innovation playground Idris Mootee

Design Leadership Is More Than Simplicity. It Is About Design Discipline.

El·e·gant, an adjective and define or characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style. Marc Jacob? Chanel? Jil Sander? Hermes? All are unquestionably elegant by design in the fashion world. How about smartphones or interfaces? Can they be elegant? Or what about customer experiences? Can you describe a banking or customer service experience as elegant? Most people don’t.

Is elegant a word reserved solely for tangible product? The design world likes to use words such as “elegant”, “simple” and “user friendly”, many designers understand how to subtract in creating simple and elegant design solutions. Human factors usually subtract more than add. Good designers often take away complexity in objects or interfaces. Design is more than just making things simple. They appears simple but not necessarily simple. Design is the most complicated process but least understood.

Design should be strategic. Being strategic also means being human. 9 out of 10 designers barely understand what that means. Most are trained as design craftsman. There are very few design visionary and I only know a handful of them. They are also very few design managers. And that’s the reason why designers never made it to the boardroom and they complain they don’t have a voice. Because they are not strategic. Design becomes a competitive advantage for corporations when it is used strategically. At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism supporting by the underlying economics to make it feasible to produce and sell.

I have been hiring and mentoring designers (including some of the very best talents) for decades and can tell you which typology they belong in 5 minutes. It is very easy to find designers, it is not too difficult to find good designers, it is very hard to find design visionary. Because they are not trained in design schools. They need to be cultivated.

But there are so much business can learn from design. If the best design can be elegant, then can a business strategy be “elegant”? Or can a particular management style be described as “elegant”? Anything elegant is often simple; not everything simple is elegant. Things that are simple are often user friendly, not everything simple is user friendly. Sometimes complexity is needed. Simplicity has different meanings. Good businesses need to be simple and easy to understand, and that’s the investment criteria for Warren Buffet. Businesses are getting too complex these days and same for design. Long gone are the days where a few talented young folks sketching out ideas in a room. That's a mindset that stops designers from growing up to a highly complicated world.

Design process is never simple, it is often very messy as everyone has an opinion. Don't try to make it simple. But the result shouldn't be complicated. Design needs strong leadership and no different from other disciplines. Design never works in a highly politically environment and as a result you get design by committee – which is a recipe for disaster. Design management is to take the politics out and allow the essence remains. And the process is true to the mission - design to delight and make profits - not one but both.

Design needs strong leadership. Design never works if it is not managed. Best designers perform well in a professionally managed environment. Not the most desirable for many, but it is necessary. Apple design team is professionally managed and same for Mercedes and Burberry or BMW. There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. Strong design leaders are never popular, because they need to cut out the non-sense that designers to hide behind. To force people to unlearn old theories of design.

Designers wants to remain small, fully independent and less disciplined and that’s why most design firms cannot scale beyond certain size and fail after a few years. They want to ignore the commercial complexities and stay pure. I appreciate that too but companies cannot afford it. Unless it is your own business and you don't care about making profits.

Design for elegance is better for design for simplicity. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. In today's super connected world, the proliferation of digital devices and experiences require designers to create new ways of harmonizing software and hardware with elegant connectivity – connecting humans in an elegant way. Industrial designers, human interface designers and mechanical engineers need to explore new theories for them to make physical products real and meaningful and elegant. Why elegance? It is not an elusive target? Industrial designers should stop thinking about functional ease and simplicity, that is an over simplify way of thinking design. Some times people love things that are not so easy. Think about your personal relationships, you don’t go for the easiest one, you go for where your hearts is. Design is the same. How do you put love in an industrial produced object? That’s our job.

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.  

It's a Bird! It's a Drone! It's Amazon's 3-D Smartphone? It Displays 3D Images, 3D Maps And 3D Gaming!

Amazon has been working on a number of cool devices for a while. The temptation of playing the hardware game has always been there beyond just the e-reader. This month they will finally be unveiling a new device and there are plenty of rumors out there on what it actually is.

It is most likely going to be a Smartphone. Mostly made by Foxcom. Most like not producing any profits for Amazon. Most likely supported by a suite of Amazon Cloud based services. Most likely to be below the standard set by Apple, Samsung or HTC. But it will be a Smartphone that has some distinctive features, including 3D capabilities projecting 3D objects as part of its interactions. It will be using gyroscopes, accelerometers and other sensors to power the experience. Most likely mid-range specs such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and 4.8 inch display (keeping cost down) and many advanced camera functions; likely using 3-4 cameras and a Sony sensor. It will be a futuristic experience with 3D gestures controls. Gimmicky or not, we will have to see.

