innovation playground Idris Mootee

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.

Apple's Biggest Challenge Is What To Do With $100 Billion. Just Write A Check And Buy Sony Before They Further Destroy More Value.

Apple's current biggest problem is not the next iPhone. It is the 100 billion dollar problem. Microsoft had been criticized for years for having too much cash and not putting them to use. They eventually started paying dividend starting 2003. It is not easy to deploy them in a way that creates the expecatation of return Apple's investors are expecting. I think they will eventually start paying dividend.

With Apple's war chest hitting $100 billion soon (currently around $98 billion but was originally estimated to be $60 billion) investors are asking the same question: What are you doing with the money or return it to shareholders? Putting that kind of money to work is not easy. It is over $100 in cash per share. $100 billion is roughly the same as California's 2012-2013 state budget and can literally buy a few countries or pay for a year of student loan for every college student in America.

Apple's core business is like printing money. Apple recorded a $16 billion increase in cash sequentially and there is no sign of slowing down with 66% rise in revenue with 36% rising expenses. That makes Apple the most valuable company at $300+ billion, which is close to the sum of the market cap of three computer giants: Microsoft ($200.2 billion), HP ($72.5 billion) and Dell ($29.2 billion).

Unfortunate big acquisitions don’t always work because of many reasons. And there is no magic formula for successful strategic transformation post acquisitions and most companies ended up underperforming post acquisitions. The problem is the inability to articulate the strategic logic of an acquisition and developing an organization and cultural integration plan.

At Idea Couture, we help acquirers in visualizing the future state and show how the pieces fit together in a very tangible (and credible) way. The future strategy is manifested in a well-articulated way showing its value creation potential. It is done through applied design thinking. Power Point cannot do the job. We bring the future state to the present to excite shareholders, employees and customers.

Apple’s history of acquisition has always been late stage start-ups that bring unique capabilities or technologies rather than revenue. With $100 billion you can literally buy up every early-stage start-up you want. Google has $44.5 billion for comparison.

Apple can use the money to purchase all patents over the years developed by Kodak, Research In Motion, Xerox Parc and Erickson and that can only account to a maximum 15-20% of the cash that they hold, but that patent portfolio allow them to sue anyone competing in their space in the next ten years.

Or Apple can use the money to buy up HP and Research In Motion and swiftly end Windows dominance in the enterprise market? Or buy Amazon and Netflix to reinvent and dominate content distribution.

Or Apple can just buy Sony? Funny Sony was looking at buying Apple when the company was at its worse shape in 1995. I still have a strategy deck I produced in 1996 about how Sony can leverage pieces of Apple and how the deal can create value for Sony. Now Apple could easily afford to buy Sony with its market value around $18 billion. If I am Apple’s CEO, that’s what I’ll do. Sony has been poorly managed from a corporate strategy level but does have great technologies, products, brand and talents. I would sell the studio business and concentrate on entertainment appliances. This deal can immediate further increase Apple's enterprise value. The integration part would be a nightmare.

Or just make it easy, Apple can acquire with cash HTC, Sony Ericksson, Samsung, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola, Nintendo which together has a combined value of roughly $93 billion. That's a lot of fun to figure out what you can do with these companies. And you still have $7 billion left to play with. Perhaps acquire New Balance for $400mm, Jobs probably would like that idea if he is still around. We miss him.

Creativity And Innovation In Small And Medium Size Firms

I am in Egypt this week and trying to finish three big Power Point decks, writing 6 documents and finished reading 63 documents with a slow Internet connection. And trying to finalize the editorial content for March 2012 issue of my magazine. It is not easy.

The December issue of M/I/S/C/ is the big "Creativity" issue. It will be out in 25 countries in the second or third week of Dec. This is thickest issue so far  and will also available on iPad. I like the idea of "Creativity" as a magazine theme but also wanted to make sure they are relevant to business and not just pure creativity.

People often ask what is creativity? How does it happen? How do we prepare ourselves for it? Or can you be prepared for it? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker, or do you only need the right side of your brain? Does it require for other profession that are usually not associated with creativity too? There is no simple answer.

Creative individuals have a few features that distinguish them from their peers. First, they possess both a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and with well-developed skills to express them through different medium. And second, they find their work intrinsically motivating and enjoy the creative process not only interested in the outcome.

