innovation playground Idris Mootee

Five Typologies Of Snake Oil Innovation Consultants. Bad Advice Is Worse Than No Advice.

You've probably come across many self-claimed innovation experts in the past and it seems like anyone who has a different way of saying or doing something is calling themselves one. So many dumb things I’ve heard these people said about innovation. Some are snake oil consultants promising to help clients to innovate and to organize a company for innovation. There are some selling to clients how to be creative I’ve heard people promising clients that they can improve innovation success rate from 4% to 80%! 80% wow, if that’s the case, this consultancy should worth a few billions at least. Google would have bought them already!

And then there’s talk about what type of people are best suited to be innovators. What kinds of archetype that represent the best quality of an innovator. This is so BS, innovators come in all sizes and shapes. I’ve come across many big ideas people who were trained in finance, economics, accountancy, legal, operations and engineering… and I’ve also met many working in the creative industries with zero ability to come up with big (medium or small) ideas although they dress creatively (that's a matter of taste).

Here’s a typology of 'fake' innovation experts:

• Mr/Ms Easily Happy – their bar is set so low and called anything new an innovation including a different color bottle cap or a new packaging. They can’t tell the difference between incremental innovations, radical innovation and design improvements and focus on the novelty value of cute things. But they are a happy camp and innovation is just a little more creativity for them.
• Mr/Ms Let’s Change-The-World – these are the people who wanted to change the world but have no ideas of how to start. So they come up slogans such as “sea change” and talked publicly about how the word needed change but have no idea of the what and how. Real innovators are change agents and know what is needed to be done and how to mobilize. These are modern day hippies. Change is too much for them to handle.
•  Mr/Ms Zero Clue – These people capitalize on the emerging interest of innovation and probably read every single magazine article on the subject and possibly a few bad books. Or even written one. Their messages were usually “let a thousand flowers bloom” or “change the game by doing something different”. Right. They never talked about the very core idea of ‘value’ and how to redefine them. They throw out words such as “collaboration”. “openness” or “listening”. They are afraid to say more because they don’t know more.
• Mr/Ms More-Focus-Groups – These are focus groups addicts that believe customers know what they want. Do they? Well, focus groups are effective in testing positioning, slogans and brand perceptions etc. But it is exactly the wrong tool for innovation. Customer doesn’t know what they don’t know? Imagine Apple asking them what do you think of an iTouch Jumbo that has a bigger screen? Apple is a company that systematically ignores their customers in the design process.
• Mr/Ms Toolbox – These are people who love to convince you how using a particular tool (creative tool or online tools etc.) can help you magically improve your innovation results or come up with the next big ideas. I think tools are important but it is one component. The human behavior aspect of the team is also important. The right leadership is also important. The right incentive system is also important and there are another 15 things. Tools are no more important that those and there should not be over reliance on them.

Innovation Is Badly Needed For Non-lethal Weapons? How About The Weaponization Of Drugs And Music?

Between the G20 and World Cup, everyone is busy. The economic inconvenience to Torontonians, security costs paid by taxpayers and businesses disruption are the price we paid for 3 days of meeting. This meeting is not changing fate of the world, in fact, I don’t think there is plan, I mean a real one. The economic, environmental, social and geopolitical issues we are dealing with are unprecedented and the world has changed so much that many macro economic theories are not holding up.

The outcome of the meeting? It is a draft document that includes new wording such as "voluntary, member-specific approaches – meaning we all do our own thing for what’s best for us. Not sure why they can’t do a webex and the money can be used to solve some of our social problems, instead of talking about it. What can $1B buy? It is more considering individual country paying for their cost.

And for those peaceful protesters, I feel sorry for them for their voices not getting heard. I also feel sorry when there were thugs mixing in and all they care was breaking windows. Not sure those people know what they want. And for the police, they are dong their job. And it is hard for them to identify who is who in the crowd. May be there needs to be some innovation here.

How about a visual tagging device that can target these thugs or their leaders and use special non-lethal weapons on them? OK what non-lethal weapons? Back in early 70s, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem portrayed a future in which civil disobedience can be controlled with hypothetical mind-altering chemicals dubbed "benignimizers". Lem's fictional work opens with the scary story of a police biochemical attack on protesters. As the environment becomes saturated with hallucinogenic agents, protesters descend into chaos, overcome by delusions and feelings of complacency, self-doubt, and even love. It works better with the right music.

