “developing relationships within and across the organization”. Leadership is not an individual sport, and in our networked age the ability to connect and build trusting relationships is a key competency. While leaders try to create trust, optimism, and harmony, they often get anger, cynicism, and conflict instead. The core capability of relating centers on the leader’s ability to engage in inquiry, advocacy, and connecting. Inquiry and advocacy are terms coined in the pioneering work of Chris Argyris and Don Schon , as well Peter Senge. In order to enable effective interpersonal relationships, both practices are necessary.

Inquiry means the ability to listen and understand what others are thinking and feeling. It also involves trying to understand how the other person has moved from data to interpretation to assessment, rather than simply reacting to the assessment itself. It requires the leader to suspend judgment and to listen without imposing his/her personal point of view. And yet leadership requires having opinions and taking a stand.

The second area of relating is advocacy. This involves taking a stand and trying to influence others of its merits while also being open to alternative views. It means taking responsibility for your own biases and leaps to judgment while being able to say, “I was wrong, I jumped to conclusions based on insufficient data and overreacted.” Yet often in business there is a great deal more advocacy than inquiry. Sometimes we are so busy trying to push our own ideas that we do not really listen to what others are saying. The third area of relating is connecting. It is the ability to build collaborative relationships with others and to create coalitions for change. Tips for effective connecting are:

• Understand the perspective of others within the organization and withhold judgment while listening to them;
• Encourage others to voice their opinions; Be clear about your stand and how you reached it;
• Think about how others might react to your idea

The third one is “create a compelling vision of the future”. While sensemaking creates a map of what is, visioning is a map of what could be. Visions are important because they provide the motivation for people to give up their current views and ways of working in order to change. Perhaps most importantly, visioning provides people with a sense of meaning about their work. It answers the question “why am I doing this?” Thus good leaders are able to frame visions in a way that emphasizes their importance along some key value dimensions. Tips for effective visioning are:

• Develop a vision about something that excites you or that you think is important;
• Frame the vision with an ideological goal; Use stories, metaphors and analogies to paint a vivid picture of what the vision will accomplish;
• Practice creating a vision in many arenas; Enable co-workers by pointing out that they have the skills and capabilities needed to realize the vision;
• and Embody the key values and ideas contained in the vision— “walk the talk.”

What Are Next Big Innovations For Personal Banking? Yes, The Current Customer Experiences In General Are Pretty Bad.

What are the next disruptions for personal financial services? Are they ready for a full “reset” ? Can they develop new perspectives fast enough and overcome their dogmas? How do we inject out-of-the box thinking and make them work within-the-box? Or can we re-shape the box? The last 6 weeks, we’ve been focusing some of the most interesting paradigm shifting ideas of how to transform banking, insurance and healthcare. Back to personal banking, there are so many opportunities for innovation.

Here’s one interesting one. iPhone check deposit. The military bank and insurance provider USAA recently launched mobile check-deposit technology, which lets users deposit checks from anywhere using an iPhone. USAA customers take photos of both sides of a check with the phone and transmit the images to the bank, which then verifies and makes the deposit.

The bank has just one branch in San Antonio and, because of its military legacy, has customers in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is so cool because it integrates with existing checking habits. It is reported that USAA has deposit growth nearly triple the industry average over the past three years. Further, 17% of all its customers across investing, insurance and banking use USAA's mobile app, which also facilitates on-phone trading, filing claims for auto accidents, loan calculations and the usual access to account information.

The future of banking is mBanking. The phone will become your wallet (contactless payments), your branch (for deposit) and your credit card. Just don’t lose it. We’re prototyping a number of cool mobile wallet and developing scenarios how they would fit it into a social-media culture. And what it means for SMEs etc.

Nokia will be a big player and could use P2P payments as an entry-point to emerging markets -- and a new revenue stream. It's partnered with Redwood City, Calif.-based Obopay to launch Nokia Money, a service that lets users make financial transactions on their phones. With Nokia Money, which will start to roll out in 2010 in undisclosed markets, mobile users can send money to other mobile users, pay merchants and utility bills, or top up prepaid cellphone minutes. I think more will join. We will end up having Nokia Money, iPhone Dollars, Tata Rupees, Ericsson Krona. Then we will need another kind of currency exchange.

Another Product Innovation: Introducing The New Digitpon.

Digitpon, or digital tampon - is an innovative tampon design made of absorbent material capable of being compressed to self-sustaining form. A portion of the material is compressed to a rod-like shape to provide a rigid central support for the remaining relatively uncompressed portion.

