innovation playground Idris Mootee

eBay + Paypal + Skype + Stumbleupon + ? + ? = ?

eBay recently acquired a small company called Stumbleupon which directs traffic to socially rated content, it means it's not even something you are "searching for" but something people like you might like that you've stumbled upon. The beauty of this is while Google is mostly good when you have some ideas of what you are looking for, but this is about what people want to see, sort of like window shopping followed by impulse buying when you see something you like in a shop window. Before the acquisition, Stumbleupon was among the top ten in terms of sending traffic to eBay. Let's imagine what eBay can do with it. One feature that now exists is the ability to rate a webpage and code it with a keyword on the fly by clicking on a comment button on the Stumbleupon toolbar. Ebay took paypal and turned it into the worlds largest online payment system, adding Skype (it probably costs too much) and now this small one.  I think I have an idea of what it is becoming and I can see a few more missing pieces. I think this is a good move. Maybe I should share my scenario planning slides with eBay in 2010.

 

Marketing of Innovative and Disruptive Technologies

There are many disruptive innovations happening these days and unlike the dot.com days, these are nimble start-ups powered by an open innovation software ecosystem and exploding networks. With any disruptive business models, the key challenge they face is how do you drive adoption and how fast can you do it? Marketing innovative products and technologies are very different from conventional product marketing.

Let’s first define what is an innovative product or service? I define it as something that offers next-step improvements of existing ideas or offering high value / performance at an affordable price. It can be evolutionary or revolutionary, or it is not that easy to draw the distinctions?

Let’s try again. An evolutionary product is one that is an extension of an existing technology and is typically compatible with older, established technologies but incompatible with new, competitive technologies. In contrast, a revolutionary technology is one that does not offer compatibility with existing technologies but may offer superior performance. So let’s use the Nintendo Wii as an example, while it is fully compatible with older games but at the same time it offers very revolutionary features targeting non-gamers. Or if we take the PS3 as another example, it is a big step forward from a performance point of view and incorporating many advanced features and yet still compatible with many existing technologies. Is that revolutionary?

The key is to look at whether they improve the performance of established products, along the dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued. Or they can aim at different sets of dimensions and create new markets. Sometimes disruptive technologies result in a worse performance, at least in the short term. Disruptive technologies perform established products in mainstream markets. But they have certain unique features that a particular segment of customers or markets finds valuable. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and easier to use or sometimes perform tasks in the background without the user knowing it. This is where Customer Experience Innovation comes into play.

Here’s a truly disruptive innovation, Google's attempt to make all of the world's information searchable now extends to the human genome. Google has just invested $3.9 million in 23andMe, a start-up company that enables users to search their genetic profiles online. Google said that the investment was made as 23andMe’s goal of developing new ways to help people make sense of their genetic information will help us further our mission of organizing the world’s information in this new and important field. That is truly revolutionary. Not sure what exciting things will happen when they combine your search record with your genetic profiles? That’s a marketer’s dream!

A disruptive technology typically challenges all previously held assumptions and threatens all the painfully acquired knowledge - not only internally (within a company or the industry) but also externally with customers. The introduction of a disruptive technology is an incredibly painful process. Like a hurricane or a tornado, it wipes out or makes the years spent learning languages and systems, investing in tools and programs, acquiring market knowledge and information, obsolete. If you are interested you can download part of my presentation through this link.  http://www.highintensitymarketing.com/images/mktofinnovativeproductsdownload.pdf#search=%22site%3Awww.highintensitymarketing.com%2F%22

Selling "Innovation" and the RFP game

The demand for interactive (I am not sure this is the right word) services is growing. That’s good news for our industry and may stay that way for a while. Even with this high demand, I still hear a lot from business development folks explaining that why we did not get the business… either because we are too expensive or we did not comply with their needs or they choose a partner with an established relationship. Here I want to help us to think about the behaviors and not only the words of customers and they not necessarily are the same.

Let’s start with our emotional/behavioral mind-set which is the foundation on which all successful consultative selling relationships are built upon, or it can be the primary instrument sabotaging that. We embark on customer conversations with a pre-established view of the world or mind-set and that derives from our personality and experiences. It is also formed by the expectations and assumptions we have about the individual we are speaking with, the conversational and feedbacks, and the outcomes we hope to achieve. To be an exceptional BD person, there is nothing more important, nor harder to master, than to get your mind-set right. I have worked with many truly great BD people and they truly mastered this. It is the art of “gaining control” of the process. As a economist by training with special interest in game theory, i can tell you how the game works.

