innovation playground Idris Mootee

I Miss Bruce Nussabum's Business Week's Innovation Pullout So Much That I Decided To Publish A Magazine Focus On Design And Innovation.

I was having a casual dialogue with a friend/client in London about strategy making and paradox of resources management between investing in today’s business vs. tomorrow’s business. As usual I went into explaining the 50 reasons why innovation is so hard for larger organizations (and the 50 tactics to deal with each of them). There is no simple and quick answer to that question; it is like asking how a company can become more profitable. The answer is growing your top-line and control your bottom-line. That doesn’t help. The same for innovation, the quick answer from consultants is separate the business and treat it like a new venture. Well yes and no. If only if it is that simple.

The answer lies in how strategic planning is being carried out today and company quickly ignore any of non-quantitative and non-financial data. And there are a lack of tools for them to collectively imagine the futures and sense-making of massive data in large organizational settings is another challenge. And how different organizational designs can allow the strategic agility needed to cope with external shocks. There are so many things in our current management practices that are outdated and even business schools are behind. 

My friend was complaining that he didn’t find magazines such as Harvard Business Review useful or interesting to read anymore. For me, I stopped reading that about 3-4 years ago, especially after they switched to monthly from quarterly or bi-monthly and the quality of the editorial was not as good as before. At least 90% of the content are not of interest to me anymore. Not sure if it is me or it is them. But I am sure they are doing well from an advertising revenue perspectives as well as circulation, it has gone mainstream and mass market and did a great job optimization every revenue opportunities from the content. But it is no longer a publication for senior management at least that’s not what I think. But it is a solid publishing business with a healthy bottom line.

On the other hand, MIT Sloan Management Review and California Management Review have not been able to get beyond being academic journals but produce very high quality academic content. Both are more managerially friendlier than the other 100 plus academic journals basically catered for small academic communities.

Strategy+Business is the shinning star and has remained to be extremely relevant for senior corporate managers and the editorial and layout design is far better than HBR and others. I think it is the only magazine that circulation was still growing last year.  I think they get it right. I personally like the editorial direction, design and the format. There's a very consistent senior management perspective across all issues and riogr in editorial selection. And it is not academic, very practical in everysense.

Rotman’s magazine offers a lot of fresh ideas and has the most up-to-date ideas on management, although the design is pretty bad from a readability perspective. It is just difficult for me to read. I suspect their circulation base is very small.  LBS' Business Strategy Review has gone through a completely redesign and not sure why they decided to go for a smaller size, but it has become less academic and more managerially relevant, always there is a seriousness in it the LBS style. Very global in nature and almost aims solely at the C-suite and policy makers.

And then there are Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes and Business Week.  Other than Fast Company, all are very traditional business magazines and other than Fast Company, everyone is getting a bit boring. I don’t have time to read magazines, but I always love having a copy of Fast Company lying around and occasionally pick it up and scan for 5 minutes. There are also a dozen of local magazines un the UK, Netherlands and Australia on design and innovation, but they are very local in nature.

In view of that, I decided to publish our own magazines.  Here’s what I think is needed: We need a magazine that talks about innovation including design, art and business, which have traditionally been viewed as three totally different domains. There is no innovation magazine out there, Business Week used to have an innovation section which I like so much when Bruce Nussbaum was still there. That should be the future of Business Week. They missed that opporunity big time. Unfortunately Bruce left and there was a big restructuring. So far, only Fast Company is the sole business magazine that bridges the gap between design and business.

The idea of this new magazine is bring design and business together - the d-shool meets b-school idea. I want to see a magazine that is easy to read, non-academic and professionally relevant, provides alternative concepts and ideas on design, strategy and innovation, blurs the boundaries of design and business, talks design not in technical sense or as a craft but as a way of problems solving, introduce new innovation frameworks and processes to power up strategy, illustrated by contemporary photography and delivered in a cool and edgy editorial design. Some one mentioned it will be Wallpaper plus business and innovation and minus furnitures and fashion. Interesting. I do want a nice cover that makes you want to leave it on your coffee table. That’s kind of the implicit goals and will probably take us a few issues before we get it right.

Here's a frist glimpse of the cover, the cover pic was shot in Milan and the cover model was chosen from a dozen of models to best reflect elegance. The magazine name MISC stands for Movement/Intuition/Structure/Complexity. The name just came to me one night while I was talking on a conference call with a client, but I like it. First issue in newstands late Jan/early Feb 2011 in UK, US, Canada, France, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Here is a preview of the different cover designs. I am excited about it. And I really need to get some sleep.