Creative people also tend to have a “discovery” orientation, which leads them to view situations from different perspectives, to find problems, and to ask novel questions and to avoid group-think. Almost every entrepreneur/start-up person is a creative person at heart, because it requires a lot of creativity to start and manage a new business (with the exception of franchise business). It is harder to find creativity in large firms not because there are not enough creative people, but the organization design and business processes make it almost impossible to be creative. And for them, creativity means finding ways to work around the system but not creating new ways to meet customer needs.

For that reason, many believe that small firms are more creative and innovative than larger firms. Not only they are more creative, they are more agile and nimble. But what about mid-size firm? There are companies that are too small to be big and too big to be small?

Medium size companies tend to lack resources and expertise whereas larger firms tend to have more resources and knowledge (including hiring consultants) but more vulnerable to external shock and any radical change. People think the sheer availability of resources means larger firms should be able to innovate along product, channel, process, and paradigm more effectively. That's not true at all. Any large established businesses carry their own old mental models and operational legacies make them hard to adjust to any changes - in particularly new ideas that cannibalize their core businesses.


I am not saying it is easier for small firms to innovate, it is not for the lack of creativity. Small medium companies tend to suffer a lack of knowledge cross-pollination and carry a higher degrees of path dependency. There are basically three strategies for innovation for small and medium size firms:

1. Advancing creativity and technological competitiveness based on new processes to deliver better products
2. Advancing technological and design creativity to design innovative new products
3. Advancing creativity and design thinking to turn products into experiences

Generally these three distinct models identify three trajectories for innovation that are largely separate from one another, although some complementarities exists. Medium size firms often suffer due to a lack of strategy or expertise to develop a robust strategy.  Their innovation in processes are often the results of the need to search for greater flexibility and minimize resource requirement. The high performance small and medium enterprises are usually the results of access to strategic advice combined their speed and agility in execution.

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.

How Do You Create Industry Breakpoints And How To Benefit From Them?

I've just delivered an opening keynote in Mexico City for AMAP. The topic was STRATEGY IN THE AGE OF INN0VATION: How do we anticipate and leverage industry breakpoints? A very engaging audience and the weather was great. The keynote was based on the notion that companies should not only aware of when industry breakpoints are happening, they can also strategically create one to upset the industry status and create an environment for a new game.

Most people understand what the S-curve is in terms of technology but less so on what it means in terms of organizational design and strategic innovation. If you are not the no. 1 or no. 2 market leader, then you should consider deliberately creating an industry breakpoint to upset the market leaders. So how does one create an industry breakpoint and are there any pre-conditions? To make that happen, companies must be able to:

1. To learn about the breakpoint potential in the industry and have a sense about when it will happen (through strategic foresights)
2. To commit to making a quantum organizational change (through creating a case for transformation)
3. Having an economic engine (cash flow) to sustain the transformation (and do not take your eyes off from the core as you need it to sustain the transformation effort). 

I’ve seen people making the mistake of getting extreme pressure from investors when their core businesses are eroding and the future business are at embryonic stages. I see industry breakpoints within the beverage industry; consumer electronics industry, fashion and active wear industry and even the advertising agency business.

At the very basic, more executives see the challenges and fail to understand the implications and how to manage them. The bigger the organizations the bigger the challenges are. Most would resort to hiring a top tier management consultancy and after months of analysis the recommendations would either be

1. Invest in a particular product/segment/market that is growing and disinvest in markets that are too small
2. Acquire a growing competitor to add to revenue per share
3. Acquire a bigger competitor to gain better control of the market and increase market power.

None of these solutions are about innovation and worse; their key competitor would hire a management consultancy and came out with exactly the same recommendations. No wonder they are all locked into this zero-sum game. The reason people come to us is our ability to bring imagination and strategic foresights into the strategy process and creating new ideas not only to reinvent the core but also to re-imagine the future. So how do you recognize industry breakpoints? Here are the early signs:

1. Falling demand for standardized products
2. Declining margins in the industry due to low cost good value competition 
3. Rationalization of the availability of new sources of supplies or technologiesas amplified signals
4. New entrants pushing a new value curve supporting by different economics
5. New entrants/existing competitor promoting new behavior that can be disruptive And remember, it is far easier to try to create an industry breakpoints then reacting to one.

Many companies come to this too late and it is a lot harder to innovate when market share and earnings are under pressure. When earnings are under extreme pressure it will affect CEO’s credibility and even a good strategy can be misunderstood by analysts and critics.

What Every Innovation Manager Needs To Know About Value Creation? Let's Start With Something Simple.

