Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Do best practices keep you from being innovative and disruptive?

Sever recent articles I have read bring out some interesting things to think about.  Woody Bendle wrote about best practices. Jeffrey Phillips wrote about filling the gap.  And Mike Brown wrote about strategic planning and using a technique called "What its like".

Being innovative means that one needs to think outside the box.  Best practices focus you into following someone else and their ideas.  What makes them best practices?  Someone developed these practices by thinking outside the box and noticing that they had a gap that was not being filled.  By generating a process that filled their gap, it became their best practice - for the moment.  We have talked about process improvement before, and if you implement what others are calling best practices, they have probably moved on to their next best practices and you are left playing catch up, once again.

Filling the gap is a key to innovation.  First you have to see the gap, then you have to generate ideas to fill the gap.  If you use best practices to fill the gap, you may still have gaps left.  You have to fill your gaps, not someone else's gap. You may want to use best practices as an idea generator, but by definition, a best practices means that it is the best - there is only one of them.  For you they may not be best.  Your practices may be best.

If you have problems generating ideas, you may want to look into the What its like concept.  How does a similar company in a different field do what you are trying to do.  It may surprise you that someone in a completely different filed may have just the trigger you need to generate your own ideas to fill your own gaps.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Do you leapfrog?

Innovation is sometimes thought of as leapfrogging, jumping over the current processes to get in front of the latest and greatest.  Soren Kaplen wrote a book called Leapfrogging in which he talks about how to embrace uncertainty and invite surprises to obtain the breakthroughs that the business desires.

Kaplan talks about 4 leapfrogging strategies for 2013 in a recent blog:
1. Define your leapfrogging opportunity
2. Leverage data and then go with your gut
3. Test the waters with your pinky toe
4. Savor surprise

In effect, what Kaplan is say, plan your innovation, where you want to be.  What breakthroughs do you want in your business.  Item 2 talks about recent research that indicates that one's best decisions are often made with little supporting data, especially when you are in uncharted territory that disruptive innovation brings.  Item 3 talks about doing a little to gain a lot.  And item 4 talks about is that we should not resist surprise, but embrace it.

With these 4 strategies, innovation can be explored and directed to where you want it to go, but be prepared to embrace the idea that where you want to go is not always where the innovation will end up taking you.


Thursday, January 24, 2013

Is the way you think keeping you from being disruptive?

A recent article I read got me to thinking that the way we think may hinder or encourage us to develop disruptive innovations.  All this ties in to change management and resistance to change.  We all are familiar with people who resist change no matter what, even if they would benefit from it.  So, how do we break out of this way of thinking and find a new way that allows to follow the "what ifs"?

Dr Ellen Weber has developed something called Mindguiding base on practical applications of neuro discoveries.  The idea in Mindguiding is to use working memory to cultivate new ideas and rely less on long term memory of how things used to be done.  The idea is to question things in a way that allows others to see possibilities through another person's viewpoint.  Similar to the 5 Whys of root cause analysis, Mindguiding says to ask What if questions.  In a group setting this can bring about extraordinary results.

What to you think?  Would this work for you?  Try it an let me know if you find it easier to come up with disruptive innovations by using your brain in a different way.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Do you have to be crazy to be disruptive?

Not long after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the iconic “The Crazy Ones” commercial aired as part of the larger Think Different campaign. This is a variation of that commercial that never aired, with Steve Jobs himself narrating.
 Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
But, do you have to be crazy to be disruptive?  Can disruption be systematic and planned, strategized and organized?  Are the elements of disruptive innovation well enough known to be written down and followed, like a recipe for an omelet?

Where is the middle ground between planned innovation and crazy innovation that can lead to disruptive innovation at a frequency greater than chance?  Does disruptive innovation require the type of person described by Steve Jobs in the above quote, or can a person with the ability to understand and define technology trends have the insight that recognizes when some of those trends, when integrated, provides an opportunity to do something no one has done before and create a disruptive innovation?

