innovation playground Idris Mootee

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.

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.

I Am Not A Gadget! Or Am I Becoming One? How Close Are We From A Full Blown Computional Culture?

Sometimes I feel like I am a gadget. We all performing various specialist and general tasks everyday and somehow you feel each of these tasks are not related. And the worst part of our job is to perform something that is so tedius and doesn’t really require any creativity, analytic and imagination. And you wonder why this work cannot be done by a gadget. Or if I am doing the job, does it mean I am a gadget?

There are over 600,000+ personal pocket gadgets out there for whatever purposes and over 700,000 apps for iPhone 7000,000; Android and 99,500 Blackberrys to turn your smartphone into a gadget. There's an app for almost anything and someday my resume will look like my iPhone and people will look at how many apps I have to decide whether I qualify for that job.

Human is supposed to be good at problem solving. Or at least we think we are, I am not getting into that debate. There are differences between the different types of problem solving from pure creativity to system level thinking or analytical processing.  Creativity requires periodic, temporary “encapsulation” as opposed to constant calculation or recalculation. You need time for working privately as well as times for group ideation. Encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of self-testing that enables a quest for excellence.

The big question is will the proliferation of gadgets push us towards a more creative culture where our time is better spend on the creative side while our gadgets take care of the rest or in another scenario where these micro-computing machines (gadgets) will take over and we will be pushed towards a computational culture?

All these micro devices, bit data-warehouses and pervasive communication facilities are now omnipresent in our daily activities. The way we live, work, play, communicate and interact with each other is in permanent flux due to the influence of these cool gadgets. Historically speaking, technologies are developed as a result of the need for faster means of calculation to achieve the unachievable before the world emerging into a full-blown computational culture. Emerging in its modern form in the seventeenth century after the introduction of typography, that culture, it is here argued, remains dominant today.

Can future gadgets evolve to a point that they understand our feelings and not just commands and preferences? As part of our extended mind and heart and algorithm that can add feeling to an otherwise mathematical, non-physical, and consequently non-aesthetic, thought? This is the theme of the next issue of MISC for March. Look out for the big Gadget Issue.

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 ......

Design Thinking Can Make Strategic Management Simpler. But Never Simple. People Are Naive To Think That Management Can Be Explained In A Few Circles.

"Strateic Management" sounds academic. Should management be always scientific?  Since the publication of Frederick Taylor’s 1911 treatise, “The Principles of Scientific Management,” the field of industrial engineering has attempted to improve efficiency through ‘scientific management.’ At almost 100 years old, this form of industrial management is primarily based on a mechanical view of our universe as it relates to finding the ‘best’ ways to work.

Spurring powerful business models like the Ford assembly line, this discipline of speeding up productivity, controlling quality and minimizing cost remains the primary management modus operandi. Ever since then, scientists haven’t made much headway in scientific management.

In the mid-1980s, scientists used advanced computer modeling to seek order in chaos, creating mathematical diagrams at warp speed with the new technology. Though they found some fascinating data visualizations, they couldn't explain or understand the patterns. Like forecasting the weather, one could make educated predictions but never guarantee sunny skies. A decade later, some scientists stopped focusing on chaos and took a new interest in complexity.

Using advanced computer models to uncover the structure of life forms, a new approach was applied to business management. Comparing everything from beehives to genetic DNA to traffic jams to the hyperactive, complex properties of our technological and economical environment, they created many a compelling metaphor for strategic management. Still, these studies fell short of revealing any fail-proof practical applications. Today, Fortune 500s and other companies around the world still manage companies like machines – valuing profits before all else, maintaining authority with command-and-control management and relying on Six Sigma to improve quality, overreliance on the metrics on utilization, output and efficiency of mass production.

Thanks to Mr. Taylor,these practices suddenly serve to create a bureaucratic structure, distance executives from laborers and encourage them to manage rigidly and systematically. They do nothing to benefit companies that are looking to innovate in today's creative economy. If anything, it’s getting harder to weed out the chaos now that we’re bombarded with massive data and enterprise software, which forces managers to think in confining formulas. They get caught in a tangle of technology, complex processes, product portfolios and business units, and the straightjacket only tightens its grips. They watch in paralysis as these systems drain their financial and labor resources overnight.

