innovation playground Idris Mootee

Some Celebrate Failure. Some Even Romaniticize Failure. The Best Strategy Is To Avoid It!

The new M/I/S/C Bounce Back issue is out in newstand.This issue is packed with great articles about how companies should deal with adversity. It is one of the best issues ever.

For the last few years, magazines have made failure romantic, and start-ups love their failure stories. It’s true, there are some great stories out there: at the top of the list is Steve Jobs who was fired from the very company he founded. J.K. Rowling took Harry Potter to 12 publishers; all of them turned her down. Walt Disney filed for bankruptcy in his early twenties.

And there was Bernie Marcus who was the son of a poor Russian cabinetmaker from New Jersey who got fired from his job working at hardware store. With US $2 million in capital, Marcus and a partner went into business and opened a different format store with hangar-size, no-frills outlets, friendly service and a huge selection of products, they called it Home Depot. For Marcus failing was about character building and part of the journey to excellence.

These stories are both motivational and inspirational. Magazines from Fast Company to Harvard Business Review jumped on the bandwagon, selling the message it’s ok, even cool, to fail. Some people take this as a ticket to push bad ideas forward. Sometimes people carry failure as a badge of honor. There was a guy who wanted to join our company; his resume read ‘six times failure, a proud veteran.’ When I asked him whether he had any confidence that he will succeed the next time, he said no. It sounds like Vegas to me. The organizations we design and operate are not agile enough to support smaller experiments and the bigger the company is, the harder it is to bring innovation to the market.

Companies are using the stage-gate approach, taken from product development, to the innovation process, which is a big mistake. They’re also applying the wrong metrics to measure innovation projects. But the fact is failure is a bad thing – if you can avoid it, avoid it. Instead of putting too much focus on those who ‘made it’, and their struggles and resilience, we should be really be focusing on teaching people how to avoid failure in the first place.

The problem is we should not encourage people to fail, but should not penalize them either. We should be encouraging them to take calculated risks. The danger I am seeing is when young people embrace failure in the wrong way. It almost seems like they’re trying to race through more failures to earn a badge, rather than trying the best they can to give the idea the best chance. This ‘failure movement’ is mostly supported by mediocre people who have few ideas and cannot execute. They continue to romanticize failure, to the extent that they start to expect it. We need to prepare for failure, but never expect it. The failure movement is growing an irresponsible attitude toward risk-taking and Design Thinking.

Just because you fail many times, doesn’t mean that you have a better chance of emerging from challenges unscathed. It gives people an excuse to think harder and learn to apply Design Thinking principles to model scenarios to avoid or minimize failure. Most innovation can’t avoid failure. In fact failure is often by design, it is part of the process of iterative development and market learning. I don’t consider that failure.

Prototyping and learning from mistakes can ultimately lead to a higher chance of success, but it also de-risks project mistakes that usually come from the weaknesses of our human mind, such as hindsight bias. We should be teaching people how to deal with those biases.

The failure movement often falls prey to both of these biases. How many people can you name that went broke while attempting various business ventures, and are still broke? Can you write a list of these people more easily than a list of successful entrepreneurs who overcame immense obstacles to succeed? I think we are giving ‘failure’ too much credit.

I can see why those stories sell, they’re comforting to read and somehow people feels closer to success. This is not the case. If you’ve failed 50 times it doesn’t mean you’re closer to making it. Let’s stop over-glorifying failure and avoid the pain. We know what it means when you have your fingers burnt once. The smartest way is to teach people to learn from Other People’s Failure (OPF). There is so much we can and should learn from it.

When I teach my strategy courses in master level programs, 80% of my teachings are around how companies fail and how to avoid it in the first place. For me, it’s called ‘strategy.’ There are so many free lessons our there, you don’t need to pay the price to feel the pain. Someone did it already. There is no need to romanticize failures, instead, we should learn how to best avoid failure and, in the worst-case scenarios, be prepared to bounce back from it. That’s what Design Thinking can do.

For the full story, pls see the June issue of M/I/S/C which is available in 26 countries and digital subscription is available through Zinio.

Media Disruption Is Not Slowing Down. Mobile Is Now The Center Of A New Ecosystem.

The media business is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. When people asked me about my magazine and the economics of that, they were saying why am I in publishing business. Well that is not my core business, just a hobby. It has been almost three years since the first publication of MISC and readership is growing nicely. We're now in 28 countries and we have have the digital version. I am getting a lot of positive feedback from readers from all over the world. Perhaps I should make the next issue the thickest one. This is the first cover that was shot in Milan. And the next cover will be shot in Shanghai.

The media business is certainly not easy with the never-ending technological disruptions we are experiencing and new behaviors keep evolving, we are nowhere near the end of it. The word social media makes no sense anymore as it is already main stream doesn’t matter how you look at it. Many traditional media types continue to cling to an old way of doing things, based largely on making minor adaptation to existing approaches and some are relentlessly experimenting with finding new revenue stream, largely still through advertising or sponsorship.

There aren’t many new opportunities for business model innovation if you take a strategic view, people are still thinking about advertising or sponsorship. Yahoo and Google are the same. The hybrid model of readers’ empowerment and buttoned-down professional journalism is already fullyoptimized. Media executives are spending a lot of time thinking about the future of their industry and what it will look like in 2020. 

Five years ago everyone is thinking about the online model and suddenly the tablets came and changed everything. And what’s next? Multiple screens device, new interactivity through voice, gestures and more external data sources, and glasses and watches etc. No one knows how content discovery and consumption model will evolve given the abundance of choice consumers have today. Neutrality is probably not the best interest for the media industry.