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Our awareness of the emotional mind-set when we enter an engagement comes in all shapes and form. It's the elements that we aren't aware of that can become emotional blocks to open and honest communication with our prospects and really hinder any successful outcomes. The best way to recognize the sources and effects of mind-set in conversation and relationships is by looking at patterns of “adopted beliefs” and “observed behaviors”.

MR/MS PROSPECT: Our organization is planning to look for a partner to develop a new online strategy that drives our growth. Our website is three years old and we have yet truly understood its role within our channel, brand and service domains. We understand you are leaders in this field and we have seen some of your work you’ve done with XYZ clients, and we would like you to demonstrate your ideas and solution to our management team by the end of the month.

MR/MS SALESPERSON: We'd be glad to demonstrate our capability and solution, but first I need to get a better understanding of your company's needs, business goals, pain points as well as you budget and timeline. I'd like to schedule some time to meet with several you and your other executives. I’d like to invite your senior folks to visit our offices to get a sense of our culture.

MR/MS PROSPECT: Actually we’d rather not take the time for that as they are very busy. We'd like you to come up with some of the best practices and ideas of how we can execute within 12 months within our budget. We are very open to have new relationships as we are not too happy with our current agency.

MR/MS SALESPERSON: It's very difficult to present such a complex solution without understanding more about your situation, your requirements, and your budget constraints.

MR/MS PROSPECT: I believe we have a budget in place, and we will see your recommendations first and decide if we need more money. If we like the ideas we can find more money. We have heard a lot of good things about you.

MR/MS SALESPERSON: Certainly, when do you need us to do the full presentation?

This is the beginning of the end. The minute the salesperson jump to agreement, the client can immediately move on to recruit another agency to play their game.

CX Innovation Summit Jun 10-12 - Experience-based Diffferentiation

Today’s consumers have a large array of choices for brands, products and services. On top of that they have unprecedented any-time, anywhere, any-network, any-device access to information and content that comes from other consumers

In this hyper-competitive, rapidly evolving environment, marketers must develop their differentiation based on experience because it is less replicable and more sustainable. It’s true CX innovation starts from finding what customers want that's not currently available to them: these are customers' key unmet needs. They are often unarticulated. (There are two schools on the role of the customer in innovation. One holds that all innovations start with contextual observation with the goal of uncovering and then filling an unmet need. The other school says that customers don't know what they need; at least until they see it, and sometimes a need doesn't even exist until a solution is available to fill it. This is known as marketing-driving innovation). They are not trends or any "hot" Web 2.0 features. In fact, by definition, any ideas that follow current trends aren’t innovative at all. They are just fashionable. Many are confused between “fashion”, “creativity” and “innovation.”

 

Success will come not just from delivering the hottest next-generation web 2.0 features and services, but from creating a customer experience that is consistently simple, uniquely personal, fully empowered and immediately valuable at every point of service. Your company’s customer experience is the key to standing out from the pack and ensuring profitable relationships. Experience design becomes the fabric of new insight. Next month I will be speaking at the Blast Radius CX Innovation Summit on “Strategies for Discovering the Next Big Opportunity”.  I will demystify innovation and debunk dangerous assumptions about how breakthroughs happen and share a framework of managing purposeful innovation.

The event is hosted by Blast Radius’ CEO Gurval Caer. It is an intimate gathering of business and thought leaders converging around a single, powerful idea: EXPERIENCE-BASED DIFFERENTIATION. It is a private thought leadership forum on CX Innovation, an in-depth, two-day discussion of new strategies for delivering next-generation services and profiting from convergence. During the event, we’ll examine new strategies; tactics and tools that are needed to compete and win. If you are interested you can contact Brian Mitchinson at Blast Radius and find out if your organization can qualify for an invitation.

 

Are you afraid to speak up at work?

Many are afraid of speaking up at work when they think their bosses are making wrong decisions? They are concerned being perceived by their bosses as non-supportive and creating a sense of negativity particularly when it is about things that are about to go wrong but has yet happened. This is the topic of research from two researchers Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School and James Detert from Penn State. Here are their observations: While there are individual and contextual reasons why some people speak up more readily than others, the main reason why people do not speak up is "fear" - something that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. As they point out: “it seems we're all hard-wired to overestimate rather than underestimate certain types of risk—it was better (for survival) to "flee" too often from threats that weren't really there than to not flee the one time there was a significant risk. So, we've inherited emotional and cognitive mechanisms that motivate us to avoid perceived risks to our psychological and material well-being...Thus, fear of offending those above us is both natural and widespread." They went on to suggest that organizations must change their culture so that people can speak up more frequently. The reality is that changing a culture of hard-wired fear is very difficult. Add to that the fact that change hurts and it may be impossible to really change a company culture without also changing the fundamental hierarchical nature of companies.

