innovation playground Idris Mootee

Microencapsulated Scent Will Move Beyond Sampler Into Public Spaces And Electronic Devices

I was shopping at some department stores yesterday and realize there’s some scent that is being pumper from the ventilation system. I realized this is not uncommon. Imagine in the cinema, popcorn is probably the scent that you will be exposed to, but in a European cinema, you might just smell bread, caramel, chocolate or whatever else an advertiser wants you to smell. This is the technology tested for Beiersdorf's Nivea, and exit polls showed a 515% rise in recall for the Nivea ad compared with moviegoers who saw the spot without the scent.

A German company called Cinescent is allowing marketers to pump out the scent of their brands in German theaters. I wonder how they calculate the advertising rate. The estimated cost is over double the normal price of an ad reel spot and rolling out a national campaign would not only be expensive but no doubt also a logistical nightmare. Here’s how the test works, a specially made 60-sec spot shows a typical sunny beach scene, with people lying around on deck chairs or sunbathing on towels while waves crashed and seagulls cried in the background. As people wondered what the ad was for, the scent of Nivea sun cream permeated the cinema, and a Nivea logo appeared on screen along with the words "Nivea. The scent of summer."

I remember four years ago I was giving a similar idea to a client who was the CEO of a HAVAC company. I was telling him that by supplying a scent distributor with their rental furnace, they can easily charge a few dollars more every month. More so, it is a differentiator in a pretty commodity market. I was suggesting different scents for different time of the day. They never went forward with that idea.

Pearl & Dean (which sells cinema ads) likes the idea so much that they are now bringing it to the UK and are selling to talking to a handful of clients, including sun cream, bread, coffee, perfume, air fresheners and chocolate manufacturers. It is easy to see why this works. Let me think what doesn’t work. Perfume doesn’t work as it is more of a sampling product and sometimes too strong. Pharma products..a Viagra scent? Probably not. Durex? Not sure people like the smell of plastic. Tobacco and cigar won’t work. Automobile? May be the smell of the leather seats in a new car, this works for me. Pizza Hut? That makes people hungry, not a bad idea.

Scent marketing is not new, we know the sense of smell is the strongest and most primal of all our senses. It vividly reminds us of moments and experiences– good or bad.  It is the first of our senses to evolve in the evolutionary chain and the sense with the strongest, most accurate level of recall. Scent is processed by the limbic system in our brain which is responsible for memory and emotion processes. It is probably more powerful than visuals. Marketers are learning how to apply multi-sensory marketing techniques to enhance customers’ experiences of a location and its products or services. These experiences allow customers to develop deeper memories and emotional connections. We know how it works fro our experiences. At least this is a area which you will be safe from Google attack, I don't think they have a scent search engine or something that detects smell and place ads. Not yet for now.

Oh one more application I can think of. Scent can be used to prevent counterfeiting since it cannot be easily reproduced. So next time if you want to see if your friend has a genuine pair of Nike, just smell it.

Mick Jagger Is Turning 65, What Does That Mean?

As from this Saturday, Mick Jagger is turning 65 and will officially be entitled to a basic state pension of probably under $180 a week. Not that he needs the money. Mick will be officially an old-age pensioner. He represents the new boomer, always age-defying and creatively charged to change the world. Have you seen his live performance this year "Shine a Light” which he acted as executive producer. I think a new Rolling Stones album is in the making. Michael Philip Jagger was born in Dartford, in the south of England, on July 26, 1943, the son of a school teacher and a hairdresser. He is the oldest among the Boomers (born between 1943 and 1960, aged between 47 and 64). He joins the rank of other Boomers including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Tony Blair.

What are Boomers like? There’s a strong sense of “Individualism” – sense of self-sufficiency. They are anti-establishment. They are more well educated and generally in good financial shape. Many research offer considerable advice with regard to potential changes in health and finances, but a question of particular concern to an aging generation is how to deal with their lifestyle in changing world? When career, financial, health potency and family circumstances change, how do they keep, and even improve, their sense of who they are, their self-esteem, and their satisfaction with their life?