There is a US report currently in public domain that explored the advantages and limitations of Calmatives for non-lethal use, the report revealed a shocking Pentagon program that is researching psychopharmacological weapons. The report concluded that "the development and use of psychopharmacological weapons is achievable and desirable." The research team, which is based at the Applied Research Laboratory of Penn State University, was assessing weaponization of a number of psychiatric and anesthetic pharmaceuticals as well as "club drugs”. They can be delivered by spraying directly or through other agents.That's a real innovation, weaponization of drugs and music.

Most of the drugs under consideration are basically depressants affecting the central nervous system. Most are synthetic, some are natural. They include opiates (morphine-type drugs) and benzodiazpines, such as Valium (diazepam). Antidepressants are also of great interest to the research team, which is looking for drugs like Prozac (fluoxetine) and Zoloft (sertraline) that are faster acting. Scary thoughts but anything is better than bullets if we pick the right drugs. That’s a new adjacencies for those failed drugs that carry funny side effects to find a second life.

Here’s the funny part, the report points out that pharmaceutical candidates that fail because of excessive side-effects or unattractive side-effects... wonder what kind of scenarios if we spray people with happy drugs while playing John Lennon music loud on the streets. "All we're saying, give peace a chance"

My Next Book Will Be Called "The Authenticity Gap". I May Not Get Many Serious Readers. How About "Authenticiy Without Commitment"?

The Authenticity Gap - that should be the title of my next book. Well, I don’t think I have time to write another book, it takes me almost 5 weeks last time. I guess I will need at least 8 weeks. But no. May be a blog post, it takes only 15 mins. I do like the name, but I guess it won't sell well. May be "Authenticity Without Commitment", this is a far better title, I think I can sell 200,00 copies and sell a lot of seminars. Will get sponsorship from BP for sure.

Marketers have been talking about authenticity and brands for a long time and have been trying to be authentic, they are using the wrong tool. And often they don't know what it means. Advertising doesn’t make brands authentic. They build awareness and interest… but rarely building brand equity these days. That was a very different case 20 years ago. Today every individual, organization and brand is struggling with closing this gap.

When you are being viewed as ‘authentic’, people will tolerate your mistakes if they are the results of good intent, understand you’re human and seeing you as ‘real’. Consumers want ‘real’ brands, ‘real’ companies that empathize, and ‘real’ leaders that care. When public relation companies getting ‘real’ in using social media, it simply widens the gap. Sam problems with CEOs, employees want ‘real’ leaders that do not read out from a prewritten piece of paper, they want ‘real’ leaders that understand their needs. It also include saying and doing the very difficults, telling an employee that he is not the right fit for the job in an honest and respectable manner is part of being authentic, helping that individual to find his core is more important that force fitting someone into a job that he/she do not have the passion or the potential to be best.

Consumers also want ‘real’ brands and products that mean they accept the ‘imperfection’ and ‘limitations’ and want the ‘transparency’ to go with it. 90% of advertising out there doesn’t pass the ‘authenticity’ test. I am tired of advertising that trying to be cute and I am sick of those ads that the CEO shows up and talk about how they care about consumers. Stop Botoxing your companies, start changing the core of the organization and start ‘doing’ what is responsible for shareholders, societies and the environment.

All authentic brands are in many ways is the identity reflecting on company culture and leadership. They help that culture become visible and understood both customers and employees. They also embody the values and purpose of the company and giving them a face a personality and a voice that can be seen and heard. The mistake people makes is they try to engineer that from a marketing perspective, from extending that from the core. Icing is icing, it doesn’t change the quality of the cake.

That’s why many organizations are now relying on Corporate Social Responsibility to make organizations authentic, it is not a PR campaign, it is a business strategy that informs the brand, product development, customer service and marketing strategy. It is simply the best thing a company can do – going back to the heart of the company/brand and rediscover that the inner voice and use that to remind the public / employees that organizations can also be human, it is people making decisions, not a machine. We made mistakes, we correct them. We don’t ignore it and turn on a PR machine and hopefully we spin them enough people will forget it.