Digi doesn’t digital; it simply means the product is inserted into the body by using a "digit" or finger---hence the name "digital tampon". There is a US patent on the design. It is interesting to note that over 97% of European female prefer digital tampons, and in the US only 3% of use them. Like many digital products, it has adoption issues.

I am no expert in this product category although I am very familiar with other personal care products, any innovation in the personal care space often have long adoption cycles. A digipon comprises an elongate absorbent body of unitary construction, with the remaining upper portion of the absorbent body being relatively uncompressed with upper portion overhanging the top end of said insertion. The bottom end of the insertion provides a small downward facing finger-receiving pocket based at the bottom end of said insertion means, and a withdrawal cord, one end of which is secured to at least the bottom end of said insertion means. Lots of human factor insights are incorporated into the design.

Without the need for any ethnographic studies, we know how some women the menstrual cramps can lead to nausea and makes it hard to concentrate on work. There are real unmet needs here that provide lots of opportunity for innovation. New research to be presented at the 2009 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) annual meeting in Now reveals that a new device to treat this pain is safe and effective--, since the device is essentially a glorified tampon. The research participants received an oral dose of 10 mg of Ketorolac (a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory medication), and nine of whom received a tampon coated with the same amount of the same drug. Then, during the next menstrual cycle, the patients switched treatments, so that each woman had access to each type of drug delivery system.

The results? The drug administered vaginally accumulated more efficiently in the uterine tissue than the drug administered orally. Existing oral medications cause significant gastrointestinal side effects for women, creating additional discomfort.

I think there are plenty of opportunities for drug delivery platform innovation, I am really bad in swallowing pills or capsules and I hated the after taste in many cases. I don’t see why drugs can not be delivered by many everyday surfaces. Here are two killer ideas:

Imagine you can use the computer mouse as delivery platform for vitamins or prescriptive medications. Knowing what deficiencies you have, now you can customize how those can be delivered. Don’t use your colleague’s computer without asking as you might end up getting an unnecessary dosage of Viagra.

Imagine you can use your iPhone skin as deliver platform for your cold medicine? And you can pick different colors and patterns. Polymers can be used as a drug delivery agent. The chemical conjugation or the physical embodiment of therapeutic agents in polymers offers great potential to improve the efficacy and safety of therapies and create novel therapeutic opportunities. Polymer is a large molecule (macromolecule) composed of repeating structural units typically connected by covalent chemical bonds. While polymer often suggests plastic, it actually refers to a large class of natural and synthetic materials with different properties.

Why We Love Swedish Deisgns? Three Simple Reasons: Function, Aesthetics, and Affordability.

What is so special about Swedish designs? Designers love Swedish designs. Swedish design scene is now more vibrant than ever despite the size of the economy. Take a look at the success of IKEA and H&M. Sweden's penchant for practical innovation stems in part from its geography; I imagine it is kind of a necessity when resources and materials are limited. There is one more thing in common: design for affordability.

Swedish design has a historical tradition: They didn't invent design, but they did write one of the first books on it. Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts outlines the importance of function, aesthetics, and affordability, and remains in print even though the first volume was published in 1899. Sweden is very different from America, elitism attracts strong criticism. There is a sense of humbleness, authenticity and modesty, and the Swedish lagomhet (appraisal of modesty and humbleness). Swedes often express themselves in modest terms. Since the 19th Century, a strong urge towards more individualist values took over the more collectivist ones.

Some suggest that the high-concept design culture is rooted in the country's socialist ideology, not sure I agree with that and they said the same thing about Bauhaus. Swedes have an overarching belief in equality with deep sympathy for the underdog. This is a core element if we think about social design, or design for the bottom of the pyramid. I think this is a good design attitude to have.

Minimalism and practicality are virtues, and there is no shame in having the same couch as everyone else on the block (there is a big cultural difference). In profiling notable residences for her coffee-table book Domesticities, Pilar Viladas cited the Swedish word "lagom", which means "not too much, not too little." It is what Swedes strive for, the "yin and yang" of design.