Design Thinking is what Scientic Management needs to maintain its relevance. The only way to simplify management is to apply the voice we’ve lost touch of amidst all this white noise: our intuition. Intuition is anything but simple, yet it has the remarkable ability to bring clarity to strategic decision-making to light because it reveals a subtle qualitative and quantitative balance that is oftentimes needed for all the parts to click.

Sometimes we need to tune out the algorithms, the data and the consciousness. Sometimes it takes a white board, some weird field trips and a few crazt people to show us the world has changed and our business models have expired. We need to use our sense to get into the rhythm of disuptive competition. We need to free ourselves from the rational-logical-linear model that keeps us frozen or stagnant in a fast-moving and uncertain environment. We need a touch of finesse and the courage to wipe the slate clean.

Apple Vs Samsung - The Verdict Is A Wake-Up Call And Shaping The Very Nature Of What Competitive Strategy Means.

Here I am the first day in our new office - the building is officially named Idea Couture Place and I took the opporunity to talk about who we are and what are really good at to our people. There are still a lot of people that don't quite understand what a strategic innovation firm does and why it is not just another industrial design, strategy firm or creative house.

Now the move is over but it will take abother 2 months before we are really settled as many furnitures and equipment are still shipping from Italty, Belgium and China. I can't wait to see the fully finished office. For now, everyone is really happy. The roof top patio will look like a boutique hotel.

What exactly does Apple’s victory means for many other companies? The overwhelming patent infringement victory over Samsung is shaping the strategies of many and everyone is getting a wake-up call and now they need to revisit how they approach strategic innovation.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook told his employees about how Apple values originality and innovation and pour their lives into making the best products on earth. They do this to delight their customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

The result of this court case actually shapes the playing field of competition and the very nature of competitive strategy. Samsung, Motorola (Google), HTC, RIM, HP, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Xerox, Sony, Amazon and IBM . All have quivers full of patents and armies of retained patent lawyers ready to go to court to protect their interests and raise the barriers of entry for new players.

If you look at any new or old product categories, product and user experiences will become more andmore similar over time. Look around you and you realize a lot of cars looks the same and drive the same way. And over time, most phones, laptops or tablets will have similar designs and behaviors, just like TVs, cameras and typewriters. Switches and buttons whether they have rounded or rectangular corners or whatever shaped icons and the overall look and feel aren't likely the key points of differentiation. It has always been part of the commoditization process and companies will continue try to innovate with new ideas.

Every great innovation attracts copycats and it is hard to say whether we are promoting innovation by offering protection or deterring innovation by raising the barriers. There is no easy answer to this one. What’s next? If you’re a small start-up you will have a hard time to make it big as once you gain some attention and market success, you will then discover that you may be infringing on patents even though you think you’re not.

Can anyone realistically come up with an idea that can past the patent test of Apple/Google(Motorola)/Cisco/Xeorx/RIM/Sony/Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures (the world's biggest patent troll) when everone is waiting to collect royalties for what you were pretty sure was an original idea or invention.

I can’t wait for a day when Apple is suing Google and Google is suing Nokia and HP is suing Apple and Samsung is suing HP and everyone is suing everyone – one hell of a party. In the end, it's more likely that these crazy entanglements will result in more cross-licensing agreements than to massive payouts – one big happy family and everyone is getting a check.

As for now, my phone hasn’t stop ringing as every company needs to “out-innovate” and wants Idea Couture to bring Design Thinking to them. Now no one is safe. Welcome to the crazy world.

It Is Time For China To Think Real About Innovation And What Policies And Practices Can Propel China Into The Next Century When Labor Cost Will Double In A Few Short Years And Intensified Talent Shortage..