I would like to think the latter is true and not everyone who creates disruptive innovations has to be crazy.  What do you think?

Monday, January 21, 2013

What YOU can do to be disruptive

No, I don't mean be disruptive in behavior, but in creating disruptive innovation in your work environment.  Mike Brown blogs about taking the NO out of inNOvation. He posits that there are ten things that block innovation irrespective of business culture.  In each of these areas he suggests change management steps and actions that an individual can take to mitigate those hindrances.  Many of those steps reference further details in past blogs he has written that address those issues.

As he says, not all ten challenges to innovation are present in any business, but just a few of them are effective in reducing innovation.  Here are the ten challenges he lists:

1. NO Knack for Disruptive Innovation 
2. NO Direction 
3. NO Rocking the Boat 
4. NO Talent Pool
5.There’s NO Tomorrow 
6. NO Resources 
7. NO Motivation to Innovate 
8. NO Process 
9. NO Implementation Success 
10. NO Measures
Disruptive innovation can be disruptive to an organizational culture and many businesses do not handle disruption well, putting in place processes and procedures to minimize disruption.  Many perceive disruptive innovation as a threat to their position and authority and actively work to minimize disruption. 

But, every organization needs someone to work against these forces until it is recognized that disruptive innovation is necessary for survival in today's dynamic environment.

Tell me what you do to encourage innovation in your environment. 

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Disruptive Process Improvement and Innovation


So, in my last blog I ask the question: Can process improvement be disruptive? I have found several blogs and articles that suggest a positive answer. Craig Reid suggests innovation is the forgotten man of process improvement. By adopting systematic process improvement methods and starting from a clean sheet of paper one can create innovative processes, products, and services. Ben Nneji wrote
" Everett Rogers, in his book, "Diffusion of Innovations," defines innovation as "an idea, practice or object that is perceived as new by an individual" or whoever else would use, consume or adopt the innovation. While process improvement focuses on improving an existing idea, practice or object, innovation focuses on "newness." But they both focus on bringing desirable change."
 To implement both process improvement and innovation you must be disruptive and grow a culture of disruption.  Process improvement helps reduce inefficiencies (Lean), reduce defects (Six Sigma) and ensures that you do the right thing - Customer Experience Management (CEM).  Innovation helps you look beyond your current customer base and technology focus to be award of what is happening around you.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Can Process Improvement be Disruptive?

A number of articles I have read recently say that it is difficult, or impossible, to develop disruptive innovations in an existing company or organization.  See here for an example from a blog post.  Suggestions are to separate them from an ongoing business to isolate them from the pressures of meeting operational goals, such as revenue, profit, etc.  So, they reinforce the idea that innovation must occur in a new company or isolated in an existing company.

But, what about continuous improvement, such as those encouraged by the Malcolm Baldridge award?  As a Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence (CMQ/OE) I would think that process improvement would lead to the potential of developing disruptive innovations.  If anyone has seen any research or articles that address this, please let me know.

Process improvement, if properly addressing all aspects of the process and resulting products/services, would take into account innovations that are new and have potential to affect what the company is currently doing.  If cost reduction, then addressing all areas that could result in cost reduction might lead to a disrupting innovation that made them a market leader.  Sane with almost any characteristic of either the process or the result of executing that process.

What do you think?  Is it possible to develop disruptive innovations through process improvment? 

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Top 7 Disruptive Personal Media Trends for 2013

Innovation Labs published their analysis of the top personal media trends that they believe will be disruptive to business in 2013.  They list the following:

1. Responsive web design is becoming a strategic must-have
2. Mobile data encryption: growing exponentially in importance
3. Mobile video is fast becoming mass consumer phenomenon
4. Every organisation will need a UX Designer
5. The ‘Internet of Things’ is merging the digital world with the physical world
6. Mobility is the top priority as a driver of transformational change for CEOs
7. iOS and Android continue to dominate in a fast moving ecosystem, with app stability becoming a major issue

Individually I don't think many of these are or will be disruptive.  Taken as a whole as characteristics of mobility they play a role in the disruptive innovation of mobility.  People do not want to be tied to any one place to do their work, enjoy their entertainment, or connect to their friends.  Any business must address the issue of how they deliver the services and products in a mobile society, and this will change many things.