Smartphone adoption has reached its maturity but everyone is pushing new ways for consumers to use mobile devices. Average prices will drop a further 15-20% and the top end will come under pressure. Android market share will stabilize around 70%-73%. Amazon certainly thinks it is not too late to play the game. Every player will not give up on it and will try innovative ways to jump-start a new S-curve for the Smartphone. Even Apple is struggling. What new applications and new interaction paradigms can they think of that are considered unthinkable today? We are working hard 24x7 on these ideas.

Back in 2010 there were around 180 Petrabytes a month of data moving through the networks from a single user and it was mostly voice, and today with streaming video, social media use and mobile gaming - now averages 1,900 Petrabytes a month and is expected to grow at least 40%-50% every year thanks to additional wearable devices. It means by 2020, in a week’s time, five Exabytes of information will be sent by the average Smartphone user. Traffic problem ahead.

On June 18th we will find out. And suddenly everything makes sense.

China Is Pushing The Frontiers Of Innovation. It Needs To Move Beyond Just Technological Progress. China Is Behind In Commercialization And It Is A Big Gap To Fill.

There were lots of interesting debates about "new thinking around innovation and future development of enterprises in China.” With almost three decades of sustained economic growth and orchestrated government support for advance technology research resulted in a large talent pool (but still not large enough) and many are well trained by foreign univerisities and companies.

China has made impressive achievement in many areas including network technologies, article physics, structural biology, genomics, human space exploration, supercomputing and high-speed rail which is part of China's centrally designed and state-led innovation model. Moving towards a more innovative economy is one of the main challenges facing China's President Xi Jinping. He understands what is important for China to sustain prosperity and development. China has developed a range of policies to create "indigenous innovation" to reduce dependence on foreign countries for advanced technologies including government procurement, competing technology standards, and requiring technology transfer from multinational corporations in return for access to Chinese market. Is this enough?

At the same time there is more proof that the western style of management is becoming more and more less effective and sometimes even becoming a barrier to innovation reform. To achieve China’s vision and development goal, China must produce and support innovators whose ideas and execution will enable China to create greater and broader economic wealth beyond manufacturing, infrastructure and real estate development. For most companies in China I've talked to, they are a long way from understanding what it takes to make innovation real beyond basic R&D and to compete outside of its demestic market.

China’s innovation cannot just rely on progress in science and technology but in both education and research; the most crucial piece is to be able to own the core technologies and design applications (let me stress - technology alone is not enough, without design), which China is still reliant on foreign companies. The most important strategy is to acquire innovation skills as a core capability so China’s companies will be less dependent on foreign IP and can create ecosystem of technologies that local companies can build upon.

Innovation goes beyond idea generation but also commercialization. It requires a new level of thinking and cross-industries and collaborative-competition that is currently not happening in China. Currently, the model of business education doesn’t deliver on innovation training as they basically modeled after the west.

Most of today's Western style of management and business problem-solving is primarily made up of prescriptive remedies still very much rooted in decades-old conceptual frameworks, developed in the 80’s as a response to pressing events then. They not only have long outlived their usefulness for Fortune 500s, they were not designed to handle today’s unprecedented pace of continuous disruption nor are they irrelevant when applying in emerging economic power such as China which has a very different historical, political and cultural values as well as a unique operating environment and a well deserved national aspirations.

My guess is that 80% of what they teach in business schools MBA’s curriculum today are not applicable for managers in China. Despite managers in China being thirsty for management development training, the net results are less to be desired. In short, we are beyond the point of questioning the effectiveness of western management practices; we need a China approach to management. Or perhaps China should take on the role to reinvent management.

Now 3D Printers Will Become More Affordable. Can You Think Of Something You Want To Print At Home?

There has been a lot of hype on 3D printers at last year CES and now this year I saw tons of competitors offering low-end models as well as high-end professional desktops. XYZprinting Inc. from Taiwan, a new entrant revealed their da Vinci 3D printer with a starting price of just $499, cost as much as a color laser printer a few years back. It is a simple plug-and-play design for small business and personal use. Now I am not sure how often if you need to use one if you’re not a designer. The nice thing is it allows access to a database for free 3D models and 12 different color filaments to choose from. I guess you can print your iPhone case, earings or even chess set. Still hard to think of a reason to own one at home other than novelty.

