innovation playground Idris Mootee

Scary Thoughts On Buisness and Social Change

The idea of sustainable development is Halloween stories for corporations. Asking about what it would take to transform a company into a genuinely sustainable operation raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions in any strategy discussions. Questions like: What sort of society do we want? What kind of world do we want our children to live in? How do we best meet people’s needs and drive social change? I have many informal discussions on this topic with senior executives and once those macroeconomic issues are touched, people get nervous because there are no simple solutions.

How could we compete in that social climate let alone dealing with the hyper-competition?  What will the shareholders and the institutional investors think?"  Will people see this skeptically (probably yes)? Can we measure progress?

Business decisions are mostly driven by short-termism. Companies are, for the most part, not seeing enough of the distant horizons and scenarios. I have not seen a single case that a director get kicked out of the board because they spend too much time focusing on immediate results, and not enough visualizing what role a company might play in a more sustainable future? I have not seen one case.  The discussion of sustainability strategies is inevitably about the long-term – about aspirations, corporate intent, not achievements.  It should be part of any company’s long term strategy. CEOs prefer to talk about achievements – what’s actually been done rather what should be done. Both are important.

We understand this is a double-edged sword. When BP unveiled its ‘Beyond Petroleum’ brand a few years back, it was making a clear statement of future intent (to its customers, staff, shareholders and investors) – not suggesting it was about to close down the pumps next week. For those who recognized this applauded the strategic vision and the courage of the board. But for its critics, the whole rebranding was simply a marketing exercise. Greenpeace was quick to seize it, countering with its own rebranding: "BP – Burning the Planet" – claiming that the oil giant spent more on the new brand than its entire annual budget for renewables (that is also true). A little unfair, perhaps, given the fact that campaigners had been challenging the oil majors for years to declare an intention to transform themselves into sustainable energy companies – but then communication is sadly all too often about impact, not accuracy and dialogue.

Peter Barnes (co-founder of social venture group Working Assets) wrote a book called Capitalism 3.0 calling for a fundamental change in the way our economy is structured. He believes that our current version of Capitalism 2.0 is failing to generate the environmental, social and economic returns that are vital to create a sustainable future. A new approach is needed to simultaneously protect our natural resources and reduce poverty. I would add that we need to create better efficiency in distribution of wealth. Without that, there will always be global conflicts that prevent us going forward.  Is this impractical? I don’t know. Think climate change, corporations are not dong enough to limit the emissions of carbon into the air because air is free, and the same can be said about water.

Let’s think about another idea of social change. Young people who weren’t not born to rich parents often struggle to pay for college or children that require special medical care cannot afford them, I throw those numbers out there you will find it scary. Why can’t we redefine our stock exchanges as part of the commons? In exchange for the right to issue publicly traded shares and the privilege of limited liability, larger organization would be required to deposit 0.5% of their shares in a fund every year for ten years? Why can’t the larger oil companies that made billions deposit 1% of their profits when they exceed certain return ratio to a fund that support alternative transports? What can’t the top them large software companies that are sitting on billions of cash pay a small dividend every year to a fund that provide affordable computers to the inner cities kids so they can learn and stay away from troubles?

I think every corporation (large or small) must have a social change component in their long term strategy. ‘Corporate social responsibility’ sounds nice, but in itself is virtually big meaningless bullshit. It is time to act. I believe this is a test that every global brand needs to pass. I hope it happens sooner. Please share your thoughts?

Happy Halloween!!

Advanced Brand Stratgy Masterclass - Week Seven - Global Branding

This one is long overdue and I apologize for the delay. Between airports, clients meetings and running workshops there is not much time left. This is the last of the series and next week we will conclude our masterclass.  This week we will focus on global branding, I remember we did touch on this subject during week two and three, so we can now revisit this again.

While many consumer goods markets in the Europe and North America are stagnating, 65% of the world’s population is living in societies that are experiencing economic growth of 5% or more a year. While the baby boom occurred between 1945 and 1960 in the US, much of the rest of the world is still experiencing a baby boom that began in 1975. The average person has seen his or her standard of living double in the past 15 years, far surpassing that of the US or Western Europe. Put very simply, the majority of the growth potential in consumer markets exists outside of the US and Western Europoe.

Here's an excellent piece by John Quelch, Prof Quelch is the Senior Associate Dean and at Harvard Business School where he taught markeitng for decades. I remembered one time when he was lecturing he presented a marketing positioning diagram of the royal family members, it was hilarious. He is also the non-executive director of WPP Pepsi and a few other companies and has published probably half a dozen books on global marketing.