Let Me Propose To Limit The 'Intenet Kill Switch' To Just Facebook And Twitter.

For me, the Internet is more important than the phone, television and even electricity in some cases. When the Internet is down, we can't work and suddenly we're disconnected from our world. It has become so important for many of of us these days. I can't imagine if the Internet is down for more than a few hours. 

A US Senate Bill is proposing that if there is a "cybersecurity emergency" the President should be able to "seize control of, or simply shut down, portions of the Internet," with broadband providers and search engines required to comply. It is called the 'Internet Kill Switch'. The US President could be awarded absolute power to control the Internet in the case of a nation-wide emergency. I wonder if he will be too busy for that in such a situation.

This bill is so ridiculous. This is not the same as shutting the down US air traffic during a terrorist attach, this can inflict an enormous damage on the entire world and this should not be in the hands of one country. All our systems (banks, hospitals, transportation) and societies will simply be shut down. The proposed switch is effectively a switch to shut down the world. I suggest just give the government a kill switch for just Facebook and Twitter as terrorists hate our social networks because they don't have access from the caves.

Can The BP Brand Be Saved? The Logo Is Now The Symbol Of The Worst Ecological Disaster In Decades.

This BP mess is definitely an ecological disaster as well as a brand disaster of the century and it will take us decades to see the real impact. BP has lost half of its market value and there are even considerations for shareholder lawsuits on behalf of BP investors who have lost money because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Evidence is mounting that BP's directors, officers and executives missed or ignored numerous 'red flags', which had they been addressed, may have prevented the disaster. These actions also exposed BP to criminal and tort liability, and subjected the company to adverse publicity. Years of investment in the brand equity is pretty much gone overnight.

 

The brand now becomes a liability. Greenpeace launches a crowdsource logo design contest to publicize their cause. They are inviting professional designers and amateur designers to redesign British Petroleum’s logo and are getting an amazing response. The contest was launched shortly after Greenpeace climbers scaled a balcony above BP’s London headquarters to hang a giant flag bearing a reworked BP logo. The contest will run for six weeks, ending on June 28, 2010. I've picked a few that I like here.

The winning participants besides having their winning logo used in various Greepeace campaigns, they will get a day of training on a Greenpeace speedboat (not sure what that training it is), a design Masterclass with design agency Airside, or one of 50 goody bags (curious to know what’s inside).

The BP logo was designed by Landor and is featured as a blossoming flower on BP television commercials. Up until now, the design has been lauded by designers as a good example of a logo that reflects environmental responsibility. It is a pretty nice logo, but a pretty logo can only do so much these days in the age of transparency. Wonder how the original logo designers like the derivatives or are they participating in the contest

The Intersection Of Style And Sustainability Lies Great Opportunities.

I am not sure if Hunter boots are still in fashion, but I do like the look. I always have a thing for girls wearing boots or be specific Wellies. It is less about splashing in puddles and more about the look. Do you know what Lilly Allen, Kelly Osborne, Kate Moss, Samantha Cameron, Liz Hurley, and Angelina Jolie (and my wife) have in common? They all have the same boots.

They were so hot last year and not sure they can sustain that. The first original rubber Wellington boots were produced in Scotland in 1856 and Hunter Wellies were then introduced back in the mid '50s. But only 36 pairs were sold. I see many making the mistakes not wearing them right, such as not pairing with jeans that are slim enough or not matching the right short dresses or skirts.

The next cool thing is a pair of Orange Power Wellies, they are thermoelectric rubber boots that charge your cell phone using heat from your feet. These could come in very handy and also very energy friendly. UK mobile operator Orange teamed up with renewable-energy company GotWind to create the boots, which feature a power-generating sole that converts feet heat into an electrical current. That’s a great idea.

The power collected in the ‘power generating sole’ is collected via a process known as the ‘Seebeck’ effect. I hope they will make one that can power up an iPad with an extended cord, or a matching raincoat with a pocket for iPad. It will take a lot of walking (roughly12 hours) to give a full charge to your phone. We don’t know how much it cost but this is a great example of applying sustainable technologies to our everyday lives.

