innovation playground Idris Mootee

Disruption Is Less About Technology. It's About Customer Experience. Disruptive CX Strategy Needs To Get Emotional.

Why do some companies make so much profit and command price premiums while some continually  struggle to make minimum margin and gain market share despite spending good money on advertising, buying channel presence with some even having a better designed product?

The secret is very simple. Though these different high performance companies operate in very different industries and face different challenges, the major reason for their success comes down to one thing. They understand it is all about the customer experience. And they don’t even have to do it for everyone. At least not initially.

They are putting their customers at the center of their universe; they also understand that not every company can do that (including their competitors who are many times bigger and with big marketing budget) because it will be difficult or too expensive for them to make that work for everyone.

The secret is that you should start with ‘not everyone’ and identify those ‘someone who cares’. Those someones who appreciate the extra things that you do and will ultimate tell everyone about it and essentially those become the most tangible evidence of your brand promise. The declining effectiveness of advertising is well evidenced and many marketers are still doing that despite their value propositions which are unclear, and customer experience is underwhelming. And instead of spending time and resources on the latter, they take the easy path and buy more display advertising, it is not going to work.

Smart companies understand that success depends most fundamentally on a few core customers and if you can tailor your customer value propositions to them and then design the experiences just for them, you’re on the right track and can achieve a new level of performance and differentiation. These customer experiences are not about a $50 rebate, or a free something or many thank you emails. These are things that consumers take for granted and believe you’re doing it to get their business as the cost of doing business.

Customer experience needs to get emotional. This is how our brains are wired and this is when design thinking comes into play. You need to map the customer journeys and engineer happy accidents. Not a business process exercise at all and don’t mix them up. Walk their shoes in their everyday life and constantly invent new ways to apply the best value propositions on minimal scale. Remember customer experience is not about being well said, it is about being well done and it is not a published rule book. It is embedded in your culture and how your brand dictates your behavior.

Virtual Reality Is The Next Big Thing. Beyong Shocking And Disruptive. It Will Create Tens Of Billions Of Value. Who Will Win This Game?

The world is becoming crazier and more exciting as Virtual Realities are becoming more real and the lines between our physical world and virtual word are fast becoming blurred. Next year 2016 will be an important year as companies are finally making virtual reality real with only 2 main players participating on the race: HTC/Valve, Facebook/Oculus will be making VR products available. Microsoft is partnering with both Valve VR and Oculus while Sony is pushing hard not to miss the bandwagon with Morpheus.

The user behavior of VR has yet to come to shape and will be evolving for the next 5 years, the idea of information conveyance is interesting and playing a special role in the realm of virtual and augmented reality. We are learning to design cues in the VR world to tell users where to move or go or to touch. This is still a challenge as don’t think about it that much in the physical world. We walk into a room assuming the chairs are moveable and the cabinets are not. That sense of reality has changed in the VR world. Anything can happen to everything. It is like living in a dream.Those who have experienced the HTC/Valve Vive were completely fascinated by the experience. HTC Vive is clearly ahead of the game.

For VR, unlike 2D gaming or in the real world, we have arrows and signage to tell people where they can go. In the VR world when user is wearing a head-mounted display, the users are actually operating in two realities – the real, knowing that the user is wearing these gears and the virtual, which is so immersive (more so for the HTC/Vive roomscale technology that allows you to walk around the room) and therefore difficult to find a frame of reference.

The question is do we want user to have the feeling of wearing a space suit or simply feeling they are acting as normal with no gears on them? The awareness of wearing a suit will remind people they are in a VR world unless the suit is a normal suit. While body motion sensing is great when body movements are being interpreted by motion sensors as perceived input and turns it into commands and controls. Basically, with this technology, you are the controller.

KOR-FX is making an interesting gaming VR vest that uses acoustic feedback that, in turn, is processed into haptic feedback. Its software analyzes the feedback felt by the user, depending on what’s going on with the on-screen and what the user is doing it with. The controller “acousto-haptics” is to define acoustic feedback that is being felt.

Sixense is another company currently developing a wireless solution to hand input in virtual reality with the STEM System making use of alternating current (A/C) electromagnetic field to accurately track body movements in terms of position and orientation within a radius of a stationary base.

In designing VR experience, the haptic side of things is perhaps the most difficult to address. Oculus has yet to demonstrate an “official” control mechanism for the Rift, instead letting each developer use the peripherals they find most suitable. I am speculating they may end up figure out a visual hand-tracking technology from a front mounted camera. So what is the best way to navigate in the VR world? Input is still a key challenge for VR as a pure look-based movement (turning your heads) supported with some analog input (mouse in your hand as an example) but sometimes the head is looking at a different direction and the hands are not in sync. This can causes problems as if the system is receiving two very different commands.