How To Build a Global Brand - by John Quelch

Ford has finally woken up to what Toyota knew a long time ago: the power of a single global brand. Over twenty years ago, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt praised Japanese manufacturers for their focus on "what every consumer in the world is seeking: world-class modernity at affordable prices." Either because they didn't understand regional differences in consumer preferences or out of self-confidence, Toyota, Nissan and Honda sold standard products under a single brand umbrella. For decades, Ford adapted its manufacturing platforms, features, and model names from one country to another. The results: added manufacturing and supply chain costs that strained consumers' willingness to pay; a balkanized bureaucracy in which regional managers exaggerate the need for local adaptations to defend their turf; and a deteriorating market share, financial performance and stock price. Ford was once one of the ten most valuable brands in the world. They’re no longer on that list, but Toyota now is. How did Toyota—and the other nine companies—do it? There are five characteristics that all top global brands have in common:

1. The same positioning worldwide. This provides a combination of functional product quality and innovation with emotional appeal. Think Coca-Cola and Disney.

2. A focus on a single product category. Think Nokia and Intel.

3. The company name is the brand name. All marketing dollars are concentrated on that one brand. Think GE and IBM.

4. Access to the global village. Consuming the brand equals membership in a global club. Think IBM's "solutions for a small planet."

5. Social responsibility. Consumers expect global brands to lead on corporate social responsibility, leveraging their technology to solve the world's problems. Think Nestle and clean water.

Ford has a proud history. Its name recognition is strong worldwide. The chairman is committed to the environment. Many consumers are no longer considering Fords when buying their new cars, but they are predisposed to giving Ford another chance. Fords worldwide should henceforth have a common look, feel and brand essence. Low volume management distractions including Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo will be sold off; they’re now meaningless. US-based models like Mercury will be discontinued.Can Ford recover? The answer lies in whether the common vehicle platforms developed for the new strategy prove to be truly global in design or merely more of the same Detroit-centric product that have caused Ford's market shares around the world to erode.

We Are All "Choking" On Technologies And All Those New Features

Let me tell you what problems I’d been having lately. I am having some challenges using my blackberries, my new ThinkPad with the new Vista, Office 2007, a dozen of special applications that I run and almost everything single remote control in my house (last count 26). Either I am too busy and impatience or these devices are simply not designed for people like me. At least my Mercedes is not like my other devices and there’s nothing I need to learn every time when I get a new one. Thanks to German design and engineering.

As chips get smaller and cheaper and memory devices get larger, engineers are cramming more features and functions into all these devices, resulting in level of complexity that we have never encountered. I wonder how many products were returned to retailers (estimated at around 10%) not because the products are not working but simply because no one knows how to use them. The same thing can be applied to the monthly statements I received from my cell phone carriers, it usually takes a phone call to find out what’s a column is all about. Is this a strategy so we don’t ask about the amount billed or they want to keep the employment level for their call-centers?

I think too many companies are endangering their market positioning by adding too many unnecessary features. The best word to describe it is that we are all “choking” on technology.  Everyone wants to pack as many features as possible as long it doesn’t add cost to manufacture, there’s seems to be a small advantage on the point of sale level when some customer compare features. They really need to consider the idea that “less is more” and marketing should steer customer away from making purchase decisions on features alone. The number of features should based on the users' goals that allow them to effectively get their “jobs” done. 

The best way to solve these problems up-front is prototyping and product-in-use research so engineers and designers can correct any misleading information market research brought out.  In a focus group, everyone will tell you they want everything in one device, assuming usability was not a factor. Usability is not a factor, it is the key central idea.

The other side of the challenge is that “one trick ponies” are a hard sell. The marketers demand marketing points from the designers, the designers try, but the more stuff they add makes the end product an unmanageable morass of go here, back up, press this to open that a few clicks of this to arrive there. Then somebody slaps a big headliner in the ad proclaims, in really big letters “MANY GREAT NEW FEATURES!” and the clueless consumers line up to buy the stuff.

Many readers of this blog also are big believers in simplicity. Making something easier to understand without removing value or meaning is an art. I don’t think that can be argued. The challenge is how to remain as simple and easy as possible and not removing value or meaning from them.

The role of usability strategist is so important these days and its job is to create that balance, bringing a human-centric approach to technology; making things as easy to understand and use as possible, while at the same time maintaining their value and brand meaning. The world needs more usability strategists.

But complexity isn’t the only a design and technology concern for me. The same goes for business of strategy consulting. I often come across deliverables from some large (tier four) consulting firms, it is amazingly painful just to figure out they are trying to say or any logic behind it. I’ve always insisted we structure our processes so that we’re as easy to work with as possible. We do our very best to eliminate unneeded complication (including buzz-words) from it. Hopefully to the delight of our clients!

When Did You Last Re-frame Your Business?

I was surprised to receive so many responses from my last post on “management buzzwords”, including dozens of emails, I guess that resonates with many of you guys. I personally think the underlying reason for that behavior is simply because many people simply have no idea of how to deal with their business challenges, so they resort to using buzzwords to give the perception that they have the answers. Many executives have the toughest time making the right calls when there are too many uncertainties in the business environment. Rather than carefully examine all their strategic alternatives, they quickly jump to a quick solution (management concepts) and assume all problems will go away.