 

 

 

Three Book Reviews For Your Summer Reading: Innovate The Future, Seizing The White Space; and The 24-Hour Customer.

I’ve a stack of books sitting on my coffee table waiting for me to write a review. I am reading less and less lately, from a historically high of 4 books a month to now 15 books a year. But I am buying more art books. And I review 2 dozen of books a year. My magazine subscriptions have been cut down from 40+ magazines to less than 10. Many including Wired and Forbes have dropped off from my list and I stop many of the journals, many are just repeating old things. It is like digging out bones from one graveyard and put them in another one.  I’ve picked three books to review and share with you this week:

First one is Innovate the Future: A Radical New Approach to IT Innovation by David Croslin (Pearson-Prentice Hall Professional 281 pages). The author is the president of a consultancy specializing in customer, product, and market innovation and previously served as Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard's $12 billion Communications, Media, and Entertainment division.

The book is organized into four parts:

• Understanding Innovation--the difference between innovation and invention; 
• Business and Technical Life Cycles-- product lifestyle, market life cycle, and stagnation challenges;
• Targeted Innovation-- innovating to dominate, conquer, or disrupt;
• Innovation Deployment-- valuing innovations and bringing them to market.

The book is organized in a very practical manner. The author brings out an important distinction between invention and innovation, which I think many are still confused. Patents are granted for inventions, not innovations. And customer buys innovative products, not inventive products. If you use this lens, more than 50% of products out there should not have made it into the shelves. I particular like the term used frequently in the book “Transformative Value”, it talks about how the three planes of idea, invention and innovation and how transformative value is needed to move to the next plane.

The author also identifies three innovation inflection points from a product sales perspective:

• Market Dominance Growth Flattens: As the acceleration of market dominance drop to a steady state when incremental inventions no longer act as disruptive innovation aftershocks.
• Customer Acceptance Falters: When incremental invention no longer drives an increase in the transformative value, customer begins to react negatively about paying for further incremental improvements. Similar to the idea of the S-curve.
• Customer Acceptance Ends: When negative incremental inventions become destructive inventions, the transformative value drops precipitously and customer no longer accepts cost increases.

This is a good book for beginners and provides a good coverage of innovation and product development for undergrad; I am not sure what they subtitled it as “A radical new approach to IT innovation?” It is really not about IT, it is a somewhat misleading title.

Seizing The White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal (Harvard Business School Press 288 pages) by Mark W. Johnson. Mark is chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company, which he cofounded with Prof. Clayton M. Christensen.

This is a very popular subject and there is a lack of books on this subject. The cover is nicely designed. The author starts with a simple framework for analyzing and creating business models. The framework is composed of four boxes: the customer value proposition, the profit model, the processes, and resources of the business.

• The customer value proposition delineates why the customer values the product or what the customer hires the product to do (the Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done metaphor which is getting a bit old to be honest and they had a good run with the idea).
• The profit model encompasses all the crucial financial dimensions that determine viability, including the revenue model, cost structure, target margins, and velocity (there is an over simplification on this one).
• The resources and processes boxes consist of what the business needs (people, technology, information, partnerships, etc.) and how the business delivers the customer value proposition within the bounds of financial viability.

The author uses a four-box definition of business models throughout the book to analyze different case examples and to illustrate a hopefully repeatable process of building new business models. The book is a good general read and is well written, but does not really contain any new ideas. I have a high expectation from this book but frankly a little disappointed. The business model thing is pulled too far away from other pieces of the innovation puzzle which are not addressed Johnson’s idea is to explore of white space and business models with a view of how that can fill their growth strategy gaps.

The author's approach to business models is overly and deceptively simple. It is like skipping three books and jump straight to business model consideration. My other disappointment is also in the case example used, Amazon, Apple iPod/iTunes, Dell, Zara, Tata, Southwest Airlines are very overused.

The last few chapters talks about how business model can be a repeatable process. I am not sure I agree with the approach, I wrote on the subject of Business Model and Business Strategy extensively hoping to bring some clarity to the topic. A recent survey found that more than 50% of executives believe that in the future, business model innovation will be even more important for competitive success than product or service innovation, so this book is clearly addressing the demand, but not providing enough rigor to deal with the subject.

The author addresses in the last chapters the inevitable challenges that always accompany changes especially when it is as radical as in many of the case studies. In particular, the author shows how it is all too easy for new strategy to be severely undermined when the incumbent management try to force it to live within existing business models. Again not a newly discovered insight, I was really hoping for something more.There need to be a follow up book to explain the "hows".