What is value creation? Something commonly used in strategic discussions but not well understood among managers as well as business or design school students. If a company needs to reinvent itself, they need put value creation first. If a disrupter wants to attack an industry leader, it needs to put value creation first. If your company want to grow your way to greatness, put value creation first. If your company wants to stay relevant, put value creation first.

There are many practical issues that affect value: from the nature of owners and investors to the shifting perception and behavior of the financial market, smart and foolish ways to invest, divest, reorganize and acquire etc. At the very core, it is about how companies create value by investing capital to generate future cash flows at higher rates of return than their cost of capital. And how different ownership structures and organization designs could affect value. Here I am talking about one level below.

For business managers, technologists and design professionals this means creating value with everyday decision. Value is the source of competitive differentiation. Here are a few ideas for you to think about:

• Every innovation manager needs to know or consider constantly how each new ideas will benefit consumers and in what way whether helping them to perform, produce, organize certain things or feel certain way. Value can be both tangible and intangible. Customer value needs to be created first before you can think about capturing them. Value creationn before value capture.

• Every innovation manager must understand and better than their competitors at understanding where, how and why value is created and destroyed within your industry and your company. Not only by business unit, by product, by customer, by channel, by market, by technology, or whatever that best reveal your formula that drives value creation.

• Every innovation manager needs to know how their decisions will enable the organization to create, deliver and capture new value from change and foresight. By bringing new perspectives, they can help executives to make better future-informed decisions that create value.
• Every innovation managers need to stay focused on the objective of creating value through purposeful innovation. Don’t be distracted by other management measurements and indicators that don’t build organizations (they are for managing organizations, not building them) and avoid the trap of spend time managing the lagging indicator rather than creating real value for the future.
• Every innovation manager needs to remember that creating value is also about managing expectations. They need to accept that even great ideas will fall flat and some mediocre ideas will be successful and timing can be a key factor. Avoid "short-termism" and confusing product extension is innovation. The best way we can build successful innovation that delivers growth is by putting value creation first.

A misunderstanding of “value” is causing many companies to be “recklessly cautious” or "creatively overwhelm" and forgetting that they are competing for tomorrow’s market and cash flow – not yesterdays. And by their “short-termism” they are passing up terrific opportunities to create long-term value. “Short-termism” is not good for innovation.

Apple: A Rare Case Of Successfully Building A Truly Sustainable Compeitive Advantage. It Is Definitely Worth The Current Valuation Premium.

Here's the cover model for the coming issue of my M/I/S/C magazine. We shot the cover in London and here is a picture of her taking a picture of me. The concept seems surrealistic. The next M/I/S/C Design Thinking and Customer Experience Issue will be in book stores Sept in the US and a bit later in Europe and Asia/Australia. Now I am working on the Dec issue which is Design Thinking and Creativity. I am thinking of who to invite to write for this issue. BTW this is a picture below of Idea Couture's latest window display. I am liking it.

If you've just upgraded your iPhone you will not be happy if Apple is bringing out a new one in a few short months. In addition to launching both iPhone 5 and iOS 5, there will be the new iTunes 11 bought to you from the Cloud.

Expect a very clean design and iCloud will be closely integrated with iTunes. iTunes Store is actually turning into a browser (funny without we seeing it that way) and it will actually be integrated into the entire app. Your music will be backed up by the Cloud and everything will be fully synced.

It is harder and harder to beat Apple with its deep integration between apps, OS and devices. It is reported that iCloud will be offered for free initially, and at some point users will be charged $25 annually for subscription of the service. That’s another way to get another recurring revenue stream just like MobileMe service.

Apple has finally locked-in deals with big record labels Warner, EMI, Sony, and Universal. With 30% of revenue from iCloud’s music offering with the major lablels, 12% with those holding the songwriting rights, and the remaining 58% for Apple to keep. That’s a good profit margin. Not only it is helping with the bottom line, it is further stenghtening the Apple fortress with all these integration.

Apple is building a fortress around its suite of product/services/experiences and it is almost impossible to break that. It is not only around music and devices. They have just filed a patent application that an iProjector that I believe is in the making. It makes perfect sense, a minisize slim projector that sells for $600 to $1,000 and most of them have problems with setting up. And you thought it should be easy. I will not think for a second of getting one if it is fully integrated with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad. With interactive presentations and sharable contents between devices.... and not to mention a really good looking Apple design.