Expanding information conveyance is still early in the usability learning curve and we are a few years away before arriving at a dominant model. There are still many creative options we can explore and they are not mutually exclusive either. A voice based system guiding the user as an example. Once we start adding social interaction in shared virtual environments, it will explode. Social VR means social presence and this is a $20 billion dollar business at a minimal.

The inevitable evolution of inputs in some form of controllers will keep coming. Xbox and Playstation will need to think how to migrate their current controllers to take advantage of the new requirements (not easy) and we can expect to see more innovation from start-ups including companies such as Razer Hydra from Sixense, or camera-based systems which are limited by the camera’s line of sight. HTC/Valve is also working on some cool solutions aiming to provide the best and not just the first.

Immersive VR systems that alter your sense of physical reality can give user the illusion that you are located inside an unreal virtual environment – or a telepresence - the ‘sense of being there’ or ‘feeling of being there’. In the early 1990s this idea was transplanted to virtual reality, where instead of being at the remote physical environment, the participant was in a virtual environment with a sense of being at the place depicted by the virtual displays.

A Swiss healthcare hybrid MindMaze announced its pioneering move into the VR and gaming spaces with MindLeap. Combining headset-mounted neural sensors and motion-capture cameras, the system is designed to “facilitate neuro-powered immersive virtual and augmented reality” on consoles platforms as XBOX, PlayStation and Android. This is still in development and I am not sure if it can be done soon. They leverage technology developed by the company for a range of medical applications in treating neurological deficits, such as helping amputees control robotic limbs. Neurologial control is still a bit of science fiction and will be a long way before it can be mass commercialized. I like to dial my HTC M9 with my brain some day.

For now, we will be sticking with head-mounted and handheld controllers. They are enough for us to re-create boundaries and rethink presence. Every time you pick up a HTC Vive,  you are about to enter a virtual boundary that didn't exist before. Exciting and also scary!

The Most Successful Wearable Design Is All About Balance, Benefit, Beauty And Behavior.

This is the billion-dollar question: “How do we create the iPhone pr Walkman of wearables?” and “How do we create sub-ecosystems around these wearables?” At the CES who this year, you can still see everyone displaying their newest or not-so-new wearable ideas. No one can afford to miss the train but most of the wearables out there now are just toys and eventually will become thrown aways. I can't find a reason anyone would want to buy most these so called wearables. Google glass is officially a failed experiment, or at least for now. GoPro is a stellar success and Apple will enter that game soon. They have been granted a patent for a wearable camera that could possibly challenge action cameras leader GoPro.

The path to mass adoption of wearables will not be a straightforward one. There are numerous technology, user behavior and production economics barriers to cross. With all this buzz and emerging innovative conceptual designs competing for the dominance, there are still many questions to be asked about what the future holds and how consumers will adopt a different product paradigm. Even the smartphone is still shaping our behavior and we are still actively reprogramming ourselves. The smartphone is becoming the operating system of our professional and personal lives, our relationships with the outside world and emerging systems around it. When it comes to the operating system, the main battle will be an OS that will interoperate across all devices. This is the big play. The success of any dominant design for wearables will be based on successfully tackling of the 4Bs:

Balance, Benefit, Beauty and Behavior.

Balance: To design wearables, one must ensure that they are, indeed, wearable. That means comfortable and adaptable to the various places and spaces the body inhabits in the world. To do this, design needs to include studying the anthropometric measures of the human body and of the equilibrium between the various zones of the body. One key to success is ensuring that the form or shape of the wearable fits the body and its actions in the world. Nerdy high-tech designs will not cut it. Balance reflects the highest level of design excellence, seeking an unselfconsciousness in interactivity languages, adding a sense of space to that of place with engineering overtones that are human at the same time.

Benefit: Designers must first determine the real problem the wearable concept is trying to solve, needing to solve, able to solve. Focusing on needs means designers can concentrate on the things that deliver the highest value. The benefit doesn’t have to be a known benefit today and there could be some needs users don’t even know exist until they see them. Sometimes these benefits appear to be small but actually can make a big difference in behavioral change. Contained product moments and the tiniest interactions are important in designing the customer experience of wearables, and designers must try to transform them into opportunity.

Beauty: The consumer needs to love the design. It needs to have visual appeal so, to the user, it doesn’t look like something you see in a Sci-Fi movie. The design needs to be expressive and not only limit to the form factor, but the overall interactive experience. The connectivity piece is key – it needs to allow for seamless wireless connection. The interactions or interface design is the trickiest part. The designers must translate the mass into energy, form and relationship. This is about creating order out of chaos, to put order into things, to make things more simple, to give meaning to objects through the presence of a design language.