Media business is still suffering from an identity crisis, at least for another decade. The business model will not change, we will still end up paying for content through transactional, subscription or advertising models although there will be more flexibility on how we purchase them. With every person with a smart phone also has a video camera that can turn them into amateur journalists, news will become real-time and shows us different views of any event. And contextual bits will be consistently updated and events unfold. The Twitters of the world are the instant updates and these short bursts will create more noises than news value and readers need someone to break them down into manageable pieces.

Audience now lives in a multi-screens world. They can choose between raw news and organized news. The three key drivers of mobile disruption are hyper-local (geolocation), integration with home appliances and digital payments. The three together can put mobile at the center of an entirely new ecosystem. It is not merely another form factor. It is the biggest leap forward since writing first arrived about 7,000 years ago, which only impacted a tiny percentage of our population. Word of mouth was the only “information system” for most of humanity and now that will be turbo-charged by mobile as it unlocks an incredibly deep desire and capacity among us (humans) to share personally relevant information and feelings such as “I am waking up happy to a sunny morning” etc. These personal information is competing for attention with other news. And for me, I'd rather be reading what my friends are saying than the news. CNN is depressing.

Idea Couture Is Ready To Take Innovation And Design Thinking To The Next Level.

This has been a very tough two months for me in terms of time and I have not been spending much time writing my blog as much as I used to. It is getting a bit difficult to find the time as we were going through a reorganization, adding new offices, putting new management system in place and at the same time trying to finish my two books on the weekends which will be published in May and Oct this year.

I am excited about my new Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation book that I hope to fill a gap in the market place. And management of the company is taking more and more of my time. So the time I can afford to touch projects is shrinking, I think I only spend 25-30% on projects these days instead of 40%. And people think I spend a lot of time on my MISC magazine, the reality is it is less than 2% of my time. I have a great team helping me with that. I only pick the theme, cover girl and the designs.

We have always designed Idea Couture to be a company that is agile, high style and deserve great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because we want style, speed and substance. Not everyone can make it. I remember someone said something like "Out of difficulties and impossibilities grow miracles." Perhaps we’re naïve. Idea Couture is not a place for small thinkers or people with big egos. It is place for people who believe in being AWESOME and won’t spend time fighting for excuses.

I take pride of seeing people that I mentor growing everyday. We’ve come a long way since launching what we called an innovation firm – whatever that means. It is not a design firm with MBAs; or management consulting firms with some designers or digital agencies calling themselves innovation agencies. We are built from the ground up to do what we’re supposed to do – we work with organizations to uncover innovative ideas that sustainably grow market share or create new markets through powerful customer experiences innovation. We are close to the completion of our reorganization and I am very excited to wait for more new people joining us every week.

Our technology team is amazing and we’re now adapting new methodologies so we can deliver better and faster cross-platform solutions. Our strategy team is growing and growing and have so much untapped potential (unsolicited resumes are flying in dozens everyday).

Our design team is world class and I personally make sure they will remain the best all the time. They not only produce great work, but also open minded and egoless, and fun. At Idea Couture, design is at our very core, not the surface. Design here is under transformation and it is not done within a studio, it is done in the real world in future tense. Design is where technology and art breakeven and where love and logic intersects.

Our insight team is AWESOME with all capital and it is our intellectual powerhouse. When the company advanced forward to a new stage, our foresight capability was not meeting the standard that I required both in terms of strategic knowledge and professionalism. So we needed a full upgrade. Now we have a new global team and a plan to fully integrate that into our innovation process.

We have no time for amateurism. People are committed to giving their best. We just launched our idea couture culture page, which is my personal most favorite part of our site that best represents us. It shows us who we are as individuals which really what this company is all about. People are here for a reason, not for a job. They find their best and it is our job to bring out their bests. It is not always easy. It is how they find meanings. There is a strong correlation between job satisfaction and meaning.

We refuse to act like a "grown-up" company; however at times the company and will always want to think we’re small even though we have 6 offices around the world.

We refuse to act like a “think tank" as we don’t just think, we do.We don't just produce report, we ation on them. We use visual output for sensemaking and mobilizing change that increases organization adaptability and agility.

We refuse to act like we "know it all" but we believe we are equipped to find the best available solutions.

We refuse to accept any "best practices" as we are the one who invent “next practices”.

We refuse to accept that “amateur foresights” is better than no foresights. Actually it is better to have no foresights than wasting time on amateur futurists.

We refuse to accept that "ideas are everything", in fact ideas don’t worth much. They are cheap. There are no shortage of people with ideas and can never execute anything. The art of jump starting innovation is strategic commitment and it is more valuable because nothing happens until someone do something.

We refuse to accept people with "big egos", it is simply not part of our culture. But there is one nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk and think about other people at all.

Idea Couture is a working prototype and will remain a working prototype in time to come.

Apple's Magic Is Not Repeatable. Innovation Means Reinvention. Not Taking A Page From Someone's Playbook. Here's The Proof.

Apple magic is not repeatable. And even if you think by poaching senior talents from them. The same can be applied to many great companies large and small. It is too simplistic to think that stealing talent from great companies larger or small can help a company to repeat the magic.

Here is a good example when Ron Johnson, former head of Apple retail joined JC Penny as CEO, his plan was to reinvent the company. From when Johnson took the reins Nov 1, 2011, the stock price dropped in half. He received $53.3 million in compensation for 2011 and his pay package for 2012 was $1.9 million, no bonus after the company booked a $1 billion loss for the year. Yes a $1 billion loss!