The patent application "Projected display shared workspaces" was filed in February 2010 and it is basically a system for taking what's on screen and projecting it onto a nearby surface such as a wall etc. The true innovation is that about the system proposed in this filing is that it can combine projections from multiple devices into one screen, in what's dubbed the "shared workspace." So you can simultaneously show power point from your computer, a video from your iPhone and notes from your iPad. No switching between apps anymore. Called it a “presentation canvas”?

Apple’s horizontal integration strategy across devices and channels and vertical integration strategy from chip design to software and retail is creating a truly sustainable competitive advantage that is hard to replicate. For that reason alone, its valuation skyrocketed. This is a brilliant example of classic business strategy theory at work.

Every single Apple products complement (compete) and complete each other. Get an iPod, and you can download content via iTunes and access them trhough iCloud and use that to move content to iPad or other devices. The sort of control over the entire user experience or process, from hardware to software, strengthens customer loyalty and provide lock-in. You cannot leave Apple once you’re in. It is becoming the consumer equivalent of IBM for business.

Random Thoughts On Muggles, Magic And Design Thinking.

For those of you who are not familiar with Muggles, they are people who are incapable of magic, and who are usually unaware of the wizarding world. Design Thinking is sort of like wizardries, it takes certain type of people with the certain type of training, Hogwarts or Harvard.

When Muggles think Design Thinking, they see nothing new there and they believe it has been around for a long time, it basically means they still don’t get it and may never will. They hardly see the real challenge, it is simply not to invent a better mouse traps. We care capable of doing more and being more innovative. The power of our imagaination is what it is.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."  ~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore

Design Thinkin is alot more than lateral thinking and creativity de Bono style or ad agency style brainstorming. Design Thinking fills the gap created by management theories and business schools which analytical thinking and data-driven decision making override intuition where empathy is never part of the equation.

Companies have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of strategic making, leadership styles and management model. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards Design Thinking. Design Thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. It takes a certain type of people who are comfortable with different thinking styles. I’ve read so much poorly written papers about design thinking and many of them don’t even grab the basic principles and its true transformational power.

Often people talk narrowly about design and prototyping, but Design Thinking is not just bringing the power of empathetic creative problem-solving to bear on a human needs, it is an organization culture, a mindset, a framework and a toolkit to solve complex wicked problems that we created. It provides a balance between the needs to create customer value, shareholder return and social value. Design Thinking is strategic.

Everyone comes to me hoping to join Idea Couture claims they are creative, they have great ideas and can turn ideas into great products and create new markets. Go deeper and I ask the how… there comes the sound of silence. Great Idea, great products, great business is a tagline, not a strategy. Design Thinking can be applied to fill the gaps of traditional strategic thinking. The increasingly complex needs of the business need a new toolkit and Design Thinking is exactly what is needed. It helps to uncover new needs, creatively redefine value, reconfiguration of value-chain activities, develop compelling brand narratives and create markets that are yet to exist. When my friend Roger Martin advocates Design Thinking, he is not talking about ethnography or prototyping; he is talking about a whole new management paradigm.

Everything is designed—from behavior, systems, organizations to public policies. Design is universal. The dirty secrets of why how big corporations destroy shareholder value are actually no secrets. Everyone from the board of directors to the frontline employees knows 'why' a company is 'stuck.' Because their structures and management systems are so rigid and can’t adapt to changing market shifts or respond to any disruptions; their over focus on core competencies and optimization that prevent them to see beyond the core and; fail to see and anticipate the future and even if they see it they fail to act on it. This is where Design Thinking comes into play.

Everyone understands the need to make money and everyone hope they can do magic. And everyday many moguls are trying to create magic with cute packaging and fancy taglines and hoping to make a lot of money, off course it won’t work. The real magic lies in understanding deep human desire and unmet needs and anticipate emerging behavior, not every company truly understands how to do it. They teach those at the Ministry of Design Thinking.

Design Thinking, Business Transformation And The Creative Enterprise.

It is time to take a look at the report card of our design for business organization, management and strategy. After half a century of quality movement, brand management, marketing and catefory management, globalization, customer service automation and organizational design fine-tuning, we should have a pretty good of idea of what is working and what is not. As a result of all suboptimization efforts over past decades, we begin to see the impact on the whole system.