Behavior: This is the least predictable part. Just look at all those health tracking devices, there is a tremendous gap exists between collecting and reporting data and changing behavior, there are little evidence to suggest that these wearable is making people more healthier. But for sure, the most successful wearable would be those who can influence our behavior as a mechanism for human behavior change and reinforcement. The subconscious mechanisms by which a human brain forms habits are still a bit of a mystery, and this can let us down a path to come up with devising tools for changing them.  

The Bionic Man/Woman Is Now Possible! It Gives New Meanings To Wearables!

Remember that Six Million Dollar Man TV Series? When ace test-pilot Steve Austin's crashed, he ended up in a poor shape that his only chance of survival was to replace human spare parts with technologies. That was the beginning of “wearables” I supposed. The government decided to invest millions to use the latest technology to rebuild him with cybernetic parts which gave him superhuman speed, response and strength and the superagent.

Thirty-five years later, DARPA's Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) is working on it and  trying to improve the speed and accuracy of neural interfaces. Such interfaces can happen in the brain, as in the case of Hemmes, or someplace else farther down the line, closer to the missing limb. It is a highly complicated task to try to translate these commands to muscles that drives the myoelectric arm. Most important is that any of these won’t need a brain surgery or implant. The challenges include weather change and other external factors can affect the myoelectric arm and there is the issue of electrodes slipping on the skin.

The idea of implanted electrodes is very attractive with the goal to provide near-natural hand movement. Another sign og progress is FDA just approved the world’s first approved bionic eye. The Argus II, which treats patients with the rare genetic condition known as retinitis pigmentosa was approved by the FDA after twenty years of research and $200mm of investments. The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, which was approved to treat people with severe to profound retinitis pigmentosa, doesn't actually restore vision or allowing them to see, just enough to detect light and dark and the contrast can identify the movement or location of objects. Almost like the first generation of cell phones. We are a few years away before they have advance features. When the photoreceptor cells in the eye's retina are damaged, people can tell the difference between light and dark.

To restore light and dark vision, a tiny chip containing many electrodes is implanted on the patient's retina. The patient wears a pair of glasses with a video cam attached to it. The camera sends the recorded image wirelessly to the electrodes in the chip, which then turns the information into a signal that the brain can understand. It will be a low-resolution 60-pixel image only and enough to give people a sense of what’s in front of them.

The breakthrough in nanochip will open up tons of opportunities to improve our senses or replace in medical cases or enhance in other cases. In less than ten years, those who can afford to spend $25,000 can get a bionic eye to capture wider light spectrum or advanced your visual search functions through Google. I won’t be an early adopter for sure.

Wearables That Promiss To Make Us Smarter. What's Next?

Do you wonder how we measure brain activity? Our brains communicate through the cell sending tiny electric signals to each other and the more signals the more electricity it will produce. An EEG can measure the pattern of this electrical activity. There are some who believe that if we stimulate certain part of the brain (pre-frontal cortex) will improve certain functions. For years, there had been experiments of stimulating the brain using small electric currents and see if it can make us thinker better or smarter.

Some believe the results are temporarily and some belief that it helps us overtime and the impact is long lasting. Not enough studies to prove it but expect products like this availabe in the market as werables soon. But attaching dozens electrodes to your head that shock your brain, a new product called Foc-us headset is designed for gamers (18 years and older and have $249 to spend) promise to make you a better gamer.

If it can do that to gaming, then it should work for other brain activities too. I can see a high end version for stock brokers and probably one for hedge fund manafers too. So far, scientists have tested the technology, but mainly to figure out if it's has any effect but no idea of prolonged use. Brain enhancement wearables can be a big thing and it is like Viagra for the brain.

A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, it examines how to identify emotions without relying on people's ability to express themselves. It could be used to assess an individual's emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus including faces, advertising or products. The idea is based on the assumptions that different people tend to neutrally encode emotions in similar ways. The researchers believed that is the case. In the future, wearable means literally wearing our emotions on our sleeves. The method for brain stimulation here istDCS, for transcranial direct current stimulation, and it's a brain stimulation method that involves sending ultra low amounts of electrical current through various parts of the brain to achieve different effects. You probably have seen this in movies for medical treatment and it has been used since 1804.

Actually the design of the device is not complicated, The tDCS enthusiast community is also blossoming, especially considering that stimulation can be replicated with do-it-yourself electrodes and over-the-counter batteries and perhaps it is the next iPhone and we will all be wearing one around with downloadable apps for stocks picking, chessgame, dating, anti-repression, golfing, negotiating and fishing. The competition to become strataight As students will depend on which werables that you use.