On the higher end,ChefJet 3D printer and the ChefJet 3D Pro printer costing between $5,00 to $10,000. There is the Solidoodle’s 4th generation printer priced at $999 which I have not tried out. And there is the MakerBot’s Replicator priced at $2,899 but this year they introduced a compact Replicator Mini which will cost $1,375. Another 3D printer maker Cube will be introducing a new model which will be priced under $1,000. We can see these printers selling below $500 in a year as they will get aggressive in pricing to gain market share. The quesion remain what is the reason to own one?

I don’t think the business is in home 3D printers, the real money is in the business market such as the ability to print spare parts, or complete part without assembly and complex inner structures too difficult to be machined. 3D printing makes it possible to manufacture pretty much anything in just 5-10 hours depending what you’re printing, and, as you can surely imagine, this capability would come in very handy in product parts which sometimes take days to locate and ship due to inventory supply issues. A piece of equipment breaks and your repair technician can print it for you.

3D printing has attracted a lot of interest but still at it's infancy, the material science necessary for a lot of these claims about printing tooth or even human organs just isn't there yet. You can't use the same plastic or metal for different parts. It comes down to different tolerances and they are critical. So we’re a few years away. And we will get there.

What Is Happening To Sony? Can Sony Be Saved?

2013 was a good year and a very busy one for me. Having been on the road for over 120 days; delivered some great projects and worked with some of the smartest and most creative people around the world was all fun and also exhausted. Now is the time to think about what the future holds?

I really don’t know what to write these days, I want to write about a lot of things from economics to politics and from luxury brands to consumer electronics and from rethinking management to education, so much to do and so little time. I hardly find time to write for my own magazine these days.

2014 will be a year of big change or beginning of one for many.. We’re seeing most dominant designs of our everyday technologies reaching the end of the S-curve and it will hard to see any breakthrough unless we change the way to look at the industries. Some big innovation is needed to create demand. Not speakers and headphones and other accessories although it helps retailers a bit.

Innovation is hard to come these days and most innovations today are mostly incremental in nature. In the world of consumer technologies, from smartphones to tablets and PCs or digital cameras to TVs, everyone one of them is facing serious challenges whether you’re the market leaders (defenders) or followers (attackers). It is hard to drive new behavior and predict on their adoption rate and the low end is flooed with commodty players. On the other side of the coins, opportunities are plentiful. Microsoft, Sony, HP are all in the process of rethinking their business strategies.

Sony was once the most loved and most innovative company. The company is both strategically vertically and horizontally integrated; once designed and produced the best TVs, video cameras, music players, home audio systems and game console, today they are struggling on all fronts. Sony was my no. 1 brand for a long time. For many, Sony is already dead or what turned into I call a zombie brand. It might seems like an overly pessimistic view given the size of the company and they still have a lot of good products, strong brand (in some markets) and a lot of technological innovation, but then what went wrong?

Sony used to be the synonymous with Japan and innovative products. They even considered buying Apple at one point and decided it not worth acquiring (Can't imagine if they've done that and there would be no Apple today). In 2012, Sony’s net loss of almost US$6 billion mainly came from heavy losses in its TV business. Of all eight divisions, only music and financial services units managed to boost a little profit from a year ago.

When I visited Sony stores the last time a few weeks ago, they were so 1990s even though some of the products are pretty impressive. In fact, I was very impressed with the latest camera line-up and I use a RX100 along my Leica M. I am not sure if good products are enough these days.

Sony have made a lot of mistake including alienated smaller retailers, limit itself to internal innovation capability insteadn of using outside consultants to come up with new ideas and heavily rely on local markets (30% of their sales) and as a result ignore what’s going on out there. Sony CEO Kaz Hirai has proclamed that Sony must chart a new course, his quote: "I believe Sony can change." So far it is not happening.

This Japan's technological prowess, wowed the world with the Walkman and Trinitron TV and PS2 and PSP is now struggling to stay relevant. Is it just Sony or "Japan Inc." that is in trouble?  They missed the while digital music wave, missed the smarphone wave, missed the tablet wave, missed the social face and now probably will miss the next whatever wave. Even Google missed the social wave and left the door opened for Facebook and Twitter, but they do have a few wins such as Android.