The idea is that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. Some porodcts, brands, businesses are better at the expense of other things. This intrinsic difficulty may degenerate into the "tragedy of the commons": the exhaustion of shared resources because of competition between the subsystems. This is exactly what had been happening in different business units and functions including product design, marketing, operations and sales/channel management. The principle of suboptimization states that suboptimization in general does not lead to global optimization, and as whole businesses and societies are far worse. Here comes Design Thiking.

Finally, this is the Design Thinking Workbook for the Harvard Design Thinking Seminar. It ook us a week to put this together. Coming together nicely. Design Thinking allows us to to rethink, reimagaine and reset the game. I am not saying every company needs to make radical changes in its core business itself, and a lot of instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as in the case of Blockbuster, it came too late.

Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (to play a new game). This means complete or partial transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create, deliver and capture value at the new way not in a sub-systems level.

Business model transformation may include a strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or sideways along the value chain or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. The idea is to apply visual sense making as part of the Design Thinking tool kit to reimagine new value ecosystem and value chain reconfigurations.

Vvisual thinking can play a very vital part in the business design process. The key to successfully design a capital-efficient business model is to visually identifying assets, risks, and cash flows by their distinct risk characteristics and then visually modeling them and retaining only those that are central to how a company creates value.

The Harvard Design Thinking for Business Creativity Seminar in NYC tomorrow, for the first time I will be introducing these applications to people outside Idea Couture and expecting a large group of very senior executives and looking forward to a great day of intensive discussions. Here’s the workbook as takeaway together with the 150 slides. Here’s a first glance at the workbook and workshop material. Planning to bring this seminar to Europe and Asia next.

Seven Steps To Better Brainstorming. Or May Be There Are More. Is Brainstorming The Right Word?

Let’s start with this…this is not the best title. I really don’t like the word "brainstorming." It means a group of people getting together to generate a lot of deas for the solution of a problem. In 1953 Alex Faickney Osborn popularized the method in his book called Applied Imagination, he proposed that groups could double their creative output with brainstorming. Fully the book title is called Applied Imagination, which is very appropriate, and the trick is on the “Applied” part.

The authors of BRAINSTEERING by Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne pointed out the problem with brainstorming today is a bunch of people selected (for technical or political reasons) and put together in a room and an external moderator asking people to think outside the box. Traditional brainstorming is fast, furious, and ultimately shallow which I am in full agreement. By taking a more well planned approach can get better outcome from their ideas/solutions generating workshops investments.

I’ve seen how many moderators have no ideas of how large organization functions or any training on advanced group problem solving techniques, design thinking concepts and tools or system thinking or sense-making, and that’s usually a recipe for failure.

The McKinsey Quarterly article “Seven steps to better brainstorming,” taken from the author’s new book BRAINSTEERING, attempts to address some of these issues. They called it “Brainsteering,” it may be another buzzword but anything is better than brainstorming.  Here are their key recommendations from the authors and I’ve added my comments for readers’ considerations:

• Know Your Organization’s Decision-Making Criteria - Managers hoping to spark creative thinking in their teams should therefore start by understanding (and in some cases shaping) the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas. Are there any absolute restrictions or limitations, for example?

My advice is this may be appropriate in some instances, generally speaking it puts way too much constrains on the creative process. For those of who have worked in large organizations, we know how difficult and almost impossible to know the criteria for decisions making. It is a political process as well as a realization process and it is not what is written down in any company’s operating manual. I think this is unrealistic.  Plus the fact that the change in external environment can quickly change the risks appetite of senior executives and any criteria we impose may be not valid at all. I would say ignore this one.

• Ask The Right Questions - Decades of academic research shows that traditional, loosely structured brainstorming techniques (“Go for quantity—the greater the number of ideas, the greater the likelihood of winners!”) are inferior to approaches that provide more structure. Build your workshop around a series of “right questions” that your team will explore in small groups during a series of idea generation sessions. The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective.

I would say this is the number one most important part in any creative exercise.  How we practice this at Idea Couture is we apply Design Thinking techniques in helping them to frame and identify the issues, better framing means new perspectives and better solutions. There is a lot of science and art in doing this. We use visual sense making, customer journey mapping, strategic foresight scenarios and other 5 or 6 techniques to get the job done.

Strategic framing can involve using many different lenses, and one example would be time. Time could be a frame of reference. Whether we are talking about past, present, and future. Younger people frames the world in optimistic terms where mature people are realistic as they come to terms with many things in life. An organization’s past history carry forward certain orthodoxies that also limit how they see things. 