The idea is not new, Japanese telecommunications company NTT was developing shoes that generate electricity upon movement early 2008. The shoes generate 1.2 watts of electricity— enough to power an iPod forever if the wearer doesn’t stop walking. Unfortunately, the shoes are not capable of storing energy, but they are certainly good for juicing up gadgets on the go. The shoes are powered by small turbines and each shoe has a small generator attached to the water-filled sole, which spins a small turbine and generate power each time the wearer takes a step. Last heard they plan to bring them to market later this year. I hope Apple can design their own iBoots. That will be very cool.

Is The Age Of 'Indovation' And 'Chinovation' Becoming Real And What Are The Threats To Established Global Companies ?

‘The age of ‘Indovation’ dawns’ - this headline from Financial Times caught my attention while I was sitting on a plane flying out of New Jersey. It is an interesting article about Armin Bruck, managing director of Siemens in India, trying to convince the board of the Siemens of the potential of Indian innovation. He gave them the keys to a Tata Nano to convey the “smell and feel” of a revolutionary mass market product and to persuade his company that it should improve its pipeline of local inventions aimed at Indian consumers.

So, in February, Peter Löscher, the company’s chief executive, and his colleagues Heinrich Heisinger and Joe Kaeser piled into the world’s cheapest car – priced at $2,000 – and drove round New Delhi. I think the same can be said about ‘Chinovation’. Innovation from emerging economies will change the dynamics of global competition and forces every company to rethink or reconfigure their strategy for developing its high-quality technology for low-cost emerging markets. Good quality and low cost products with advance technology will becoming an important battlefield between global companies and local companies in India and China.

FT reported that after three months of that February visit, Siemens had declared publicly its intention to develop more than 80 “base level” products – targeted at financially constrained mass markets – with an investment of €3bn in India, China, Russia and Brazil over the next 3 years. Siemens expects to raise its order book 10-fold in India from these redesigned products during the next decade to €1bn a year. It also foresees double-digit profitability from the low-cost, high-quality strategy – what in India is called “frugal engineering”.

China understands the accelerating competition and the need to develop high value add industries, China is actively transforming itself from a low-cost manufacturer to global innovation test bed. The manufacturing base big domestic market give them a competitive advantage, but China’s companies still face tough challenges in their quest to move up the global value chain, and they still have a long way to go, but need to move fast.

In short, Chinese companies don’t understand ‘innovation’, let alone innovating beyond manufacturing. The idea of a ‘customer’ is still pretty foreign to Chinese companies and to understand how to embed empathy and user needs to help innovation is a long way away, because of cultural differences as well as business management mind set. China today does not have the talent base nor the culture for design and innovation at the corporate level, developing leadership skills is vital to close those gaps, and at the same time be able to attune to the end user will open vast new opportunities for consumer-centric innovation. It is at least 10 years away.

The concept of creative industries (happening in Shanghai and Beijing but not much outside these two big cities) in the context of China raises important issues, they have been trying to develop the creative industries with Chinese characteristics, but there are plenty to be done on intellectual property and copyright protection, design education, regional and enterprise development, consumer activism, and the fundamental tensions within the creative industries between individual design creativity and industrial scale. Only if the barriers are crossed otherwise the creative industries will no more than just fringes. 

But the trend is unstoppable and it is a serious threat for those companies in the west such as the Siemens or GEs of the world. Siemens understands the threat and is acting fast.

The Future Of Sustainability In Design Is Invisible. Idea Coutue's Patrick Glinksi Presented Three Snapshorts Of The Future At The Sustainability Brand Conference.

The Sustainability Brand Conference 2010 in Montery California last week attracted over 700 leading sustainability, brand strategy, product design and communications executives from top global brands as well start-ups, NGOs to share ideas and green practices.  Idea Couture's Head of Social Innovation Patrick Glinski was speaking on The Future Vision: 3 Snapshots of the Possible. Patrick’s key messages for the audiences are:

• We need to talk to our customers more often.
• We need to communicate a message of improvement rather than perfection in our attempts to be sustainable. This was echoed in several other sessions, including Starbucks (who gave themselves a needs improvement ranking on their ability to meet their 2015 target of 100% reused or recycled cups).
• The future of sustainability in design is invisible. Sustainable choices are made by brands and built into products as part of the design process and supply chain.

