innovation playground Idris Mootee

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.

With Our Increasingly Reliance On Smart Devices And Gadgets, And We Are Becoming More And More Vulnerable.

You’ve seen all the time in movies when the bad guys hacked into public surveillance cameras and could see what’s going on out there. It is actually not difficult to hack into most security surveillance systems for commercial or residential buildings and particularly those wireless ones. Theses cameras that are used by retailers, hotels, and elevators, are often configured insecurely. Many are preconfigured with simple to access passwords and you can try as many times as you wish to attempt to guess it. Start with “1111”, “1010”, “1234” or “1001” or try “admin”.

And the same problem exists for video conferencing systems, imagine you’re on a conference call with your team on developing the next secret product. Sometimes you can random call in and get access to these conference calls where VCs are talking to start-ups or people are pitching their latest ideas. .

What about all those smart gadgets or devices that we increasing rely on in our everyday's work.  Not only do we store a large amount of information on our gadgets, they are increasingly becoming our gateway to online services. Our smartphones stay with us 24 hours a day, giving us ample opportunity to leave them behind in a gym, taxi or bar. If the device is lost our information is vulnerable. Most smart device users aren't prepared to handle the multitude of technical and security challenges that come with carrying one.

Smartphones that aren’t properly decommissioned also leave us vulnerable. As smartphone use becomes even more prevalent, we can expect to see more malware and other viruses targeting both Android and Apple devices. A serious security flaw was recently uncovered, affecting some Samsung Android smartphones. The flaw allowed hackers to erase the device remotely, simply by sending an SMS or getting the user to click on a URL. How many employees have personal phones on the corporate network that you don't know about? While the use of smart devices may keep employees connected, efficient and, in most cases, productive, allowing a personal device to connect to the corporate network without vetting could compromise your business.

Threats to mobile security aren’t always obvious. It’s surprisingly easy to hack a smart device. Easier still for users to download a game or another similarly innocuous app that, once installed, turns that phone into a bug. PlaceRaider, a malware created by the United States Navy to showcase Android vulnerabilities, does just that. The app activates the phone's camera and other sensors, collects data to create a 3D image of the phone's physical location including sensitive data that may be visible on computer monitors or desks.

And we all use some Bluebooth enabled accessories. Bluetooth is a key vulnerability, there is a hack called Blue Scanner that searches out for the Bluetooth enabled devices and then  extract as the much information as possible for a each newly discovered device. It is easy to do.

We love our gadgets but, at the risk of sounding dramatic, they have the potential to turn against us. Your smart phone probbaly knows more about your than Google. So from now on, just assume that everything is hackable. So when you need to be in secretive meeting, put all your electornics in a bag and make sure the room has not video confenecing or security cameras installed.

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!

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.

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.

Sometimes Design Means To Achieve Timeless Deconstruction, Stimulating Unpredictability and Controlling Chaos

Designing something simple is easy, but adding elegance and substance requires a subtle complexity that not everyone can access and achieve. Design of elgance product is easy, becasue they don't have to deal with the complexity just as some other products. When you want elegance, ability to handle complexity and substance, that's hard.

When it was first introduced in literary criticism, deconstructionism aimed to question traditional assumptions about certainty, identity and truth, asserting that words can only refer to other words. Novelist and philosophy professor Rebecca Goldstein notes that, “in deconstruction, there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning.” In other words, language becomes far more than the sum of its scattered, severed parts. In architecture, the finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist ‘styles’ is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

As the deconstructive philosophy trickled down to other fields, particularly art and design, it further demonstrated how destruction could be commoditized. The fashion house of Comme des Garçon, as shepherded by Rei Kawakubo, reinterprets this aesthetic by taking clothes to their undoing by strategically dismantling them and then putting them back together. The show, White Drama, presented in Paris provided an unforgettable sensory experience – Snow White meets Victorian Lace. Rei Kawakubo is one of the most influential fashion designers and master of what I like to call ‘simplexity.’

Her signature style of modern simplicity reflects how imperfect beauty captures the complexities of the relationships around us. Kawakubo begins by actually creating the fabrics for each specific collection. Many of her ‘broken bride’ dresses are made from bolts of silk that she printed with intricate trompe l'oeil effects, which enriched the texture and shape of her pleated skirts without adding extra bulky fabric or thread.