Examples of how things are already impacted are reports you see in the news about Best Buy being a showroom for on-line ordering - but not necessarily from Best Buy.  Mobility has also changed the delivery business since what you order on-line from your mobile phone has to be delivered.  Stores like Walmart are offering instant pickup of orders placed on-line, or even delivered to your home.  All these are disruptive changes in the market place.

But, I think the Internet of Things (IoT) is probably the most disruptive of all, and we are just now beginning to see the effects.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Are Tablets Disruptive to the PC?

The Wall Street Journal today published an article that indicates that Gartner sees a structural shift in the PC market.  This is based on the drop in PC sells by 6% for 2012.  While PCs are not being left in the dust, the tablet appears to be the gift of choice for this past Christmas gift giving season.

I see coworkers carrying around tablets to meetings instead of laptops.  I have a tablet that I use for various things, but it doesn't replace my PC.  For me there are several reasons the PC will continue to be in my life - complex graphics and virtual reality video games - all of which require the power of a PC and graphics card.

At work, the table may be disruptive to the PC as most companies work from a server based infrastructure, so email, etc., are all kept on a server, and not on a laptop.  In the future, the cloud (a server in the sky) will do the same thing.  For my tablet to become really usable at home, I will have to move to a cloud environment, otherwise if I read my email on the table, I have to either save it there, or read it again on my PC and save it there.  Or both, and then I need to sync both systems.

So, are tablets disruptive?  Not yet, in my opinion, but they may become so.  The trends in storage, power included in the tablet, and communications speed in wireless capability, even in the home, all will merge to make it disruptive.


Sunday, January 13, 2013

Characterisits of Disruptive Innovation

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University recently published (Fall of 2012) an article: "Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism" by Clayton M. Christensen, David Skok, and James Allworth.  Christensen had developed a theory of disruptive innovation to explain how businesses grow, become successful, and then falter as startups take away their customers.  This has been demonstrated in multiple industries, and this article applies it to the field of journalism.  

But in this study they propose that disruption comes about because of the job the service or product allows one to do.  They suggest that you need to ask three questions to identify that job:
  • What is the job audiences want done?
  • What kinds of employees and structure does the company need so it can fulfill that job-to-be-done?
  • What is the best way to deliver that information to audiences?
As markets and products are disrupted, they are replaced with markets and products that do the job better.  How does one move from providing a solutions one way to providing the same solution in a better and different way? A way that replaces the old way? A disruptive way?  This article suggest that there are three things one needs to examine: resources (or capabilities), processes, and priorities.  All of these are difficult to change as they are part of the culture of the company.  New ways often need to be done by new people, new processes, and new priorities that are separate from the old ones.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal indicates that magazines add pages dropped 8.2% in 2012 and 32% since 1908.  This illustrates the problem of old media be supplanted by the new media.

One area that they don't address which I believe is critical is the technology trends that cross and merge to make these new ways of doing things possible.


Saturday, January 12, 2013

Is 3D a Distruptive Technology?

Last year at CES 3D was everywhere. This year at CES there was very little mention of it.  One can buy 3D TV but most people that I know never turn on the function.  I personally have 2 TVs with 3D capability, but have never used it.

3D doesn't seem to fit the definition of a disruptive technology.  It is not something that emerging markets are using and the big players all have it, so it is not something that appears at this time to create new markets or displace established ones.

Is it just too soon?  Is 3D a sleeping technology waiting for the right application of the technology to make it really take off?  Ot is it just another technology that can be used when special effects are desired.

I was at the dentist the other day and he had a 3D machine that took a 3D image of your tooth.  Similar to a CAT scan for you mouth.  Maybe 3D is a niche market today, but will it break out into something bigger?