Companies are rushing to get in front of the revenue train, searching for a constituency of consumers to whom they hope to market to and never has their been so predictable a mass of humanity with an undeniable need as the aging Baby Boomers. The Boomers have accumulated special skills, tons of knowledge, and a sense of being productive. Their pride in themselves is often tied to their youth, careers, and families. And many, especially those used to exercising their minds and using their hard-earned skills, want to retain the levels of competence that are important to their self-concept. The idea is to continue using our skills and knowledge, but in different ways. This time around, they are not using their vast storehouse of knowledge and capabilities to advance a career, make money, or "prove something". They are ready to change the world, again.

If you talk to those top model agencies in NY or London, they will tell you older models are the fastest growing segment and in high demand. They are referred to as "classic" or "sophisticated." After all, what middle-aged woman wants to buy moisturizer from a model who's too young to order a martini? Boomers want to see someone they can relate to. J.Crew has introduced an online section within online store that features 58-year-old Los Angeles model Pia Gronning. The sundresses will be the same, but the styling will be more age-appropriate and sophisticated. The aspiration in ads has shifted to having a full, rich life. If you look at many of the fashion and luxury brands and products today, they are missing on these “new youths”.

First There Were Kiva, DonorsChoose And Now Comes Better-The-World.

What’s the next best web-enabled social innovation idea since Kiva? Brad Burnham, a VC with Union Square describe what he sees as the collision between the market forces that govern technology innovation and the underlying stasis of philanthropy, where it’s very tough to break through with a new model.

According to Brad: “Philanthropy markets have a number of significant advantages over traditional nonprofits but they will need to find ways to increase the amount of information available to donors and lenders if they are going to continue to grow. Cell phones may become the portal through which the third world participates in philanthropy markets. As the Facebook/Craigslist generation becomes a larger part of the donor community, they may be willing to exchange the radical efficiencies of the marketplace approach, for a less perfect, retrospective, Craigslist-like approach to fraud. If more transaction data is hosted on servers located in the developed world, there may be enough market data to use the same computerized techniques the credit card companies use today to spot fraud. Kiva and DonorsChoose captured the imagination of the folks at our event, I think, because most people instinctively believe that the immediacy and emotional power of engaging directly with a borrower or recipient and the inherent efficiency of a lean market place approach to philanthropy already outweigh the risks, and that the balance between opportunity and risk will shift further to opportunity as information and information technology becomes more broadly distributed in the developing world”.

I think this is very well said. We need more ideas like Kiva. I’ve read in the New York Times that now Kiva simply can’t keep up with the demand for new projects to support. Can you imagine the demand simply outweighs supply. Kiva’s problem is the best example to show how strongly donors respond when social capital markets are created. This is perfect for the Internet. There are a lot of inefficiencies to connect social capital with those who need it, Kiva was the first one to take out the inefficiencies, expect to see more to come.

Another interesting and big potential idea is an inspiring start-up called Better Better The World (for full disclosure, this is one of Idea Couture incubation start-ups founded by three very smart like-minded MBAs / social entrepreneurs) and then later joined a team of passionate professionals including a head of product development and head of finance. Their strategy is to create new way of giving by calling it “freerasing”, I love this name. They're now focused on creating a global movement which will enable anyone with access to the Internet to be a freeraiser – raise money for a cause, while surfing the web, at no cost to them. The start-up described themselves an innovative, for profit, social venture that delivers new ways to raise money for leading global social causes by connecting a network of like-minded parties that from individuals, to corporations and global charities.

They are working hard developing a comprehensive platform that supports and provides high value and connecting individuals, companies and charities with a vision to create the world’s most innovative fundraising platform. Their mission? To leverage the power of innovation to raise $1 billion for global social causes by 2012. Visit their site and sign up for the movement. I have added a permanent link here. Many now believe that you can make a profit while advancing your philanthropic interests. This includes San Francisco-based Good Capital that operates like a venture capital fund and invests money from wealthy individuals and distributes earnings back to investors. The difference is that Good Capital invests in non-profit organizations as well as for-profit ones that perform functions associated with non-profit charities.

