Meet Innovation's New Partner: A Strong Brand

I've often wondered why I put posts on this blog about brands despite the fact that there are dozens of brand blogs out there. What's more, I don't even care that much about Starbucks, Apple and other celebrity brands. I'm far more interested in looking at brands like Horlicks, a bedtime drink that helps you sleep or Taiwan's Foxconn, Apple's Taiwan-based design and manufacturing partner in China. One, a consumer brand, and the other, an under-the-radar business-to-business brand, are much more interesting to follow if brands are your thing. 

So why the posts on brands on a blog on innovation? One of the problems with innovation is that its outcomes often make the world more complex for us. A counterweight to this state of affairs is one of the many, yet overlooked, functions of a brand: its ability to simplify. A brand acts as a mental shortcut -- the path of least resistance in an increasingly bewildering world. So when we spend our day feeling obliged to innovate at work, we can grab our favorite branded product on the way home without having to burn up any more mental energy than is absolutely necessary. We have at once complexity and a caveman-derived desire for simplicity.

Firms have three extremely difficult things to get right if they are to succeed in this environment:

1. Staff who have the heart to innovate.

2. Strong brands . . .

3. whose country of origins are attractive, or wield the iron-cored feather duster of soft power.

The battle of innovation, brands and the moral high ground is about to begin.

National innovation systems

"To say that Edison discovered electricity . . . satisfies our predilection for stories that are easy to comprehend and involve superhuman heroes." -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)

There's a bit of debate over at Hugh MacLeod's fantastic blog GapingVoid on the topic of creation and collaboration. It seems that some people are still drawn to the myth of the lone inventor -- the genius. Others recognize that it takes a bunch of people to create anything worthwhile. 
 

When discussing the role of collaboration, I think it's important to make a distinction between the head end of the innovation process (the initiation stages) and the market end (the implementation stages). It's reasonable to expect that there is relatively little collaboration at the head end, however, this does not mean that nobody else has contributed or is involved. Ideas don't just arise from you: they are a product of your education, your family, your experiences, your culture, your diet, the music you listen to, the physical environment in which you live, your religion -- the list is endless. That great idea you had is a product of historical inputs (e.g. a teacher you had when you were eleven or a favorite television show) and horizontal inputs -- the environment in which you live now, including institutions.

What we're talking about here are innovation systems. A national innovation system requires far more than "3 percent of national GDP invested into R&D" and pampered individuals studying at "top schools" (it's the education level of the people at the bottom of the pyramid that signals the strength of a nation). A successful national innovation system also requires an environment that produces a few more Mick "Where's Keith?" Jaggers of the world and individuals willing to break loose from the relative safety of business, law and medical schools. Guys and girls that clean windows during their summer breaks with a quiet confidence that they will not be doing said chore ten years from now: "I'm cleaning this dude's windows because I know in ten years I will be buying the damn place from the guy and building a public library." The next Andrew Carnegie.

When no means don't know

"The business chameleon may change its colours but at the end of the day its fundamental form and instincts remain the same."
- Tim Wright, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
The above quote is worth remembering whenever you approach somebody in your firm or a market with your groundbreaking idea. The more radical the idea, the more difficult it will be to get approval: your colleagues will hate it (more work); your supervisor will hate it ("Holy crap Batman, this is going to affect my bonus.") and the market will hate it ("Is it safe? What? Betty next door doesn't have one, I don't need it."). You could call these the 3Ms of Resistance: your Mates, your Manager and the Market. The letter below, written in 1829, is also worth keeping close at hand:

Dear President Jackson,

The canal system in this country is being threatened by a new form of transportation known as "railroads" . . . If the canal boats are supplanted by railroads, boat builders would suffer, and towline, whip, and harness makers would be left destitute . . . God never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.

Sincerely,
Martin Van Buren

Governor, State of New York, 1829


Martin tells the peeps about the future potential of railroads. 

PS. I've decided that this blog is not too cool for Google ads but I am getting bored shitless with them. Somebody please come up with something a bit more interesting, please. Even if you just replace the text ads with some cute 120x60 buttons or videos. Or how about ad blocks as CIRCLES ("portholes")? Something, anything.

PPS. Google is a bit of a strange phenomenon: it's a "cool," and much-sought-after place to work, yet many "quality" Web sites and blogs see it as being a bit too common. Go figure.

Hands up if you've invested in China

The chart below shows the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index Fund (Ticker: FXI) over the past year. As you can see, investing in China-based companies is a great way of learning the real meaning of the word "evaporate." I'm no expert on investing but I can tell you that many of the professional analysts that I met in Taiwan preferred to invest their own money in non-China funds. Trust is the key word here. These analysts and financial advisors are still quite happy to recommend investing in China, though, just as long as it's not with their own money.


Still on a China note. The following interview on Smallbizpod is worth a listen. In the interview, David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com, discusses his experiences working with the company in China. One interesting part was his comments about how the company forces new projects to succeed by restricting the cash the team has access to: "Money makes people stupid." At the same time, the team is placed in the original two-bedroom apartment in which the founders of the company started the business: "This is how you start a great business." How's that for a great reminder of what innovation and the company culture is all about?



RELATED POSTS: Doing business in China