And for Sony, my advise for you is to stop behaving like a Japanese company. Adopt new practices and move fast. Speed kills. The world has changed and you need to wake-up. Play catching up is not enough and you’ve been doing a good job producing a decent tablet, a nice phone and a set-top box, a not so smart smart watch and whatever, does it matter?

You don’t have a strategy. You want to win in every product category and that's impossible. You should get rid of at least 50% of your product lines. And at least make 10% of your product spectacular ones - iconic. Rethink if you want to play in the smartphone game, may be you should exit it for now.  Your strategy of “One Sony,” will not work, it is an ideal strategy only on power point or paper. Apple works with “One Apple,” but if you consider the context of Sony's situation, it may not be the best move for now. Sony needs to think different and should not make the mistake of try to replicate Samsung or Apple, those two companies are unique in their own ways. The two will own the market (already did) and eat you dinner, since they already took your breakfast and lunch. 2014 is a critical year for Sony.

What's Next BlackBerry? You Need A Plan. You Can Have A Future. But You Need To Think Radical.

I am a BlackBerry Fan. Or I was. Big one too! It is one of the best innovations for the working professional. I missed the old flywheel BlackBerry that I can throw it across the room and it survives. I was really hoping they could turn the company around and have a real strategy. The problem remains that the management is so disconnected with the real world and the engineering focus overshadowed the needs to create something beyond just a good user experience. The BlackBerry Z10 is a beauty. But that's not enough.

I don’t think the Fairfax deal is a good one. Fairfax, which already owns 10% of BlackBerry, plans to pay $9 per share for the company, about 3% more than its closing price which I think is way undervalue. So what does the company worth? There is no right answer.

Blackberry assets include 1/cash 2/patent portfolio 3/real estate and jet 4/software all add together and then minus any long-term debt and liability. Their hardware business pretty much worths nothing. The math is not hard. 1,2 and 3 are easy to value. Software is not so simple. WhatsApp claims to have 250 million active users, and they are now a paid application. BBM, on the other hand, is free and have more compelling features. BBM can make money from this if they know how to play the game. It is not the BBM customers that they used to know. I think they have good chance to play in the OTT communication game on cross-platform devices.

The radical rethink of BBM can create a survival plan and could easily bring in $350-400mm a year and would contribute about $0.50 in earnings per share (EPS) and be worth roughly $6 per share (using 12x earnings).

Patent is a secret treasure chest. In addition to patenting their won technologies, BlackBerry has also bought tons of patents from the bankrupt Nortel and other stast-ups and spend time developing a whole new operating system. Typically patents last 20 years from the date of their application, making BlackBerry’s 3.6 year average very attractive. BlackBerry’s 9,268 granted patents could worth between $3 to $4 per share depending how intense the bidding and that makes already $10. Now add roughly $1.5 billion plus in cash (after write-down) and the sale of building and the jet. The very minimum the company is worth $13 a share. Lenovo is happy to pay that but Canadian goverment might not like the idea.

China cellphone maker/start-up Xiaomi latest funding round values it at $10 billion. That’s nearly two times BlackBerry’s current value. It is currently the sixth-biggest smartphone producer in China. Clearly, its strategy of selling high-spec smartphones at low-spec smartphone prices is paying off quite well. Blackberry has a lot to learn from other companies. Blackberry were distracted by Apple and being dragged into a no-win game. The company was operating with yesterday’s operating system in terms of strategy and don't understand how fast the world is moving. It was destined to fail. There is still a slim hope. You need to think radical.

For Disclosure. I personally hold BlackBerry shares and Blackberry bought research services from Idea Couture at one time.

The Future of Wearables? Everyone Will Get It Wrong. And The Winner Won't Be Google, Apple, Sony Or Microsoft.

Wearable is hot. It is supper hot. The billion-dollar question remains, “How do we create the iPhone of wearables?” and “How do we create sub-ecosystems around these wearables?” and "What new business model opportunities will emerge?" The buzz is here but the money is not here yet. Everyone is betting on it and no one can afford to miss the train. Most wearable out there are just toys for the geeks. I can't find a reason anyone wants to buy this Sony Watch. Wll now everyone can see my Facebook messages. What is dumb idea! OK I can use it to tell time and the weather.  Apple’s iWatch or whatever it will be called and Google Glass are getting so much attention and everything is figuring out what are the high value potential applications. Google has openly promoted its potential as an always-on, always with you computing device but it has yet to find a killer application beyond the obvious. They are hoping someone out there can figure that out for them.