Her deconstructive approach in cutting and sewing fabrics is deliberately compromised by design. Hems are left uneven; yarn is dropped mid-stitch in her knitwork; and clashing color threads hold the seams together. Final pieces seem to be the blueprint rather than the final product. Even the patents that inspire her initial work are executed in unconventional steps in an effort to fully divorce form from function. Her design philosophy further sets her apart because she doesn't design for any specific body type, allowing those shorter than 6 feet and larger than size zero to access her clothing. A truly refreshing concept in the world of fashion. At the end of the show, Kawakubo explained her inspiration for the collection by remarking that “all of life’s drama in a white dress.” Each one embodies the complex and contradictory relationships in our lives.

I hesitate to even describe her pieces as ‘fashion,’ because they are so uninterrupted by time and trend. They are artworks that free us to consider, create and embody our passions. That’s when you know that the work appeals to more than just fashion followers, and it is not meant to épater le bourgeois, but anyone who appreciates postmodernist simplicity and visual intrigue.

Design Thinking Requires Storytelling. It Is Both An Insight Tool And An Organization Culture Building Tool.

 
Stories inspire, motivate, and shift the way the people think and work. Many civilizations throughout history understood the power of storytelling. From ancient Egypt to modern China story- telling provided the foundation for nearly everything. For business, often there needs to socialize strategies within executive management, the board and senior staff and they include telling innovaiton, survival and hero/heroine stories. Most survival stories are around when organization had to overcome big challenges from disruptive business models that threatened its existence. It is an important piece of organization culture building.

There are a few universities offering storytelling degrees. I believe Columbia University offers a BA in storytelling an mythology and East Tennessee State University offers MA Storytelling, one of a select few fully accredited graduate programs in Professional and Applied Storytelling. All MBA should include a module for this.

From our daily routines to historic events, storytelling can be the best tool to uncover insights. Historians use storytelling to draw out the facts – and it can be used in the modern corporate world too.

Storytelling has been used as an insight tool to give idealized accounts of ancient life. Sometimes drawing from events and at other times drawing from art itself. When I was in Egypt, I learned about the poems found in an excavated workers' village on the outskirts of the Valley of Kings. These poems contain insights into the life of ancient Egypt – a window that can still shed light on ancient life.

In Japan, Kamishibai was a popular form of visual and participatory storytelling that combines the use of hand drawn visuals with the engaging narration of a live presenter. ‘Kami’ in Japanese means ‘paper’ and ‘shibai’ means ‘play’ or ‘drama.’ The presenter stands to the right of a small wooden box (call it a mini stage) that holds the 12-20 cards that feature the visuals that accompany each story. The presenter changes the cards at the speed that matches the flow of the story he is telling. Today, this type of performance is rare but the essence of what was achieved is still alive and well – to capture the audience with a story.

Anthropologists and ethnographers have long been using storytelling to communicate findings. By painting a picture of a situation, the insights gleaned become clear and understandable. Not only used to communicate the findings, anthropologists use the method as part of the research as well. Individuals are asked questions and in return, a story is told. CEOs are telling stories everyday from painting a future to crystalizating emerging market opportunities.

Despite the universality of storytelling, many research professionals that use classic research methodologies for qualitative and quantitative studies are reluctant to accept storytelling as an insight tool and some may be skeptical about how storytelling can be beneficial in applied research.

A few tips to keep in mind if you are willing to embark on a new story. First it is not about the number of stories that correspond to a particular segment; it is the quality of the stories. There is no need to be overly concerned about the factual accuracy of the story. And second, the focus should never be around the discussions. While it may be useful for the researcher to understand the questions in the client’s mind, a discussion guide is only useful in a limited sense. At idea Couture, storytelling is considered a leadership skills as much as it is an insight tool.

 

The Five Rules Of Business Reinvention: What You Can Learn From Burberry?

The word ‘Reinvention” is a beautiful word. It links people to a path of hope, dreams and possibilities. It is a point when people or organizations are ready to claim and design a new defining moment that will cause a major transformation in their lives and in their organizations.  It takes commitment, reflection and action and in the process removing distractions, making peace with realities and sometimes completely letting go of the past.

Business historian can come up with a long list of great names of firms that failed to adapt and change with the times. For every Apple and Jobs; IBM and Gerstner; and GE and Welch, there are dozens of firms - many of which once held great status in households around the world - that are no longer great, good or even exist. 

Companies that have reinvented themselves successfully typically have some combination of factors on their side. Committed leadership, a deep sense of trust among employees and the courage to throw away irrelevant legacy systems are but a few. The new issue of MISC Magazine is the Big Reinvention Issue. The cove feature story is Burberry – the Reinvention of a British Icon.