Patrick also co-presented with Rob Kaplan from Brown-Forman where Rob talked about the Jack Daniels American Forest program and Patrick presented the design and implementation process from the Aviva Community Fund.  Patrick top five take aways from the conference:

• Organizations need to focus on innovations in sustainability. But from the outsiders perspective, most talks took the position that innovation is easy - a fact that we know at Idea Couture is simply not true.
• There is a strong economic impact that results from sustainable practices. But in selling through the idea of sustainability to the C suite, most sustainability practitioners focus on social impact rather than rationalizing financial impact first.
• Strategic sustainability (solving social needs within the core business, leveraging the assets of core business, and forcing innovation through impossible constraints) will be a major economic force in the near future.
• Being sustainable is no longer a significant differentiator for your brand since most organizations are including some form of sustainability / green / pro-social messaging as part of their value. No one is going to pat you on the back for following regulations.
• It's ok to be profitable by doing good. But unless you're transparent about your intentions, you're going to deal with a lot of doubt. Transparency is becoming a key factor of building trust with customers.

I guess the biggest myth in sustainability in business that there's no money to be made from sustainability or being seriously green. This is definitely true ten years ago, but not the case today. It should be part of any company's business strategy, not just marketing strategy. Sustainability innovation offers brand opportunities for both top and bottom line benefits and build brand equity. Sustainability not only involves cutting down on waste and carbon, it many instances there are opportunities to support economic development for developing markets.  Innovative companies have found they can resell used products and materials that were formerly considered waste and help support micro-enterprises.

Is The iPad An Evolutinary Product Or A Revolutionary Product? Will It Revive The Print Publishing Industry Or Turn Them Into Zombie Business?

The iPad is cool, almost as cool as the ACE Hotel. I really like this place and it is becoming the place to stay for me in NYC. Forget the W, it is so boring. They were running out of room on my last day of stay so they switched me to this special room with bunk bed. Very cool.

The question is whether the iPad is an evolutionary (jumbo iTouch or iPhone) or a truly revolutionary innovation that can transform industry? Compare to other eReaders, the iPad experience is many times better, not to mention it is an Apple product. Apple is not slowing down anytime. I think Apple will design a smaller iPad, or iPad junior with a 5 inch screen, may be this Christmas or early mid Feb, it will be priced under $400 targeted for those who use it as ebook reader and iTunes movie player. I think there is 80% chance this will happen. And then next summer iPad will get an upgrade. I will write about what it could be next week.

Can the iPad save the print publishing industry and in the process creating a value migration and pushing content to the bottom of the value chain? Can the iPad perform CPR for magazines or simply turning them into zombies (the living dead)?  A side story. Even Steve Woznisk (Apple’s co-founder) had to wait in line for the iPad. An Apple engineer showed his iPad to Wozniak for 2 minutes just hours before the device went on sale on April 3. The engineer was later fired. Bazaar.

The iPad is both an evolutionary and revolutionary innovation, depending how you look at it. The user behavior is still emerging and I don’t think we truly understand where it is going. Apple has sold one million iPad in 28 days, comparing this with the 74 days that it took to sell a million iPhones. The naysayers are buying too. The iPad also violates many marketing and design rules. It does not have a targeted segment; people from all walks of life are buying and using them. It is also not design to do one thing really well, you can argue it is a media device, but in fact it has the potential to do a lot more. I think we should not narrowly see this as a media device. It is not a phone and do a lot more than what a phone can do due to its size and lack of permanence. We switch phones too often.

The print publishing industry has no clue of what to do. They are embracing the digital form as the inevitable future, but struggle to find a strong customer value proposition for their content beyond just being content, and fail to redefine what’s ‘value’ means to the digital readers. These are not your typical magazines subscribers who receive your magazine one or twice a month and read them.

A rethink is needed to look at the roles of physical magazines, digital magazines and service design. For me, I am buying way less books and magazines. 5 years ago, I subscribed to roughly 50 magazines and purchased 8-10 books a month. Yesterday, I’ve spent an hour at Barnes and Noble and realized there are so many garbage books out there that are not worth the trees killed and paper they are printed on. The problem is with the publishers. I have not seen many decent newly published book for a long time.