Media Disruption Is Not Slowing Down. Mobile Is Now The Center Of A New Ecosystem.

The media business is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. When people asked me about my magazine and the economics of that, they were saying why am I in publishing business. Well that is not my core business, just a hobby. It has been almost three years since the first publication of MISC and readership is growing nicely. We're now in 28 countries and we have have the digital version. I am getting a lot of positive feedback from readers from all over the world. Perhaps I should make the next issue the thickest one. This is the first cover that was shot in Milan. And the next cover will be shot in Shanghai.

The media business is certainly not easy with the never-ending technological disruptions we are experiencing and new behaviors keep evolving, we are nowhere near the end of it. The word social media makes no sense anymore as it is already main stream doesn’t matter how you look at it. Many traditional media types continue to cling to an old way of doing things, based largely on making minor adaptation to existing approaches and some are relentlessly experimenting with finding new revenue stream, largely still through advertising or sponsorship.

There aren’t many new opportunities for business model innovation if you take a strategic view, people are still thinking about advertising or sponsorship. Yahoo and Google are the same. The hybrid model of readers’ empowerment and buttoned-down professional journalism is already fullyoptimized. Media executives are spending a lot of time thinking about the future of their industry and what it will look like in 2020. 

Five years ago everyone is thinking about the online model and suddenly the tablets came and changed everything. And what’s next? Multiple screens device, new interactivity through voice, gestures and more external data sources, and glasses and watches etc. No one knows how content discovery and consumption model will evolve given the abundance of choice consumers have today. Neutrality is probably not the best interest for the media industry.

Media business is still suffering from an identity crisis, at least for another decade. The business model will not change, we will still end up paying for content through transactional, subscription or advertising models although there will be more flexibility on how we purchase them. With every person with a smart phone also has a video camera that can turn them into amateur journalists, news will become real-time and shows us different views of any event. And contextual bits will be consistently updated and events unfold. The Twitters of the world are the instant updates and these short bursts will create more noises than news value and readers need someone to break them down into manageable pieces.

Audience now lives in a multi-screens world. They can choose between raw news and organized news. The three key drivers of mobile disruption are hyper-local (geolocation), integration with home appliances and digital payments. The three together can put mobile at the center of an entirely new ecosystem. It is not merely another form factor. It is the biggest leap forward since writing first arrived about 7,000 years ago, which only impacted a tiny percentage of our population. Word of mouth was the only “information system” for most of humanity and now that will be turbo-charged by mobile as it unlocks an incredibly deep desire and capacity among us (humans) to share personally relevant information and feelings such as “I am waking up happy to a sunny morning” etc. These personal information is competing for attention with other news. And for me, I'd rather be reading what my friends are saying than the news. CNN is depressing.

I Imagine Over 95% Of All Patents That Apple Filed Are Useless. Here's A Good Example.

The patent wars are continuing as we speak. With the proliferation of cheap sensors people are talking about putting them everything. We use them in our cars to see if the tire pressure is correct and washroom etc. It is part of our everyday lives already.

Apple just filed a patent application to put sensors in your sneakers so they can send signals to your iPhone to tell you it is time for a new pair. If I am Nike, I would file 100 patents to put sensor in everything from sneakers to sport pants. Is this patent really useful? I think we all have a pretty good sense when do we need to replace them just by looking at it. I don't need sensors to tell me.

The application describes a "Shoe wear-out sensor, body-bar sensing system, unitless activity assessment and associated methods." The application's summary describes the system thus:

A body bar sensing system for sensing movement of a body bar may be provided. The body bar sensing system may include a housing having a coupling mechanism operative to couple to the body bar, a detector disposed within the housing and operative to sense movement of the body bar when the housing is coupled to the body bar, and a processor operative to determine a number of repetitions of the movement based on the sensed movement. In one embodiment, a shoe wear out sensor includes at least one detector for sensing a physical metric that changes as a shoe wears out, a processor configured to process the physical metric, over time, to determine if the shoe is worn out, and an alarm for informing a user of the shoe when the sole is worn out.

I really think this is a pretty useless patent. Perhaps a more useful one is we can have them in our leather shoes and it sends a warning signal to me when the pavement is slippery just like my Mercedes. Today’s sensors are mostly simple designed for specific purposes, like measuring temperature, gas, light or tyre pressure.

Most sensors are designed as part of a closed system design and not connected to any networks. Future network sensors will drastically expand the possibilities by using wireless, radio waves, ultra sound and infrared signals to connec to big systems, we can do a lot with the information that they collect.