And China is watching and Baidu is rumored to be working on a "Baidu Eye," an internal code name for a wearable device that features speech recognition for Mandarin, as well as image search technology, which pulls up relevant information based on a photo. So if you see a product, it will search for product info and price and availability. That take 'showrooming' to a new level.

 
The path to mass adoption for wearables will not be a straight-forward one and there are technology, user behavior and production economics barriers to cross.  Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony and LG are all committed to play this game. Apple recently acquired a small company Passif Semiconductor founded by two Ph.D. students from the University of Berkeley, worked on developing chips with radios that consume very little power and work with the Bluetooth Smart (a.k.a 4.0 and low energy) standard. The acquisition will provide Apple with addition al expertise and expect an acquisition boom as players gearing up for the big game.

With all these buzz and emerging innovative conceptual designs competing for the dominant design there are still many questions to be asked about what the future holds and how consumers will adopt different product paradigm. Even the smartphone itself is still shaping our behavior today and we are still actively reprogramming ourselves. Smartphone is becoming the operation system of our professional and personal life and our relationships with the outside world and emerging systems around it.  And when it comes to Operating System, the main battle will be an OS that will interoperate across all devices. This is the big play.

Expect to see all sorts of novelty design coming into the market. There are lots of novelties out there including a wearable electronic synthesizers to be embedded into T-shirts turning them into human musical instruments. There are also people using neurophysiological signals and brain waves to play video games. These will never be mainstream wearables.

The success of any dominant design for wearables will be based on successfully tackling of the 3Bs: Balance, Benefit and Beauty.

Balance: The design of the wearables needs to fulfil the requirements of fitting comfortly with our bodies and many human factors considerations. The design needs to include studying the anthropometric measures of the human body and of the equilibriums between the various zones of the body. The connection between the physical form of wearables and their active relationship with the human form will be key to the concept success. These nerdy high-tech design will not cut it. Other considerations include comfort, the design to adapt to different body type (male vs female, tall vs short) and study of non-obtrusive shapes and the optimal conditions to let the sensors work well.

Benefit: The designers must first determine the real problem the wearable concept is trying to solve and needing to solve and able to solve. The benefit doesn’t have to be a known benefit today and could be some needs user don’t even know they exist until they see it. The design can open up new possibilities for people and  must fit within the context of the user’s lifestyle and experience and the infrastructure around us.

Beauty:  Consumer needs to love the design. It needs to have the visual appeal that the user won’t look like something you see in a Sci-Fi movie. It needs to be expressive and it doesn’t 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 most tricky one. Are we thinking touch screens, gestures or eye tracking?

More next week. I won't tell you what works. I can tell you what definitely won't work. And like everyone else, I could be also be wrong.

Many Made The Mistake Of Taking the Brand Out Of The Innovation Equation On The Fuzzy Front-End. Are You One Of Them?

Companies make many mistakes in their innovation journeys and often they go down the same path again and again and wonder why that is the case. The four main reasons among many are:

1/ They think it is all about creativity and coming up with more ideas.

Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming with good ideas is not difficult. Coming up with more ideas is not helpful. It is the quality of ideas and once ideas are being exhausted, it is time to perform the more difficult job of sensemaking and mapping. This is where most people fail and have no ideas of what and how to do next. They lack a framework of synthesizing these concepts into bigger themes and look at them in a differently way to see how each of ideas-system means to the customers, business and industry.

2/ They think innovation should be separated from the brand. Often people start thinking of new ideas without thinking without understanding the scope and scale requirements and that should be governed by the brand.

These ideas need to link to the current brand or masterbrand in whatever ways and has the potential to scale within a reasonable period of time. No established companies, unless for a very good reason, should start a new brand because of economic reasons and also the brand can be the powerful source to inspire innovation, in addition to the users or customers. Otherwise people can waste a lot of time and realize even they have a good idea, the marketing investment will cost too much making the project not worth pursuing. On the opposite, they also should not confused brand extension or other incremental innovation as strategic innovation.

3/ They think their current capabilities (including that of their agencies) are adequate and can do the job. The learning curve for them is too steep.