Johnson's strategy to bring some Apple Store magic to JCPenney was not innovative or strategic. His strategy was to move away from price and he started by taking off any discounts and introduce a store-within-a-store design that emphasized experience over value. According to him,"Inherently, department stores have significant advantages compared to all other retailers." I don't agree with that statement with the exception in some markets such as China, Korea and Latin America.

When he took over the job of the CEO, he said that successful retailers will be "the ones that start from scratch and figure out how to create fundamentally new types of value for customers" by asking "how do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers' lives?" Good questions to start with but did they end up with the right stategy? JCPenney’s business model needs reinvention, not just the retail format or taking a page from Apple’s playbook.

It takes more than that to transform a very out-dated business model. It was a bad idea in the first place to abandon the discounting that customers had come to expect, it’s a behavior they are not going to change. Instead they should embrace the idea of “discounting” and innovate around it. JCPenny wants their customers to feel "special" about discovering these discounts. And not getting rid of it. Reinvent it! Make it fun! Make it social! I can give you 10 ideas of how to innovate around the “discounting”. The backlash against this tactic was so strong that Johnson was forced to bring back sales and discounts last quarter. That was a big mistake. Innovation needs to be strategic. Design without strategy is useless.

JCPenny needs to rethink the needs of these middle-class shoppers that are shrinking in both total size and wallet. It should move down to aim at the expanding highest of the lower income group.This is where the opportunities are.

Retail is a tough business overall and there weren't a lot of innovation happening. Those giant interactive screens, talking mannequins and RFID tags are bringing the virtual into ‘real’ retail spaces and tablet computers are turning up at pos’ from independent boutiques to multi-national chains. There are also companies working on virtual ‘touch’ for users to ‘feel’ the texture of products they want to buy. While still in development stage, the innovation would address one of the main problems of shopping online. Shopping is as much a tactile experience as a visual one.

In a creepy addition to the tech enabled retail experience, mannequins may now be watching you as you browse. Via built in cameras and facial recognition software mannequins are now able to collect data on your race, age, gender and shopping habits to assist retailers in their marketing strategies. While it’s not quite new, retailers have been using in store cameras to collect data for years, the addition of facial recognition is making it a simpler process. Big brother/sister is watching you shop!

This Is Just The Begining Of The Mobile OS Battle. Plenty Of New Players Will Join The Game.

The mobile OS war is getting more interesting and the current market share battle is between iOS and Android will go on for a while. Will there be a breakout of it will be more like a Pepsi vs. Coca Cola market share battle that has been lasting for decades? Android is getting better momentum the last two years and I expect that to continue. I think the overall market share is stabilizing and the other two Windows and Blackberry will remain niche players. Newcomers will join the game and there are three in the US and they are Mozilla, Tizen and Canonical. There are a few emerging ones in Asia and they all worth keeping a close watch, especially those up and coming companies in China.

In China Android accounts for 86% of all new smartphones sales and there are three times as many Android users than the US. The business model is basically freemium, developers hoping to make money from in-app purchase. The Android ecosystem is growing like crazy as people find iPhone is getting a little boring and may be too restricted.  

There will be surprises that in the next 12 months perhaps cool smart phones from China that came from nowhere selling for half the price and have even better performance.  There was a private lab test done on the top 10 most popular smartphone in China a few months back and the result was 5 of the 10 most popular Android devices from local Chinese manufacturers perform better than the imports. They include the Lenovo A750 and the XIAOMI MI 1S.  

Apple is watching the market closely and also struggling whether to add a stylus for the next iPhone,  it will be a tough one as they have always been strongly against it and the Samsung Galazy stylus is nicely designed. There are no definite right or wrong in this business and the behavior changes so quickly.

Expect some big design shift for the next iteration of Android that leverages more of the Hybrid Card layout.  Android needs to jump into the next game in terms of user experience and it demands a shift in overall visual language from current Jelly Bean paradigms to something really different. The jump from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich was a big jump. I believe Android will be looking at gestures control beyond the screen, perhaps the back and even the side. Apple already has a patent filed 2006 relating to using gestures on its back and a recent Google patent might bring that concept to next generation of Android phones. The principle is as easy as touching the back casing of the Android device in order to interact with the gadget and that can drastically improve the user experience. Imagine back tapping to change page or call list etc. It will be powerful when combined with acoustic feedback. The battle of mobile interfaces design has barely begun. And Facebook is joining the party.

How Imagination Can Create The Future? Start With Those Old Comic Books and Sci-Fi VHS Tapes From The Flea Markets.

For centuries we show our human spirit with stories about our glories,hopes, desires and dreams for a better future, one filled with modern machines that enable us to do things we long to do from being invisible or traveling in flying cars or telepods (may be not telepods as I always worried that something would go missing during the transmission). These stories manifested itself in art, comics, fictions, movies and even science discoveries.

What was known as “futurism” is the artistic movement that began in Italy and Russia that fast-forward us to the future of the machine age into progressive state of mind. Futurism also championed speed, technology, science, youth and also a lot of uncertainties. It's mantra was that the answers to humankind’s problems lay in the future driven by technology – and not the past. The main literary work of the movement was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, and generally considered the beginning of Futurism. I still enjoy reading that once in a while.

To invent the futures that we desire, business and government leaders need to see things in new ways that trigger their imagination to dream of new possibilities. Many of them are too "stuck" in the present. That’s when Design Thinking comes into play. Design Thinking is not just about understanding  people's needs.  It can also be used to bring people's imagination to propel us into the future. To see the future, Design Thinkers are equipped to creating guidepost for developing strategic foresight. It is called Future Casting.