Until the 90s, neo-modernism was predominant and Swedish design stood for traditional values like simplicity, functionality and blond wood. Remember those wooden chairs? Something happened and a new generation of young craftspeople and designers led by Zandra Ahl and Uglycute questioned the values handed down to them, and started promoting a more abrasive, less perfectionist, more human attitude to design. They believe in a well-meaning ideology underlying the slogan “more beautiful things for everyday use,” with form dictated by function. Resulting in a new kind of democratic design, inspired by feminism and postmodernism, they pursue for designs that are able to tell users something of the historical and material culture in which we live. Design reflects our societies' value and attitude.

Desigin Is Cool. From Co-Creation To Design For Social Change. The Question Remains What Makes Design Strategic?

This is a week of design for me, meeting with two talented design practitioners in Boston who are running a very successful company, talked to the folks running two of the top design schools and interviewed 4 designers respectively from London, Brazil, LA and Toronto. And catching with my design reading on the weekend. UK has been a big believer that design can solve many problems and forget the role of economics in many of these issues. People should not forget the advise of architect William Pena: "To put it positively, a social problem calls for a social solution. After there is a social solution then it can be part of a design problem for which there will be a design solution. You cannot solve a social problem with an architectural solution. Let me add another category of design, call it "Social Design".

Design, design, design. Why is suddenly design is so popular? Why business leaders are suddenly talking design? What does design has to do with strategy? Other than sexy products, design thinkers are aspiring to solve the big problems that face modern society. From sustainability to schools, poverty to healthcare, it's the future perfect.

One very popular concept is co-creation. Here's an example how it is in practice. Architect Will Alsop was asked by the British non-profit organization Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) to rethink the concept of prison. If Idea Couture is doing the project, we will start with ethnography. We will send in a team of anthropologists and human factors to do a week of field work.I am not sure we have people in the office with that vertical experiences (unless I don't know).

What Alsop did was he handed large sheets of paper to a group of inmates and asked them to draw a new cell. Each participant (minimum of 15 years) drew the cell in which he was already incarcerated. He asked if they would like more space. Next, he asked them to draw what they'd like to see from their windows. They all drew gardens. In prison, there is time to watch things grow. Alsop's conceptual solution uses an old space-saving technique: build upwards (photo below).

In a series of brightly colored towers, The Creative Prison (yes prisons can be creative and may be Richard Florida would be interested in doing a study too) provides inmates with more individual and collective legroom, surrounding each structure with deep moats of greenery: working gardens, training areas and sports facilities. Next, he tackled the community issues. Rather than caging inmates in massive cell blocks, he proposes units designed to house groups of up to 14 prisoners. For socializing within a wider community. The crazy part is he proposed to add a restaurant, barber shop and radio station. He did not include a spa. I would add an XBox room for them to play Grand Theft Auto, everyone there should beat the game in 15 minutes.

The London Design Festival will begin in a week and this is always one of my favorite events, unfortunately I cannot attend this year. Royal College of Art will be holding two major exhibitions, one is exploring new ideas in solar energy and he other is people-centered design. EPFL+ ECAL Lab, a new Swiss initiative to foster innovation at a crossroads between technology, design and architecture is presenting Sunny Memories.

Sunny Memories is a project that explores the potential of a newly invented technology: dye solar cells. Inspired by photosynthesis in plants, the technology harnesses solar energy with flexible, colored and even see-through surfaces. Over 80 students from the Royal College of Art's Design Products department, the California College of the Arts, the University of Art and Design Lausanne and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris took part in the project, under the guidance of top-level designers. Lots of design minds working together.

Concepts include a letter box which sends an e-mail when the post arrives; a bench which lights up public parks to make them safer and more welcoming; a signpost for cycle tracks which provides useful information to users; a charger enabling homeless people to recharge a small radio on the street; a radio where the cells capture almost all of the light spectrum; while a fruit bowl suggests a fundamentally new way of positioning solar cells.

Another great design idea is the Dream ball, a brand new soccer ball which is made by recycling famine relief packaging. Since a lot of children in third world countries cannot afford a soccer ball, they usually use pop can and other to use as soccer. A team of Korean designers observed that all aids provided by NGOs are usually packaged in boxes whether they contain medication, food and consumer products. Unplug design came up with an idea that can reuse these boxes to turn them into different types of balls depending on the size of the boxes. They can be made by simply cutting the perforated cardboard boxes and weaving the pieces together. Hats off to Hwng kung chan, Jin song kyou, Lee hak su, Han min hyun and Jun jin of the Seoul based design studio Unplug .

What Features Should Twitter Add Next? Twitter Muisc? Twitter Chat Or Twitter Sex?