In many cases, companies have existing working relationships with their advertising agencies and marketing research firms and naturally would want to work with them on innovation projects. This is a bad decision as for the advertising agencies, they are too deeply embedded with the existing idea of what the brand is and should do rather than a fresh way of looking at it. And most marketing communications people and not equipped to manage the innovation process. Some innovation firm is basically ex-advertising agencies people repackaged themselves as innovation consultants (there are some occastions people successfully migrate). Most marketing research firms are not equipped with the right tools to do research that support innovation, and end up applying the usual quantitative and qualitative research methodologies which were designed for market testing and tracking.

To unlock the full power of applied creativity to drive innovation and economic value, let’s not approach innovation with overly simplified approach to getting the magic and bringing in the money. There is no magic in the innovation process, no one should hide behind this magic black box and the client expect them to show up one day with some magical ideas and then write them a check. Innovation is about applying design thinking and having all the right type of people and capabilities in place.

4/ They are confused between strategic visions, brand and innovation and what comes first?

Executives spend a lot of time on strategic vision – answering questions such as who we are, what we do and what do we want to be when we grow up etc. Then they trying to figure what the brand really stands for. At the same time they also spend time on creating new products and service ideas? What usually happens next is now they struggle bringing the two together to use?

When people hear about vision, they think of it as something that guides the company into the future, and to succeed in the future requires innovation. And innovation is about building a powerful brand and create new market space for the future. While the value of having some kind of strategic vision is obvious, it should never be mistaken as strategy. Strategy is not only about vision, it is about strategic innovation. And brand should guide innovation. It is so easy to get confused.

Moving forward companies need to do two things differently.

1/ Reorient their brand people with the idea that brand needs to get beyond communications. My new book 60-Minute Brand Strategist shows readers step-by-step guide to build a brand from the core and its meanings to customer experience design. Brand Managers should not be stuck in the old world with old-school approach and brand-building model developed in the 80s and take on the roles as Brand Innovators. Every brand manager’s jobs should have two roles: managing brand business performance and managing brand innovation.

2/ Rethink what kind of people and skills that is needed to implement innovation. Implementation innovation is 10X harder is coming up with the ideas and it requires more than a product development person. They need to understand the different roles that they have already – and will need – on the team and each role’s importance in the ideation and activation stages. Idea Couture research on innovation practices shows that many business leaders still believe that innovation is a rare gift that exists mainly in creative people who are in leadership roles or gifted creatively. For example, just think of how often you hear people saying, “That’s why I get paid the big bucks because I am the big idea guy.” Such thinking is not healthy as it usually means that organizations are overlooking other, much better sources of potential innovation. An idea, even a big idea, is not the same as an innovation. Only when an idea is turned in to a product, a service or a business that creates new value can it be considered an innovation. Whether the innovative idea is radical, substitutive, incremental, or complementary, it still needs to fit into the stages of a value chain within an industry.

On another note, my book 60-min Brand Strategist is offically launched this month. It is available in Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book stores. These are some pages taken from the book. It only takes you 60 minutes to read through it. I know you're busy. Share with me your thoughts.

Will The Facebook Phone works? And For Microsoft and Samsung, The Future Of Smartphones Is Dual-Screen.

The Facebook phone is here.The Facebook phone rumor has been around for a while and it is a matter of time it becomes real. I think they should have done it earlier and should have larger ambition other than just trying to design a ‘home’ for Android.  Home sounds like a PaaS personalization tool and not sure how many FB users will want this. FB see the potential for them but it is hardly a threat for others but Android might modify their terms so this won’t happen again in the future.

With FB already commands more than 20% share of people's time on mobile devices (excluding Instagram), it can further boost FB mobile usage particular for younger users. Will FB take over 20% of all Android phones, we have yet to find out. For now, FB is pretty convinced that people will want a phone designed around it and perhaps with additional hardware feature that is uniquely FB. 

FB should really be making its own phone, it is reported that they are working with mobile chipmaker Spreadtrum to pre-optimize its software for the cheapest Android handsets. It is hard to compete on the high end with Samsung and Apple, if Facebook prodcued its own low end phone, though, it could create a new business model in the mobile market and FB could negotiate better data plans for their members or partially subsidize them with advertising. This is not easy for Facebook to jump in and get carriers to agree to sell its phone.  For me, I see no reason to have a FB phone.