It’s election time in the US and everyone is talking about China. China bashing happens before the election and after it’s over, people will be back to business as usual. The fact is US trade deficit is due to domestic factors and not Chinese policy and we need to address the very core of "structural competitiveness" rather than these nonsense talk. We should be focusing on innovation on a large scale and reinventing industries of tomorrow. US will always procure from low cost countries whether it is China or others.

China is an integrated part of the US (and the world) economy and no one really has any idea of the true implications of rising Chinese labor costs and what does it mean for China, the US and the world? I’m traveling across Western remote China (I was in India last week) this week and visited dozens of companies and trying to understand development even in the remote provinces, so it’s the perefct time to write this blog post about innovation in China.

Labor costs in Guangdong province (in the southern part of China which is sometimes called the factory of the world) have been rising at 13-15% a year and with rising costs for logistics will at some point make China less attractive. China has tremendous competitive advantage even with rising costs.

First, the extreme flexibility and scalability of workforce is unmatched by any other country in the world. For them, if they need to ramp up a factory in 2-3 days with an additional 1,000 workers that are prepared to work 14-16 hours a day to meet a production deadline, they can do it.

Second, it’s a tightly integrated supply chain eco-system, the main reason being that companies are not moving their factories inland to save costs is the speed-to-market. Consider that a strategic innovation in industry structure by design.

China are constantly “playing” with the idea of “process innovation” by incrementally improving the way they make things and adapt to market needs. It is a matter of time that they will start to think how to capture high value opportunities going up-stream in the value chain, which resides in the design and technology development. Currently designers, engineers and marketers are the ones who create and capture most of the value from innovative products. Policy makers in China understand this (no surprise) and are pouring massive dollars into research and development. The five-year plan calls for “indigenous innovation”, which the government thinks it can foster by subsidizing “strategic” industries and strong-arming foreign firms to transfer intellectual property to budding national champions.

And smaller companies are happy to copy and learn from whatever they can get their hands on by working with their customers. The question is can China truly develop its own innovation capability beyond absorbing know-how from international companies, which are under pressure to protect their IPs, and trying to bring in as many jobs home as possible? Can innovation be orchestrated by the state? And is the education system and workplace training support the needs? China does not understand innovation. It is just way too difficult for any Chinese innovative ideas to move from the lab to the marketplace, there is a lacking of complete view of market dynamics and infrastructure.

Policy makers in China is taking a very short-term view and they need to balance between research and development as well as lack of market orientation and design capability. And they have no clue how the system works in the Valley and government bureaucrats will not tolerate the complete free market system that works in the Valley. “Favorism” is still the dominant way of big investments for obvious reasons and antitrust and competition laws are clsoe to non-existan or not-enforceable.

So that alone creates big barriers for start-up challengers. I don’t think China has done enough on new product innovation alone, not to mention strategic innovation on a larger scale. Product innovation is often the most important driver of growth. In most cases over 50% of the growth of many categories from snacks to drinks and electronics came from just a single new product.

China is a far friendlier place for product innovation than the developed markets because the cost of going to market is not as large and consumers are more forgiving when innovation products are on constant beta. And when products fall into grey area of regulations, China is the best place on earth to launch products and don’t need to wait for permission, and they might never need to. Combine with a big domestic and uneducated markets, this creates the ideal environment for innovation.

It Is Time For India To Think Big And Stop Their Obessions With Jugaad. What They Need Is Bigger Asipirations And Design Thinking Competencies.

I wrote a blog post about two years ago titled “Is the Age of ‘Indovation’ and ‘Chinovation’ Becoming Real?” and it was very popular piece and I’ve got a few publications calling me including Knowledge@Wharton and others seeking out my point-of-view. Two years later and I am writing this post in India and will be in China next week, perhaps it is time for an update.

Let’s start with the question around innovation in India and is it really happening? Or happening enough? Well the answer varies depending who you talk and what industry sectors you’re referring to.  For the Indian pharma industry, it is not without trying but there were no commercial or very little success so far. For the auto industry, there are moderate successes but I won’t call it breakthrough innovation. For IT mainly software, there are hardly any effort and it is not because of there’s a lack of money or talent. These tech companies understand the risks and it is easier to just write codes and make money. 