The most fascinating ones are those we can put under out skin. LifeCare in Bergen is working on the development of a new type of sensor that can be placed under the skin for measuring the blood glucose level.  It is small enough to be injected underneath the skin and no operation is needed. A nano membrane moves when the blood sugar concentration is irregular. One big challenge is power supply because all sensor needs energy. You don’t want to rely on battery. Some researchers have consequently developed wireless energy transfer between the glucose sensor and a bracelet carrying a battery. 

What I find really cool is the EPOC's Neuroheadset. It is the next competitive field in gaming. The headset features 14 saline-based sensors and a gyroscope and is primarily designed to gamers. Think shoot and think jump! Another application is to help people with disabilities to regain control of their lives. It includes EmoKey, which is a lightweight application running in your computer's background to allow user ot to map out thought-controlled keystrokes. This headset is the used by the Dartmouth Mobile Sensing Group, which created a brain-to-mobile interface that allows you to call your friends by thinking about them. Imagine I am looking at other people’s Facebook pages and it will leave a comment or 'like' for you.

Now I Can Read Your Tweet On Your Dress. Or You Can Program Your Dress For Any Special Occasions.

It was at least 10 years since I was talking about wearing technology and fashion in conferences and 10 years later we don't see any mass commercialised products out there. It is another example of innovative technologies usually takes way longer that we imagine for diffusion for a number of reasons. May be this is the year we start to see it coming.

There are a few out there working hard to make it happen. CuteCircuit is one of them. It is a wearable technology and design company based in Shoreditch, London. Founded by Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz, the company incorporates LEDs, telecommunications, and smart textiles into fashion, bringing a sense of style and tech fun to wearable tech. I visited their studio a month ago and talked to them about the challenge and opportunity.

Rosella's background is in fashion, having worked at Valentino and Esprit, while Genz was an artist and anthropologist. The pair met while studying interactive design at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy in 2001 and began to collaborate almost immediately. The first collection Rosella and Genz designed, called TransforMe, was based on the idea that garments could change shape, color or illuminate during the course of the day in response to the mood and activity of the wearer.

The most well known piece from the collection is the Kinetic Dress, a dress with embroidered electroluminescent fibers that light up in response to the wearer's movement. The dress features Victorian style mutton-sleeves and a train, and is made from black elastic that creates a sleek, body hugging silhouette. And their famous “Aurora Dress”  which was designed for an opera singer, features 10,000 LED lights and hundreds of Swarovski crystals.

The fashion industry’s manufacturing system has been using the same supply chain design for many years, disrupting this process, even slightly, has to be done slowly. Facing the manufacturing process has helped refine the products and streamline designs, and has given the opportunity to create viable products. Like any other industry innovation, the biggest barrier is always the supply chain. The industry needs a new flexible supply network to achieve scale. Perhaps in another 3-5 years. May be more. I can't wait to see when we all have a "smart" wardrobe.

 

At CES Everything Is Touch, Touch, Touch. Will Touchscreens Make Typing Obsolete Soon?

At CES this year everything is touchscreen, TV, laptops, tablets and kitchen appliances. Is the future of interfaces is moving to touchscreen? Is this the end of keyboards? We are seeing a completing transition in the design of user experiences to software based and touchscreens. The notebook computer is the final piece of the migration. Most people would find no reasons to touch a screen on a laptop or notebook, but we are also increasing used to the habit of touching screen even most of the time even we’re not aware of. Thanks to the iPhone and iPad.

Our view will change even when we don’t think touchscreens on laptops are useful; just see someone use a keyboard with an iPad or Galaxy. For many, it just feels more natural to touch the screen. I sometimes find myself touching the screen forgetting that it is not a touchscreen device.

Blackberry will join it even they will still keep the keyboard as an option for people like me. Automobile entertainment will move there too. Your next laptop will likely be touchscreen and you might not have any choice, whether you like it or not. I wonder when will Apple launch a touch screen macbook? I think it is only a matter of time before all laptops become touch-enabled. LG was showing a prototype of interactive retail display so you can try differetn outfits without going into the changing room.

With touchscreens, we will never worry about spilling coffee onto your keyboard but will have to deal with the problems of greasy fingers. I think touch will become the key user experiences but there is still a lot of room for innovation. Touch-enabled devices will accelerate adoption in the enterprise market and next will be education market. The next generation of workers will forget what a physical keyboard looks like.

Hong Tan, a professor at Purdue University who works for Microsoft came up with an interesting way to add the feel of buttons and other physical controls to a touch screen by using vibrating piezoelectric actuators installed on the side of a normal screen generate friction at the point of contact with a finger. The nice thing about the innovation is it can make an ordinary sheet of glass feel as if it has physical buttons or even a physical slider with different levels of resistance. That is a bug jump forward from just touchscreens. The haptic feedback could help users find the right control on compact or enable the use of a touch screen without needing to look at it.