Are the requirements for special glasses holding it back.  Will glasses-less 3D catch on better?  Or do we have to wait for Google glasses to make 3D available for any and everything?

What do you think?  Will 3D be disruptive?

Friday, January 11, 2013

What Will Be Disruptive in 2013?

In 1995 Harvard Business Review published "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave"
by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen.  This article addressed one of the most consistent patterns in business, i.e. the inability to stay at the top of their industry when tecnologies or markets change.  Ultimately, these authors posit, the problem is that they stay too close to their customers.  The result of this closeness is that investments are strongly influenced by existing customers.  The technology they could have invested in was not wanted by their customers - until their customers wanted it, and then it was too late.  The technologies that enter through emerging markets are ignored, because existing customers don't want it, and the emerging markets are too small to address.  The technology in the emerging markets are also often not as good as what currently exist, but the rate of improvement is often faster than that of existing technology. 
"For example, although personal computers did not meet the requirements of mainstream minicomputer users in the early 1980s, the computing power of the desktop machines improved at a much faster rate than minicomputer users’ demands for computing power did. As a result, personal computers caught up with the computing needs of many of the customers of Wang, Prime, Nixdorf, Data General, and Digital Equipment. Today they are performance-competitive with minicomputers in many applications. For the minicomputer makers, keeping close to mainstream customers and ignoring what were initially low-performance desktop technologies used by seemingly insignificant customers in emerging markets was a rational decision—but one that proved disastrous."
 The Harvard Business Review Blog published on January 10, 2013: "Disruptive Trends to Watch in 2013"
"The pattern that simple, convenient, low-priced solutions would grow from humble beginnings to create and transform industries had not yet been identified."
But, that excuse no longer applies.  Many have built on the work of Clayton Christensen and have identified the critical phases of disruptive technology:
  1. Conception. When a disruptive idea is first born, typically far away from the market's mainstream. In these early days, there typically are a range of companies experimenting with a new model, fighting to figure out a sustainable business model.
  2. Coming of age. When at least one of the would-be disruptors crosses from the fringes to more mainstream applications.
  3. Crossing over. When the disruptor becomes the mainstream. Sometimes this shift results in the whole-sale replacement of the previous market leader; sometimes it creates a completely parallel market (which typically ends up being larger than the previous market due to the democratizing power of disruption).
The article goes on to identify those technology in 2012 that have proven disruptive and predict four technology that will be disruptive in 2013:

  1. 3-D printing
  2. The Internet of Things
  3. New healthcare business models
  4. Low-cost, online, competency-based learning universities     
These are all worth watching and have been suggested by others a potential disruptive technologies of the near future.  What do you think?  Will these be disruptive?

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Disruption in Your LIfe

Disrupt has the following definition from The Free Dictionary:
1. To throw into confusion or disorder: Protesters disrupted the candidate's speech.
2. To interrupt or impede the progress, movement, or procedure of: Our efforts in the garden were disrupted by an early frost.
3. To break or burst; rupture.
 
Disruption occurs in all areas of ones life, not just in markets and technology.  For example, marriage is surly a disruption in your lifestyle.  Children not only disrupt, but they are a disruption in your lifestyle as well.  Changing jobs can be very disruptive, sometimes resulting in a complete change in you career.  
 
Are they good, or bad?  Maybe both at the same time?  Whatever they are to you, they can be the catalyst to make changes that are both sustainable and better for you.
 
Disruption in technology can destroy markets and create new ones almost overnight. Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology.  
 
My interest is in why and how do these occur.  What have been the disruptions in your life?  What disruptive innovations have you experienced.   Let me know how you handled these.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Object storage predictions for 2013

Object storage predictions for 2013
Object storage is an on-again, off-again topic.  But, now it appears that object storage will be a game changer for cloud storage, big data analytics, and mobility which requires that the metadata be stored along with the data.  For object storage to take off in the corporate market, there has to be a standard interface for application vendors to write to. Object storage is the solution for organizations that deal with extreme amounts of unstructured data.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Disruption, Again, by the Automobile

The arrival of the automobile was a disruptive technology, replacing whole industries that had grown up supporting horses and buggies.  A recent post in Wired byThilo Koslowski suggests that the automobile, aka, the car, has become the ultimate mobile device. 