Was this due to a lack of aspiration, unwilling to commit or was it due to the lack of ability to execute successfully?  In my opinion, India doesn’t really get innovation and seriously lacking robust innovation capability. And I don’t mean R&D. Their world-class engineering capability was not put to use solving problems that yet to exists – unknown and unmet needs of customers. 

They need to stop thinking innovating only at the bottom of the pyramid but start to build aspiration for innovation for bigger ideas.  Instead of engineering down products to fit the needs of the limited buying power constrained mass markets, they need to start thinking engineering up for products that shape industries in the developed markets.

India needs to develop high value industries and actively transform itself from a low-cost software and outsourcing economy to global innovation test bed. How can India learn to overcome the fear of failure? And how do they move away from thinking small hoping it will grow big?

Conversations about innovation in India with anyone always start with jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that loosely translates as "the gutsy art of overcoming harsh constraints by designing an effective solution using limited resources." For them, Jugaad is an antidote to the extreme complexity of Indian societies: a country with pervasive scarcity of resources and infrastructure and good policy. Over the years it has developed a way to fixing things that are broken and mashing up different products for different usage.

Jugaad is not unique to India and they should stop putting that at the core of innovation for India. The future of innovation in India is solving bigger global problems. India can help the world to search for new solutions that do more with less for more. That is to say, they should provide more value using less energy, material, effort or time, and serve more consumers.

To be fair, it’s not just the Indian companies that are grappling with this issue. Companies in UK, US, Canada, Finland, Japan and Korea all grappling with this. Every country has a different need for innovation and needs a different strategy for innovation and not everyone needs to look at frugal engineering. Some have a steeper climb in brining design into the engineering process. By bringing together different sectors of society to think and talk about innovation in a structured manner, India can bring about a new and higher threshold for innovation thinking and practice.

Reinvention Lessons From Karl Lagerfeld That They Don't Teach You In B-Schools Or D-Schools.

How many other people do you know with teddy bear replicas of themselves? Karl Lagerfeld is not only the creative force behind some of the top names such as Chanel. He is constantly reinventing with each collection he creates – something that gets harder, not easier, with time. What he did for Chanel with tweed is incredible, his explorations in sable fur were stunning and his creations, for example that signature unfinished trim is endlessly copied and replicated. Sometimes you wonder how can someone reinvent himself season after season and still good at it. Here's a few lessons.

The man’s an art-making machine and his public persona is unequivocally all about making women look radiant. Working quickly and creatively, he enjoys the exploration of art as much as he does the execution. Last year, after a TV appearance with Lady Gaga that ended in an impromptu photo session, the king of couture sent the queen of pop culture a signature Chanel bag featuring portraits of the two of them embellished with Crayola-color.

Growing up in Hamburg, Germany, Lagerfeld learned to speak French, English, and Italian as well as his native German language fluently. At 14, he moved to the fashion mecca of Paris, and by 17, he confirmed his unparalleled talent by winning first prize in a sketch contest organized by the International Wool Secretariat. In 1983, Lagerfield became the art director for Chanel, and launched his debut clothing line, Karl Lagerfeld. With the assistance of Gilles du Four, his Chanel ready-to-wear collection was an instant hit. At the time, Chanel was losing steam, failing to attract young customers with their tired line. They needed a glamorous re-haul,—nothing short of a brand reinvention.

Lagerfeld’s magic touch transformed the conservative fashion line into a timeless label with contemporary style, while preserving all the glamour that Coco infused in her classic pieces. In the studio, Largerfeld is an artistic powerhouse and hands-on with every step of the design process. It’s no wonder that the press refers to him as Kaiser Lagerfeld.

He does everything from designing to shooting the fashion ads and commercial campaigns. In the fashion industry, it’s not just the clothes that go out of fashion with every season. Hyper-competitive designers are always trying to claw their way into the business, and with little to no guarantee of customer loyalty, it’s harder to stay ‘in style’ than get your foot in the door. So how does someone like Lagerfeld reinvent himself every season for over 50 years? Here are four lessons that you can apply in your work:

Lesson One: ALWAYS FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS “I’m not a marketing person. I don’t ask myself questions. I go by instinct. Be politically correct, but please don’t bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that’s the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation.”