I am sure almost everyone faces situation that he or she personally experienced (or observed) in which he or she did not feel it was safe to speak up. Or he or she finds oneself in a situation even if they wanted to express his opinion, an idea or suggestion and felt that no one were listening even they might agreed with you. No question that is important for organizations to allow their managers to express and deliver bad news in a non-threatening environment, but I wonder how many companies can actually do that? This requires a lot of maturity and confidence.

Using DESIGN to reframe everyday realities

I’d like to share this video with you as Paul Bennett (a creative director with IDEO) reminds us that design need not invoke grand gestures. Showing a series of inspiring, unusual and playful products, the British designer explains that design doesn't have to be about grand gestures, but can solve small, universal and overlooked problems. He shows how his firm works to reframe the everyday realities of its diverse clients to create results that truly make a difference. From hospital design that takes the patient's-eye view (staring up at the ceiling) to toy storage that responds to how children see the world, the answer, he says, is very often to be found in the question.

My point is to show how design thinking can help impact business strategy. By taking a design approach to business problems, organizations can free themselves from constraints and synthesize information more efficiently and create new opportunities to create customer value. I hope to write more on this subject next few weeks.

Random thoughts on Experience Design

Experience design is an emerging discipline. This is a relatively new term and does not yet have a common definition. Here I am referring to “experience” to include “service” design and not simply usability. Service management existed for ages but mostly in the fields of operations management or hospitality management. They often involved non-designers and mostly owned by business managers or engineers. Today, with complex integration between human and technology interface, it is becoming less clear whether this should become a discipline on its own.

You wouldn’t design a new product without a product designer. Nor would you design a building without an architect. So why do organizations design new services that involves millions of dollars of investment, whether it is a new coffee chain or retail concepts, without involving experience architects or designers? Many of today’s experience activities are either designed by non-designers such as operation managers, retail consultants, software designers, and these disciplines end up having a significant impact on design. All without service design thinking?

Another question I have is what differentiates between a service and a tool. Say there’s a tool that can connect individuals to social networks whether through a mobile device or the Internet, at what point is the tool more than a tool but a service. And at what point a service becomes an experience.

Experience should include services that could typically relate to designs for product connectivity, interactions, or could add value to customer experience in areas such as leisure, retail, entertainment or banking. An experience designer’s job is to identify, investigate, design and present their service concepts, and will produce a written justification from both branding and economic perspectives.

Designers are advocating that ‘design thinking’ has something to offer for strategy beyond the design function. Design consultancies are pushing into strategy and it’s still a hard climb. Business schools are experimenting with ‘design thinking’.  So what’s next? Will management consultancies such as McKinsey and Bain get into this space? Or will the interactive agencies leave behind their legacies of web design and expand their capabilities to include service design?

Design methods for experience innovation context are based on core design principles such as prototyping, user-centered focus and contextual observation. They include experience prototyping, evidencing, service blueprinting, scenario building, body-storming, paper-storming, customer journey mapping, video prototyping etc. But these skills alone will not do the job. It needs to be combined with business strategic thinking in order to move upstream. This is typically where B-School meets D-School. I think there is tremendous market opportunity for this kind of firm. We can expect to see this next wave of firms coming to the market and taking over clients from interactive and advertising agencies. So maybe in a couple years we’ll see how this affects the interactive and advertising industries. More tomorrow.

The "Real" Art of Management

While we are on the subject of business and management, I would like to share part of an article written by the late Sumantra Ghoshal (1958-2004), Professor of Strategic and International Mgmt. at London Business School. He was one of very few profs that had me really looking forward to his lectures which were very inspiring. Born in Calcutta, he graduated from Delhi University with Physics major. He took a job at Indian Oil Corporation before moving to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1981. There, he managed to produce two PhD dissertations simultaneously, first at MIT's Sloan School of Management, then at Harvard Business School and earned two doctorates. He was described by The Economist 'Euroguru'. Here are some of his ideas from his lifelong research.