They need to figure a way to make money. What’s their business model? Is their one? Probably not, there isn’t one. But think about a suite of features and services that can be built around Twitter. Use a little creativity I can come up with a few good ideas. How about special interest Twitter? How about voice-enable Twitter? How about Twitter comedy? Twitter Ask-a question? How about Twitter jam? How about Twitter music? How about Twitter sex? Ok Let's not go there.  I can develop interesting customer value propositions from each of the above.  Sure it will inspires you too.

Someone is working on one. A new third-party offering from Jajah (Jajah@call) is going into beta this week and allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing "@call @username"--where "username" is someone's Twitter ID--into any Twitter client.

Currently the calls are limited to two minutes, but the company will revisit this and see what makes sense. I think they should stick to the magic number 14, so make it 1 minute 40 seconds. It is kinds like a verbal tweet.

The best thing is that users can keep their phone numbers private, but still be able to have voice chats with just about anyone on Twitter. Since these calls are initiated by one person, the recipient may well not be online on the other end, or just want to ignore the call. No far no one has played with the idea that one can initiate voice communications directly between Twitter users. So this is a first.

Adobe Systems Is Paying $1.8 Billion To Acquire Omniture. So What's The Strategic Logic Behind The Idea?

When I heard the Adobe and Omniture deal on the Twitterverse, I started scratching my head. What is it I don’t know? Does Omniture has something that Adode really want and have to pay $1.8 billion for it? Whilst Omniture has suites of different products but there aren’t any that fits with what Adobe does. Does Adobe want to extend into developing a next generation full marketing suite using rich media applications that can benefit from Omniture’s analytic capabilities? Is this the "game changer" move that Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen talked about?

Adobe is one of the companies that I believe is best position to challenge Microsoft. My best guess is Adobe is trying to measure the impact of rich media in a way that it cannot be properly measured today, called it the science behind the art. I can see that developing advance dashboarding technology to allow marketers with a means of tracking the impact of cross-channel rich media campaigns on brand perception, purchase intent, customer acquisition, retention etc. This can help CMOs to synthesize disparate data into intelligence that is actionable and can be used to make sense of different creative execution..

The acquisition price of $1.8 billion represents a 45% premium to Omniture's average closing price for the last 30 days (higher than the average premium 25-30%). Omniture has about 1,200 employees and took in just under $300m last year. The two companies said the deal is expected to close during Adobe's fourth quarter and is subject to government approvals. Omniture will become a new unit within Adobe, with Omniture CEO Josh James continuing to lead the business as an Adobe senior vice president. Adobe said the deal should add to earnings in fiscal 2010.

This type of pricey acquisitions often raised questions around value creation. Historically, many mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their objectives, which are typically to accelerate growth, cut costs, increase market share or take advantage of other synergies or create dominance in an industry. AOL Time Warner charged up to $60 billion to its net worth for impaired goodwill from past deals underscores the burdensome legacy that many companies confront long after completing their acquisitions. And for eBay, Skype doesn’t worth anything close to $3 billion. EBay has written off roughly half the value of its investment in Skype in the first two years and is now finally getting rid of it.

So why do so many M&As fail to meet expectations? Or are those strategic assumptions realistic in the first place? And what can organizations do to improve the chances of a successful deal? Deals can fail without a “strategic-architectural” and “people/capabilities” related logic. Both need to make sense. Some quick stats here to give you some perspectives, McKinsey reviewed nearly 1,000 global mergers and acquisitions from 97 to 06 and compared share prices two days before and two days after each deal was announced. The analysis shows that value created in deals between 03 and 06 averaged 6% of the transaction values, whereas those between 97 and 00 average less than 2% and though an alarmingly high 58% of all acquiring companies are still overpaying for acquisitions - this is better than the 70% that were doing so in 2000. It is all about the acquisition premiums. A good strategic deal can still be a bad deal when premium is up and value creation potential is down.

Broadcast Media Is Reaching An Indsutry Breakpoint, And Hulu Is Fast Becoming A Key Part Of The New Industry Architecture.

Here are pictures of the Idea Couture team running several days of long sessions at the MIT.  Jeff, Partick, Adam and Cheesan were happy with the progress to date and I am so looking forward to see the first milestone. It is just a great project and a great client/partner.  Everyone is excited.