The right thing to do is not to introduce these fancy buzzwords or ideas, but simply to reframe the business challenge through new lens and understand where the shift is heading. If the rate of change outside an organization exceeds the rate of change inside the organization, the end is in sight. The changes outside the organization driven by generational, technological and economic drivers are actively reconfiguring the competitive space. It is time for “re-framing”.

This new interconnected and hyper-competitive environment is changing the actor, the time, the place of all value added activities. Consumers are now the key actors. The optimal reconfiguration of these dimensions is one of the key challenges of our time. The most pressing strategic question for these businesses is how to use digital technology and value networks to reconfigure the value proposition and business model of their organization.

Lou Gerstner’s reframing of IBM business resulted in four themes, notably the shift from product company to service company, buying Lotus, walking away from Prodigy and reduce reliance on mainframes and PCs and shifting 25% of their R&D efforts to develop Internet applications. “Reframing” is not the job of the CEO alone, is it the responsibility of all senior executives. And I would argue it is everyone’s job.

Today IBM is still continuing to reframe their business, last summer IBM was re-imagining their future and the topic was no surprise “innovation”. They committed $100mm in development fund for best ideas and they brought these framing exercises to everyone in the organization with something which they called “Innovation Jamming”. The 72-hour jam involved 57,000 people logged on a common platform and shortly afterwards 40,000 posts were collected. A group of 50 people sorted out the best 31 ideas and they produced a business case for each one of these ideas. They were rated based upon business impact, societal value and market readiness. I can already see we can even invite customers into this “re-framing” process.

Random Thoughts On Management Buzzwords

I was travelling with my business partner Scott to visit a client and in the airport I overheard the following conversations. Some of the sound bites got me curious and so I decided to listen in.  I looked at his briefcase and from the name tag I learned that the guys was the Head of Strategy Planning of a larger Fortune 500 company. I didn’t find out what’s the other person does. She may be a finance executive I guess.

Joe: This is crazy times for business and I guess we need crazy practices. Our organization is behind the curve on many fronts and new competitors are showing up every week. We must move up the intellectual food chain and rethink our knowledge workers management strategies.  Also we need to quickly agree on how we want to play the innovation game that is causing disruption everywhere. I was thinking about how to bring sustainability into our business strategy too. We really need to move fast.

Jane: I totally agree with you. This is all about seeing change and embracing change. In the pursuit of better bench strength, it is about carrots and sticks. We need to measure everything we do and we can only manage what we can measure.  Our balance scorecard implementation is going well and next we need to be closely aligned with our CSR and AGS targets.  EBITDA parameters need to be watched closely. We need to rebuild our strategic architecture, and get full buy-in from our executives on this new vision, and align all our current strategic initiatives to this vision.

Joe:  I believe innovation is the key to our future. And this organization is all about talent too, we need to have a strategy here. We must spend more time exploring our core competencies and at the same time bring a new paradigm to the way we see things. In the meantime, let’s explore how we’ll be impacted, in one way or another, by downsizing, re-engineering, restructuring, delayering etc.

Jane: I think we also need to bring customer-centricity to our culture. We should brief our corporate communications people to come up with a plan to make this a center piece of our communications. Also, we must explore how a social networks strategy that allows us to own our customers and their communities so we can shape their opinions.

It was only a short 10-15 minute conversations. I was impressed that the two of them bought up almost 80% of major management theories invented during the last 20 years. The question is I wonder how many of those words they threw out that they truly understand what it means. Not only is this disturbing and dangerous, I am concerned if this represents mainstream corporate America.  A big part of strategy is creating purpose and then clearly communicates those to everyone in the organization so action can be mapped to those ideas. The goal is to have everyone understand and translate it into individual actions. The words are supposed to allow us to construct reality and to act on them.

Buzzwords is a dangerous trend in management. It is the  “talk instead of act” strategy that is now practiced by managers of all levels (the senior the worse). The production and systematic application of “strategic bullshit” is polluting the minds of managers. If it comes from a consultant, it is worse as it reflect badly on the industry which should hold itself against the highest standard if not higher than other professionals such as in medicine, law and accounting.  So if next time someone throw some of those words in a conversation, make sure you ask them to define what it means and out that in the context of your organization. Those are all very important concepts, but not to be used casually. And if used right, they are very powerful concepts. Management trends come and go. They are mostly good depending on some variables: industry; company culture; strategic intent and proper manifestation. It depends on how well they are being applied. Here experience and wisdom can be very useful.