Future Casting is how people from the past thought of the future. I remember visiting an exhibition in Prague where artists from the former USSR were imagining how the future was like with its futuristic art of space vehicles. Those Russian Futurists were fascinated with the optimism, speed, and restlessness of modern machines and urban life. They were actually performing Future Casting for the public.

I grew up watching Thunderbird and Ultramen and as a boy and they were the only things that were available for me that I could use as a guidepost for imagination. Funny enough, Ironman is like an unfinished prototype based on Ultraman design with the same battery problem. Ultraman highlighted the bottleneck of all technologies decades ago which is the battery. From iPhone to the latest Boeing 787 we still have not solved the battery problem.

We have always tried to look into the future and try to figure out what comes next. Sometimes we create fictions, fantasies of what may come. Will some of these fictions ultimately become real? There is no scientific evidence for this, I suspect the percentage of fiction becomes real is way higher that some thought our research based predictions that never made it close to become real. These materials open a window into the past and in term a perspective of the future… how the future should have been or their fears of how they were afraid it would turn out.

The realities of tomorrow are the fictions of today. If you want to have good strategic foresights, don’t hire designers or futurists. Hire Sci-Fi writers! And pair them up with behavioral economists and anthropologists and you will get good foresights.

The latest issue of MISC The Gadget Issue which has a special design feature Project 2020 about the future of sex, social and beauty. There is also the main feature How New Technologies With The Power To Evolve, Disolve, Disrupt and Democratie Industy which is fun to read. MISC is now in bookstores in 26 countries. And you can get it from Amazon too.

Strategic Foresights Is Used To Make Sense Of Patterns Of Threats And Opportunites. Companies Barely Understand How To Use It.

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”   ― Alain de Botton

What's the future of interactive glass windows, interactive eyeglasses and 3D mirrors etc? Via a pair of glasses information and apps can be projected into the air and controlled by gestures and eye movement or just a thought? It is hard to imagine what's the future of Nokia, Ericsson or even Blackberry. What does strategy mean to these companies when there are so much unknowns?

Strategic planning is changing and many organizations are not designed or equipped for the changes we see happening. And with many business models going out of date in such rapid mode, every manager is trying to find ways to see the future. And they must adopt a different approach and mental mindset as it tries to embrace disequilibrium. The ability to imagine, analyse and prepare for the future is becoming very important. It does not only apply to technology or biotech industries. It is about survival for every business.

Preactivity basically guides all approaches to future studies, forecasting, scenario planning and strategic foresight. Proactivity aims to bring about the desired changes by means of strategic planning to effectively deal with not just the speed of change but also complexity, uncertainty and paradox and that's the reason why Strategic Foresight goes hand-in-hand with Deisgn Thinking. The future arises from a constant stream of individual, organizational and policy decisions, strategies and commitments that have to be made in the present, with as much understanding of risks, possibilities, wisdom and foresight as possible.

Strategic Foresight is not a tool kit. Or some wild card ideas.It is not fancy (and useless) diagrams or algorithm. It is both a process (transformational) and an outcome (results in knowledge and artifacts for, from, and about the future). Strategic Foresight is not about predicting the future. Rather it is more about framing, reframing, informing, opening up minds, and inspiring strategic dialogues about possible futures. You still need a good understanding of industry economics in order to apply it. It is not a design exercsie.

Strategic Foresights is still in its early stage of adoption and takes a while before it comes a core part of strategic planning. It enables companies to use weak signals to identify opportunities and threats. Weak signals are defined as poorly understood drivers of change and/or signals which are currently unconnected with a trend, industry or market and appear irrelevant on the surface. The identification and correct interpretation of weak signals can be vital to the success or survival of an organization.

An executive team equipped with powerful foresight capability will be able to make sense of, and respond to, the emerging pattern of threats and opportunities, and to use this understanding to manage risk and capitalize on opportunitie. It is not just about keeping the bad from not happening, afterall business is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual reframig and reshaping your plan.

Can Gadgets Save Healthcare? What's The Next Big Disruptive Technology That Can Reinvent Healthcare? But The Fact Remains That Our Health Care System Sucks, And Will Continue To Suck.

I like the lastest Bond movie and the only thing I missed is smart gadgets. Bond needs to have latest tech toys. I don’t want to see Bond becoming Jet Li. Half the fun of watching a Bond movie is reveling in the odd ingenuity of the clever devices. Bond needs all the tech innovation he could use. Her Majesty's government is not investing enough in innovation for sure. Mi5 has a lot of catch up to do. Perhaps they should retain Idea Couture to develop an innovation roadmap? I might get a call from Sir Jonathan Evan!

In Bond's world, the smart phones have access to intelligent databases; miniaturized radio homing beacons operate on their own encrypted frequencies, the cars come equipped with bullet proof glass—semi-autonomous or remotely controlled—and become invisible to the naked eye. Implantable, traceable RFID chips confirm your identity and carry your medical history. And a smart scan to show when enemies are nearby too. And no, Bond does not need speed dating gadgets at all.

Bond gadgets may have once seemed far-fetched, but in our tech-addled age most are at least possible, if not realized already. In 2009 Harvard Chemists collaborated to successfully develop a low cost micro-fluidic "lab-on-a-chip" (actually it was on paper) solution to identify various biomarkers related to the AIDS virus. This idea of a miniaturized bio-chemical lab is a solution currently being funded and developed by DARPA to get ahead of the bio-weapons curve.