While we are on MIT, I came across some early research from MIT Media Lab on "Emotionally Reactive Television" , it is a very interesting concept. The idea was from the time TV was created, watching TV is considered as a static activity. TV audiences have very limited choices to interact with TV, such as turning on/off, increasing/decreasing volume, and traversing among different channels. The working thesis is that TV program should have social responses to people, such as affording and accepting audience’s emotional feeling with the growth of technologies. This paper presents HiTV, an Emotionally-Reactive TV system using a digitally augmented soft ball as affect-input interfaces that can amplify TV program’s video/audio signals. HiTV transforms the original video and audio into effects that intrigue and fulfill people’s emotional expectation. This is a super cool idea.

Some people think media should all be free. Just imagine a world where every form of media as we know is accessible for free. Is this the future? We’re reaching an industry breakpoint in the world of media, fight between pirates, broadcasters, entertainment labels, demanding consumers heats up, the stakes will get higher, and higher.

The convergence of PC and TV will accelerate. I’ve participated in debates and forums around the three screen convergence scenario in the telec industry. That means one provider who can deliver a converged/integrated video/entertainment experience to the TV, PC, and mobile device. This is the telcos’ dream. The idea is, you're watching something on your TV and you have to leave, you can continue to watch it on the go or so you pause it. Is this something we all wanted?

Analyst Laura Martin (Soleil Securities) crafted a worst case scenario for broadcast media. Martin believes Hulu will wipe out the network television business as we know it. In a recent report, she estimates that the online video hub will cost TV networks $920 per viewer in advertising if their audiences are cannibalized by Hulu. She believes the bulk of viewing on Hulu is indeed taking eyeballs from TV. It definitely makes some sense but there are still many wild cards.

Earlier In May she warned that the entire $300 billion market valuation of the television industry is threatened by the shift of programming from TV to the Web. Spearheading the overthrow of TV-as-we-know-it is Hulu, the premium video site backed by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney that offers content from the 120 partners. Martin is very confident that Hulu will succeed in the long term. With more than 38 million monthly viewers who watched 457 million streamed videos, it is 6th-most-visited video site, ahead of competitors like AOL, CBS Interactive and the Turner Network, according to comScore.

Hulu is seeding the value migration for its TV network creators as more content that becomes available on Hulu, the more likely it is that consumers will cut the cable cord altogether. Together with that trend is the less attractive economics of online video to advertisers, which offers higher CPMs but fewer ads. The industry estimates that Hulu runs four ads each hour at a $50 CPM compared to 32 ads during each hour of programming on TV at a $35 CPM. ($1,120-$200 = $920). Hulu did not disclosed actual ad sales or ad rates.

The TV everywhere idea is not new. Except it is getting real. I am not sure if it is so simple. There is a lot of uncertainty about the speed of deployment of new technologies and services, and of their adoption driven innovative user experience design. Hence the implications for spectrum demand and management of all these changes are far from clear; and convergence raises the fundamental question of whether current service definitions will make any sense by the end of next year.

Scenario Planning Are Comming Back Into Fashion. How Do You Develop Your "Wild Card" Scenarios To Make Your Strategy More Robust?

Every executive wants to know what’s the future will be like or what will likely to happen to their industry and what are the most disruptive forces will impact their bottom line or even survival. That’s why we use “Wild card” to paint scenarios. “Wild card” scenarios are in theory things that are not likely to happen, but most likely to create the highest impact and disruption. The idea of “wild card” scenarios is not to predict or calculate which scenario will occur, but to identify, where possible, important surprises that could occur.

I wonder how many banks had the current financial crisis as part of their “Wild card” scenario. Did someone paint this scenario in advance of the actual financial crisis? Or did anyone ever paint a scenario of an African American US President the last 20 years? Or the influence of social networks? Any good forecasters and long-range planners recognize that there are innumerable plausible futures to consider in any industry context. No finite set of future scenarios can ever hope to completely cover all possible surprises. You can develop a set of “wild cards” but might be missing the “wild wild cards”. So how do we do this? Here’s a 5-minute crash course.

The art of generating scenarios must include assumptions about what will (and won’t) occur – what trends are likely to continue, what changes are likely to occur, what events are not likely to take place etc. From a small reasoned set of assumptions, a set of scenarios can be developed to address remaining uncertainties and can be used for their intended purposes. Whether you apply it in the media industry or auto industry, it is by nature a strategic creative exercise. In the long range planning arena, assumption-based scenario exercise is basically built on the notion that a set of “wild card” scenarios should be developed for purposes of making more robust the plans that have been developed. It is a mechanism to test your strategy plan. Those plans have made assumptions about the future, not all of which are certain to come depending on many external factors.