He wrote about the first and foremost task of a leader is to engage his willpower, and then to unleash the power of that will in others. Leadership that focuses on motivating managers is often superficial and even counterproductive. The same leadership practices that lead to high motivation often destroy the willpower of middle managers. He suggested that to engage one's willpower behind particular projects or goals, leaders need to create a desire for action without encouraging superficial acquiescence. They need to make commitment more difficult and build in barriers rather trying to get quick buy-ins. They need to make their people consider conflicts, doubts, anxieties and emotional ambivalence.

He went on to suggest that there are three forms of support that are needed for managers. First, they need supervisory support, which is the source of inspiration, intellectual stimulation, backing and encouragement. Second, they need personal relationships that provide both the professional and emotional. Thirdly, there needs to be a supportive culture. Ultimately, it is the culture that stimulates and sustains a manager's courage to exercise choice and ability to enjoy freedom.

Here is the best part. He believed that ultimately, what distinguishes human beings from almost all other species are two things "imagination and willpower”. Corporate leaders have many resources at their disposal - capital, technology, people etc. - but none as valuable as their ability to use their own imagination and will, and enable others to do the same. This is the task of the purposeful leader.

I have worked with hundreds of senior executives in my mgmt consultant career and if I look around the business leaders today, I don't know how many of them have the ability to use the power of “imagination and will” that can create and sustain great organizations.

Get a copy of his last book A Bias For Action and it may change your perspectives.

The Business of Life

A dear friend of mine sent me an email today on the topic of business and profits. This reminded me of my favorite management thinker of all time Charles Handy. Then a thought came to my mind that maybe I should share this really good piece. Charles Handy is recognized as one of the world’s pre-eminent management thinkers over the last 20 years. His books include The Future of Work, The Age of Unreason, The Empty Raincoat and most recently The New Alchemists: How Visionary People Make Something Out of Nothing, which have fundamentally changed the thinking and practice of organizations.

His ideas have encouraged a new generation of knowledge workers to re-think their relationship with employers, leading to more flexible working experience, portfolio careers and consultancy roles.

For all that, Handy remains a man focused on others. Prof Haskins expanded on the topic of his new book to look reflectively at Handy’s achievements, as well as his concern that all of us – as individuals – need to shape our own lives, set an agenda and make a difference.

Here are my favorite quotes from the interview which was just published in Business Strategy Review and you can download a copy following the link below:

“My definition of success is basically borrowed from Aristotle. He called it eudaimonia. I translate it as doing the best at what you’re best at, for the good of others. That sounds trite and easy, but it is very difficult to know what you’re best at.”

“You’ve got to believe in something. You have to believe that there is a purpose in life, you have to hope that the world will be a better place, and you have to love. There is a Chinese saying that happiness is having something to work on, something to look for, and someone to love.”

“I suppose that my worry about the world is that we are too driven. We are too reactive to the forces around us. We’ve lost the ability to shape our own world. That’s why people leave organizations. The organization has got to give more space to its people to make a difference in their own way.”

http://www.london.edu/assets/documents/PDF/BSR_Spring07_sample.pdf

Future Scenarios 2010

Change is happening fast and in a very unpredictable way. It is a bit too fast ( particularly worse if you are in the media, entertainment and telecommunications industry). There is barely enough time to finish writing your three year strategy plan not to mention implementing your last one. Many organizations are dealing with five or six strategic issues at one time, while trying to keep in eye on future impacts of disruptive events unfolding in their environments. The increasing digitization of economic activities deeply impacts the overall configuration of business models and generates interesting mutations (the business model version of the “The Fly” if you have seen that movie). Such mutations can be incremental only and apply to conventional business models or they can be disruptive and translate into the creation of innovative business models. Whatever the magnitude of change, many of my fellow strategists refer to Darwin and promote a controlled evolution instead of a bloody revolution. Everyone is in search of value creation for both customers and firms. Strategic innovation is the key driver of success.

Here are a few slides from the 80 slides deck of the keynote I presented to many business leaders during the past two years and it covers many potentially disruptive scenarios in 2010. It covers a wide spectrum from technology to culture and lifestyle. Just want to share a few of those scenarios with you here.

Three Minute Guide to Customer Experience Innovation

Here you'll get a three-minute guide to “Customer Experience Innovation”. Not only does it need a better definition as it is often casually used to describe "sales automation" or generally referred to as "usability design".