Is China, Korea or India Part Of Your Gobal Innovation Strategy? If Not, You Must Think Twice.

What a view of probably the most vibrant business place in the world. In Hong Kong seeing the hyper competitive markets and it is the gateway to the world biggest market of the future, funny enough that I wonder why the word 'innovation' is not commonly used or comes up in board room conversations here. But innovation is deeply embedded in every inch of this place and the people here. For them, it has always meant survival and opportunities.

Fortune 500s of the west is thinking too narrowly about the emerging world, particularly China and India, these are not only emerging markets, they are emerging innovation centers. If we are not careful, there is a risk that we may eventually become the emerging market if they out-innovate us.

Since global brands first entered these markets 2 or 3 decades ago, and to a some extent today, these companies have an "imperialistic" view of seeing the emerging markets as something waiting to be conquered., or markets waiting to be colonized. With the growing middle class and a thirst for the latest and newest, companies expect to harvest the fruits of the innovation efforts developed at home (suck costs). It is easy see the logic but this is to some extent can be a dangerous view, a complacency problem. The very presence of Fortune 500 together with the entrepreneurialism of the web 2.0 World and the competition they create have inspired the emerging world's companies to raise their game in response. They are seeing and learning how these innovation games are being played out.

Emerging markets on steroid such as China and Korea are generating a wave of disruptive product and process innovations that are helping established companies and a new generation of entrepreneurs to achieve new price-performance levels for a range of globally marketed goods and services. Eventually, such companies can be the worst nightmares for Whirlpool, Ford, Dell and Nokia of the world. Although this is not going to happen tomorrow, but I don’t think it is that far away either. The low incomes of consumers in China and India — a total of a little less than 500 million households with an average annual income of less than $6,000 a year. You do the math. The other is the spending behavior of this immense group of consumers, who, by Western standards, are unusually youthful, demanding, extremely open-minded, and adventurous. They are the perfect customer archetypes for any kind of innovative products and services.

The powerful low-end home market can provide an unfair competitive advantage for these emerging market companies to innovate on the low end of the market and then bring them global. The low end of these markets are generally underserved and ignored by many. There are three innovation models, most common one is process innovation: wiring everyone to the same network and leveraging the cost, talent, and scale of a global company. This is the most commonly practiced and lease innovative, really just a conventional scale-play. The second one is creating lower quality products and services sold cheaply to mass, which works to some extend for commodity products. The third one is innovating through local  joint ventures.

Organizations must reposition themselves to deal with and prepare for this. This is not about stripping features and lowering qualities, they must instead redesign their products and processes from a "clean-sheet" perspective, and innovation out of these “white spaces”. My advice for them, stop innovating based on familiar markets. Your home-market organizations should no longer be the primary locus of innovation. When you think innovation, try starting from the emerging market and then bring them back home. Or at least, integrate your innovation in your home markets with the emerging markets.

What Do You Do When Old Media Vehicles Are Losing Effectiveness And New Media Vehicles Are Not Proven And Generally Lack Measurement?

On the flight to Asia I was reading a latest study conducted by Aegis Group's Marketing Management Analytics and Financial Executive magazine. 6 in 10 financial executives believe their companies' marketing departments have an inadequate understanding of financial controls, and 7 in 10 said their companies don't use marketing inputs and forecasts in financial guidance to Wall Street or other public disclosures.

The answera to the questionshere are two fold. First, people generally use last year’s budget as a base and use a percentage adjustment. Or some use a percentage of total revenue. They seldom re-examine overall media effectiveness or use ROI for their marketing spend. The research used an online survey of 130 financial executives across a range of industries. More than 80% of respondents were CFOs. On the whole, the data showed that CFOs appear comfortable with how their companies tally up marketing spending: 80% of respondents said their firms have an adequate audit trail for tracking what was spent. And more than four of five firms in the survey had some sort of marketing ROI metrics in place.