For Microsoft, they are waiting to see how well Nokia's Lumia phones Windows Phone 8x and 8s sell before making a strategic decision to enter the smartphone market on its own. I think it makes perfect sense for them to decide to play in the hardware space. They have made that decision with  Surface tablets. It is a matter of time that they will play in this smartphone market, they risk becoming irrelevant as market is switching into different computing format.

Microsoft is thinking dual-screen and has applied to patent a dual-screen phone interface. One screen for device interface and the other as a monitor and is detachable. NEC is making one and is marketing them as the "best cloud device," the dual-screen Android from NEC handset also has a super powered battery to keep both displays running.

It will be interesting to see what can we do with two screens. We're already designing dualscreen user experience models and I think this is catch on. The mobile industry is changing faster than anyone could have imagined and the interface paradigms there have been static. Here is the opportunity for us to introduce new ways of interacting with others and new ways these machines can understand what we need.

 

This Is Just The Begining Of The Mobile OS Battle. Plenty Of New Players Will Join The Game.

The mobile OS war is getting more interesting and the current market share battle is between iOS and Android will go on for a while. Will there be a breakout of it will be more like a Pepsi vs. Coca Cola market share battle that has been lasting for decades? Android is getting better momentum the last two years and I expect that to continue. I think the overall market share is stabilizing and the other two Windows and Blackberry will remain niche players. Newcomers will join the game and there are three in the US and they are Mozilla, Tizen and Canonical. There are a few emerging ones in Asia and they all worth keeping a close watch, especially those up and coming companies in China.

In China Android accounts for 86% of all new smartphones sales and there are three times as many Android users than the US. The business model is basically freemium, developers hoping to make money from in-app purchase. The Android ecosystem is growing like crazy as people find iPhone is getting a little boring and may be too restricted.  

There will be surprises that in the next 12 months perhaps cool smart phones from China that came from nowhere selling for half the price and have even better performance.  There was a private lab test done on the top 10 most popular smartphone in China a few months back and the result was 5 of the 10 most popular Android devices from local Chinese manufacturers perform better than the imports. They include the Lenovo A750 and the XIAOMI MI 1S.  

Apple is watching the market closely and also struggling whether to add a stylus for the next iPhone,  it will be a tough one as they have always been strongly against it and the Samsung Galazy stylus is nicely designed. There are no definite right or wrong in this business and the behavior changes so quickly.

Expect some big design shift for the next iteration of Android that leverages more of the Hybrid Card layout.  Android needs to jump into the next game in terms of user experience and it demands a shift in overall visual language from current Jelly Bean paradigms to something really different. The jump from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich was a big jump. I believe Android will be looking at gestures control beyond the screen, perhaps the back and even the side. Apple already has a patent filed 2006 relating to using gestures on its back and a recent Google patent might bring that concept to next generation of Android phones. The principle is as easy as touching the back casing of the Android device in order to interact with the gadget and that can drastically improve the user experience. Imagine back tapping to change page or call list etc. It will be powerful when combined with acoustic feedback. The battle of mobile interfaces design has barely begun. And Facebook is joining the party.

Can Gadgets Save Healthcare? What's The Next Big Disruptive Technology That Can Reinvent Healthcare? But The Fact Remains That Our Health Care System Sucks, And Will Continue To Suck.

I like the lastest Bond movie and the only thing I missed is smart gadgets. Bond needs to have latest tech toys. I don’t want to see Bond becoming Jet Li. Half the fun of watching a Bond movie is reveling in the odd ingenuity of the clever devices. Bond needs all the tech innovation he could use. Her Majesty's government is not investing enough in innovation for sure. Mi5 has a lot of catch up to do. Perhaps they should retain Idea Couture to develop an innovation roadmap? I might get a call from Sir Jonathan Evan!

In Bond's world, the smart phones have access to intelligent databases; miniaturized radio homing beacons operate on their own encrypted frequencies, the cars come equipped with bullet proof glass—semi-autonomous or remotely controlled—and become invisible to the naked eye. Implantable, traceable RFID chips confirm your identity and carry your medical history. And a smart scan to show when enemies are nearby too. And no, Bond does not need speed dating gadgets at all.