"“Connected vehicles” are cars that access, consume, create, enrich, direct, and share digital information between businesses, people, organizations, infrastructures, and things. Those “things” include other vehicles, which is where the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Cars."
One might ask when such vehicles might become available?  The prediction is that within the next few years companies will begin announcing plans for advanced automotive technology products.  Google has received permission from the State of California to test autonomous vehicles.

What type of disruption could one expect?  If we look backwards and see that the automobile replaced the requirement for one horse per person.  One automobile also replaced the requirement for several horses per buggy.  With the American love for the automobile, we have regressed to one or more cars per person.  But, the younger generation may change this.

"These tradeoffs are even more important to younger vehicle owners (18- to 24-year-olds) than older ones (54+ years). The younger group is more likely (30%) to choose internet access over having a vehicle (compared to just 12% of the older group), and about the same percentages are likely to use a car-sharing service as an alternative to vehicle ownership. "
So, car ownership may change.  One can envision that taxi cabs may not disappear, but become autonomous vehicles that are called when needed.   One can envision a tiered transportation system from individual autonomous cars at the high cost end, multiple person shared vehicles, such as Vans, in the middle, and busses with fixed routes as they are today, but moving autonomously.

If one spends a few moments thinking about the potential, there will be a large shift in the types of services available to the public.

Friday, January 4, 2013

The Comming Disruption of Big Data

The predictions have been coming for some time that Big Data will make a tremendous impact in our Digital Universe.  I made a presentation back in 2008 to an FFRDC that suggested to them that this was an area they should start looking into for their government clients, but it didn't get much traction then (may it was just me?).

Steve Todd recently posted that a recent issue of The Economist indicated that three technology trends are enabling machines to become more prevalent:
  • The new version of the internet protocol (IPV6), with an address space of 128 bits, provides for 340 billion, billion, billion, billion unique addresses.  The current protocol, 32 bits long, supported only 4.3 billion binary addresses.
  • There has never been enough bandwidth to support wireless M2M data streams.  Over the past year, new 4G networks have rolled out to accommodate smart phones and pads.
  • Cloud computing has collapsed the unit cost of storage.
The interaction of these trends are what disruption is all about. These trends, along with the growth in analytic visualization, will allow any organization to mine the data that collected an an accelerating rate and quickly respond to nascent indicators of interest.  New product and services will meet the immediate needs of crowd-sourced requirements.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Security In Your Digital Life

Let's talk about a different kind of disruption today - how your digital and personal life is disrupted by those who might attack you in some way, whether physically or digitally.  We recently had some friends who live in a retirement setting in a gated retirement community.  This facility has the type of security you would want people to have who might be less able to protect themselves.  But, they were robbed.  If you have ever been robbed you know how invasive and disruptive that can be.  But, they were robbed not just once, but twice.  Treasures acquired over a life time were taken.

The second robbery took all of their important papers that contained their wills, etc.  The potential for ID theft is now very real to them.

Physical protection is relatively easy - locks, alarms, protective services - but none are foolproof.  To protect my property I only have to worry about access to that property, which is usually located in one place, maybe a few places.  But digital protection is much harder.  Much of my identity information is scattered around the country depending on someone else to protect that information.  I have no control over how, or if, they do anything to protect that information.  I can implement digital protection on my computers and servers, but even that depends on the manufactures of those devices and software to have a system that works and is kept up to date against the rapidly changing methods used by those who would digitally attack you.

Information Assurance (IA) is a hot topic these days.  Standards have been developed by NIST and others.  But, these are only lacklusterly followed by many, leaving them easy targets.  But, like physical security, digital security is not foolproof.  If you want to be absolutely secure, then you have get rid of anything that someone wants to take from you.  Digitally, that mean unplugging your computers from the grid.