• Choose The Right People - They suggest only picking people who can answer the questions you’re asking. As obvious as these sounds, it’s not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the org chart.

I understand the authors’ point, but it is about balance. I don’t think we can ignore the fact that decision-making in large organizational setting is always a political process. We need a balance of domain knowledge, outsider perspectives, and project stakeholders in order to get momentum. This is a necessary evil. You cannot ignore people who have a prominent voice in an organization and part of the power circle. That’s life.

• Divide and conquer - When assign people to subgroups, it’s important to isolate “idea crushers” in their own subgroup. These people are otherwise suitable for the workshop but, intentionally or not; prevent others from suggesting good ideas. They come in three varieties: bosses, “big mouths,” and subject matter experts. The boss’s presence, which often makes people hesitant to express unproven ideas, is particularly damaging if participants span multiple organizational levels. Big mouths take up air time, intimidate the less confident, and give everyone else an excuse to be lazy. Subject matter experts can squelch new ideas because everyone defers to their presumed superior wisdom, even if they are biased or have incomplete knowledge of the issue at hand.

The authors have a lot of good suggestions here about carefully picking the people and assign them to the group and managing "big mouths" is a very good one. This requires a little bit of advance planning but our experiences says it is an important step that we should not ignore.  Yes, brainstorming needs strategic planning.

One big big one the authors have missed is the role of social technologies play in the idea generation and management value chain. This has a big implications on how ideas are collected, socialized and activated. Ideas are far better when they are built on top of one another, at that point, you can't even chase it back to where the idea was originated from. That’s another post, next week perhaps.

 

Idea Couture's Planned IPO Is Now Official.

Newswire - Idea Couture's planned $150 million initial public offering is being greeted favorably on Wall Street and could help buoy the stocks of other innovation consulting and services firms, according to industry watchers.

"Stock prices in this sector were up fairly dramatically today, and I think it's primarily related to the news of the Idea Couture filing," says an analyst with S.S.D.D., an investment advisory firm in San Francisco.

“As Idea Couture goes public, it will remind investors that this is still an early stage in the development of this type of firms within the consulting service industry and the firm has created a lot of value over the last four years,” he adds. "What this has done is reinvigorate interest in the sector."

The announcement had been widely anticipated, and there were rumours that Idea Couture will merge with Fahrenheit 212 before filing an IPO. Both firms were considered top players in the space and together becomes the market leader. An attempt to contact the CEO of Fahrenheit 212 but they did not return calls.

Insiders says the IPO will give Idea Couture stock currency with which to do deals and build up its innovation organization design business, making the innovation consulting firm more of a competitor to more traditional consulting firms such as Monitor or IBM (NYSE:IBM) Global Services.

The timing of Idea Couture's offering remains uncertain. The innovation firm could wait later in the year in hopes of riding an upturn in the market. The market is anticipating a successful offering that pave the way for further acquisition as the company continues its international expansion.

Happy April 1st. Now let’s get back to work. Stop dreaming.

"Build to Fail" And "Fail To Build" Can Have Different Meanings. To Fail Is Part Of To Build. To Fail Is To Hep To Build To Last. I Hope I'm Not Confusing You.

In London this week, fully packed with meetings. Staying at St. Marins Lane and it is one of my favourite hotels in London. Both for style and location even I am not the saturday night crowd that hangs out in the cocktail lounge. I am getting a lot of work done writing and editing for the next issue of M/I/S/C. Deadline is a few days away.

We love to read successful innovation and design stories of how a cool idea turns into great success story. The reality is most cute or good ideas don’t make it to the executive’s desk and even for those who did, most products and services launched to the market ended up failed. What good is innovation if the failure rate is so high and how we wonder how it would impact our credibility or career future? Is it a good thing after all? Do we know why we fail? Most don’t have any idea.

How do we anticipating failing as part of design thinking? How fast should be fail? How soon should we fail? What’s the right mindset? “Dream to Fail” or “Fail to Dream?” Or should be thinking about how to “Build to Fail” or “Fail to Last?” What is right approach to embrace a culture of failure? Fail often and fail faster is a bad idea, I know how easy it is for people to say, “oh you should fail more and fail often”. That means you’re no good in innovation management or don’t understand how to manage innovation risks.

Business schools do not celebrate failure and design schools spend too little time understand how not to fail. If you've failed too much and too often then it doesn’t reflect well on you. And if you’ve never failed, it means you never tried anything innovative. And if you tell me your innovation success rate is 70% or 80%, you don’t know what innovation is all about.That's part of the reason I wanted to publish M/I/S/C Magazine.