The 24-Hour Customer: New Rules for Winning in a Time-Starved, Always-Connected Economy (Harper Business 240 pages) by Adrian Ott . The author, founder of a consulting boutique Exponential Edge, is a consultant based out in SF with a prior 15 years of experience with HP. The central thesis of the book ultimately comes down to: Consumers aren’t only pressed for cash; they’re also pressed for time. As such, helping customer to save time can help companies have built profitable businesses.

She proposes a 4x4 consultantish quadrant to help looking at the these opportunities. Her framework relates a customer’s propensity to spend time with the propensity to pay attention. The significance of the stratification Adrian uses is that in order to play in one quadrant, one needs to develop specialized strategies and tactics in order to win in that quadrant.

As an example, to play in the “Habit” quadrant, one often has to understand the everyday routines of the customers. Ott cites the example of P&G’s Febreeze, which was a great product but initially failed in the market because people forgot to use it. Once P&G helped to tie the image of Febreeze with the notion of the daily task of tidying up a room, Febreeze turned the situation around into one of the fastest growing brands. Not sure this is the best example, this is more of another 'job-to-be -done" type of approach. I think there could be better examples to illustrate her framework.

The idea of time-value economics is not new, the author did a fantastic job in providing a fresh lens to help innovators to look for new opportunities in a systemic way simply by asking the questions "What is competing for the customers' time?" and "How to provide value to this context that is greater than what the customer realizes today?" 

At a time when most businesses are struggling to find new source of customer value, Adrian’s fresh approach to time is value is a breath of fresh air. This book is worth adding to your summer reading list. Even advanced marketers can still benefit from this book. I think the publisher can use a better title than the current one. Honestly the content is more attractive than the title.

What Do You Know About Business Model Innovation? People Are Confused About The Difference Between Business Model, Strategy And Innovation.

Most people think they know what a business model is. But when you ask them about the "strategy' then they wondered what they're talking about. Most of the time they mean business strategy (what a company does and how to make money) and use the words interchangeably. That’s fine. Then some people even get more confused when they apply that in innovation context. They mean changing or rethinking the business itself, including its core, boundaries, activities and capabilities. That’s strategic innovation. Business model innovation could be part of the outcome. But let’s face it, how many companies out there need to (and can afford to) rethink their business models?

A company can innovate strategically but with no need to change its business models. After all, there are only less than 10 business models out there, it is not like you can do unlimited creative explorations. At its simplest, a business model simply about exploring various ways to develop, improve or optimize your revenue stream(s) and matching them to your customer value propositions. Here are some examples of how people missed the term: 

Google is probably perceived as one of the most innovative companies today. They are essential exploiting technology innovation and you can say they have created an innovative culture. But there is nothing innovative about their business model design. Selling ads and sponsored links, not different from other media in that case, but there are so many people saying Google has an innovative business model.

And think about Amazon.com, it is an online retailer started with books and now expanding into new categories and even products. OK, it is a pretty innovative company but there is nothing innovative about their business model. They are an online direct merchant even though they open up their channel for others to sell their products and take a cut, that doesn’t qualify as business model innovation. That’s retailing except there is no physical store, just technology infrastructures.

What is Facebook’s business model? Not sure there is one, but so far it is advertising. And what options are available to them, not many. You don't need a strategist to perform a business model design innovation exercise, I can tell you in 5 minutes. I’ve read so much garbage about people running seminars on business model innovation, these are feel business yoga classes for those who knows nothing about real business strategy or Jnana yoga.

I’ve just finished writing 90% of our Innovation and Strategy Training package material, lots of good stuff and we will be using them to help our clients to truly innovate from organizing to planning and activation. These materials can turn anyone with a few years of good general business experience into an innovation strategist in a few days, and smarter than those who write books and articles on business model innovation who are as confused as the people who they talk to.

To strategically innovate or complete redesign of a company business model, first there must be a need, or strategic intent. Driven by a business strategy that forces the rethinking of the business models. Not the cart before the horse. Also one must understand what options exist and the migration paths. Strategic innovation can sometimes include business model redesign in combination with product, service, social, technology and experience innovation.

Not every company need to make radical changes in its core business itself, and in some instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as it is in the case of Blockbuster, Kodak, Palm or GM. Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (a strategy to play a new game). This means complete transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create value in a new way. This include a business strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. Not every company needs it. But every company needs to innovate around their products/service/experience/delivery/technology in order to remain competitive, all without rethinking their business models. My strategy and innovation material includes methods and tools that are rigor and effective, sometimes reading these junks can actually confused me.