Lesson Two: CREATIVITY CAN BE AN UNLIMITED MACHINE “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.”

Lesson Three: DON’T OVER ANALYSE “I never analyze my collections. I do eight collections for Chanel each year — they overlap. Sometimes I work on two collections at the same time. But I can separate my mind, I’m very organized. In fact, I’m a computer. Also because I don’t use cell phones and computers. My computer is my brain.”

Lesson Four: INVENTION IS LIVING “I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.”

What Is The Right Organization Design For Your Corporation? And What Test To Use To Know If You've Got The Right One?

Innovation effectiveness is closely linked to organization design. In the past, most organization design objectives were driven by a need to improve efficiency, resource sharing and improving focus. It is not common to see innovation as the core driver or organization design to improve speed, creativity and agility. Many organizations struggle to 1/designing the organization and available options 2/understand the implications of different design option 3/making the decision among different organization design models. So what are the factors that should guide the choice (and criticality) of organization design?

There are many rules of thumb about things such as spans of control / empowerment and cross functional/business units reporting relationships and revenue and cost allocation.  There are many theories on organization design but not very useful in guiding organization design decisions. Even if you’ll have 2 or 3 different options on the table, you still need to figure a way to make the big decision? What I advise companies is use the following test when prototyping organizational design. It is both a logical exercise as well as a creative exercise and requires serious prototyping, not moving boxes in a power point.

The Future Test: Does that design reflect the needs for how a company thinks and tthey plan to compete in the future and not just replicated an existing org design taken from another company.  And how does the org design help create some competitive advantage? How future proof is the design?

The People/Culture Test: Does the design adequately reflect the motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the available managers and staff and the organization purpose?

The Competitive Advantage Test:  Does the org design allocate sufficient management emphasis to the strategic priorities in any specific product/market spaces or chosen boundaries?

The Corporate Parenting Advantage Test: This one applies when there are multiple business units and each unit is being looked at individually before holistically. Does the design allocate enough attention to the intended sources of added value and strategic initiatives of the parent or holding company?

The Power Test: Does the org design provide the desired allocated power to groups/individuals that is linked to the strategic value of the unit or functions? Or does it leverage the strength of groups/departments that can positively drive performance beyond its direct influence.

The Agility Test: This addresses whether the org design provide the adaptability and increase speed to respond and allow having the agility to adapt quickly to future changes?

The Market Perception Test: This address how the investment communities perceive the motive and benefit of the redesign. It is important (for public company) that investors and analysts buy into the needs as well as the outcomes.

Organization design is not a pure rational exercise. What is a good organization design?  You won’t know when you finish designing; the prototyping of organization design is tightly linked to employee engagement, strategic futures and organization purpose. It takes some experimentation before getting it right. At the end, its goals are to improve all of the above. The tests provide a good starting point to look at organization design requirements. That’s where Design Thinking comes into play.

The Hardest Part Of Any Innovation Process Is Sensemaking. And Sensemaking Is Closely Linked To Insights.

The hardest part of any innovation process is where data and insights come together and trying to make sesen of them. Sensemaking is about using visual mappings and narrative techniques to mine the non-quantitative data. This except is taken from a piece in the current issue of M/I/S/C magazine on Insights and Sensemaking co-written by me and Richard Thomas.

Customer inishgts can be inspiring but insights are only useful when they prompt action and self-reflection. Ideally, the best insights inspire even more insights and them more insights, but vast amounts of insights or the lack of context gives way to a different difficulty – the loss of both inherit and intended meaning leaves insights appearing senseless. For this reason sensemaking and insights are closely related. These pictures are from our M/I/S/C Insight Issue launc party. This is a thick issue and flying off the selves fast.