Continue on "Widgetnomics"

I have seen people throwing out crazy numbers around usage of widgets. Those big numbers are being thrown around by widget developers and tracking firms and just smoke screen, becasue of the fact that many of those companies are not bringng in any decent revenue. So I dig this up from comScore ranking the most popular widget services. Popularity is one thing but figuring out a business model is another. This is not a popularity contest but it helps. Here they are:

1.  Slide
2.  RockYou
3.  Picturetrail
4.  Photobucket
5.  BunnyHeroLabs
6.  BlingyBob
7.  Poqbum
8.  Brightcove
9.  Layoutstar
10.  Musicplaylist.us

The number one on the list is Slide with 117 million people a month seeing one of its slideshow widgets distributed all over the Web.  RockYou comes in second with 82 million.  Other notables are Photobucket with a monthly audience of 28 million, and Brightcove with 17 million. Slides is based in San Francisco. Slide has developed customizable and easily assembled slide shows of photos that can be embedded in a blog or a MySpace page, sent out in an RSS feed, and streamed to a desktop as a screensaver. It is believed that they are funded by Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla and others. Founded by Max Levchin and currently has 46 employees and have been in business for 3 years.

While slides show and video clips are graat, I really like the idea of drawing and sketching. That's why all of us use the ThinkPad Tablet and my business partners Scott and Keith are just using them like a notepad. I am the old fashion white board guy (with colorful markers). While many concepts cannot be communicated easiy through text, using visuals is an absolute must, and if you are a visual minded person, SketchCast is for you. SketchCast is a relatively new service that let's you create sketches and add audio to them. The concept is similar to screencasting, with the freedom of drawing whatever you want - to convey your message. Their idea is to help people better express themselves, but I think there are more applications i we use our imagaintion. I should try to create my next slide show with it and see how it works.

Blogging Gets Easier Everyday

I’d start by saying that I don’t think blogs are going away, I would say that we will see a period of slowing down in terms of the growth of new blogs or volume of content being generated, with the excpetion of micro-blogs which is a very different thing and will have a life of its own. I can see many new meshup ideas that combine micro-blogging with LBS and other things. Here is one example. This new Twittervision has a login feature now, but this new Atlas application looks pretty impressive. The Microsoft maps can be zoomed and you get better details.

Talking about microblog, HelloTxt is “an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in both simple and simultaneous manner.” What does it do? For those who use Twitter, Jaiku, Yappd, Meemi, Beemood, and Tumblr, managing multiple microblogging services can be a pain, this thing centralizes the insertion of messages to these services, saving many trips to those sites.

They're saying that having to visit numerous microblogging services diminishes some of the advantages of the services. Namely, updating your status is time consuming and with HelloTxt, a single message will reach the different services. All login information and messages are encrypted, so you can feel safe using the service. This is a good solution. The site has a very clean design, well organized, and smart enough not to provide an over-abundance of features ( I have seen a lot demos lately people are trying to do too many things with their app). The problem is I think they do not have full mobile phone support yet.

An interesting one is Reuters and the Nokia have announced that they are working on a joint project to enable journalists to file and publish stories and multimedia news content from handheld devices instead of computers. It is called Reuters Mobile Journalism, the initiative relies upon connecting peripherals to Nokia's high-end N95 device--a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard, a small tripod for video interviews, and a microphone that can plug into the mobile handset--as well as software to make it easier to put together text, images and streaming media. Sounds cool.

Social Networks for Ad Men/Women and the Dead?

Ok, I am talking about two seperate sites. One is a social network for advertising practitioners and the other is for the deceased. The advertising professionbal social networking site is called Adgabber. Not a bad idea but not impressed with the execution as this one can attract some cool peole with all the cool ideas. The site is disappointed given it's potential. The other far more interesting one is a social network called Respectance whose mission is “dedicated to remembering those who have died.” They have raised $1.5 million in venture capital financing led by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures. I honestly think this will work and I am surprised people only thought of this now. It is wonderful thing to have all those special memories of loved ones on a site that friends and relatives can visit, leave message and share warm thoughts. I can think of a hundred ways to make the experience special. The VCs definteily see the potential.

.

Web 2.O And The 4Cs

Web 2.0 is a loaded term that is unarguably subject to enormous amount of hype but now also a lot of serious corporate interest. Different people define Web 2.0 in different ways, which are often confusing and is understandable (same as branding, strategy and many other words). I have written a lot the last few weeks on Web 2.0 and Media 2.0. However, the very fact that Web 2.0 is touted as being so many things underlines its strategic importance and implications for business. Web 2.0 encapsulates everything Media 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and Brand 2.0, which is best approached by breaking it down into the 4Cs: connectivity, community, conversations and most important of all co-creation.