So, why are some companies successful in reinvention while others fail? To begin to answer that question, consider the road taken by the company that can arguably claim the biggest success story of the past decade, Burberry. What's the difference between Aquascutum and Burberry? Both are famous for their trenchcoats but while Burberry's success is the luxury brand equivalent to the iPod, Aquascutum's is the MP3 player. Here's an excerpt from the article Burberry: Reinvention of A British Icon. You can download the full article here.

So, how did Burberry do it? While its secrets are woven in and out of the ideas, experiences, inspirations and actions of Ahrendts, Bailey and their senior executives, here are five ways that the iconic British brand has reinvented itself over the past six years.

Rule #1 - Reignite The Passion

Too many organizations attempt to spark a reinvention with an over simplified vision or a strategic statement like "double sales by 2015" or "achieve an ROI of 15% by 2015." These goals may be achievable, but they're uninspiring. At best, they provide a measure to evaluate strategic outcome. At worst, they are more suited towards pursuing efficient operations than encouraging innovation.

From smart shareholders to employees, people being told about a reinvention in the works need stories they can get behind. While never losing sight of how to make the firm more competitively effective, Ahrendts and Bailey clearly understood that Burberry needed bigger aspirations and goals powered by passion. They achieved this by making brand the core focus and announcing to executives that art, not business, would drive major decisions. In doing so, they reconnected employees around the world to the legacy of the iconic 150-year-old British brand, enabled strategists, to planners and beyond to experience the real spirit of their industry and inspired everyone to design beauty into every facet of the business.

Rule #2 - Refresh the Brand Core

Having a globally recognized brand is one thing. Making it magical is something very different. In failing to understand meaning, purpose, promise and history as defining features of a brand, too many companies hope to spark reinvention with a new logo, tagline, communications strategy or other 'brand' sleight-of-hand. With years of what some critics suggested was irreparable neglect and damage to the brand caused by copies of its trademark tartan, mass-market designs produced by franchises and a dearth of product presence in discount outlets, Burberry could well have fallen into this trap. It didn't. Instead, since 2006, its comeback has been elegantly executed with constant brand refreshing, courtesy of Bailey and his design team charting a sustainable growth path through collection after collection. Surprising and delighting customers with every new handbag, jacket, trench or dress, Burberry keeps the magic alive by reimagining its spirit of 'disheveled elegance' with every season. From the latest collection inspired by the color and energy of Henry Moore's textiles to the opening of its more causal Brit store in London's Covent Garden, surprises are always around the corner.

Rule #3 - Reinvent The Brand Experience

Companies often think about customer experience in a very limited sense and are often far too conservative in adapting to and using new social technologies. And luxury companies have, arguably, been the most reluctant to embrace and adapt to the new. To reinvent its brand experience, Burberry brought a redefined promise to life by designing a customer experience that was truly global, true to its core and what other luxury houses at the time could never have imagined and would never have implemented: democratized access to luxury. With an agnostic and borderless approach to social media, Burberry gave customers total access to the brand across any device, on multiple platforms and anywhere, anytime. As a result, it's the dominant luxury brand on Facebook. With a belief that fashion is for everyone - not just the press and industry elite - it opened the locked doors to the runway by livestreaming each season's show and then allowing customers to order pieces for home delivery before collections arrived at stores. The result is excitement, interest and loyalty among consumers who are not yet even customers.

Rule #4 - Reinforce A Balanced Culture

Creating a results culture requires not only producing the right results but also producing the right results the right way. For too many companies, that means relentlessly promoting a single way of thinking, working and doing. At Burberry, where 'balance' is one of the key words in the company's vocabulary, there is no single way of thinking, working and doing. Instead, by hiring people with an EQ as high as their IQ, pursuing cross-disciplinary collaboration between right- and left-brain specialists, and encouraging informal mentorships across and between various departments, tacit knowledges, divergent processes and asymmetrical personalities are shared. The result is that ideas are born, decisions are made and designs are discovered in ways that are more organic and holistic. It's not a formula; Burberry recognizes that maintaining balance is not an end game, it's an ongoing practice.