The problem is that CFOs don't seem agree the CMOs' claims for ROI in marketing spend. The problem is there are serious challenge to measure marketing effectiveness especially with many old media vehicles losing their effectiveness and new ones unproven. Only one in 10 marketer respondents said they could forecast the effect of a 10% cut in spending. Just 14% of marketing executives said senior management in their companies had confidence in their firms' marketing forecasts. Despite the push for more measurable results, it is hardly the case. In a recessionary climate, advertising is generally less effective and these traditional “shouting loud” and ‘buy me” ads are not working. What influence consumer? Recommendations from friends are what shape consumers’ behavior. That’s why social media will thrive in a economic downturn.

And in times like this, it is the true test of a great CMO who pushes for innovation on all marketing front. It forces people to think hard about “customer value” and look for ways to refine existing product concepts and produce something better or cheaper. This downturn, expect to see smart men and women begin to do battle with their former employers in the marketplace. We will see a generation of frustrated executives, armed with M.B.A.'s and readily transferable skills, take innovative business ideas to the market. By the time the recession is over, thousands of new businesses and new jobs will have been created and the economy will emerge stronger than before. That is because recessions -- despite the pain -- are times of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. If you believe in what you can do and dream big, this is the time.

Obama Is One Of The Hippiest Brand Of The Decade. The World Needs More Brands Like This One.

I was watching Jack Cafferty today on CNN talking about the questions why Obama gets so much more coverage than McCain. When Obama announced his trip, 200 journalists have asked to join him although the campaign can only be able to accommodate 40. Meanwhile, McCain has taken 3 foreign trips the last 4 months, and not a single network anchor has gone on any of them.

A post from Tina on Cafferty’s blog. “Jack, God bless John McCain, he is a war hero. But let’s face it, every time he gives a speech I fall asleep. On the other hand, I actually surf channels looking for any coverage of Barack Obama; I can’t seem to get enough of him. He makes me feel like there is hope for this country… I imagine that the news media senses the same thing and wants to be there to record it all.” That pretty much describes the difference between the two brands.

No question Obama is probably one of the hippest American brand in this decade, ranking together with Google and Facebook. This election is a competition between brands, or endorsed brands. These candidates are all cross-endorsed by parties and other politicians and entertainers. The future of American depends how the elected brand manifest itself. This branding decision affects everyone in the world and people from all walks of life, particularly the resulting US policy has huge implications outside America since the world war two. This is unarguably the most important brand decisions in this decade.

Is the media biased? Yes. But why? Because the Obama brand has stories for us, it has dreams to share and words that give us hope.  Wondering how everything can go so wrong in American and how to get out this mess. Given the beating of the image of America during the last five years, getting back to "trustable and hopeful" is a long uphill climb, bit not am impossible one.

As for the McCain brand, it is as boring as a Warmart store but offer less value than the retailers do. His straight-talking, grand-pa-can-do-it do persona are not helping and translate into "arrogance" by many and that’s exactly the kind of brand attributes America doesn’t want for his brand. Some see this as Bush extension brand. So what would you pick?

 

What's The Future of Blogs? What's Your Organization's Blog Strategy?

I have only been blogging for just over a year. I am benefiting from it in many ways from being able to exchange emails with a few thousand people from all over the world to getting to make tens of new friends among the thousands of visitors to my blog everyday who share similar interest.  I ended up collaborating with some of them on projects. Most of all, it is just great to have a place to share my thoughts with others. The future of blogging is unknown and we don’t know how it will evolve. At its most basic level, it is a giant content machine that forms the next extension of the Web. After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity the last 3 years. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the hosted blog tools.  Blogs is now part of the media ecosystems.