We will be running a Web 2.0 boot camp for our clients in the next couple of weeks and these are the key themes which I will share each of them here:

• Web 2.0 means many things, but all anchor upon the 4Cs.
• Understanding the Web 2.0 customer value chain
• Introducing the concepts of “social utilities”, “social shopping” and “socialcasting”
• Opportunities and pitfalls of leveraging social networks
• The evolution of ecommerce and the four scenarios
• Transmedia storytelling and the new role of branding

The last one is the most interesting one as I will be showing videos and films that bring out ethnographic insights that illuminate many of our thinking. We have one strong commonality in that we all have our stories to tell, there were barriers to put these stories in a verbal manner and can be stored and shared, not to mention the efforts to find people who are willing to listen. The two most popular ways in the past is 1/go to the pub (old English tradition) and have a few beers and start telling strangers your life stories or 2/ pay $250 an hour for someone whether he/she is a psychiatrist or an escort (a Geisa as in old Japanese tradition) to listen to you talking. The exciting part is with Web 2.0 it is now becoming a rituals in our everyday lives. Exploring new ways to tell them and actually taking the time out to "listen" can bring happiness by recognizing relationships and likenesses on a human level, across continents. Today we have so many new opportunities to using a mix of media to tell, explore, reveal, and aggregate stories in such ways that make us feel connected even if you're alone. The concept of “long tail” makes a lot of sense here.

This whole transmedia digital storytelling are changing the ways our societal behavior too, it is becoming a “social tool”. People have the ability to build interpretive movies very simply and to lay sound tracks around the content and mesh them up. They can easily condition or "sculpture" the context around the content. The serious interplay between context and content is key to what film - and rich media in general - are about. Consumers can now create an emotional scaffolding around a story so that it connects first to the gut and then to the head? That’s why we are seeing this continuous growth in social networks. The question is what is the role of brands here? (Illustrations by John Wall for Idea Couture Inc.)

World-wide visitors to social-networking sites in September, in thousands, and change from a year earlier

	Unique users	% Change
Blogger	142,971	85
Windows Live Spaces	119,838	21
MYSPACE.COM	107,031	37
Yahoo! Geocities	85,994	-8
FACEBOOK.COM	73,521	420
WORDPRESS.COM	62,232	N/A
FLICKR.COM	40,906	98
Six Apart Sites	39,340	47
Lycos Tripod	35,379	-25
HI5.COM	35,064	51
FRIENDSTER.COM	26,504	74
Orkut	24,612	57
Yahoo! Groups	24,389	3
DADA.NET	20,196	32
BEBO.COM	19,722	142

Source: comScore World Metrix 2007

Branding In the Post-Modern Culture When Consumer Transcend The State Of Being The Subject In A Society

Brands are transforming themselves and I would argue they are becoming more and more important. They exist beyond the ads and the products, they are trying to find new ways to get inside your home and be part of your life in the form branded content, branded entertainment, branded utilities and branded space. L’Equipe, the Parisian based daily sports newspaper invented the tour de France only to sell more newspapers, its branded content with a pinch of engagement.

New social forms have emerged from all kinds of new network-based social behavior.  These conversations between customer that are previously unknown to each other to the extent where over 50 million people are able to interact in a single online space, generating billions of web site page impressions every month.  The question is how should brand play a role here. These social webs are exploding everywhere and this can no longer be ignored by any brand. 

The structural nature of consumption of information and content are in a state of flux as we enter a world where content will be increasingly delivered through all kinds of networks that can be personalized and entirely self-scheduled. In that world, the viewer – not the broadcaster – whoever that may be, will decide what is consumed, when, how, when, and with whom you share it with.

We are in a transition from interruption and intrusion to engagement. When distribution is trivial, unlimited, and available to all comers, marketing to a captive audience sitting on a cough in front of a box is the thing of the past and creating "quality" product/service/content is paramount. Content is now a part of any product (and its experiences). Consumers will consume only what‘s relevant and what entertain them most, not what is marketed to you them in a repetitive fashion. By providing branded experiences, brand can extend engagement rather than disrupts it, by doing so it strengthens its contextual involvement and connection with the consumer.

With the emergence and convergence of the mobile phone and the internet and location-base-system we suddenly have immediate access to our co-workers, our friends and family members and know where they are at any point of time. We are getting used to living in a connected age where we naturally and increasingly draw on our participation in various networks for information, assistance, information and support.

The language of our post-modern world is not broadcast-branded-content pushed to our TV box that we consume passively. This kind of traditional marketing has become adversarial in the eyes of customers. Customers have changed and adapted to this new always-on, always connected, media fragmented world, where they seek value by searching, where they are not waiting for you to interrupt them with unwanted messaging, where they look to their peers for voices of authority. The behavior of sharing user-generated-videos will evolve and new behavior will emerge.  What we are seeing in YouTube I called it “socialcasting”. Does this signal the end of broadcasting? Consumer will spend more and more time interacting with each other and mashing-up content rather than passively watching low quality content. I think we have yet to see the full impact of this phenomenon. This will determine the new of our post-modern culture which I define as follow:

- Immediacy

- Flexibility

- Portability

- Permeability

- Fluidity

- Interactivity

- Mashability

- Ownerablity

This postmodern culture is characterized by the density, the intensity, and the fragmentation of the instances of communication, by hyperreality that continuously creates fresh vidoes and meanings based on the same signifiers, and by the incredible array of brands and products that impose their own rules and procedures as a way of life. The postmodern consumer thus transcends the state of being the subject positioned in society to satisfy one's individual needs. And everything seems so hyperreal's. Please share your thoughts.