In Casino Royal, a similar device helped save Bond's life after he was poisoned. After plugging into a cell phone, the data from his blood sample was transmitted in real-time back to HQ for analysis. A dedicated team of medical professionals including molecular biologists; immunologists, neurologists and virologists provided advice on how to mitigate the sticky situation of being infected with a designer biological agent from half a world away. The biggest idea here is this can become the premium health service for those who can afford it, specialists are all standing by and all one click away to saving your life. That’s an innovation.

Today, self-diagnostic technologies in tandem with the hundreds of personal health and wellbeing apps have emerged to take advantage of our over-connectivity. We are all a click away from massive global expert networks for information and advice related to described symptoms. Our helathcare economics is not working doesn't matter becasue the cost is too high and doesn't matter who is paying for it. The biggest opportunity for smartphone is not smartphone, it is Personal Health Device. That’s a $20 billion plus industry from the start. We need geniuses and mad scientists and designers to make his real and affordable.

“All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards thier goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singlenee of purpose could have given focus to thier genius, would have kept them in the groove of purpose. Mania ... is as priceless as genius.”

                                            ― Ian Fleming, Doctor No

This is anexcerpt from an article co-written with M. Lincez to be appeared in the March issue of MISC magazine the Gadget Issue.

Now I Can Read Your Tweet On Your Dress. Or You Can Program Your Dress For Any Special Occasions.

It was at least 10 years since I was talking about wearing technology and fashion in conferences and 10 years later we don't see any mass commercialised products out there. It is another example of innovative technologies usually takes way longer that we imagine for diffusion for a number of reasons. May be this is the year we start to see it coming.

There are a few out there working hard to make it happen. CuteCircuit is one of them. It is a wearable technology and design company based in Shoreditch, London. Founded by Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz, the company incorporates LEDs, telecommunications, and smart textiles into fashion, bringing a sense of style and tech fun to wearable tech. I visited their studio a month ago and talked to them about the challenge and opportunity.

Rosella's background is in fashion, having worked at Valentino and Esprit, while Genz was an artist and anthropologist. The pair met while studying interactive design at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy in 2001 and began to collaborate almost immediately. The first collection Rosella and Genz designed, called TransforMe, was based on the idea that garments could change shape, color or illuminate during the course of the day in response to the mood and activity of the wearer.

The most well known piece from the collection is the Kinetic Dress, a dress with embroidered electroluminescent fibers that light up in response to the wearer's movement. The dress features Victorian style mutton-sleeves and a train, and is made from black elastic that creates a sleek, body hugging silhouette. And their famous “Aurora Dress”  which was designed for an opera singer, features 10,000 LED lights and hundreds of Swarovski crystals.

The fashion industry’s manufacturing system has been using the same supply chain design for many years, disrupting this process, even slightly, has to be done slowly. Facing the manufacturing process has helped refine the products and streamline designs, and has given the opportunity to create viable products. Like any other industry innovation, the biggest barrier is always the supply chain. The industry needs a new flexible supply network to achieve scale. Perhaps in another 3-5 years. May be more. I can't wait to see when we all have a "smart" wardrobe.

 

Forget About Being A "Manager". You Need To Become An "Innopreneur". There Is A Huge Demand For Corporate Entrepreneurs / Innovators Everywhere.

The time for New Year resolutions is here again, not sure if we're all up for the challenge as we can expect more intensified competition, more uncertainty both in politics and economicsl and more disruptive re-organization for all big companies. It is the time for self-reflection and thinking about what do you really want to accomplish this year and what how to bring out the best in you.  If you’re an emerging manager or young leader you should read this.

Drop whatever idea you might have of "what is a manager" in your mind. You don't want to be a "manager". Manager is really not the right title although “managing” is part of the job but a smaller part of it. You are a manager, a knowledge worker, a leader and an entrepreneur. It is easy to learn the skills of being a manager, but very hard to be a great leader and an entrepreneur.

Let me clarify. An entrepreneur doesn’t mean you should be running your own business or start-up; what I am talking is a state of mind. Look around you, do you find a lot of “entrepreneurs” around you? Is your team comprised of people who take ownership of any project or task that comes across their desk or inbox and apply design thinking skills to accomplish them? Do they embrace complex challenges, team skills, and take personal responsibility – for successes and failures alike? Do they think about the good of the larger them than optimzign for their own career gain? Do they provide leadership even they do not have the formal authority?

Corporate entrepreneurs are basically innovators. These “innopreneurs” are hard to find and it is far more difficult to be a corporate entrepreneur than a start-up person. It is relatively easy to say let’s have your start-up and honestly most of them are no more than just an excuse or a way to escape. Entrepreneurship is not about proving a job for yourself, it is about aligning your passion with the right capability and resources that link that to a big idea that create economic value. And not afraid of the challenge of working with the elephant.

A corporate entrepreneur s someone who works in a large corporate setting and his/her job is to create new growth opportunities from coming with the big ideas to launching/managing a corporate venture that is distinct from the parent company either at an adjacency or something that could disrupt the corporate parent. He/she needs to be creative about how to leverage the parent’s assets, market position, core capabilities, brand, channel or other resources. I am estimating that less than 1% of corporate managers are corporate entrepreneurial material or has the quality to sustain as one.

“Corporate innopreneurship” requires the following attributes: (1) a leader that are comfortably to act without authority; (2) a design thinker that enjoy solving complex business challenges with limited information; (3) a manager who understands his everyday job is to resolve dilemmas and not just dreamers; (4) an explorer who can navigate even there are changes in scenarios; and (5) an organizer who can manage people and resources in an agile manner. Every company needs a few of these to achieve innovation-led growth.  Everyday I look around me and try to identify them. The difference may be not only the way they think and self-motivate, but they way they’re being nurtured.