As digital convergence is changing the way we conceive of and consume communication, entertainment and media services. How can organizations evolve their service offerings, their networks, their customer communities and their entire organization…and stay competitive while creating and delivering an integrated, innovative, engaging customer experience?

Today’s business climate is radically changing the way companies interact with customers.  I encourage you to read the book Best Face Forward by Jeffrey Rayport and Bernard Jaworski. They refer to customer interfaces as the next frontier of competitive advantage. (To me, Jeffrey was the most entertaining prof at Harvard and I was telling everyone in the class then he was more of an entertainer than a B-School prof. He was very passionate about "service management" back in those days.) Companies today need a CX innovation strategy that will allow them to create, communicate, and capture value through all "customer interactions". The CX innovation strategy defines the elements of the customer experience that drive bottomline performance by segmenting the customer base according to responsiveness; level of engagement and brand relevance. It also brings into consideration the use of customer advocacy and empowerment. The demand chain-operating model examines how to organize the client’s internal and external resources to develop and manage customer experiences, and defines which elements of the demand chain should be managed internally or externally. Used together, these two elements define the boundaries and requirements for all customers’ interactions, management systems, business processes, organizational design, and enterprise technology systems. The main point is:  the value of the service you deliver increases exponentially when you improve the experience design. 

CX innovations are often associated with risky decisions and too many unknowns, the way to deal with it is a “design-thinking-business-strategist” will make decision based on their informed intuition (some form of ethnography) and then cross-validate them with business and customer economics. They will not wait for the perfect data. This risk-killing or discovery-driven planning approach to CX strategy combines with an informed set of possible futures of the converging landscapes are the key to successful customer experience innovation.

Organizations need to embrace risk in order to innovate and grow. Anytime we’re bringing new things in to the business we introduce risks. There are risks of whether the technology will work; risks of customer talking over control of the brand; risks of customers adopting too slowly and risks of integration within the open-networks of partners. Risks are everywhere. The key is to learn to live with the risks and embrace it.

Successful customer experience innovation requires effectively managing risks along the development cycle. We need to combine D-School thinking with B-School thinking.Design thinking starts with customer's unmet needs and may be the most effective way to mitigate risk, not marketing research or endless quantitative studies. Rapid prototyping that let's you identify problems and solve them early on. By crafting and telling a compelling customer story is part of the strategy development approach, and this is not typically what strategy consultants do. The questions is ..who will be the master of this new art?

Customer Experience Innovation and Brand Trust

I talked about in my last posting about the connections between Customer Experience Innovation and Trust. Brand trust manifests itself across many different dimensions. Business models, brand meanings, customer loyalty and social responsibilities are just a few of them. This is the paradox-trap that many brands are stuck in. Only a few are able to rethink these dimensions to properly retool their brand in this new marketing environment.

The phenomenon of social networking (both technology and behavior) plays to the challenge of brand trust. It's all about dialogue, conversation and transparency. It's about the journey to discover a brand rather than presenting or accepting as it is. The new priority for brand marketers will be maximizing time-to-conversation to accelerate their transformation. Every established brand out there needs to think “Brand Transformation”.

Outlaw Consulting has released a report on the 'most trusted brands' amongst young consumers. Called the 2007 Trusted Brands Index, it reveals which are brands that earned the trust and loyalty amongst young trendsetters across US:

Top 10 Most Trusted Brands

                                                

    1.   Apple                                  60.9

    2.   Trader Joe’s                      57.4

    3.   Jet Blue                              46.4

    4.   In-N-Out Burger                 38.8

    5.   Ben and Jerry’s                 33.6

    6.   Whole Foods                     32.4

    7.   Adidas                                31.8

    8.   American Apparel             31.2

    9.   Target                                 29.4

    10. H&M                                  28.9

There's no surprise that Apple is on top of that list. It is interesting to think why companies such as American Apparel, Trader Joe's and Whole Food are on that list. Has anyone wondered why Google, Microsoft (X-Box), Sony(PS3), Abercrombie and Fitch, Nokia, Motorola and Coke are not on that list ?? I have some answers. What's yours?

Customer Experience Innovation

There is no question about the value of creating engaging consumers is key to brands that wish to thrive in the "experience economy". There's yet to have any common definition to what extent CX Innovation goes beyond digital interface design and expanding its boundaries to "experiential marketing" or opening up new competitive space in "service design".