So What's Your Open Platform Strategy? Do You Really Understand The "Widgetnomics"?

Four months after Facebook unveiled its platform initiative, now everyone is talking about a platform strategy. Everyone in the technology ing space dream about creating the next web 2.0 platform. Virtually every major tech (software, mobile, hardware, broadcast, payment) company has a platform strategy, not to mention an equally elaborate set of plans to do whatever possible to stop any competitors from achieving platform status or anywhere near there.  Over lunch yesterday, one of my business partners was quick to point to the need of an open platform strategy for Apple's iPhone. That’s a little too simplistic if we consider the business strategy of Apple and the complexity of putting literally hundreds of small technological innovation into one big one. They simply cannot afford to open the floodgate to deal with all kinds of unpredictable technical issues due to many proprietary designs (hardware included) as well as the speed they bring these products to the market. There are many factors that make platform-based design a sine qua non . Design has become far too complex to allow engineers to start from scratch development and verification at reasonable effort every time. While time-to-market targets have reduced drastically to an unrlealistic level – development from scratch is very difficult challenge.  Apple performed a mission impossible job. And just reusing your own or third party IP modules is not enough, reuse as a methodology itself has to be optimized as well.  In many cases, it is no longer sufficient to focus on one specific bus protocol because of different applications require very often different bus protocols, for example by a given choice of an embedded CPU or a specific touch-sensistive screen. But it is an inevitable move for Apple, Jobs will announce the plan for third-party iPhone applications on Wednesday. Next Feb, iPhone developers will finally be able to obtain a software development kit that will give them the tools and the know-how to create safe and reliable applications for the iPhone without having to depend on "jailbreaks" programs. That means iPhone users will be able to add applications without voiding their warranties. It has taken a while and the reason being Apple wanted to find a way to be as "open" as possible to third-party development while still keeping a lid on viruses and malware as well as managing potential risks that could kill the iPhone before it becomes the iPod.

Platform strategy is always an interesting one which most people understand half of it only. Any platform innovation takes on very different properties depending on which of the following three strategies you have in mind:

1/Improve Cycle Time Productivity -This is the most basic domain of platform innovation—develop your own product line with a product architecture that people can build and extend upon.  Over a longer term, almost every company needs to undertake some form of architecture rationalization effort to migrate toward a common platform. The goal is to improve their productivity and reduce cycle time and time to market. So this is platform strategy 101.

2/Strategic Business Eco-system Building - This is a bigger idea, brining in innovation from partners and suppliers, the goal is to build out an ecosystem of partners who will add their efforts to yours to develop solutions that jointly compliment and reinforce each others’ strategic positioning. The typical mistake of these efforts is recruiting a large number of strategic partners, which is almost never a good idea. Rather the focus should be on a smaller group of intimate partnerships, making sure you actually bring together the best of breed companies that share a common industry vision or more effecitvely a share enemy.

3/Owning a De Facto Standard - This is the ultimate thing, in which your technology becomes a critical enabler of a whole class of applications or verticals or categories.  Microsoft, Google, eBay and iPod did that. There are many others too, GSM vs CDMA, PS2 vs Nintendo and XBox, ATG vs BEA, etc. Becoming the De Facto is like winning the lottery and you almost need to have this in your b-plan if you are pitching VCs for big dollars. Being a monopoly also has its price. You will become the incumbent and the core target of all these basement start-ups, those young smart guys in India or France is working day and night to put you our of business. You will end up being the Defender. Again, it is not a bad problem to have because you must be filthy rich by then.

Last few weeks, social networks Tagged, Hi5 and LinkedIn have made it clear they're working on application program interfaces (APIs) for developer platforms much like Facebook's. I’ve heard rumors that Facebook's chief rival MySpace.com is also working on something similar as well. Third-party developers are all scratching their heads just by thinking about the ideas of creating applications for a ten platforms. That will never happen. Customers' lock-in is always very tempting idea, doesn’t happen often and if it does, it doesn’t last long enough.

If you are successful, you want to push the open-innovation button and open your APIs. If you are failing, you might as well do that too. The idea of wooing developers to one social-networking platform makes Google, which has for several years been integrating with third-party developers on other properties such as Google Maps, an intriguing possibility in this fight for attention / big wins. There are rumors saying that the company is seriously considering opening the codefor Orkut, its social network, which is getting anywhere. Google might leverage some of its existing properties, like Gmail or new acquisitions like Jaiku, into a more coherent "social utility". Just by virtue of being a Google company, it gives you a ticket to enter the game.