Is there a blogger business model? Probably not. It is a bigger movement of the democratization of media, which is replacing the centralized, top-down controlled model. Companies now see the power of blogging, not necessarily just about asking the CEO or the marketing folks to write a bog. It is about harnessing the power of influence and knowledge to create possible affiliations. Companies can use bloggers to put a more human face on interactions between evangelist, expert users and amateur users and; marketers can create buzz through blogs; and bloggers can act as fact checkers for the mainstream media.

Blogging can also be a dangerous act. The Iranian parliament is about to pass a draft bill that would add a few of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution and among them "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy." Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. Iran already imprisons bloggers for challenging the government and executed 317 people for other crimes last year, up from 177 the year prior according to Amnesty International. The Committee to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is "among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students.” The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among other sites.

And on another side of the world, Procter & Gamble's Pampers is bringing as many as 15 top "mommy bloggers" to the company's Cincinnati headquarters this month in the company's biggest effort yet to reach online influencers. They understand the power of influence and they are providing all-expense-paid trips as part of their communications outreach campaign. P&G sees the move as an emerging standard industry practice to inform bloggers, rather than buy their loyalty.

Johnson & Johnson's BabyCenter also entered a partnership last year with Federated Media to form the BabyCenter Parenting Federation, a hub featuring 17 mom blogs. According to Tina Sharkey, chairman and global president of BabyCenter. "But they were voices we felt were representational of the different moms online. BabyCenter partnered with them so we could have a blog network not just for our consumers but also for marketers who wanted to get the reach of the influentials."

Here are the some key considerations if you are developing a blog strategy from a corporate perspectives:

1/ You need Credibility. When developing  a serious of corporate or marketing blog, being credible is the number one thing. No one wants to read press releases or marketing BS. Credibility also include the authenticity of the content and the nature of these content. Full disclosure is absolutely necessary. What unique perspective, experience or knowledge do they bring to the table? Industry credibility is especially critical in the world of corporate blogging. 

2/ Having some Perspective.  You need to have a unique perspective otherwise there are no reasons for people to read what you write. This is a simple one but often ignored. The authors' unique perspectives help humanize the whole experience otherwise they read your company annual report. Who does?

3/ Maintaining Relevance. The whole idea about blog is the timeliness of the content because people expect to get updated information due to the nature of blogs. Prepared to throw in information even before they are official. This is part of the deal. Insiders' info is expected.

4/ Balancing Risks Management. No question organizations struggle with this one. The idea is to find a balance between over stringent guidelines and restrictions due to the potential for legal liability and totally lack of risks management. Lawyers and HR dab the perspiration off their foreheads, hoping to avoid lawsuits created by inappropriate posts by employees and at the same time markets want an open and free dialogue with customers. .

There are a few more... but I really need to get back to my emails.

Can Too Much Innovation Be A Bad Thing? Or We Are Doing Too Little?

Managed to get home on a midday flight and getting some work done on the plane is not bad. I find it is often a good idea to have a few hours on Friday to plan what to do for the weekend (I mean what work to do). So I use Friday afternoon to prepare work uninterrupted work and then Sunday night to plan for the week.

I get a lot of questions on "what constitutes an innovator" and there’s no simple definition on this one. There are companies that are serial innovators (3M, Amazon.com, Google) and there are occasional innovators. And then there are hyper-innovator that (mostly in the CPG and CE world) that constantly innovating on a product level to the extent that they create diminishing return. There are strategic innovators who look for opportunities for disruption up and down the value chain.

There are challenges with hyper-innovators because they are adding too much complexity to their product portfolio and as a result miss out up to 40% in incremental revenues (according to a Bain Global Survey). Their findings suggest that hyper-innovators may make it harder for people to find exactly what they want, or for sales people to match the right product with the right customer. As a result, there are a lack of co-ordination and synergies among these activities. This is most common in consumer electronics, CPG and automobile industry.

The most common mistake when people are adding too much complexity while innovating new products and services without realizing that’s what’s happening. A key part of any innovation journey is to find a path to ultra-simplicity and yet deliver the value customers expect. If you make your product or services complicated, it could be that you don’t understand enough your customer needs and should try to be laser-focused. Work hard to identify the optimal point of innovation as customer needs and technologies evolve.