Rule #5 - Reimagine The Future

Making the right trade-offs between investing in today and investing in tomorrow can be one of the most daunting challenges for any organization. Performing well or not, every company feels the short-term pressure that often forces managers to make bad trade-offs. Very few have the capabilities or the culture of trust that empowers management to make the right trade-offs to balance the need for long term strategic health, cash flow and shareholder expectations. Burberry does. In addition to a clear, creative vision at the top, a Strategic Innovation Council pools the interdisciplinary and intergenerational wisdom and experience of some of the company's best and brightest to consider, examine, feel, see and sense what might be ahead. Stacked with Millennials who live and breathe the kind of cultural shifts that are or potentially will be relevant to the industry, it's a place to challenge assumptions, imagine solutions and, ultimately, dream about what this iconic, 150-year-old British brand could become in the years ahead.

(Disclosure: Burberry is a client of Idea Couture)

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.

Design Thinking And Creating Social Capital. Here's An Example From Tampiquito, Mexico.

Creativity happens everywhere. Not only in design firms or creative agencies. And you can easily find the results of creativity all around you; you don’t need to seek out a gallery. People think creativity only happens in art schools and innovation don't usually happens only in a lab. Design Thinking and Strategic Creaitivty is all around us and funny enough many don't it Design Thinking. In fact, they happen more often than in a design environment. Design is not Design Thinking.

Creativity is everywhere and you need the eyes to see them. One example is PARK(ing) Day, an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good. The beauty of these guerrilla installations is in their ability to engage and energize people. If all advertisers take 5% of their ad budget and use it for street installations, I think it would be a very valuable addition to their media mix. Imagine using this space for activation in creating social capital?

Meet Luis Alvarez who is an engineer by training and owns and runs a car repair shop, Autocity, in Tampiquito, Mexico. Luis also run an art gallery and an Artist-in-Residence program that aims to engage young local and international artists in projects for the development of the neighborhood’s social capital. Both the Gallery and Art Studio are located within his auto repair shop. Yes, people create art to the sounds of auto equipment and mechanics shouting, the entire process blends into a performance all its own.

It is a first for sure. And It brings me to the question, why doesn’t this happen in other spaces? In other places of business? What about shopping malls? This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve come across this year and I think Luis’ idea has legs. So far, two Artists-in-Residence projects have started up in Tampiquito. In 2009, the urban artist Eltono came to Tampiquito, stayed for two months, and painted the facades of about 50 houses in the neighborhood.

In 2010, Luis and his friends, El Narval, invited the Colombian sculptor Ana J. Haugwitz to join them. She also stayed for two months and worked together with the neighborhood’s craftsmen. The result was a collection of nine works of art, which were exhibited publicly in the neighborhood. Each work of art reflected the young artist’s collaboration with the talent she found in the workshops. I think art itself needs innovation more than anything else. It should get out of the studio and galleries and be part of our everyday lives. We can use a few more Luis in every neighborhood.

There Is An Inherent Conflict Between Logic, Emotion And Creativity. So How Should We Deal With It?

When peope ask the quesion "Do you know the correct answer?" I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us to function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic. If you have been around for over 50 years and have travelled to more than 20 countries and speak a few languages and have a few degrees under your belt, you probably know there is no right answer, may be a lot of wrong answers.

Creativity is not a license to be wrong (you have been reading too much Fast Company), strategy is not a license to be boring or lack of imagination (Reading too much HBR). A PhD degree is not a license to overintellectualize and being irrelevant to the real world and use words that you need to explain what you mean. And an MBA is not an automatic license to make key business decision, you need to earn it.

However an MBA does teach you a few important concepts if only if you understand how to apply them. You should know how to re-org your in-laws into a 'team-based family.' You learn to refer having babies as pilot market testing. You should understand the cost structure and sytem implications of starting a family. You know the cost of capital when your spouse decided to purchase a Hermes Birkin. And most of all, you know how to talk about your past relationships as ‘sunk costs.’

I definitely school needs to teach more creativity. Not the crazy useless exercises but applied creativity and design thinking in everyday life from science to economics. Today (and I should say it has always been) creative thinking is critical to business strategy and innovation; however, If you look at the top 20 MBA programs around the world, you will be challenged to find any courses, core or elective, which teach, train or even inspire students to be truly creative. Instead, most MBA programs and courses focus on numbers, analysis and the logic of deductive reasoning.

There is an inherent conflict between this kind of logic and creativity, and in most business settings, logic is usually quick to get in the way of creativity. Creative ideas can run into the walls of business logic because 1/ it does not quickly, clearly or at all connect to 2/ business strategists often operate within the boundaries of defined roles, and decisions are made based on those boundaries – they draw on what they know and what they have learned including formulaic behaviors, processes and the “best practices” that have evolved through mass consensus – to shape how they think and act.