For all other ebook readers, with the exception of Amazon Kindle may be, no one can survive. They will all surely die. But there are no shortages of brave companies who want to take a shot at it. We all agree that we shouldn’t kill any more trees and the whole idea of carrying many books in a device is a great idea. Not to mention all my photos and music. For the music, it is a little funny when I used it on a plane just listening to music, and Nora Jones’ photo appeared on the screen like a digital photo frame. It feels like an overkill and I switched back to my little iTouch.

I think the book industry will be in big trouble soon. I don’t see any reason why I should continue to buy books, that is if I find a good one which is a bigger problem in the first place. The economics of book production doesn't make sense today.

It is interesting to see how things play out as publishes and device/distribution negotiate their share of profits. In the book industry, there was a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. That's funny. No matter where consumers buy their books, they expect digital media should cost less. And they should and will. Can publisher and writers still make money? Authors don’t make much these days and don’t have much to give up.

Have a great weekend.

Ursula Burns, CEO Of Xerox Talked About Printing The Future For Xerox At The World Innovation Forum.

Also speaking at the World Innovation Forum in NYC is Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox. Xerox is a company that was on a roller coaster ride the last 10 years and currently in a stabilized state with sales of over $22B (included the newly acquired company). But the future is still uncertain. Burns was made CEO last year after serving two years as President. With more than 80 products launched in the last 3 years, the company has increased the portfolio of document management systems and software in an unprecedented way, but it is an ultra competitive space as digitization of document blurs the boundaries of their business.

Burns believes a company needs to sustain itself into the future. Invest money to do better next time…a better product… for Xerox, they spend 5% on R&D to solve the next customer problem. She sees crisis is always a great motivator. When people think things are going well, there are no reasons to change it. The best time to change is when everything is uncertain, that gives you permission to do something differently. Good advice.

For Burns, high-level communications are good but can only go a certain way. We need to find the right and intelligent people to talk to and communicate where the company is going. Not everyone can connect the dots and understand the whole story. She is quick to acknowledge that she may not know the end point,but definitely can show people the mid point. Part of her job is look for orchestrators within the organization, and have many of those running the business.

PARC will do 50% research for Xerox and they will do work for other. Allowing partners to come in and take advantage of PARC’s R&D capabilities also help to bring in revenue for them. They do ‘dreaming with customers’ and spend time with them and spend time understanding what they do and identify the true pain points of their customers. Not by asking them but by watching them. The question for many was why can't PARC helped Xerox avoided many of the crisis and transform Xerox into the future? Since founded by Xerox in 1970, originally created to provide a path to the digital future and a window to Silicon Valley. PARC was chartered to explore "the office of the future." The stories of invention and innovation are a lot bigger than PARC itself, which is a small/medium R&D outfit but created a big footprints. I always PARC is never truly aligned with Xerox and almost an independent company although it is owned 100% by Xerox.

Now PARC is moving into clean technologies, a research team there identifies cleantech market opportunities and aggressively goes after them with a multidisciplinary approach. Joel Makower (also peaking at the WIF) has an interesting take on PARC’s move beyond the computer world to the cleantech arena. “It’s a watershed moment of sorts: the birthplace of today’s user-friendly computing wants to be the birthplace of tomorrow’s clean and green innovations."

Meeting with her senior managers a few months back, when asked about the legacy she hopes to leave at Xerox. “It’s all about growth,” she says. “It’s all about getting bigger.” OK she gets it. She needs to make Xerox a growth company gain. That includes both top and bottom line and bringing as many new innovations as possible to the market. These three things don’t seem to work together all the time. This is no easy job, bringing innovation to Xerox. It is a company has a long legacy of R&D excellence; that alone is not innovation. Innovation is more than R&D.

The challenge remains 1/ how to effectively converting good R&D into innovation (commercialized products and services) 2 how to manage the self-defeating limits of a narrow financial view of innovation but see it as creating the future 3/ how to put Xerox in different industry ecosystems rather than creating their own in order to accelerate growth? 4/ And how to avoid the gravitational pull from a company's best past and defy that to invent and deliver the next best future for Xerox? Burns has a big task in front of her.