The number one purpose of the “wild card” scenarios is to help strategic planners develop signposts for indicating that an assumption is being violated, shaping actions to keep the assumption from failing (to the extent possible), and hedging actions to prepare the organization in the event an assumption fails. Remember “Wild card” scenarios basically mean they are highly unlikely to happen. But what makes a “wild card” scenario useful is when the future it describes would produce disproportionately dire consequences. The classical case of an unlikely scenario with dire consequences is H1N1 pandemic virus mutates into a 'Superbug' and killing millions of people. The combination of its extreme unlikelihood and horrific consequences make its risk worth worrying about and planning for. It is not a dry academic exercise but an effective way to plan for the future. Most people don't realize there is an opportunity side of the equation, these exercises usually help unfold a lot of new opportunities too. So it is not only for planning for the big disasters.

According to Meyer and Miller:

• The world moves into the future as a result of decisions (or the lack of decisions), not as result of plans
• All decisions involve the evaluation of alternative images of the future, and the selection of the most highly valued offeasible alternatives
• Evaluation and decisions are influenced by the degree of uncertainty associated with expected consequences
• The products of planning should be designed to increase the chance of making better decisions The result of planning is some form of communication with decision makers

Is The Newspaper Industry Ready For A “Reset”? “Sharing” Is The New Advertising And “Content” Is The New Currency. Who Is The First To Press The “Reset” Button?

Can personalization save the newspaper? Should news be individualized? Should newspaper be social? The irony is that this steep economic downturn is a well-timed catalyst for progressive, pragmatic change in media business models – both print and broadcast. It is time for a “reset”.

I don’t need a big printer at home printing just for my morning paper. Do I need newspaper when my news feed now coming to my Blackberry and may be in the near future my Kindle? The question remains around the issue and the rationale that content producers and distributors must be paid. There is no free lunch for consumers. So far there are plenty of free lunches and there are no shortage of volunteers to provide those.

I’ve stopped reading newspaper for almost three years. Stopped my WSJ and NYT subscriptions and instead get all my news online. Now they go into my Blackberry inbox, so whenever I have a few minutes to kill (elevator or airport boarding) I just read them from my device and if there’s a good one, I will go back to it later and read it on web or share it on Facebook etc. Or I will just Google it. What’s the role of newspaper? It is time for a complete RESET and separates the “news” and the “paper”.

A report from the media private-equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson sees 2011 as the year the Internet surpasses newspapers as the nation’s biggest advertising medium. I generally don’t treat these data seriously but it is very likely. Everyone knows it is coming but no one knows what to do. I’ve spoken with many media execs and almost everyone understands the challenge but it is hard for them to see a solution. Between industry dogmas, current economic climate and crazy disruptive technologies, it is not an easy job being a senior executive in that industry.

Peter R. Vandevanter (MediaNews) in an interview with the New York Times argues that "individuated news" (MediaNews' trademarked term for this idea) will give readers the ability to "decide what they want to read and on what platform." Well readers already have that choice. Just look at Twitter. I can't imagine that people would want to have yet another big printer at home that is dedicated printing the morning paper plus stocking about paper for that. That just won’t work. Tool like FeedJournal is giving us a sense of one future possibility. With Google Reader and you want a magazine-style feed reader that you can use to read on your screen. I can easily come up with another dozen of ideas that is totally outside-the-box or in this case outside-the-column.

I will share one here and save the rest for my clients. Think paper as just a surface that we need to print news on. Take the paper away and ask what other surfaces can use for that purpose (other than electronic screen-based). There is a company Tinejet with a technology to customize printing on any pop cans. Imagine all pop cans are printed with featured stories whether it sports, music or politics? Soda cans might seem a fairly frivolous use of the technology; the Tonejet process can also be applied to plastic film, paperboard, and "an array of substrates. Readers can pre-configure to create a custom news experience and order pops for the office custom printed with fashion news if it is for fashion company or technology news for a software company etc.

Tonejet has signed a deal that it hopes will allow images of people of the moment to be printed onto drinks cans the day after they have hit the headlines. Or may be Twitter feeds for your beer? Or the most popular blog posts? Think 250 billion drinks cans are produced per year globally and who says pop drinks is not a media business? Instead of “newspaper’, call it “newspops”.

Need to get back to my day job, which is relentlessly helping clients to perform a do full 'reset".  I like this job.