Sensemaking helps to illustrate unthought-of rules-of-order and insights are the direct experience of these perceived rules. Often they are under pressure and cue toward the yet-to-be but insights, by nature, are descriptive and reflective – retrospective of lived experiences. Insights are the past. They have been separated from life. To exist as unpredictable patterns they may or may not fully characterize the ‘real world’ or persist as perceived. The list of problems and challenges organizations face in managing and applying relevant consumer insights continue to grow. Here are a few:

Insight Speed & Complexity: Organizations believe they are working from a complex abundance of insights at an increasing rate – that they are diverse, independent and conflicting – but at times their insights are not insights at all. The pressure to categorize, prioritize and validate dominates the conversation as opposed to getting at the heart of the matter. How does ‘what is going on,’ effect what you desire to be?

Old Insights: Organizations often work form the same cues, and the same insights from the same reports. Managers facing time restraints carry over insights from project to project and create a self-reinforcing false reality and homogenous actionable intelligence at the organizational level, and a lameness that is visible from the shelf.

Biased Insights: Often projects, products and categories come equipped with bias toward the past and dominant insights that reinforce the known and the safe. They are often out of context, separated from their original time, expired but treated anew.

Insight Translation and Application: Drawing value from out of scope, irrelevant or intangible ‘inactionable’ insights is resource heavy. If they do not fit with the current mental model of the market or consumer, and they are cast aside.

Navigating Misinformation: Mistaking repetition and self-similarity as truth or validation. Aging Insights have resulted in a loss of their meaning – and relevancy over time.

Insight Disbelief and Disregard: The insights and processes are becoming contradictory, trust and belief is bleeding out. The inaccuracy of the processes in the real world occupies our emotional intelligence when it should be ‘feeling opportunity’ – sensing valuable cues for action. People want insights to be singular in their validity but as a reflection of the real world, insights could and should complicate and contradict each other to accurately describe reality and texture.

These problems are symptomatic of more than the solutions they seek. The imperative to describe and validate the past, present and future has engaged tension between hesitations and over eagerness about change, insecurity and confusion associated with ambiguity. These problems stem from an over objectification of ‘the insight’ where we wish to be accurate. Insights have become ‘processed’ from perspectives of existing evaluation techniques to control, predict and guide the outcomes of their application in order to ‘de-risk’.

Overly fetishized instrumentation, metrics and measures have become the source of confidence in decision-making. It is hard to put the "sense" back into our everday managerial settings increase the signal-to-noise ration.

Sensemaking is where we sense of complexity and masstive conflicting information is being sorted through and relationships are mapped out and the emerging themes and weak signals are identified and clarified. I have been training senior managers and executives of applied sensemaking in strategy, marketing, product development, operations and technology planning. It is the most important skill managers need to master today.

Design Thinking Is A Cognitive And Intellectual Process That Balances The Rational And Emotional. Not Included With Your MBA.

What is Design Thinking? Because of the word “design” and many automatically associate it with the craft of design or design as a profession. Actually it is less to do with “design” and more with “system”. There are many ways to define "design thinking" and this list is not exhaustive:

• A way to instill customer-centricity and empathy
• A framework for exploration and experimentation
• An approach to sense-making and problem solving
• A methodology to foster exploration and experimentation
• A design buzzword to tell you a designer can do more than design
• A management buzzword sold as the “next” strategic tool
• A marketing slogan or tag line
• A self-gratifying term for those who think they are creative

The term “design thinkers” implies that designers are craftsmen and not thinkers, which is NOT always the case. It is also a stretch for traditional industrial or brand/graphic design firms to claim to be able to use "design thinking" to solve complex strategic issues. These firms need to go through a radical transformation and close a big capability gap before they can even attempt to implement it for others.

Today, "design thinking" is frequently compared and contrasted to business. This is often an over simplification that forces us into predetermined roles along with their associated rules, conventions, behaviors and formal expectations. It Is important to recognize that "design thinking" is NOT exclusive to designers or unattainable to those in another discipline. Design thinking is natural and inherent in all of us who are smart and creative.