What does Xerox has in its back pocket for the future? Can they reinvent the whole idea of what a document is? Is it printing skin? Or smart paper? Should they be sticking to the core as a document company or should they start to explore adjacencies? Is there an unavoidable collision path with Adobe possibly partnering with Cannon/HP?  The future is uncertain indeed.

Michael Porter Advocating Healthcare Reform Through Redefinition Of "Value" At The World Innovation Forum.

Michael Porter continues advocating his ideas on healthcare reform this morning at the World Innovation Forum 2010 in NYC this morning. I have not hard him speak for a long time and last time I was in his class 20 years ago. Him and many HBS profs are putting a lot of thinking around healthcare issues. He firmly believes that it is not and should not be a zero sum game. The system currently delivers high cost and low quality and as a result nobody wins. He suggests that we should reframe the problem and rethink the whole delivery structure.

The idea is how do we use the power of quality and outcome to be the cost control mechanism? As we all know, the economics and politics of healthcare is so complicated. What do we need to do to transform healthcare? He suggested 6 fundamental strategic imperatives. And the first one is organize care delivery around the patient. Sounds familiar for readers here? Another example of how businesses are not organized around customers and their strategies are not aligned with creating value.

In a book published earlier with Elizabeth Teisber, Redifining Healthcare, the authors diagnose the problem of competition in the modern healthcare system applying the theories of industrial economics and come up with a broad set of strategies which providers, payers, employers and the government can use to improve value. The core of Porter and Teisberg's argument is that the structure of health care delivery in the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter) is broken, and that it is broken because the nature of competition in the industry is broken.

Porter further adds that "In a normal market, competition drives relentless improvement in quality and cost. Rapid innovation leads to rapid diffusion of new technologies … Excellent competitors prosper and grow while weaker rivals are restructures or go out of business. Quality adjusted prices fall, value improves and the market expends to meet the needs of more consumers." Clearly this is not the case in the current health care environment.

Porter’s central thesis is that the delivery of health care should focus on maximizing value, which is to define as health outcomes/total costs, and that this metric should then form the basis of competition in the industry. Providers that can maximize value, i.e. deliver more effective, higher quality care at lower quality adjusted prices should be rewarded with more patients. Providers that can't keep deliver on these promises should either adapt and innovate, or go out of business. He believes reframing what value is, allowing competition and reorganizing delivery is one big way (if there’s another) to solve the US healthcare problem.

Porter provides a fresh view on how healthcare economics and industry structure. We know more today fragmentation of providers is part of the problem. There are too many players in the system including private insurers, for-profit hospitals, and other players who add cost without adding value. I think a Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government directly provides insurance, would effectively lower cost.

The big question remains how come we are spending ever more on health care and is that normal? Today Americans spend more on healthcare than on food. Part of that there are increasing use of new medical technology and not all of them are runaway spending. The increase in costs over the last 20 years, large proportion is caused by growth rare in private health insurance premiums. Having said that, introducing competition and reducing fragmentation is a sure way to get the system back on track.

"Reframing' Is Strategic Skill As Well As Design Thinking Skill. It Is What Many Of Us Do On A Daily Basis.

It is a beautiful day in NYC. Just finished a full day or workshop and I am back to my day job. If people ask what I do for a living, I might say reframing issues and coming up with creative solutions. Reframing is a strategic thinking skill, a design thinking skill, and system thinking skills and a design skill. It is a key element in the front end of any innovation process, to look at a problem and to position the problem, situation, or opportunity in a way that the result is actionable. Reframing is a multi-part process for exploring data that are often contradictory and ambiguous and making sense of them.

Companies have overly invested in their last hypothesis and operating on out dated business models, often unwilling or unable to get away from their orthodoxies. In another word, they are stuck in old beliefs. The fast changing consumer behavior and intense global competition present companies with a paradigm-shift challenge — needing to rethink about product and service design and delivery, supply and demand, talent and resources.

