In the same Hulu article in the Nov 2009 issue of Fast Company:
At Amazon, he learned the importance of studying customer feedback. Twitter takes monitoring to another level. "It's a transparency engine," Kilar says. "I've always said that our brand is what people say about us when we're not in the room, and this is the best tool for hearing what people are saying."
"Customers won't tell you what they want," Kilar says, citing a Bezosism. "But their behavior will tell you if you capture and analyze it."
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Cannablize
Another quote about cannabalizing your own business from Nov 2009 article in Fast Company magazine on the Hulu startup.
"If we didn't do this," says NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, "we knew someone else would."
"If we didn't do this," says NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, "we knew someone else would."
Friday, November 20, 2009
Kurt Vonnegut quote
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
US novelist (1922 - 2007)
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
US novelist (1922 - 2007)
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
About branding
Interesting quote from Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz:
... we had a lack of self-awareness. We undervalued our own brand. We were making utility products: It rains; it snows; this will keep you warm and dry. The consumer says, "I appreciate those benefits, but I'm going to wear this in the summertime unlaced without socks." The consumer says, "You understood the literal benefits of waterproofing and insulation; I understood the psychic benefits of confidence and a sense of self-assurance." And we said, "Check. Wow, got it." We are not a boot company, we are a brand, and our brand is not about protection against the elements; our brand is about confidently striding through life's challenges.
From the Sept 2008 issue of Fast Company.
... we had a lack of self-awareness. We undervalued our own brand. We were making utility products: It rains; it snows; this will keep you warm and dry. The consumer says, "I appreciate those benefits, but I'm going to wear this in the summertime unlaced without socks." The consumer says, "You understood the literal benefits of waterproofing and insulation; I understood the psychic benefits of confidence and a sense of self-assurance." And we said, "Check. Wow, got it." We are not a boot company, we are a brand, and our brand is not about protection against the elements; our brand is about confidently striding through life's challenges.
From the Sept 2008 issue of Fast Company.
Get Back in the Box: How constraints can free your team’s thinking
I was trying to tidy up my desk tonight and came across this old Fast Company article from Dec 2007/Jan 2008.
Quote: Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it's focused.
Quote: Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it's focused.
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Good Enough Revolution
Interesting article in Sept WIRED magazine: The Good Enough Revolution
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough
Some key quotes:
.... what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."
... New York University new-media studies professor Clay Shirky had a mantra to offer the assembled producers and editors: "Don't believe the myth of quality."
... To reinforce his point, he pointed to the MP3. The music industry initially laughed off the format, he explained, because compared with the CD it sounded terrible. What record labels and retailers failed to recognize was that although MP3 provided relatively low audio quality, it had a number of offsetting positive qualities
... To a degree, the MP3 follows the classic pattern of a disruptive technology, as outlined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive technologies, Christensen explains, often enter at the bottom of the market, where they are ignored by established players. These technologies then grow in power and sophistication to the point where they eclipse the old systems. That is certainly part of what happens with Good Enough tech: MP3s entered at the bottom of the market, were ignored, and then turned the music business upside down.
... a clear pattern emerges. The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time—or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price? Products that benefit from the MP3 effect capitalize on one or more of these qualities. And they'll happily sacrifice power and features to do so.
+++++++++
Apply these concepts to higher ed. Higher ed has resisted (or very slowly adopted) ease of use, continuous availability, and low prices. Higher ed has instead emphasized exclusiveness and quality. What happens when the marketplace finds "good enough" education elsewhere that's easier to use, continuously available, and at a much lower cost? And finds "quality" to be over-rated?
Higher ed is ripe to be picked off by disruptive alternatives entering the bottom of the market. It seems this article makes a very hard-to-counter argument.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough
Some key quotes:
.... what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."
... New York University new-media studies professor Clay Shirky had a mantra to offer the assembled producers and editors: "Don't believe the myth of quality."
... To reinforce his point, he pointed to the MP3. The music industry initially laughed off the format, he explained, because compared with the CD it sounded terrible. What record labels and retailers failed to recognize was that although MP3 provided relatively low audio quality, it had a number of offsetting positive qualities
... To a degree, the MP3 follows the classic pattern of a disruptive technology, as outlined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive technologies, Christensen explains, often enter at the bottom of the market, where they are ignored by established players. These technologies then grow in power and sophistication to the point where they eclipse the old systems. That is certainly part of what happens with Good Enough tech: MP3s entered at the bottom of the market, were ignored, and then turned the music business upside down.
... a clear pattern emerges. The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time—or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price? Products that benefit from the MP3 effect capitalize on one or more of these qualities. And they'll happily sacrifice power and features to do so.
+++++++++
Apply these concepts to higher ed. Higher ed has resisted (or very slowly adopted) ease of use, continuous availability, and low prices. Higher ed has instead emphasized exclusiveness and quality. What happens when the marketplace finds "good enough" education elsewhere that's easier to use, continuously available, and at a much lower cost? And finds "quality" to be over-rated?