Is there anything called too much innovation? No, it is where innovation effort is applied. There always time when any evolution of any products or services are only incremental and creating no new value to customers. This “overshooting” is common among software products and technical products. Almost all Microsoft Office products are “overshoots” and we only use 10% of those features but have to deal with the unnecessary complexity. Vista is a big overshoot. Sony PS3 is another one. Markets believe these performances claim can be key differentiators but the reality customers just don’t care. The best example is any remote control. Almost 99% of all remote controls are “overshoots”. Ask yourself how many other buttons you would use other than power on/off, channel, volume? Why can’t they just give me 6 buttons? Every remote control I’ve seen failed usability and human factor test. What are these people thinking?

Innovation is supposed to bring progress to our societies, not slowing us down or creating short-term benefits at the expense of long-term economic and environmental costs. What makes such progress possible? Economists and historians of technology agree that scientific and technical innovation is fostered by the rule of law, low inflation and the absence of civil disruptions. These conditions encourage inventors and entrepreneurs to believe that they will reap the fruits of their efforts. This is not the whole story. Michael Darby and Lynne Zucker of UCLA suggest that innovation occurs when business leaders discover a path to dramatically increased profits and then follow up by spending funds on research and development and seeking patents for the resulting innovations. And government, they claim, plays almost no role in innovation. I cannot fully agree with that, I think government should play a role in promoting innovation. One simple example, there will be no Internet if US Govt had not invested in its development together with the universities.

Another important of our innovation effort is to innovation in sustainability. We have underestimate the true cost of what we produced and consumed. Most of the problems the world is experiencing today stem from a failure to tabulate true costs of products. We're finally paying costs that we'd relegated to what traditional economic thought disregards as externalities (factors that aren't included in a cost calculus). Products need to factor in their environmental and societal impact along the value chain. Sustainable innovation need to tackle the fundamentals of external cost. Expect to see waves of innovation on that front.

Service Strategy - What Is The New Gold Standard? Michelli Has Some Of The Answers. Lessons From Ritz-Carlton.

I don’t remember when the word “service economy” first showing up five or ten years back. What is “service economy”? In economic terms, services are a diverse group of economic activities that include high technology, knowledge-intensive sub-sectors, as well as labor-intensive, low skill areas. In many ways, the service sectors exhibit marked differences from products (manufacturing), these distinctions are blurring.

Technology is shaping the economics of service.  It is also affecting the relationship between product producers and consumers in areas previously unthinkable from fast moving consumer goods to health care, where the need for personal contact to diagnose and treat ailments is becoming less essential.  One distinguishing feature of services is the relatively high emphasis placed on intellectual capital, or “intangibles”, in many service activities.  These “intangibles” are not often captured in financial market valuations although that is changing slowly. 

Service is particularly important in the top end of the hospitality industry and the luxury good sector. I have widely spoken on topic of luxury goods marketing in Spain, London and Italy over the last few years, but my focus was on the brand and retail experience design, not on the service side.  There’s always the question of what does luxury really mean? I’ve been tackling this quandary for many years as part of our work on the ultra-luxury brands.

I have identified the following recurring themes in delivery of ultra luxury brands: firstly, at a minimum, for consumers to feel the unsatisfiable desire; secondly, for them to enjoy a standard or experience that is beyond ‘their expectations or imagination’; and thirdly, to feel individual, very special and your product and services need to enhance their individuality. And contrary to popular belief, exclusivity is not the primary determinant of a luxury brand although it is the case in emerging markets. Exclusivity, in and of itself, does not increase the desirability of luxury goods with today’s democratically minded luxury shopper. Luxury has new manifestations particularly in consumer electronics and technology sector. Today luxury brand need to have certain performance too. Nice packaging and fancy ads won't cut it.