Many executives are challenged to reach beyond their usual bags of tricks for solutions, and some continence think this is an advertising agency job to come up with a new campaign. There is not better time for a complete reframing of organization’s problems. Here is how it works:

How do we understand the problem, causes and implications for non-action? How much do we know about the drivers of change causing the problem? Or the problem has always exist but was ignored?

Are there other ways to reframe the problem? What lenses can we use? What insights can support our lenses?

What are the core assumptions that lead us to see the problem the old way? Is this problem solvable? Is it worth solving?

What are the conditions needed for successfully solving this problem? In order for this problem to be solved, how do we go from existing conditions to desired conditions? And has this changed?

What else can happen along the way? Has this changed? What are the commitment, resources, capability and risks involved?

Our Idea Of D.School Meets B.School Is Not That New. There Were Three People Started Advocating It Very Early On: Tom Peters, Patrick Whitney And Bruce Nussbaum. Idea Couture Is Making Them Real.

I was speaking a keynote yesterday at an Innovation Camp. It was great place to share our stories and our journey to make innovation a ‘business’ discipline. I showed the audience the path to innovation is never a logical one. The fuzziness goes beyond the front end and extends into the late stage and innovation involves more than just design, it requires selling, positioning and marketing.

Innovation is more than just product design and even more than business strategy. If you think about it today, we are in such as mess… healthcare, financial, technology, media, geopolitics, sustainability etc…. and think if innovation is about figuring out what those problems mean to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating.

In a few short months, Idea Couture will be celebrating another anniversary year with many happy clients, and some people have been here for three years. We are adding new people every month and some are spreading across different geographies (SF and India are next), it will be harder for everyone to know everyone and no one likes that.

I have been lucky (by design) consistently finding the brightest and most creative people to join the IC family. I will NOT settle for less. My time is too valuable to spend on people who don’t the potential and motivated to become the best. I’ve heard a few times from some my staff that my standard is too high …. both on research, design and strategy. But that’s the way it is and will always be. My job is to ensure we have the most rigor innovation process (from insight gathering to opportunity mapping to design /prototyping) and our outputs supersede the best in the industry. I don’t make compromise.

When Idea Couture was founded, it was based on a few premises 1/ we need both analytical thinking as well as creative thinking to solve wicked problems for our clients 2/ we need to develop a set of robust tools as part of our innovation process 3/ we need to bring user into the process as early and as often as possible, call it participative design.

I never stress enough the importance of combing D-School and B-School thinking (our TM slogan) and believe that they are crucial to innovation management. Today's management concepts that are taught in B-schools are heavily based on "optimization" and "scale economics" and the fact that businesses need to make better use of resources and exercise their power in order to gain competitive advantage. However, this suggestion does not address “size” and can create other problems including legacies and bureaucracy that may hinder imagination and opportunities. I believe that the next generation of design thinkers can effectively use both sides of their brains to produce a winning combination and in turn move knowledge forward.

There are three people (visionary or gurus) who were early advocate of similar thinking beyond just academic debate but in a highly practical sense and probably positively influenced many people in business and design:

Tom Peters, 68-year old management consultant turned author/speaker/guru started more than 10 years ago telling executives the importance of innovation (beyond traditional technological definition) and how companies should “strive for strangeness and he as an early advocate of the "culture of prototyping." One interesting quote from Peter is "The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understand it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything.

Patrick Whitney, a 54-year-old Canadian native who is Dean of the IIT (Institute of Design in Chicago), the largest graduate school of design in the US. Whitney is a visionary leading a new movement to modernize and professionalize the discipline of design/innovation that is closer to the real business world. Whitney is turning design into a core methodology of innovation and is integrating the best of business and design thinking, taking away the airy-fairly from idea generation brain-storming. This is a big unfilled gap for many organizations and will continued to be one.

Well the third one is Bruce Nussbaum (ex Business Week innovation and design editor). He is now professor of Innovation and Design at the Parsons School for Design and I am sure most of you know him. He is not a designer or consultant. He is credited with bringing innovation and design to mainstream and an early advocate to suggest designers to take the lead in the transformation. Design has become very much an innovation industry. He is not just talking about the design of one product, but the design of the whole process of innovation in a company. Designers are thinking of themselves more as consultants and moving into what traditionally has been a management consulting function, providing "tutoring" on innovation as well as product design.