Bond gadgets may have once seemed far-fetched, but in our tech-addled age most are at least possible, if not realized already. In 2009 Harvard Chemists collaborated to successfully develop a low cost micro-fluidic "lab-on-a-chip" (actually it was on paper) solution to identify various biomarkers related to the AIDS virus. This idea of a miniaturized bio-chemical lab is a solution currently being funded and developed by DARPA to get ahead of the bio-weapons curve.

In Casino Royal, a similar device helped save Bond's life after he was poisoned. After plugging into a cell phone, the data from his blood sample was transmitted in real-time back to HQ for analysis. A dedicated team of medical professionals including molecular biologists; immunologists, neurologists and virologists provided advice on how to mitigate the sticky situation of being infected with a designer biological agent from half a world away. The biggest idea here is this can become the premium health service for those who can afford it, specialists are all standing by and all one click away to saving your life. That’s an innovation.

Today, self-diagnostic technologies in tandem with the hundreds of personal health and wellbeing apps have emerged to take advantage of our over-connectivity. We are all a click away from massive global expert networks for information and advice related to described symptoms. Our helathcare economics is not working doesn't matter becasue the cost is too high and doesn't matter who is paying for it. The biggest opportunity for smartphone is not smartphone, it is Personal Health Device. That’s a $20 billion plus industry from the start. We need geniuses and mad scientists and designers to make his real and affordable.

“All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards thier goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singlenee of purpose could have given focus to thier genius, would have kept them in the groove of purpose. Mania ... is as priceless as genius.”

                                            ― Ian Fleming, Doctor No

This is anexcerpt from an article co-written with M. Lincez to be appeared in the March issue of MISC magazine the Gadget Issue.

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.

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.

 

Apple Vs Samsung - The Verdict Is A Wake-Up Call And Shaping The Very Nature Of What Competitive Strategy Means.

Here I am the first day in our new office - the building is officially named Idea Couture Place and I took the opporunity to talk about who we are and what are really good at to our people. There are still a lot of people that don't quite understand what a strategic innovation firm does and why it is not just another industrial design, strategy firm or creative house.

Now the move is over but it will take abother 2 months before we are really settled as many furnitures and equipment are still shipping from Italty, Belgium and China. I can't wait to see the fully finished office. For now, everyone is really happy. The roof top patio will look like a boutique hotel.

What exactly does Apple’s victory means for many other companies? The overwhelming patent infringement victory over Samsung is shaping the strategies of many and everyone is getting a wake-up call and now they need to revisit how they approach strategic innovation.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook told his employees about how Apple values originality and innovation and pour their lives into making the best products on earth. They do this to delight their customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

The result of this court case actually shapes the playing field of competition and the very nature of competitive strategy. Samsung, Motorola (Google), HTC, RIM, HP, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Xerox, Sony, Amazon and IBM . All have quivers full of patents and armies of retained patent lawyers ready to go to court to protect their interests and raise the barriers of entry for new players.

If you look at any new or old product categories, product and user experiences will become more andmore similar over time. Look around you and you realize a lot of cars looks the same and drive the same way. And over time, most phones, laptops or tablets will have similar designs and behaviors, just like TVs, cameras and typewriters. Switches and buttons whether they have rounded or rectangular corners or whatever shaped icons and the overall look and feel aren't likely the key points of differentiation. It has always been part of the commoditization process and companies will continue try to innovate with new ideas.

Every great innovation attracts copycats and it is hard to say whether we are promoting innovation by offering protection or deterring innovation by raising the barriers. There is no easy answer to this one. What’s next? If you’re a small start-up you will have a hard time to make it big as once you gain some attention and market success, you will then discover that you may be infringing on patents even though you think you’re not.

Can anyone realistically come up with an idea that can past the patent test of Apple/Google(Motorola)/Cisco/Xeorx/RIM/Sony/Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures (the world's biggest patent troll) when everone is waiting to collect royalties for what you were pretty sure was an original idea or invention.

I can’t wait for a day when Apple is suing Google and Google is suing Nokia and HP is suing Apple and Samsung is suing HP and everyone is suing everyone – one hell of a party. In the end, it's more likely that these crazy entanglements will result in more cross-licensing agreements than to massive payouts – one big happy family and everyone is getting a check.

As for now, my phone hasn’t stop ringing as every company needs to “out-innovate” and wants Idea Couture to bring Design Thinking to them. Now no one is safe. Welcome to the crazy world.