If last year wasn't a great one for you, don't think back. No one can go back in time to change what has happened. So work on your present to make yourself a wonderful future. Happy New Year!

Introducing The 4P’s of Management: Peanut, Peter, Penis, and Perfection.


I used to interview between 200 to 350 fresh MBA grads a year, and many barely understand the basic principles of management let alone strategy and organization design. Most people developed some functional skills attending B-schools but most fail to develop a senior management perspectives despite those case studies method of teaching. Here’s the 4Ps that they need to teach in B-schools.

Here’s the Management 4Ps which I invented to train young managers: The Peanut Effect, The Peter Principles, The Penis Theory, and The Perfectionist Syndrome. If you have not heard all or any one of them, don't worry.


The Peanut Effect can be best described when referring to the lottery. The main reason why so many people play the lottery is because they place disproportionate weight on small probabilities. People don’t realize the true cost of a lottery ticket is a “peanut” and they don’t realize how the cost adds up over time. The same can be applied to buying snacks, coffee, magazines and other “cheap” items. If you are marketing your product or services, what you can learn from this is that you need find a way to emphasize the big benefits even if the probability to reap them is low. This can apply to bringing a vision to the company. Think big. Think possibilities and not only probabilities.

The Peter Principle is a belief that, in an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, that organization's members will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." In more formal parlance, the effect could be stated as: employees tend to be given more authority until they cannot continue to work competently. It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise. Make sure you promote people to a job that is beyond their level of ability no matter how they try to justify the case. It doesn’t matter how long people have been on a job, sometimes younger manager can rise to the challenge in a shorter time. Experience helps .. but not always.

The Penis Theory is about finding your core. Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the theorized reaction of a girl, during her psychosexual development, to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considers this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. In contemporary culture, the term is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to women who wish they had a penis – lucky you don't need one to succeed in business. What you can learn from this is that too many marketers are spending too much time trying to be someone else. Often companies try and emulate the “big-wigs” and try to be like Apple, Amazon, or even Google. These companies however are spending too much time and too many resources trying to be something they are not.  It is more productive to understand who you really are – and what’s your core?

The Perfectionist Syndrome is common among high performance workplace. I have come across many high performers who are perfectionists – but not perfectionists in the true sense because when you look at their work, it is evident that they are too afraid to make calculated mistakes. And as a result, they often reach a performance ceiling. Perfectionism muffles our ability to hear, listen and learn and what you can lean from this is that perfectionism is impossible.

Let me tell you the dirty secret of management – forget about in search of excellence. There’s not a business anywhere in the world that is without problems or a business model that is perfect. Business is complex and imperfect. You can make a spreadsheet perfect but not the financials. Every business is managed by imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect consumers. Empathy makes up for the imperfection. Business is not a machine.

Is Design Thinking Built-To-Last Or Just Another Management Fad?

I have been teaching and practicing design thinking for business for the almost ten years and over the years I saw the growing interest of design thinking among both business and design communities. Take away the aspiration side for now including notion such as design thinking to change the world etc., design thinking in business is barely understood let alone bring practiced widely. This is the time when businesses have been desperately looking for the next big thing - think the management “wonder drug”.  Lets put some thought into this, is “design thinking" helpful or is it just a hype that is exporting the dogmas of design to business strategy? Design industry is having their own set of big issues.

What's Design Thinking? Design Thinking bascially refers to the methods, framework, tools and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring and visualizing insights, synthesizing knowledge, and imagining solutions in the design and planning fields. As a style of thinking or a method of creating solution, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and ideas, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context.

While design thinking has become part of the popular lexicon in industrial design and engineering, its broader use in describing a particular style of creative thinking-in-action is having an increasing influence on 21st century education across disciplines. In this respect, it is similar to systems thinking in naming a particular approach to understanding and solving problems.

Buchanan’s (1992) paper “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” shifted design theory away from its legacy in the world of craft and industrial production towards a more generalized “design thinking” that could be applied to nearly anything. I mean anything, whether a tangible object or a complex system. Drawing on Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Buchanan saw design as a liberal art, uniquely well-placed to serve the needs of a technological culture in which many kinds of thing are designed, and human problems are complex. It is basically instilling new perspectives to look at a problem and frame them in different ways to provide more options to tackle whatever the problem is.

And for Design Thinking in Business - The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure or needed serious reset. Business leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Design Thinking brings a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- but design thinking is far from a cure-all. Innovation, strategy and leadership are closely interconnected and to succeed you must have all three. Innovation is the ability to differentiate options for the future and develop a set of perspectives to guide them there. Strategy is the ability to connect customer needs and wants to the corporation’s core capability, economics and leadership is the ability to instill a sense of purpose for the organization and to mobilize everyone to work towards a common goal.

I don't think Design Thinking will end up like other short-lived management fads and it will eventually deeply embedded in what we called 'management' today and it will help connect the three: Innovation, Strategy and Leadership.

Can We Stop Talking About The Knowledge Management Nonsense Please? Knowledge Is Not Power. The Ability To Act On Knowledge Is Real Power.

The concept of knowledge management is purely an academic topic and has very little relevancy to the real world. When consultants start promoting it as if it is the central piece of strategy or oganizaion, I have a problem with it. When companies are thinking to hire a Chief Knowledge Officer to do the job of managing knowledge, we should first consider Chief Culture Officer or Chief Common Sense Officer, Chief Foresight Officer, Chief Politics Bashing Officer or Chief Human Factor Officer. These are more practical.

If the job of a CKO is to be the chief librarian or chief facilitator, then a company will have 100 chiefs. Some are suggesting CKOs can take a more strategic perspective, scanning across the enterprise to discover how they might improve processes and customer relationship management as well as promote employee learning. That’s called organizational design.