"Design thinking" is a cognitive and intellectual process that balances the rational and emotional – in effect combining left brain and right brain thinking. When applied, it harmonizes with other modes of thinking and closes knowledge and information gaps, creating order and refining meaning. Because "design thinking" is a dynamic, constructive process that is iterative in nature, developing ideas requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation and assessment.

To achieve those tangible outcomes, you need to open the process to multiple participants and socialize the process and outcomes, visualization is a very critical part of the process, not an outcome. Even the Department of Defence recognizes the needs to train "design thinkers" that are capable of critical and creative thinking to plan operations in dynamic environments with fast-changing uncertainties in extremely complex conditions.

People who are capable of using "design thinking" to identify and develop different military response options within the context of a big strategy are crucial to successful military operations. The development of such skills requires a shift in their focus from the operational and tactical environments to the strategic environment. This is an extremely challenging undertaking given that many military officers spend the majority of their career starting at lower levels and their advancement depends upon how well they perform tactically. This is very much like managers in large organizations who were promoted based on their ability to execute tactically.

To develop senior commanding officers with "design thinking" capabilities require DOF to train them new skills including analysis as well as synthesis. "Design thinkers" possess the ability to think critically on a "system" level; break concepts into simpler parts and mapping out their relationship and system impact before rearranging the elements into a new whole; in other words, to produce something through imaginative skills and quick experiments. And yes, imagination is always needed.

10 Big Reasons Why Most Innovative Products / Services Fail? How Many Of Them Are Avoidable?

Why innovative new products fail? Because marketers believe they know the industry, the product market and the customer and their needs.  And after going through cycles of input gathering and any orginal innovative ideas were ultimately turned into something that a lot like their existing products with minor improvisation. Sounds familiar?

Too many firms “innovate” with very few real insight about the market, their customers, or customers’ aspirations, needs or wants. Rather than go out and understand what customers need and expect, they rely on anecdotal evidence and market research, or simply perform some "ethngographic" study performed by traditional marekting research companies. "ethnographic" field work performed withour an anthropologist is like goging to bungee jump without an instructor.  This is a ley failure point of the first order, like jogging on the rooftop blindly down a path that ends off the building.

What leads some innovative products and servies to succeed and others to fail? The answer to this question encompasses a number of different factors. In some cases, the product cannot deliver the promised performance, capability or attract sufficient interest.

Even if potential can be demonstrated early on, it may take a substantial amount of time to reach the projected adoption figures. Or the product’s innovative feature is being replicated by an existing product as an added function and there is no need for a stand alone new product. Or the economics of the new product is not attractive enough and cannot hit a critical mass. Insight into the minds of the early adopters can greatly reduce the risks of failure, which is generally due to one or more of the following reasons:

1. The innovative new products are not shown in the right user context thus creating a misunderstanding of the applications
2. The new technologies behind the innovative product are not linked to an exciting and worthwhile market opportunity or are too niche
3. The innovative new products are not positioned within any product category and also fail to open up a completely new category
4. There is insufficient knowledge and resources for marketers to drive consumer adoption
5. The core functions of the innovative new products cannot support themselves as stand alone products and only work as features.
6. The promised performance of the innovative new product does not materialize and does not provide enough customer value
7. The innovative new products were distributed through the wrong channel and compromise the value propositions
8. The innovative new products perform only a small function and can be included by others in other products as an additional feature thus diminishing the demand
9. The expectation of consumers adopting the new products is over estimated
10. Products are pushed to a skeptical customer group and fail to neutralize the perceived risks associated with the new product.

The innovative new products require an ecosystem of support which did not exist or were not built fast enough. Determining the suitability of market research for innovative new products or services is a challenge. Insights are not only needed in the early phase of ideas gathering, it is equally critical at the pilot stage. Many traditional market research methods are inherently more tactically focused (orientation on the customers of today) and lead to the development of small improvements in existing products and the big ideas eventually diluted. Read more of this in the next big INSIGHT issue of M/I/S/C available in bookstores in 28 countries.