Let me tell you why I am not keen in this idea. Facebook has stated that there are no confidentiality protections for developers who submit business plans to the company in the hopes of earning venture cash for their applications. Theoretically, this means Facebook could see a developer plan it likes and create something similar in-house. The other thing many developers have no idea of the platform economics, I have doing that for ages and I can just run the numbers from the back of a napkin and tell you whether it is a good idea of not in 5 minuets (That’s why I can't charge by the minute). If you decide to do that, make sure that the widget must be “monetizable” and try to create or maintain a “barriers to entry” for other. I called it "Wigetnomics".OK, just coined another  web 2.0 term.

Anyway, really need to go back to my day job. Will continute our branding discussion next week and talk about some joint outputs. Received many suggestions from many of you,with thanks.

Free Real Time Video Conferencing Is Here. Will You Use It?

We have always believed that soon we can just do video conference with anyone on our computer. We've seen them on movies and sci-fi or James Bond film. The interesting thing is that even though the technology actually existed today that allows us to chat to each-other on video in real time, this service has still not really taken off. One reason is not everyone wnats to be seen while on the phone.  Real time video calling seems to be slow getting adoption. A start-up Tokbox think believes this is going to change. They provide a free service that allows users to talk with their friends via video web-cams in real-time. The good thing is absolutely NO client software to dowload. This is a key feature. To set up a real-time video conference you only need to send a link to the person that you want to speak with.

The co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, has a financial stake-holding in Tokbox and also sits on the board. Sequoia Capital who made billions by investing in and then selling YouTube also plan invest $4 million it them. Tokbox are also currently using the same office space that YouTube grew out of. The "free" service idea will ultiamately become an issue as big dollars are required for investments. Think about it, providing a real-time service, with a 200-millisecond response time worldwide, for multi party, multimedia sessions requires an intelligent global network. And there are four people in a meeting, sharing data, voice and video. We are dealing with multiple channels of real-time information each requiring optimization and synchronization. It is incredibly difficult to deliver real-time multimedia communications over the Internet, a fundamentally non-real time network which most people do not recognized.

Will Microsoft and Google play in this space. It is an absoulte yes. earlier this year Google bought this firm Marratech, a video conferencing and collaboration company, which will now compete with the likes of WebEx and GoToMeeting.  Ultimately this will have full integration to existing Google services and all is free. When they're bringing in $1b+ per quarter in search revenue, they can afford to give these services away for free, with a little ad on the side naturally.

 

Uncovering The Art of Disruption Requires New Lenses and New Tools

The reason why every executive is feeling intense pressure from competitors or disruptive start-ups is likely becasue of the fact that the models or dominant logic behind theie business strategies are constraining the companies' ability to innovate. Have you wonder why it is so hard it is to move beyond the "adjacent" opportunities to open up new revenue streams?  Naturally you turn to your customer intelligence people, next you are overwhelmed by those terabytes of analytical data, not that these are not useful, perhaps the models you are using are not up to the challenge of making sense in this information-rich, hyper-networked and customer-in-control world.

It is easy to say that innovation is the answer to all this. But the real question is "how". I’ve been talking to many senior executives last few weeks about how to help them to set up innovation capabilities and most of all how to put them to use for current projects so they get immediate "Return-on-Innovation." I showed them different approaches and what works better in what environment. The key message was that they need to start looking at different mental models that shape their businesses thinking and start challenging them.

In any area of your life or business where there's an urgent need to change and transform oneself to stay relevance, mental models play a central role. Yet we often have little awareness of what our models are and how they shape what we can see and do (unless you have direct access to your inner world through the use of medications). Mental models can appear simple, and are often invisible, yet they are always there and have a significant impact on our decision making process. Changing the way we compete or changing the way we create customer value begins with changing the way we think and imagine.

The world we live in is not out there on YouTube or codified on a HBS business case study. It is in our own minds that those circles and arrows (like Power Point) telling us the "what" and "why". It is those little unwritten and unarticulated ideas that drive our intuition and logic. Until we recognize this, we will always be running away from ghosts. In our business (and sometimes even personal lives), we often fail to see the true threats and true opportunities because of the limits of the way we make sense of the world. I see that happening with my clients and some very intelligent member of my strategy team. To see the true opportunities requires one to go back deep inside to do a little tuning.

I personally don’t like the word "user" or "consumer". I do use the word "consumer" because of habbit. Industries that refer to their customers as users: software and gadgets. Industries that refer to their customer as consumers: consumer packaged goods and general retail. I often try to avoid it. Here’s an example, look around us today, “user-generated content” is turning into the central connective system that holds together customer communities, product and net services. These people all have different "purposes" and "jobs" to get done. But we use the word "user" referring to all those who produce, share and distribute content. This is a wrong term. This reduces the human being on the other side to someone who mechanically perform one thing with one common reason. Why can’t we try to understand why these people are doing what they are doing and what motivates them. If nothing else it would probably help marketers keep stay focus on what these people are doing in mind. Thing about this:

Flickr – Photographers Created Pictures

YouTube – Audiences Created Video
Stock Brokerage - Investors Created Advice

Hobbies – Prosumer Created Knowledge
Education - Students Created Thought Pieces

Vacationer – Traveller Created Journeys

Discussions – Participant Created View-points

Community – Members Created Stories

Parents – Parents Created Content

Well, what should we do? And can you give me an example. One of the ideas I bring to client is stop looking at your customers as "consumer". Usually they'd say "what do you mean?" Since our undergrad days, many of us studied Consumer Behavior as part of Marketing, assuming that the job of marketing is to sell things to people who consume them. This is true but not the whole truth. There's more to that. The job of consumer is "not" just to consume, there are many motivations that drive the consumer to behave in many ways, if we use this over simplistic view we are missing many of the unmet needs of these people. So I show them some of the alternative mental models (this is now part of the proprietary tool kit of Idea Couture's Customer Engagament Innovation ). The first one is using the lens from one of the following customer archetypes:

- Consumer as User

- Consumer as Creators

- Consumer as Explorers

- Consumer as Taste-makers

- Consumer as Storytellers

- Consumer as Activists

As John Seely Brown put it “In the old world, managers make products. In the new world, managers make sense of things.” Here is a good way to make sense of things. This is an example of an idea may seem quite simple and but powerful enough to allow us to see the world under different lens, and come up with powerful innovative ideas. This transformation of thinking is where all the transformations of our business and personal lives begin. Good luck with your journey. (Illustrations by John Wall for Idea Couture Inc.)

Mobile Experience Is Ripe For Innovation

Mobil experience is ripe for innovaiton, with location-based system + mobile payment + mobile broadband + social networks we are going to see a lot experience innovation.  A mobile2mobile payment service company Obopay has just acquired social payment service Billmonk.  Not sure if you know this company. It is very cool, you can check it out here. Billmonk is a free tool that allows you to track your IOU-like type of agreements with friends, roommates and family members, you can also track your other stuff like CDs, DVDs, books, etc.  So if someone borrow some money or books from you and this is your central repsoitory and personal debt management system. Just add what you borrowed from your friend and he will immediately have it confirmed in his space at BillMonk. Not sure what kind of behavior that we are promoting. Imagine an automated email sent to you reminding you to repay your friend that $50 you owe him when you guys went out for a drink? One idea to create new revenue opportunity is to provide "Micro-debt Recovery Service", kind of the $10s and $20s that you lend people since high school, that's quite a bit of money here. College kids would love this.

Both companies' revenue are proabbly not significant, but the integration of the two services will first let users settle the debts they tracked on Billmonk instantly over Obopay’s mobile payment platform and eventually by email. You can see Obopay’s release here and Billmonk’s here.  They called this "Social Accounting" . I guess it is easy being a stragist these days, jsut add "social" to anything we'll have a new strategy.  There are quite a few players including PayPal Mobile, TextPayMe and KushCash. Google will launch mobile payment within the next 6 months. Pretty crowded place, but there's always room for innovation.

Social Netwoks May Be Just A Fad? A Danagerous "May Be".

A week ago Microsoft’s Ballmer was warning that social networking may be a just another fad. Google’s Schmidt doesn’t think that is the case. Here’s what he was telling the journalists at the end of the Zeitgeist conference, a two-day gathering of an eclectic mix of Google co-opetitors, social activists and even politicians. “People don’t appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks. Social networks account for an ‘enormous proportion’ of Internet usage. It is very real. It’s a very real phenomenon.” added Schmidt.

In a conversation that also included Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Schmidt did not answer the question in the mind of many reporters: What is Google going to do to remedy its lack of success in social networking? Schmidt did say that over the next year or two, Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the “social graph,” to improve searches and other Google services. I was showing this idea toa client about a year back  and I called it “social search” and "social links visualization". Schmidt also highlighted Google’s existing social network service, Orkut, and its plan to sell ads on behalf of MySpace (and Facebook?), the largest social networking site.

What is social graph? Facebook’s Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". It is kind of when you watch on Without a Trace on TV when the FBI guys draw links between individuals that are linked to an event.

This is not an easy problem to solve. Today we need to have different logins for different social networks and often we use different names. What we use for linkedin is definitely not the same as what we use in MySpace or Second Life. This may have some legal issue as many would argue user themselves want to own their personal information - including their explicitly or implicitly links to groups or individuals. Graphs have always been very powerful modeling tools for modeling any kind of systems. Economies and cells can be represented and analyzed as networks. Let me throw out a vision. In three years, Microsoft will have functions in Explorer called "People Explorer" and one click on that you get an instant visualization of a person and how he or she is connected to others, click on filters such as “school”, “neighborhood”, “hobbies” or “work” will get you a view of those social connections within the context of your filter. How’s that?  It is essentially a meta-social network search and visualization interface. Anyone interesting in making a prototype of that, ping me. I will write a business plan for you. You can get funded in two weeks.