So what design thinking has to do with failing forward? Design thinking is about helping business managers (with no design training) to understand “play” and "exploring white space." We should question the practice of segregating design thinking solely for use by so-called “design professionals.” What’s the social bases of separating design and business?

There are semantic gaps, conceptual blocks, and social and definition barriers between design and business. What are the first stops teaching business managers the concepts of design thinking? And what’s design thinking? Most common description includes application of ethnographic research, strategic foresight, sense-making, multidisciplinary teams, strategic framming, visual mapping, strategic prototyping and iteration and form-giving. So how can entire organizations benefit from design thinking in their everyday jobs?

With some exceptions, both design industry and business community is lacking an understanding of design thinking and its potential role in business strategies and decisions making. Design thinking is a mind-set, common languages, a practice, a set of tools as well as a framework to generate more and better solutions or options. It is where D-School meets B-School.

It is not creative brainstorming; in fact it is quite the opposite of that. Design thinking is a systematic way to identify and frame issues; develop multiple solution options; test them with rapid prototypes; and iterate on them. To prototyping is to strategize.

With The Emerging Of The New "Object-Culture" - Meanings Are Sought Through Social Identities, Visual Information and Interfaces / Interactions

There are objects that I love for many different reasons. They range from my Leicas to my JBL speakers, LV bags, Prada shoes and Mac computers. Objects that are highly functional can also be highly personal … expressive, reliable and artistic. Designers, brand marketers and product development executives often have to deal with the philosophical dilemmas such as subject vs. object; humanity vs. nature; function vs. style; and simplicity vs. complexity. Every time we come up with an innovative product design or experience we need to consider all of these things.

When does the value of a product exceeds its functional value and at what point the emotive value reaches a point of diminishing return? What is the value of the emotive premium or should there be a premium at all? Can we engineer emotive elements into the design without adding cost? Whose job is it? Did they teach that in MBA or MFA ? Or neither? It is something we think about everyday at Idea Couture. The engineering of desire; emotive attributes as product features; and interactions as gateways to collective experiences.

We are definitely reaching another higher state of our “object-culture” when consumer electronics such as cell phones and other gadgets replace or compliment our usual “badges” and these new form of badges are more than just symbols of tribes and tastes, they are windows to our other world – somewhere that our identities are developed and validated. It is worth to deploy our anthropologists to study the new role and meaning of social objects (electronics gadgets) and what it means to marketers.

Honestly speaking, I think men need badges more than women and men likes to see the world in groups and believe people in groups (including clubs, schools, sports, tribes, politics, religions or nations) tend to differ from one another to such a degree that they perceive each other as though they were totally different species from another planet. These groups (reflect by badges) provide their members with a strong sense of distinct and superior identity.

As designers and marketers we design objects that wonderfully fit in the palm of our hands; sometimes bring us a sense of confidence and occasionally moments of delights in the form of a text message. This is what it looks like. It’s got a little touch screen on it; you can shake it and it will respond to your command. It is ultra thin and fits nicely into the pockets of your Hugo Boss jacket. Call this the period of late modernity or postmodernity if you wish. We are living in a time when the legacy of the modern era, in which empiricism and utilitarianism rise to prominence. It is simply just part of being human. And that’s why marketing and product design is never a true science despite people come up with useless fancy tools.

Philosopher Charles Taylor has offered an explanation of the meaning of these activities within modern societies. He says that in the modern worldview meaning is sought through concepts such as progress, reason and freedom and a sense of meaning in one’s life. I think technology is a clear sign of “progress”, collective thinking and reasoning in mass and real time code is the redefinition of “reason” and “freedom” is reflected through Facebook and other social media. Let’s see what our anthropologists have to add.

Now back to my day job. It is not so fun anymore when my to-do-list is longer than my blog post.

Experience Design Innovation Can Use Nostalgic Clues To Create Emotive Connections. Don't Under Estimate The Power Of Nostalgia.

As technology pushes forward and sometimes it is easy for us to forget about the past. I think marketers and product designers could benefit more from looking to the past. I am not ready to claim that many of the classic design whether it is product or interfaces will stand the test of being both functional and timeless, but I can comfortably say that many brands/ products /interfaces carry a lot of sentimental value for many people. And many of these deign will not only survive this lifetime and well into the next generation. 