RIM is working really hard to win this. They called it a “writing without typing”, a technology only apply to the keyboardless Blackberry London devices. This is a riksy bet as Blackberry loyalist (like me) likes typing on physical keyboards rather than tapping on a screen. I am eager to get my hands on the new Blackberry London... a few weeks I will know if that works for me.

More Gadgets..Smarter Devices...CES Doesn't Want Us To Stop! Where Do We Go Next?

In Vegas for the CES, it is exhausting. I skipped last year but didn’t feel I missed anything. I was not a fan of 3D TV and not impressed with the Microsoft / Ford automobile operating system. It has been a crazy first week this Jan with lots of management stuff to get done as well as finalizing the March issue of MISC magazine to print. It is the GADGET issue. Very happy with it and couldn’t wait to see it out in bookstores and newsstands in eight weeks.

Here I am prepared to be exposed to all kinds of crazy gadgets once I set foot on CES, as usual many are useless and hopeless. There is distinction between the two. “Useless” is product that does not answer to any customer unmet needs, it is just novelty. “Hopeless” is me-too product that tries to compete on price. I hate to think how many tablets will end up going to the landfill. With no Apple presence, it is like everyone here is try to compete with Apple. It is the world against Apple.

Many of these consumer electronic gadgets solve our problems. Problems that we know and problems that we know we have. Often they create new ones while solving the old ones. Humans are supposed to be good at problem solving but we’ve become so reliant on the gadgets in our lives that there are problems we find ourselves unable to solve without them. Sometime in the not too distant future gadgets will not just respond to our commands, they will be able to understand our mood, read our minds and learn our preferences.

When I was sitting at Starbucks, my mind was trying to visually map all those data exchanges between Macs, tablets, mobile devices, watches, cameras, and people. The visual just blows my mind and we forgot how crazy and connected we are.

Never before we have that much access (and speed) to information and knowledge at the palm of our hands and we can almost (yes almost) live our lives without thinking. We tether our brains and other senses to our smart devices and relying on them to tell us when we’re sad, confused, tired, hungry, where to go and what to buy. How far are we before we’re ready to raise the white flag and formally “surrender” to our cognitive independence? What about humanity?  

We are living in a technology-addled age, our gadgets are necessity. I wonder what’s the average number of apps for iPhone users? And how many of them they rely on in their everyday lives? We are becoming lazy. We do less walking because we have cars. Now we do less thinking because we have smart gadgets. Your brain is like a muscle. If you stop using your cognitive skills and instead rely on gadgets to do the thinking for you, in time, those skills will start to atrophy. For me, I used to be able to do complicated calculation looking at tons of numbers and within a few minutes come to sense of what it is telling me. Now I can’t even add up a restaurant bill without a calculator (app). I used to be able to map out the route mentally when I drive from one place to another, now I just listen to the command of my GPS. I used to be able to spell and thanks to auto correction, my spelling is worst than when I was 12.

May be the next innovation is not a product. Just like we’re try gin to think of ways to encourage people to walk or bike to make us more healthier and do less damage to our environment, we should be thinking about applying design thinking to help us to use our brain more – and use less gadgets. What does computational humanity means? Time to get back to the show.

 

What Are The Most Popular Innovation Tools? Here Are The Results From Idea Couture Recent Survey (Part 1 of 3).

Our new headoffice is slowing coming together with containers of furniture waiting to be unloaded. It will take another 2 months before it is picture ready. It is looking like a boutique hotel as I've heard. We've got lots of projects rooms, big windows, big space for development team and lots and lots of open space for parties. But no one has time for it.

People talk about innovation some refer to strategy, organization, process, culture and many just think of toolkits and tactics. Innovation strategy is more important today than it was 10 years ago; rapid market changes and the need for growth requires a clear articulation of answers to the following three questions:

• Is innovation part of out core business strategy or something we want to keep on the side to explore new opportunities?
• Where (product scope and geographic scope) do we focus in terms of innovation efforts? What types of innovation do we need?
• Product innovation; service innovation or business model innovation?