Some even suggest that in complex organizations where cross-business and cross-functional interventions aren’t likely to happen unless someone from the top team takes express responsibility for them, appointing a CKO would seem to be a good idea. That’s unrealistic. No P&L ownership means no influence. We need a better reason to justify another chief.

Forget a knowledge-management strategy, this is what the snake-oil salesmen/consultants invented to make them look good. Why we keep calling many things something they are not. Everything we are talking about is called “management”. If we take strategy, organization, knowledge, innovation away from management, what’s left in management? Perhaps for some management means the art of doing nothing. 

Management is a systematic way of ensuring carrying out of all activities is smooth and well aligned. It is different from leadership. Yes, now should I propose companies should add another chief – Chief Leadership Officer? Unless someone tells me knowledge is more important than leadership.

It is time for us to re-emphasize different aspects of 'management.' 
 Its task is to make managers and staffs capable of having shared vision, joint performance, to make their weaknesses irrelevant, says the Management Guru Peter Drucker. It creates harmony in working together – equilibrium in thoughts and actions, goals and achievements, plans and performance, products and markets

Lack of ‘good’ management causes inefficiency, disorder, confusion, low morale, delay, and negatively impacts company performance. Managing knowledge, money, people, processes and materials in the best possible way is the most important and essential factor for good management.

Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is real power. Knowledge is useless when people can make sense of them. The ability comes from leadership.  Many managers in marge organizations do not have the ability and courage to act on the knowledge they possess even though by not doing so will cause the company to suffer or fail. It is not about knowledge. It is about leadership. End of story and please stop selling useless nonsense. Let's get back to work to improve 'management'.

What Are The Least Understood Innovation Tools? Here Are The Results From Idea Couture Recent Survey (Part 3 of 3).

Here is a picture of our reception floor of our new office in the Idea Couture building. We're al least 4 weeks away before we can we are done with the place. This is the final of the three part series. We surveyed to find out what are the most popular innovation tools and the least understood innovation tools,  if you don't know about any of these tools on the list, you are not alone because there are many others like you.

Why are these the Top 5 least understood? Think about it, innovation is an emerging field. Therefore, at any given time, new tools are being developed, tested and refined in response to new kinds of problems, advances in technology, or as older methods are upgraded or mothballed. Other reasons include:

• Lack of exposure
• Newness of tool
• Has been recently adopted from another discipline
• Requires a unique skill set to execute successfully
• Requires rigorous adherence to a structured methodology

1. SIGNAL SCANNING Is a method of identifying and interpreting ‘signals’ from a variety of social, cultural, technological and/or business contexts to help inform, influence and inspire a product, service, marketing orother opportunity. Signal Scanning collects information, interprets information and gives meaning to information, thus helping teams build awareness, organize uncertainties, and re-orient perspectives and assumptions.

When to use it: Scanning is basic research that happens at the front end of any innovation engagement. It sits within the Insights and Inspiration Phase. It can be conducted in tandem with ethnographic and/or co-creation research. It help shape the kinds of questions that are explored in ethnographic and/or co-creation research. It can also be an ongoing process that increasingly builds internal knowledge and awareness on any specific field of research.

Why use it: Where most businesses are enamoured with watching and analyzing the trends of today, scanning provides a competitive advantage by helping organizations to better envision tomorrow. With a focus on the ‘emerging’, scanning empowers teams to more deeply, analytically and imaginatively consider the factors that might play a role in shaping future business opportunities.

2. CONSUMER CO-CREATION is a tool (it is a tool but also a research/design apporach) that directly involves consumers in an iterative process of designing and refining the concepts that will best fit into the context of their lives and needs. By acknowledging the value of customer input in the early stages of development, co-creation turns the top-down orthodoxy, of undifferentiated brand offerings on its head and offers a much higher likelihood of bringing relevant products and experiences to market. The reason this is not so well understood is that it is not a common practice for companies to include customers as part of the value chain.

When to use it: It can be used in the early stage of ideas generation to the final stage of idea validation.

Why use it: Like ethnography, Consumer Co-Creation should be used as a way to cultivate empathy for consumers. Co-Creation is used to:

• Better understand social, cultural and behavioural drivers of use & adoption when ethnographic research is not recommended or possible.
• Gather consumer/expert/lead user input into the design of a product, service or experience
• Explore potential tangible outcomes in packaging, ingredients, communications, display, retail, naming, CSR, service etc.

3. SENSEMAKING is the activity of framing observations and situations, and grounding them in meaningful ways, that help people understand and gain insight into an activity, behavior or system. In short, Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to experience. Many times problem spaces can be described as either informationally scarce, working at a deficit, or working from an overabundance of information. Ofthen there is  an overabundance of market research information, requiring a more focused and convergent approach to information and pattern definition. In both cases, recognizing and revealing the patterns are essential to developing insights and making sense of the research landscape.

The reason that Sensemaking activities are difficult because it is dealing with many conflicting and unstratucred data. Providing opportunities for people to Sensemake and infer meaning from unstructured information, allows them to hone their pattern recognition skills, contributing to their professional growth, and the professionalization of the organization.

When use it: Typically used as part of the opportunity mapping stage.

Why use it: It is an effective way to synthesize information into somthing people can understand in terms of the what and how value is being created.

4. STRATEGIC FORESIGHT is about preparing, not predicting. It is about establishing well-informed future oriented perspectives that fuel, guide, and inspire innovation processes, planning and decision-making. It helps organizations better understand, imagine, anticipate and prepare for change by equipping their teams with the tools and resources needed to ask provocative questions, challenge dominant logic, test assumptions, rethink opportunities, reset goals, and explore meaningful alternatives.