That explains how many MBA students had Adam Smith on their reading list. The 18th Century idea that people – given their limited time, information, resources and budgets – act purposefully to maximize their own satisfaction is epistemologically central to business thinking. In Smith’s view, all human behavior is rationally self-interested and we are innately selfish. Thanks to this model convinces many how “easy” it is to predict individual or organizational behavior. It is not quite that simple.

When it comes to human behavior, this is where many economic principles, particularly Smith’s, break down. I am not rational (ask those people who work wiht me) and many of us are not. The economist's notion that people act rationally only implies that they try to act in ways that are consistent with their own personal objectives, even if those objectives seem absurd to outsiders. That's the beauty of being human. Read more about creativity in this coming issue of M/I/S/C - The Creativity Issue.

Apple Is Gearing Up To Attack The Living Room And To Turn Siri Into The Next Google?

I am exciting seeing the advance copy of M/I/S/C next issue - "The Creativity Issue". It will be in bookstores in 22 countries sometime first week of December. Now starting to work on the next one - the "Big Insight Issue". I have a few great ideas and now looking for some good guest contributors. Publising is painful but fun and thank you for those 50+ emails that compliment our effort. It is great to see that people are really liking it.

I’ve been following and speculating how Apple will be using Sirri acquisition strategically to compete in the next white space. Imagine Apple is now working on creating the next home entertainment experience, a place that is still not occupied by Microsoft?

I can’t wait for the day that I throw away every remote control that I have in my living room. First it is hopeless for me to figure out their functions and second they are ugly and don’t fit in my modern and elegant living room. What I want to see is I can just say a command and the TV or the controller will translate them and activate them.

The Siri in the living room will be different from the one on your iPhone. It will be your personal entertainment assistant and understand whether you’re in the mood of a movie, convert, news or just some soft jazz. I think this is the killer app for TV and will give Apple TV a real chance to take off. Up till now Apple TV is just a little experiment. I think we are 18 months away. There are still a lot of challenges such as bandwidth in some cases and voice recognition accuracy. May be there will be a tactile interface control or gesture-based control in additional to the voice command. The beauty is Siri doesn't need a rigid set of voice commands an able to interpret natural phrases by picking out keywords and some other cues.

And then the whole idea of “search” will bring Google into the game. It is reported that they are throwing resources into a refreshed Google TV and Apple has bought its third mapping company, beefing up its cartographic portfolio with eye-popping 3D imagery based on declassified missile-targeting technology.

Apple will be playing the same new game strategy as it did to the music industry creating an industry breakpoint. It will be a hardware, software and integration play powered by the iCloud. They still need to soft the gaming piece which Xbox and PS3 are the last defensible positions. I hope the Apple TV set will be available in black other than silver and white.

Thank You Steve! Let's Type This On Our Touchscreens "We Will Miss You Steve Jobs."

It is a very very day with the news that Steve Jobs, who has died aged 56 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The world has lost a visionary, not only he made an unprecedented impact not only on the world of computing and consumer electronics with insanely great products that inspired a generation of people to dream big and be different, he has also reinvented management by building and rebuilding one of the greatest companies on earth. His creative and innovative spirit and remarkable accomplishments will forever be remembered by all of us.

Steve was the most creative person on earth in business I’ve known of. His creative spirit will inspire many for decades to come. You wonder what’s makes Steve so creative? And what is creativity anway? How creativity happens? How do we prepare ourselves for creativity? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker? Or you only need to be a rightbrainer? Are there many more young Steve Jobs out there?

Creative individuals have a few distinctive features that distinguish them from their peers: They have a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and well-developed skills, also they find their work intrinsically motivating (Simonton 2000; Amabile 1988). They tend to be independent, unconventional, and more risk-taking, and to have wide interests and a greater openness to new experiences (Simonton 2000). Steve met all those criteria and was a perfect archetype of a super creative person.

Creative individuals also tend to have a strong “discovery” orientation, which leads them to look at situations from different perspectives at the same time, to frame problems differently, and to ask novel questions. Some academics and creative managers like to describe creativity as a process, I belong to the school of Vinacke that believes creative thinking in the arts does not follow a model or any models. Ask any top creative talent, see if they follow a process. I never like the idea to reduce creativity to a five staged process. It is simply not creative to do so.

The best creativity comes from managed chaos and applied fuzzy logic. It is never about careful calculations and you simply cannot engineer lucky accidents. It is also about committment to make change, it is a powerful motivator for creative people. Design Thinking helps organization to improve its creative and imagination capability, but it is not a creative process. Creativity has no process. Don’t waste your money on any books. Just read Steve Jobs’ story.