Higher ed is ripe to be picked off by disruptive alternatives entering the bottom of the market. It seems this article makes a very hard-to-counter argument.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Understand the business, understand the user, understand the medium.
Understand the business, understand the user, understand the medium.
That's the sucinct vision statement Mark Greenfield has proposed for his web team at the University of Buffalo.
Pretty much sums it up, right?
That's the sucinct vision statement Mark Greenfield has proposed for his web team at the University of Buffalo.
Pretty much sums it up, right?
RIO: Return on Ignoring
Usually RIO stands for Return on Investment. I recently heard RIO in the context of university's getting involved in social networking.
Yes, there are lots of new social networking platforms, websites, and services. And, yes, it can sometimes be demanding to keep up with them all.
But, there's the risk that we take when we ignore getting involved or paying attention (or trying something new). The risk that others will get there before us; the risk that we won't be where our audience is at.
Yes, there are lots of new social networking platforms, websites, and services. And, yes, it can sometimes be demanding to keep up with them all.
But, there's the risk that we take when we ignore getting involved or paying attention (or trying something new). The risk that others will get there before us; the risk that we won't be where our audience is at.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Beyond Detroit
Great article in the June 2009 issue of Wired on the auto industry.
Some quotes:
By seeking to match the likes of Toyota, Detroit has been trying to come from behind in a game where its adversaries set the rules. To Klepper, the Carnegie Mellon economist, the Big Three today resemble the American television-receiver industry in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by US corporations that, after decades of domination, were suddenly confronted by foreign innovation. Companies like RCA and Zenith were slow to incorporate new technologies until it was too late; all exited or sold out to foreign firms. "Every time American companies catch up to the competition," Klepper says, "the competition already has moved on and instituted new things. In that situation, it's extremely difficult to get ahead."
The only escape from this conundrum is to pursue what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has called disruptive innovation—the kind of change that alters the trajectory of an industry. As Christensen argued in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma, successful companies in mature industries rarely embrace disruptive innovation because, by definition, it threatens their business models. Loath to revamp factories at high cost to make products that will compete with their own goods, companies drag their feet; perversely, financial markets often reward them for their shortsightedness. Good as they are, the European and Japanese automakers are established companies. At this point, they are as unlikely to pursue disruptive innovation as Detroit has been. That gives the US auto industry an opening. To take that opportunity, it will have to behave differently—it will have to step far outside the walls of the Rouge.
. . . . .
In its insularity, the auto industry is increasingly an outlier. A growing number of firms have adopted what UC Berkeley's Chesbrough dubbed "open innovation"—accelerating change by letting ideas flow much more freely in and out of companies. Rather than depending primarily on their own engineers, he says, auto companies should leverage the insights of others, outsourcing much or most R&D to an ecosystem of small, agile entities outside the factory walls. Unsurprisingly, open innovation is seen most clearly in firms like IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, but Chesbrough argues that it has been picked up with success by companies in fields ranging from chemicals and packaged goods to lubricants and home-improvement gadgets. "The auto industry is different," he says. "It hasn't learned that no one company or industry has a monopoly on useful ideas."
. . . . .
How does a traditionally top-down manufacturer become an open-ended promoter of innovation? Clues can be found in "Managing in an Age of Modularity," a classic 1997 Harvard Business Review paper by economists Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark. They studied how personal-computer manufacturers divided their products into subsystems, establishing standards that allow parts to be readily swapped out and replaced. By giving outside innovators the freedom to tinker with individual modules—hardware, operating systems, software, peripherals—PC makers spurred the development of far more sophisticated devices and allowed customers to individualize and customize their purchases. In other words, modularity encouraged multiple innovations from multiple sources and made them easy to incorporate.
. . . . .
By outsourcing most R&D, car companies would be able to reap the rewards of innovation for a fraction of the cost and risk. The growing sophistication of design and simulation software makes it easier for startups to create prototypes and test new products virtually, before undergoing those expensive processes in the real world. Not every idea will succeed, but the costs of failure will be reduced and borne by smaller firms that can collapse with less impact on the larger economy. Ultimately, modular construction will lead to cars that can be custom-built to the specifications of their future owners, somewhat as Dell allows purchasers to click on hyperlinks to add or subtract computer features. Custom-rebuilt, too—it will be easy to install upgraded modules, in much the way that computer owners replace old video cards.
Some quotes:
By seeking to match the likes of Toyota, Detroit has been trying to come from behind in a game where its adversaries set the rules. To Klepper, the Carnegie Mellon economist, the Big Three today resemble the American television-receiver industry in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by US corporations that, after decades of domination, were suddenly confronted by foreign innovation. Companies like RCA and Zenith were slow to incorporate new technologies until it was too late; all exited or sold out to foreign firms. "Every time American companies catch up to the competition," Klepper says, "the competition already has moved on and instituted new things. In that situation, it's extremely difficult to get ahead."
