Monday, March 31

Everyday innovation

I went to a talk on Saturday by Nathan Levy, author of Stories with Holes. It was an interesting and entertaining talk by a man who was obviously very passionate about his subject: education and creativity. Many books on presenting advise you to avoid jokes like the plague, but I thought Nathan's was pretty funny considering the context of the talk.

Nathan Levy: "What's red and invisible?"

Silence.

Nathan Levy: "No apples."


Here's an interesting innovation that solves a specific problem: last-minute present wrapping. Nothing sexy here, just a new combination of existing resources, which creates something new. Beautiful. (Photo courtesy of Adsareboring.com)



What type of innovation is it?

Wednesday, March 26

Brands, branding and a yearning for the country life


I tried this experiment a few months back: I showed a group of businesspeople various Chinese paintings and asked them to guess what the paintings were worth. Staring at a canvas with paint on it, most people had absolutely no idea. They couldn't tell paintings that were worth a million from one that was worth fifty bucks. The true value of a painting, or any other piece of art, only starts to surface when we get a story about the painting and the painter:

" . . . this piece was recovered from the vaults of . . . the artist lived a life of solitude in a cave on the Isle of . . . this Dutch masterpiece was held hidden in a garden shed for fifty years . . . born into a peasant family, hobbled by polio, the child picked up a twig and started painting at the age of three," etc. etc.

As with innovations, these stories are often exaggerated: they are turned into myths. They are not lies per se, but the grain of truth that allows the story to be regarded as "authentic" is often stretched to breaking point.

It's the same with a brands. It's the story surrounding the brand that provides its real value, not the logo, the name or the tag line (the canvas and paint). This story gets reinforced by a market (a very human construct) and the firm that owns the brand at any particular point in time. Brands help satisfy the universal desire to transcend the purely physical, rational world.

Despite the fact that Jaguar and Land Rover, two British car marques, will soon be owned by Tata, an Indian organization, people should still enjoy living the dreams that these two brands provide. You can talk about the fact that these cars might be mass produced in a production line in India 'till you're blue in the face, but the owners of these cars will still be dreaming that they are living the rural life on some British country estate.

Related Brand Posts:
BenQ Pretends It's German,Taiwanese Brands,Brands and Country of Origin

Monday, March 10

Innovation myths revisited

Brands and innovations are similar in the sense that the underlying processes involved in producing both are often invisible. This idea is captured nicely in a quote from The Innovators' Solution (2003):


"Though the outcomes of successful innovations appear random, the processes that result in their success often are not."


The process is there. We just don't see beyond the brilliance of the outcome.

We look at the wonderful things that firms and nations produce and we ask ourselves, "How did they do that? It must be magic!" It's too easy to forget that the famous brands and innovations of today started with very humble beginnings and a lot of roll-up-your-sleeves toil. Nothing glamorous about the process at all: "Selling shoes out of the back of my car," in the case of one multi-millionaire businessman. We idolize the outcomes of these efforts (if they are successful) yet shun the very process that brought them into existence in the first place. This is one of the main themes behind Scott Berkun's book, The Myths of Innovation. There's a presentation by BrandAutopsy on Slideshare that offers some of the "Money Quotes" from the book:



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Monday, March 3

Radical Innovations

Is the mobile phone an incremental or radical innovation?

One way to approach this question is to use the definition of radical innovation provided by Paul Herbig in his book, The Innovation Matrix: Culture and Structure Prerequisites to Innovation:

"Radical innovation requires the establishment of new behavioral patterns resulting from the introduction of totally new products. Radical technologies tend to create whole new industries and diffuse throughout the industrial base while lower order innovations tend to be found in specific segments. Examples of radical innovations include computers, photocopiers, lasers, atomic energy and radar. It is a fundamental change in technology with clear departures from existing practices -- an unusually high risk proposition for both developing firm and the user."

Herbig identifies Higher Order Innovation Activities:
  • Invention
  • Radical Innovation
and Lower Order Innovation Activities:
  • Continuous Innovation (incremental/evolutionary)
  • Modified Innovation (dynamically continuous/semi radical)
  • Process Innovation

It's also useful to think about Scott Berkun's assertion that innovations are relative: 24-hour electricity is taken for granted in many countries but, when available, will be viewed as a radical innovation in those without electricity.


So, returning to the mobile phone question, I'd say that in countries that do not have an existing telephone infrastructure (as in parts of Africa), the mobile phone is indeed a radical innovation. But, in countries, or cities, that do have an established infrastructure, the mobile phone is more of an incremental innovation -- or, using Paul Herbig's typology above, a modified innovation (basically, a semi-radical innovation). What do you think?