One big challenge in designing memorable customer experience is that experience is an intangible quality that is so different from one person to the next. Experiences are built around feelings, smells, emotions, memories, colors, places, sounds, faces, branding and hundreds other factors, and time. A great experience is created - yes created, because it doesn't happen by accident (ok sometimes it does) - and it is not only the result of better product features and functions or better services but because of how it makes people feel or help them to their jobs done. A cafe creates the right mood; a great gadget makes you feel connected; a great bookstore invites you to stay for hours, and makes you comfortable doing it; a great retail store makes you feel at home; a great brand becomes part of your own social-self or collective-self. All of these happen on purpose. Well at least through accidental discovery and purposeful improvisations.

To design innovative customer experiences you have to learn to see the world with different lens, to understand the customer's unique perspective, because experience is the interaction between a customer and the designed environment (real or virtual or probably some form of hybrid). Many of the factors that matter most are intangible, and the very first thing on this list is trust. Do your customers trust you? If they do, it is not by telling them in an ad campaign that you can be trusted. My friend Gurval Caer (CEO of Blast Radius) for years has been a total believer in customer "trust" and in fact turned himself into an evangelist in front our clients.

Trust needs to come from not only customer communities, but also from your employees and management. The sad truth is that most companies aren't giving their employees any tools for building trust, or providing online/offline tools to allow the customer communities to do that. Or simply "trust" is not embedded in the design of their business model or customer interactions.

The evolution of social networks (this is not a trend that will go away) offers some great opportunities for companies that want to build enduring, trusting relationships. CRM is a pretty silly idea that is based on the notion that customers want to have a relationships with companies. They mix up the difference between a "transactional relationship" with a "customer relationship". Most customer simply do not want a relationship with a corporation, they only welcome relationships with those other customers with share their interest and passion. Apple sends me e-mails about their special offerings. I don't consider that's part of the relationships. I do have a strong affinity with the Apple brand, and more so with the iconic Steve Jobs. But my relationships exist between me and other users. I use this example because Apple is unarguably one of most admired brand in the world, but imagine for others?

In my view, customer experience innovation must be designed to fit within the framework of an entire business model, which I define it as a set of critical product/services, brand, relationships and interactions that define how a business fits into the larger market context. Can you give me your thoughts?

Teaching Innovation at Stanford

Two professors Bob Sutton and Michael Dearing of a joint Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Stanford d.school class decided to see how creative the students could get by subjecting them to an absurdly hard final exam. They asked each one to make a short video that summarized what they learned in the class. Here is one by Gus Bitdinger, who wrote this original song that combined both the lessons learned in class about challenges of doing creative things in organizations, the mindsets and methods that kill creativity, and the ways to overcome them. I thought this was a good one to share. Next week I will get into this subject more in a series fashion. Enjoy!

Customer Experience Innovation and Growth - Summit Presentation

Kim and Mauborgne, co-author of best selling Blue Ocean Strategy suggested that companies should focus their efforts on creating uncontested market spaces and make the competition irrelevant. The main idea of Blue ocean strategy is too many companies are swimming in the red ocean of bloody competition where there is limited room for real growth. Through value innovation, a company can create a blue ocean strategy that competes based on a different set of competitive dimension. Typically, companies in the red ocean pursue incremental improvements for customers through either low cost. This might be useful ideas for those who are overly occupied with day-to-day market share battles. It is a simplistic view of strategy—either you compete on the same game or you compete by reinventing the game. While it is true that a firm needs to think strategically how it differentiates and how it break out of the commodization cycle, but the goal is to own the Red Ocean as this is where the mass market and growth is. The truth is, as I argued, for any strategic innovation is to get to the Red Ocean as quick as possible and that is where a business can achieve the economics of scale and scope advantages. This is where the market and brand power of a firm comes into play and allow it to diversify and play in a number of different Blue Oceans.

The heart of this is the lesson that all businesses are both a “competitor” (you have to be a player to compete) and an “evolver”. To prosper in the long run, a company must know how to manage its strategic evolution as it is at managing its current market space. It must be both a “competitor” and a smart ”evolver”, and be able to change it strategic postures depending on the situation. This means excelling at conflicting goals simultaneously. Companies need strategies that are both robust and focused; strategies that enable you to adapt to the external environment; operating conservatively and innovating radically; maintaining diversity yet establishing standards and routines; maintaining scale and maintaining flexibility. Historically the view of strategy has focused on sustainable competitive advantage, but not on “strategic flexibility”. Click on the slide to view my full summit presentation.