Steven Paul Jobs, management guru, creative visionary, businessman, born 24 February 1955; died 5 October 2011.

Does Management Needs Creativity? Is It A Gift Of God Or Product Of Preparation, Practice And Training?

This has been a very crazy week between meetings, conference calls with London, Mexico City, Shanghai, Seoul and Paris, magazine deadline and cover shoot, staff party, a number of other social events, and London Business School's worldwide alumni celebration took place last Thur in over 80 cities, and it was great to catch up with many familiar faces.

The next issue of M/I/S/C is the big "Creativity" issue - the magazine is doing so well and it is putting some pressure to keep up the quality. I started them magazine in a few weeks and operate it on a "zero planning" basis - meaning I do not have an editorial calendar, or editorial meetings and everything is sponstaneous. Scary thought for some. I was wondering what should I do about the cover last Monday. Decided to use a dancer instead of a model for the cover on Tuesday. Picked up the phone and called a dance school the same day and talked to Karen Duplise of Ryerson Theatre School (Performance Dance Degree Program) and went in for a quick casting the next day. Studio booked and shooting session scheduled on Thurs. Friday was for picture selection. I am pretty happy with it. You have to wait 10 weeks to see the next cover. Here's a peek.

Dance is like design, the question is always about how much art (the craft) and how much creativity. Celebrity choreographer Twyla Tharp choreographed Push Comes To Shove (1976) which featured Mikhail Baryshnikov and is now thought to be the best example of the crossover ballet. The crossover was a perfect example of creativity in a highly disciplined art. 

Tharp has written a book about creativity - The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.  In the book she shared what she has learned about creativity and how those lessons apply to anyone with creative impulses. She believes that creativity is not a gift from the gods, but rather the product of preparation and effort. Some truth here but not sure I torally agreed with that.

 

Like to share a reprint of my interview with London Business School Alum News on new thinking that is crucial to innovation, first apprared in LBS Alumni News and then LBS IMPACT.

What do you see as your impact on the world? My LBS degree was my second graduate business degree. I was able to have the luxury to put more focus on the quality of the learning in one specific subject area rather than multiple foundation components. I was excited about learning from inspiring teachers such as Sumantra Ghoshal, Tom Stopford, Jules Goddard and many others. They inspired me to think about deep management and leadership and helped me to realise the difference between good managerial practices influenced by bad management theories and good management theories applied through bad managerial practices.

Business and government leaders are experiencing a profound crisis of trust and even legitimacy and that has triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of ‘managing’. The very core of many management theories is being questioned and ‘management’ is close to, if not passed, the point of failure. My mission is to help Fortune 500 companies make sense of what’s going on and to rethink, re-imagine and reorganise for a future of unprecedented uncertainties and opportunities through applied design thinking. I operate at the intersection of design thinking, competitive strategy and organisational change.

What indelible mark do you want to leave on the world? As a side project, I publish a design thinking and innovation magazine called M/I/S/C/ (Movement/Intuition/Structure/Complexity), the idea came to me when I was in Milan trying to decide what magazine I wanted to read on the plane. I really wanted one about innovation and change but the ones on the shelf were not hitting the mark. So I decided to start one. It is doing amazingly well selling in over 22 countries. Now we’re doing a Spanish edition as well as an iPad edition. I hope it can take on a life of its own and leave a mark by inspiring future managers and business thinkers.

What is the greatest lesson you’ve learnt? I learnt that it is very important to embrace failure. I should have failed more and more often when I was younger. But unfortunately people did not encourage ‘embracing Failure’. I didn’t take many risks and I played it very safe with every project I started. I did everything I could to make it work because failure was seen something that holds you back. I know now that you learn more when you fail often. Trying to avoid failure only prevents growth but once you alleviate that fear many more opportunities present themselves to you. Slowly, ‘failure’ is starting to gain acceptance and it will make future professionals much stronger and wiser.

What was your biggest mistake? Not listening to my intuition. It’s difficult to trust yourself when everyone and everything around you is telling you something different. Trusting your gut is one of the most important things you can learn. Also, not leveraging the opportunities that come with any crisis. Every situation presents obstacles but also opportunities – you just have to look for them.

What is the next step for you? I’m very excited about helping companies power into the future through design thinking. It is the reason I go to work (or the airport) every morning. Our company started as an experiment and is now fast becoming the most talked about innovation firm. The next step is to secure a global presence and build the next generation of leaders that will propel our growth. The future is exciting.