Innovation does not happen with Power Point or Excel. They are decision support and communication tools. Innovation requires not only the right strategy, environment but also the right tools. Choosing the right tool can be as complicated as the problem it needs to solve. Executives must select the tools that will lead to breakthrough ideas, which can be brought to market effectively and ultimately create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Last year we conducted a global survey amongst executives of our Fortune 500 client base to determine their levels of awareness, understanding and usage of the tools used in the innovation process. We have broken this list of 15 tools into 3 categories and will share here some of the results as a two part series:

• Top 5 most popular
• Top 5 most effective
• Top 5 most misunderstood

Here are some of the results:

THE TOP 5 MOST POPULAR TOOLS

1. CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
2. ETHNOGRAPHIC SHADOWING
3. IMMERSION DAYS
4. RAPID PROTOTYPING
5. CONSUMER JOURNEY MAPPING

THE TOP 5 MOST EFFECTIVE TOOLS

1. ETHNOGRAPHIC SHADOWING
2. PERFORMANCE AND PERCEPTION MAPPING
3. RAPID PROTOTYPING
4. CONSUMER JOURNEY MAPPING
5. VALUE CURVE MAPPING

THE TOP 5 LEAST UNDERSTOOD TOOLS

1. WEAK SIGNAL SCANNING
2. CONSUMER CO-CREATION
3. SENSEMAKING
4. FORESIGHT
5. CREATIVE COLLISIONS

THE TOP 5 MOST POPULAR TOOLS and why are these Top Five the Most Popular?

• Many people have heard of them before.
• Have been popularized through books, articles and business gurus.
• Easy to access, and easy to use.
• Can be easily integrated into existing workflows
• Easy to migrate over from adjacent disciplines

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY: Contextual Inquiry is an ethnographic research method that reveals how people think about, talk about and perform activities in the context of their daily lives and actual environments. It is used to observe existing consumer/user habits, and to gather feedback on prototypes, and in the process gain a deeper understanding of consumer motivations, attitudes, preferences, needs and ideas. Contextual Inquiry helps research and design teams understand how to better execute on the less tactical and more social, cultural or contextual elements of a concept.

When to use it: Should be used in conjunction with Rapid Prototyping phase Why use it: To gain reliable information that is relevant to the End User. To access tacit knowledge and uncover insights into user behaviours that were previously unarticulated. To gather detailed feedback on successive prototypes, and to use that input to refine designs.

ETHNOGRAPHIC SHADOWNING is a research technique used to understand a person or group of persons behaviors and interactions related to product use, service interactions, and the processes involved in achieving tasks. Shadowing is a real-time exercise that focuses on particular events and tasks people engage in as they take place. The nature of shifting contexts and use scenarios, make Shadowing a valuable technique for uncovering unmet, and unarticulated needs, as they unfold over time. So as to achieve authentic, and honest insights into end user behaviors, Ethnographic Shadowing sometimes requires that the research subjects be unaware of the actual Shadowing.

When to use it: Insights & Inspiration phase, at the beginning of the innovation process. Ethnographic Shadowing also helps inform the journey mapping process. 

Why use it: Ethnographic Shadowing is key to understanding and cultivating the consumer empathy that should guide each and every stage of the innovation process. Where surveys find data, focus groups reveal opinions and traditional market research creates speculation, Ethnographic Shadowing fuels innovation by identifying the unmet, unknown and unarticulated needs of consumers. 

TO BE CONTINUED ......

Microsoft's Next Big Innovation: Google Maps Meets Grand Theft Auto

What's new with GPS? There were the 3D maps, then traffic information with live refresh every two minutes so to help others to avoid heavy traffic jams and GPS watch? What’s next?

Surprise the next big innovation will come from Microsoft. It is Grand Theft Auto meets Google Map. The company just granted a patent that is designed to make its maps more pedestrian-friendly meaning not only just when you’re driving, even walking. I think this is a truly innovative idea. This feature is designed to help you t avoid certain dangerous area. You know two blocks can make big differences in many cities.

This "mind-the-ghetto" feature will be killer applications in future Windows phones. So while you’re roaming the streets of LA or Chicago, your smart phones will send GPS into to a system that maps the crime statistics as well as nature of crime, day of time happened and frequency. Not sure how this will impact real estate prices or retail rent.

And they may allow you to do a trial run in the neighborhood as downloadable scenes in Grand Theft Auto on your X-Box? I am sure there is a disclaimant that you need to click ‘accept’ meaning if you do get mugged in what was identified as a safe area would not be their fault.

It is definitely a useful feature for parents to make sure the kids are not allowed hanging out in those areas and it will prompt them and send a message to the parents? If you use a little more imagination, there is so much untapped innovation with LBS and GPS.

GPS is not legal everywhere. Apple will be selling its iPhone in Egypt, people there will have to go without one of the star features: GPS navigation. Yes, because GPS is illegal in Egypt (Can you believe this?) and I think it is the only country in the world but I might be wrong. Apple is forced to take out the feature because there is a ban on the import of all GPS-enabled devices into Egypt. The ban has been in effect for years.