The reasons why Strategic Foresight is difficult to understand and execute is that it requires rigor and adherence to a set of steps and methods, beginning with problem definition, and scope.

When to use it: It can be used at the front end of innovation as a way to uncover relevant and pertinent research questions and define the problem space. It can be used to fuel innovation processes, and as a post innovation exercise to extend future contexts or to verify validity of strategy, products and services.

Why use it: The process allows people to ask provocative questions, challenge dominant logic, test assumptions, rethink opportunities, reset goals, and explore meaningful alternatives, to many possible futures. 

5. CREATIVE COLLISIONS Gives research and design teams a tool to intentionally, creatively and playfully collide (draw inferences) different, product, service and consumer culture experiences that are not normally considered together. Innovation is often born where these normally disparate categories intersect; a deliberately counter-intuitive methodology, which forces people well out of their comfort zones and challenges them to override their left-brain, analytical bias in favor of a more open-minded acceptance of contradictory, illogical ideas.

When to use it: Opportunity mapping phase or before/during ideation 

Why to use it: To leverage zones of opportunity, flesh out sub-ideas, and to get you outside your ‘box’ or mixing 'boxes'.

 

What Are The Most Popular Innovation Tools? Here Are The Results From Idea Couture Recent Survey (Part 1 of 3).

Our new headoffice is slowing coming together with containers of furniture waiting to be unloaded. It will take another 2 months before it is picture ready. It is looking like a boutique hotel as I've heard. We've got lots of projects rooms, big windows, big space for development team and lots and lots of open space for parties. But no one has time for it.

People talk about innovation some refer to strategy, organization, process, culture and many just think of toolkits and tactics. Innovation strategy is more important today than it was 10 years ago; rapid market changes and the need for growth requires a clear articulation of answers to the following three questions:

• Is innovation part of out core business strategy or something we want to keep on the side to explore new opportunities?
• Where (product scope and geographic scope) do we focus in terms of innovation efforts? What types of innovation do we need?
• Product innovation; service innovation or business model innovation?

Innovation does not happen with Power Point or Excel. They are decision support and communication tools. Innovation requires not only the right strategy, environment but also the right tools. Choosing the right tool can be as complicated as the problem it needs to solve. Executives must select the tools that will lead to breakthrough ideas, which can be brought to market effectively and ultimately create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Last year we conducted a global survey amongst executives of our Fortune 500 client base to determine their levels of awareness, understanding and usage of the tools used in the innovation process. We have broken this list of 15 tools into 3 categories and will share here some of the results as a two part series:

• Top 5 most popular
• Top 5 most effective
• Top 5 most misunderstood

Here are some of the results:

THE TOP 5 MOST POPULAR TOOLS

1. CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
2. ETHNOGRAPHIC SHADOWING
3. IMMERSION DAYS
4. RAPID PROTOTYPING
5. CONSUMER JOURNEY MAPPING

THE TOP 5 MOST EFFECTIVE TOOLS

1. ETHNOGRAPHIC SHADOWING
2. PERFORMANCE AND PERCEPTION MAPPING
3. RAPID PROTOTYPING
4. CONSUMER JOURNEY MAPPING
5. VALUE CURVE MAPPING

THE TOP 5 LEAST UNDERSTOOD TOOLS

1. WEAK SIGNAL SCANNING
2. CONSUMER CO-CREATION
3. SENSEMAKING
4. FORESIGHT
5. CREATIVE COLLISIONS

THE TOP 5 MOST POPULAR TOOLS and why are these Top Five the Most Popular?

• Many people have heard of them before.
• Have been popularized through books, articles and business gurus.
• Easy to access, and easy to use.
• Can be easily integrated into existing workflows
• Easy to migrate over from adjacent disciplines

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY: Contextual Inquiry is an ethnographic research method that reveals how people think about, talk about and perform activities in the context of their daily lives and actual environments. It is used to observe existing consumer/user habits, and to gather feedback on prototypes, and in the process gain a deeper understanding of consumer motivations, attitudes, preferences, needs and ideas. Contextual Inquiry helps research and design teams understand how to better execute on the less tactical and more social, cultural or contextual elements of a concept.

When to use it: Should be used in conjunction with Rapid Prototyping phase Why use it: To gain reliable information that is relevant to the End User. To access tacit knowledge and uncover insights into user behaviours that were previously unarticulated. To gather detailed feedback on successive prototypes, and to use that input to refine designs.

ETHNOGRAPHIC SHADOWNING is a research technique used to understand a person or group of persons behaviors and interactions related to product use, service interactions, and the processes involved in achieving tasks. Shadowing is a real-time exercise that focuses on particular events and tasks people engage in as they take place. The nature of shifting contexts and use scenarios, make Shadowing a valuable technique for uncovering unmet, and unarticulated needs, as they unfold over time. So as to achieve authentic, and honest insights into end user behaviors, Ethnographic Shadowing sometimes requires that the research subjects be unaware of the actual Shadowing.

When to use it: Insights & Inspiration phase, at the beginning of the innovation process. Ethnographic Shadowing also helps inform the journey mapping process. 

Why use it: Ethnographic Shadowing is key to understanding and cultivating the consumer empathy that should guide each and every stage of the innovation process. Where surveys find data, focus groups reveal opinions and traditional market research creates speculation, Ethnographic Shadowing fuels innovation by identifying the unmet, unknown and unarticulated needs of consumers. 

TO BE CONTINUED ......