For me, I am at a stage where the best objects or brands or products are the ones that connect me with my childhood and memories of my time with my Dad when I was a little boy. I have been collecting these objects since a while back and they seem to contain a bit of my past. I guess as we age we will become more receptive to marketers and designers who make use of what market researchers call "a longing for positive memories from the past."

The science of nostalgia isn't yet fully understood, but studies have shown nostalgic cues that can be exploited and the ways in which images from the past can yield favorable attitudes about products in the present. Ask our team of resident anthropologists and they can explain why.

The best examples would be my McIntosh amplifiers, JBL studio monitors and Leica cameras. I couldn’t really accord these (not the top end models) when I was 14 and my dad ended up buying me the entry models. I remember the joy when we bought a pair of giant speakers and we struggled to carry that home. It seems the objects I love most around the house are those that reminds me of him.  He once said to me “You're the most wonderful boy in the world, and doesn’t matter what you choose to do you will do it well. And you can do anything you want to.” 

I’ve heard the saying “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it” and I am not sure who said that. That’s kind of what I feel when I look at stuff around me. I have a thing for McIntosh (picture above my living room) and have quite a few of them lying around everywhere, I think I have at least 3,000 watts of pure clean power to feed to my JBLs. These pretty "Big Blue Meter" McIntoshes are more than sound machine, the classic design and the physical knobs are part of a very simple user experience. I am sick of remote control and I can’t even use them other than power on and off. It brings me the question why machine + usability + style can come in such a nice package then and we hardly see many today (Apple is the exception).

A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad (picute above). It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!

A great brand/product and even interface if stylistically design and adding some nostalgia touches can power up a wave of innovation that has strong emotive connections.  With more and more people entering the boomers lifestage, expect to see collectable toys inspired nostalgia factor. The essence of these brands is very appealing and emotive; something that people grew up with. It is more than Lanvin porcelain dolls and Prada toy keyrings, it is time to visit eBay.

 

 

Apple iPad Is More Than A Tablet, It Is A Window To New Behavior That Has Yet To Fully Emerge. And I Want A New MacBook Pro With A New Design Before The Summer.

Microsoft and Apple are both great companies for different reasons and operate under very different philosophies. The interesting thing is as Apple grows bigger and bigger, will it begin to behave like other large mature organizations such as Microsoft or IBM? Ever since Apple market cap surpassed Microsoft, it signified an indicator that the investment community was sending a message to the industries..

But Microsoft is still a much bigger company from both topline and bottom as well as other measure. What it means, now Apple is given the currency and blessing to go out and play the next game. Who’s the next big target? I don’t think is Microsoft, I don’t even think Apple sees Microsoft as competition. They are onto the next game.

I have three companies in mind that I think Apple will be out there trying to push out. Apple was set out not to beat Microsoft, but IBM. Are they still on that mission? Apple is still a fraction of IBM’s. Both companies have significant customers lock-in for different reasons and both are tied into the fabric of our economy. Let’s face it, the primary reason for Apple's stellar growth and valuation was due to their track record of repeatedly innovating and creating new products while at the same time maintaining a long-range vision – most companies do one at the expense of the other.

Apple's advantage is that it has a good view of the end game and driven by strategic foresight – not by today’s balance sheet and they can afford to be strategic. The iPad is not important not as a tablet, there are enough tablets out there. It is the first member of a growing family of 21st century computing appliances from Apple that co-creating a new behavior. Much like the first generation iPod. I think there will be a wave of innovation from the industry as people realize this is not just another computing device to fit between a phone and a computer. Many still don’t get it when I talked to people in CES. Tablets are dead, iPad is an appliance.

I am looking forward to the next gen MacBook Pro and I hope we will see something in 3 months. For sure it will be thinner, Light Peak will replace firewire, and the DVD drive will disappear (it should) and equipped with solid state drive. he next update to its MacBook line to make way for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. There is 90% chance that Sandy Bridge processors will be used on the 13” MacBooks Pro, it is the first to feature a graphics chip grafted atop a processor. I hope they provide a choice of different colors (unlikely) such as silver, white and black. I will take black. I don’t think they will upgrade the 15’ and 17” until later in the year. I don’t think MacAir will survive long when the MacBookPro gets thinner. It is too pricey.

I am interested to see when the revenue stream from the iPad will eventually overtake the Mac's -- much as the iPhone did a few years ago and the iPod did before that. MacBook will eventually become just be a small business unit of Apple.