The Egyptian govertment considers GPS a military-grade technology that can be used to help pinpoint the location of government facilities. But if you so happen to be travelling in the desert, you’re advised to buy one, but only from the black market which you need a GPS to locate.

Apple Is Gearing Up To Attack The Living Room And To Turn Siri Into The Next Google?

I am exciting seeing the advance copy of M/I/S/C next issue - "The Creativity Issue". It will be in bookstores in 22 countries sometime first week of December. Now starting to work on the next one - the "Big Insight Issue". I have a few great ideas and now looking for some good guest contributors. Publising is painful but fun and thank you for those 50+ emails that compliment our effort. It is great to see that people are really liking it.

I’ve been following and speculating how Apple will be using Sirri acquisition strategically to compete in the next white space. Imagine Apple is now working on creating the next home entertainment experience, a place that is still not occupied by Microsoft?

I can’t wait for the day that I throw away every remote control that I have in my living room. First it is hopeless for me to figure out their functions and second they are ugly and don’t fit in my modern and elegant living room. What I want to see is I can just say a command and the TV or the controller will translate them and activate them.

The Siri in the living room will be different from the one on your iPhone. It will be your personal entertainment assistant and understand whether you’re in the mood of a movie, convert, news or just some soft jazz. I think this is the killer app for TV and will give Apple TV a real chance to take off. Up till now Apple TV is just a little experiment. I think we are 18 months away. There are still a lot of challenges such as bandwidth in some cases and voice recognition accuracy. May be there will be a tactile interface control or gesture-based control in additional to the voice command. The beauty is Siri doesn't need a rigid set of voice commands an able to interpret natural phrases by picking out keywords and some other cues.

And then the whole idea of “search” will bring Google into the game. It is reported that they are throwing resources into a refreshed Google TV and Apple has bought its third mapping company, beefing up its cartographic portfolio with eye-popping 3D imagery based on declassified missile-targeting technology.

Apple will be playing the same new game strategy as it did to the music industry creating an industry breakpoint. It will be a hardware, software and integration play powered by the iCloud. They still need to soft the gaming piece which Xbox and PS3 are the last defensible positions. I hope the Apple TV set will be available in black other than silver and white.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Powerful And Affordable Real Time Data Mining, Visualization And Interactions Are Powering Up A New Culture Act - And Enabling "Infovation".

Just landed in Rhode Island and spendin the next 2 days in Providence, long working sessions ahead, expect to some productive knowledge exchange. The topic will be around where arts meets science, design meets technology.

We talk about how information changes our life and how it affect the way we make decisions both as individual and as a team or society, I think we are still unaware of the true power of change information visualization can have and the impact when applied in an interactive and social mobile settings.

Imagine a scenario everytime a politician suggests an idea and you can see realtime information in simple graphics visual data to confirm his/her coment or when a company makes a statment you can see how other respond with an instant trust index? That's a very likely future, an idea which I am working on. Can't say more.

And I don’t mean just data visualization such as bar chart and 3D chart etc, primarily it is the study and application of the visual representation of quantitative data, meaning "information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information."

Infodesign of infographics is actually different (it is like when I was trying to explain the differencne between customer experience and user experience/usabiity 10 years ago) from data visulaization. Information graphics (or so called infographics) instead of visualizing data, it is the strategic use of data by incorporating interactions, icons, charts, diagrams, graphs, tables and maps to present information that could bring new knowledge and sense making. Not only it helps to explain oterhwise difficult to understand data, but also illuminate and explain system complexities or system relationships in an easy to digest manner.

This is not new, in our human history our ancestors created cave murals and giant paintings to show us what was happening including what their understand of the the world, an event or even the universe. The power of infodesign lies in its effectiveness in simplifying complex data into understandable visual representations that can be universally interpreted.

The power of real time interactions with live data brings the potential to a whole new level. The human minds are real time computing machines that works to constantly changing and creating value and meaning of objects; the interactions between human brain and semiotics is conducted every time we see a visual representation of a scenario and makes possible of expanding our human cognition to absorb large amounts of data at just one single glance or click.

Here comes the most interesting part, infodesign is powering up an “infoculture” where massive real-time socailly digitally distributed (useful and useless) information is enabling a new form of cultural act. It is where science meets arts, and will continue to power up new possibilities as we learn how to use them. I will be the first one here to call it “Infovation.” Remember you hear it here first. Will write more about it next few days.

One more thing, how many schools out there actually teaches information design? Not many. We are still training people yesterday's skills for yesterday's job. No wonder it is hard for designers to find work. I think design schools should be paying for the continuous education of their graduates, becasue they never trained them enough or properly in the first place.