Back to the topic of service, my friend Joseph A Mitchelli is an authority in customer service and organizational consultant. I just received a copy of his latest book ‘The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience’. It is a follow up to his bestseller on Starbucks. The new book focuses on how Ritz-Carlton has elevated the luxury experience to an art form. The book contains a lot of field-tested advice from both senior and front-line managers at Ritz-Carlton.  Here’s a except from one of my favorite chapters ‘Attention is a Multisensory Activity’:

• Staff must empathize with the guest’s emotional perspective by utilizing all of their senses
• Staff must be encourage to put themselves in the situation of others
• Staff must look for opportunities to serve others, even when you are not in direct interaction with those needing service
• Anticipating guests’ needs is a simple, almost artistic skill-one in which you listen and observe the guests’ habits

Here are some good questions from the book to take home:

• In what ways have you designed service delivery that appeals to both the thinking and feeling aspect of the consumer?
• How does staff gain an awareness of the opportunities they have to wow or make emotional connections with customers at every touch point of the customer interaction?
• What processes and technologies do you employ to maximize cross-departmental service?

Four Cool Innovative Start-Ups That Have Great Potentials

A few people asked what are the cool innovations out there. Despite the current economic climate, there are still a lot of innovation companies launching new services. i can think of four. May have a few more.

First one is Babbel, it is an Internet application for playful language learning. Their intuitive lessons allow people to connect and interact. It's intuitive interface, audio cues and user-generated visuals allow people to virtually travel around the world and learn different languages. They include German, English, French, Italian and Spanish for now. Babbel also features game-like multimedia “trainers,” exercise applications lasting 2-5 minutes. Each lesson package contains material pertaining to a different theme, such as travel or business, so you can learn a series of words and phrases within context. I think this is very smart idea.

The second one is CalliFlower, it is an Ottawa-based company called Iotum that develops applications for free conference call service integrated into a web app. It is more than just conference call, they have spent years working on a revolutionary approach to teleconferencing. Call it Voice 2.0.  It allows the callers to see pictures of all of the attendees to the call, and see their status (muted, hand up etc) and there is also a "live wall" feature; a back-channel that allows a shared IM chat to go on between attendees at the same time as the call. I am sure they are working on many more new features. They have a Facebook app and you can manage all your calls there. Once you've tried it , there's no reason to go back to conventional conference call. They are onto something.

The third one is called SocialThing. The Colorado-based received $300,000 in early-stage funding from eonBusiness, as part of a $500,000 convertible note round. It is still in an early private beta, and is looking to launch in the 3-4 months. What it does is offer a centralized place to manage your digital life, moving a bit beyond traditional profile aggregators. You can take your profile anywhere and manage your online identity. I think we can all find that useful. Let me count how many online profiles I currently have...

The fourth one is a video-indexing and search platform Viewdle, it is based on a facial-recognition technology. It allows users to search for videos, going straight to the part of a video where a specific face appears, or where that person talks about a specific topic (hence, the tech includes voice/text recognition). It is a pretty cool idea. The system works in two stages: when a person's image is run through the system for the first time, Viewdle's development team has to identify that person (either using metadata -- accompanying text, tags, captions, etc -- or probably manually); from the second time on, the system recognizes the person with a 90% accuracy, by comparing the new picture with the one that's been identified and tagged in the system. I can see the use of this technology for other applications.

BullShits Are Like Cholesterol: Do You Know What's Bad and What's Good?

Design thinking and applied creativity is a mystique for many. We often come across a lot of bullshits because many simply want to push their own ideas and desperate to throw in all kinds of irrelevant thoughts and associations. Or sometimes designers use language that others do not understand and so labeled them as bullshits. Is it easy to tell when a design discussions becoming just bullshits or they are genuine design dialogue? Not all designers can communicate and sometime those who can articulate design cannot design. This is a post for another day.

Harry Frankfurt, a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton wrote in his book one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. We watch, listen to and read all kinds of bullshits everyday. There is no question some of us contribute our share. Many (like me) are very confident of our ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. Frankfurt, a popular moral philosopher, attempts to build such a theory. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and humor, Frankfurt explores how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. The book is worth reading. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.

Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Bullshiters don’t know whether they are right or wrong. Essentially any pitch has some bullshit elements in there, or the process is an exercise of bullshits. In design, the pursuit often include some functional design objectives, answer to user needs or aiming at a number of user personas. The emotive elements are usually harder to describe. It comes from a deep belief and intuition that simply cannot be right or wrong. Is this bullshit?

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who preferred to be known as Le Corbusier 1887 -1965), was a Swiss-born architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also painter, who is famous for his contributions to what now is called Modern architecture. Early in his career, he was influenced by the problems he saw in the industrial city. He thought that industrial buildings and housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. It is certainly true today, but when he was advocating the ideas he wasn’t certain. He was simply an advocate of his ideas. Would that make him a bullshitter? Later he transformed his ideas to physical form, as houses which he created as “a machine for living in”. (I am a big fan of his work and I have half-a-dozen of his original pieces at home)

Bullshit is in fact part of the design process, we should not see in a negative fashion. It is simply a process to rationalize ideas and concepts or the unrationalizable. Sometimes these rationale are anchored upon observational insight which again has not quantitative grounding, but that doesn’t mean they are not scientific. It is rather hard to describe the inquiry as it a very personal journey for a designer to immerse oneself to look for signals, particularly those signals that are hard to pick up. So it is fair to say that every great inventor/innovator/designer/architect needs to be a bullshitter.

Sometimes I use the world “bullshit” within two completely different contexts. When we can say we need to put more thoughts around an idea and build a story around an innoavtive concept, we say “add some bullshit around it”, but we are not demeaning the process or intend to misrepresent the idea at all. Quite the contrary, we mean we need to put more thoughts on the rationale.  We do understand the need to articulate the rationale on any innovative ideas. Sometimes we back up with some hard facts.

And sometimes I say “that stuff is full of bullshit” and that's when we refer to someone who has no idea of what he or she is talking about. That’s different from a designer expressing this design rationale. In this case, we are referring to people who has no subject matter knowledge, lack of a valid opinions or has no idea of what problem he or she is trying to solve. They are not misrepresenting or lying; just have no credibility, insight to anchor upon. I am using a different definition that Frankfurt. This is a very different kind of bullshits. And I am very good in recognize bullshit and never hesitate to dismiss them. I actually make that process quite painful for them. Ask anyone who have worked with me.

Innovation Doesn't Need Best Practices. It Needs Weird Practices!

 
I have been approached by many like-minded people from all lover world saying how much they like our proposition. Today innovation is no question the hottest topic but executives are generally disappointed in their ability to make innovation work or making tangible outputs or results. Even trying to infuse an organization with innovation is often far more frustrating than many can imagine.

There are no best practices in innovation. There are no best organization design or structure for innovation. There are no knowledge management systems or collaboration tools to make innovation less risky. There are simply no straight paths to innovation. Corporate cultures are one important driver of innovation and same as outside partners.

Our innovation experience convinces us that a disciplined focus on three fundamentals may produce the building blocks of more effective innovation. A first step is to formally integrate innovation into the executive planning agenda. In this way, innovation can be not only encouraged but also tracked, and measured as a core element in a company’s growth aspirations. Second, executives can make better use of external talent for innovation, people who bring proven tools and multi-disciplinary thinking. Bring them in as your innovation partner and have a formal innovation program that span across different business units and geographies.

Finally, identify leaders to help foster an innovation culture based on creativity and trust. In such a culture, people understand that their ideas are valued, trust that it is safe to express those ideas, and oversee risk collectively, together with their managers. Give them space to experiment.

Innovation remains one of the most poorly undertaken functions within the modern Fortune 500. Serious doubts continue about the innovative capacities of the large, diversified firms. Blame it on bureaucracy or organizational form. These challenges have long been recognized and researched by academics. Excessive hierarchies, lengthy decision-making, and resource allocation process are just some of the all-too-common features typically and frequently cited as being found in these organizations.