The only escape from this conundrum is to pursue what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has called disruptive innovation—the kind of change that alters the trajectory of an industry. As Christensen argued in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma, successful companies in mature industries rarely embrace disruptive innovation because, by definition, it threatens their business models. Loath to revamp factories at high cost to make products that will compete with their own goods, companies drag their feet; perversely, financial markets often reward them for their shortsightedness. Good as they are, the European and Japanese automakers are established companies. At this point, they are as unlikely to pursue disruptive innovation as Detroit has been. That gives the US auto industry an opening. To take that opportunity, it will have to behave differently—it will have to step far outside the walls of the Rouge.
. . . . .
In its insularity, the auto industry is increasingly an outlier. A growing number of firms have adopted what UC Berkeley's Chesbrough dubbed "open innovation"—accelerating change by letting ideas flow much more freely in and out of companies. Rather than depending primarily on their own engineers, he says, auto companies should leverage the insights of others, outsourcing much or most R&D to an ecosystem of small, agile entities outside the factory walls. Unsurprisingly, open innovation is seen most clearly in firms like IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, but Chesbrough argues that it has been picked up with success by companies in fields ranging from chemicals and packaged goods to lubricants and home-improvement gadgets. "The auto industry is different," he says. "It hasn't learned that no one company or industry has a monopoly on useful ideas."
. . . . .
How does a traditionally top-down manufacturer become an open-ended promoter of innovation? Clues can be found in "Managing in an Age of Modularity," a classic 1997 Harvard Business Review paper by economists Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark. They studied how personal-computer manufacturers divided their products into subsystems, establishing standards that allow parts to be readily swapped out and replaced. By giving outside innovators the freedom to tinker with individual modules—hardware, operating systems, software, peripherals—PC makers spurred the development of far more sophisticated devices and allowed customers to individualize and customize their purchases. In other words, modularity encouraged multiple innovations from multiple sources and made them easy to incorporate.
. . . . .
By outsourcing most R&D, car companies would be able to reap the rewards of innovation for a fraction of the cost and risk. The growing sophistication of design and simulation software makes it easier for startups to create prototypes and test new products virtually, before undergoing those expensive processes in the real world. Not every idea will succeed, but the costs of failure will be reduced and borne by smaller firms that can collapse with less impact on the larger economy. Ultimately, modular construction will lead to cars that can be custom-built to the specifications of their future owners, somewhat as Dell allows purchasers to click on hyperlinks to add or subtract computer features. Custom-rebuilt, too—it will be easy to install upgraded modules, in much the way that computer owners replace old video cards.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Invention is a flower, innovation is a weed
I just heard this quote ("Invention is a flower, innovation is a weed") for the first time. Excellent.
Attributed to Robert Metcalfe.
What does it mean? Invention is nurtured and planned. Innovation is spontaneous as it finds cracks and scratches and claws its way to life.
Attributed to Robert Metcalfe.
What does it mean? Invention is nurtured and planned. Innovation is spontaneous as it finds cracks and scratches and claws its way to life.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The less we communicate
"The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate," according to theologian and educator Joseph Priestley.
By "less" I think he means a qualitative "less" rather than a quantitative "less." Shallower.
It's a nice quote, but I don't necessarily agree with this. I think the means and modes of communication have changed. But ever generation thinks it was better when they were younger.
Aristotle himself railed against the written word, claiming it would take away from pure spoken dialogue. (I'll have to find a citation for that.)
By "less" I think he means a qualitative "less" rather than a quantitative "less." Shallower.
It's a nice quote, but I don't necessarily agree with this. I think the means and modes of communication have changed. But ever generation thinks it was better when they were younger.
Aristotle himself railed against the written word, claiming it would take away from pure spoken dialogue. (I'll have to find a citation for that.)
Friday, April 10, 2009
Architecture of participation
The idea of an "architecture of participation" has long been a staple of the Web 2.0 concept (since Tim O'Reilly's 2005 article). And the idea of openness being a critical component of innovation has also long been discussed.
However, I recently came across a quote I hadn't seen before that nicely (and succinctly) ties the two together:
Sustained innovation is no longer just about who has the most gifted scientists or the best equipped labs. It’s about who has the most compelling ‘architecture of participation.’
A quick search can't find the original quote, but at least several sites that quote the quote:
However, I recently came across a quote I hadn't seen before that nicely (and succinctly) ties the two together:
Sustained innovation is no longer just about who has the most gifted scientists or the best equipped labs. It’s about who has the most compelling ‘architecture of participation.’
A quick search can't find the original quote, but at least several sites that quote the quote:
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