Successful Business Transformation Requires A New Logic To Handle Ambiguity And Change.

The future is scary and there are reasons for it. I have been giving a lot of keynotes lately to different professional organizations and senior executive roundtables and my keynote topic of strategic innovation and design thinking went beyond innovating to find growth and adapting to new economic, market, political and social order. I shared ideas on the future of economic development, the come-back of manufacturing, developing glocal innovation networks and creative or self-destruction of old establishments and the renewal and transformation of the modern enterprise.

There were never ending questions from the audiences on these topics. I can write a book on them, I guess I won’t have time. I hardly have time to get enough sleep. Everyone is looking for a theory to anchor. The future has never been so uncertain and almost any economic theories invented decades ago has become another working white paper again. The very old ideas of management and strategy taught in b-schools are so dated and when I look at the 800+ management books I have on my bookshelf, I am guessing 80% of them are completely irrelevant (50% were irrelevant when they were first written).

Some turn to other knowledge disciplines to look for sources of inspirations. The field of business strategy borrowed heavily from industrial economics and the filed of management sciences borrowed heavily on organizational psychology. What about "Strategic Foresights?” Where can we look for anchors and new inspirations? How about mathematics?

Fuzzy logic is the branch of mathematics that says that science isn't about absolute truth; it's just a heap of guesses at a reality that's much more complicated than that. The term “Fuzzy Logic” emerged in the development of the theory of fuzzy sets by Lotfi Zadeh (1965). A fuzzy subset A of a (crisp) set X is characterized by assigning to each element x of X the degree of membership of x in A (e.g., X is a group of people, A the fuzzy set of old people in X). Now if X is a set of propositions then its elements may be assigned their degree of truth, which may be “absolutely true,” “absolutely false” or some intermediate truth degree: a proposition may be more true than another proposition.

Professor Bart Kosko (Professor of Electrical Engineering in the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and a Professor of Engineering and Law in USC's Gould School of Law) draws out some pretty interesting applications of that theory. He lost his faith and rediscovers it in science. The fuzzy future is part bog-standard libertarianism (with a side of Reaganomics), part extropian hooting-and-hollering, part small boy reveling in the Tolstoy and Clancy school of military exchange, and part Rube Goldberg engineering of unlikely theory, all bound up in hundred of pages of inscrutable equations in the footnotes.

My teaching on 'Design Thinking" goes beyond many simple (and shallow) creative tools. Forget those three wheels of design, technology or whatever. Those are complete BS. "Design thinking" is comfortable with change, it is disruptive and provocative by nature, and promotes new ways of looking at problems, often through new lenses. The strategic framing of complex and ambiguous issues requires thinking approaches that are free from organizational dogmas, codified limitations and old assumptions.

A large part of the design thinking process is to step out of roles conventions and free oneself from these dogmas and explore new frames of thought and approaches to problem solving. I am using "Design Thinking" to push us to rethink everything from scratch, including the tools of logic itself. Most people believe creativity means there is no logic. But what is creativity anyway? Or what is design? We need to look at the world or our business or social challenges with a fuzzy prism. It is like watching 3D movies without the 3D glasses. You can never make sense of the present and the future by using conventional lenses and logic.

In a world of full of chaos, unpredictability and fuzziness we need to look at the world through a fuzzy prism. Here is what Dr. Bart Kosco has to say, "How do you upload yourself onto a chip?" The fuzziest fact of all. The problem with current schemes in theory is a binary shock, when all of a sudden you die in meat, and wake up in chip. So how do you do it consciously? We could cut out that little chunk of your brain and replace it with an equally functioning chip, maybe a more powerful chip. We could keep doing it, while you're wide-awake. So in the end, you've completely transferred to a network of chips, and your brain is a bunch of sodium chunks in a jar of formaldehyde.

For the modern enterprise to evolve, survive and even prosper in the future, any change and transformation effort cannot just be putting on bandages. There is no one single future state to map against current state. There could be a range of different strategic futures and companies need to be ready for all of those. It takes a very different kind of transformation process when the future state is unknown.