One day, I realized that if we could afford it, it’s just as important to hire exceptionally talented people even when you don’t have an opening. On occasion we found a gifted person and we’d hire them into our organization. At first, we would just give the person something to do. Always, after a few months, they were working 10-hour days and making a big contribution. Inevitably, we found an important role for them, or they found it on their own. I never regretted hiring someone who cosistantly brought their A game.
I always put brainpower first because intellect is the most important of the raw materials we work with. From intelligence comes thoughtful analysis, asking the right questions, good judgment, and better decisions. I want the smartest people I can find to join our organization. High-potential people like to be with other high-potential people. When I interview candidates, I’ll often ask them to bring me through their lives. I want to know what their family history is. I want to know how well candidates performed in high school and college. I want to know whether they also reached beyond their academic potential to demonstrate some leadership potential.
Frankly, I want to know if their grade-point average (GPA) was 2.7 or 3.9 out of a possible 4.0. Even if they’ve been out of school for many years, a GPA can represent four years of evaluation, not a sixty-minute impression during a brief interview on a busy day. It may not be necessarily true that a 3.9 GPA will be better than a 2.7, but the odds are with you.
So I’m looking for the Phi Beta Kappa, the captain of the debating team the president of the student council. It’s no coincidence that seventeen presidents of the United States, thirty-seven U.S. Supreme Court justices, and 131 Nobel laureates have been members of Phi Beta Kappa.
I’m also looking for the person who rose quickly in another organization and was rewarded with an important leadership job. What challenges did that executive overcome to get something meaningful done? How did that person apply his intelligence to the job to make something happen?
My hurdle for brainpower is high, but once it’s jumped I’m on to the next most attribute of success: values. Ultimately, all the intelligence in the world isn’t going to help a person who lacks basic integrity and compassion for other human beings. I’m looking for honesty, decency, respect, kindness, generosity, and consideration.
Getting a fix on a person’s values is admittedly difficult. Values are easier to discern once you have a person on staff, but much harder to recognize in an interview. You have to sense them. I can pick up some fairly good clues by the way candidates speak about their parents, their teachers, their role models in life. I want people who have been inspired by others, who are generous in giving credit to those who made a difference in their lives. I’m looking for people who want to help others in need, who have demonstrated kindness and consideration to the disadvantaged. Some of this may be subtle. It’s what you can interpret from tone of voice or a face lighting up. But this tells me a lot about a person’s purpose in life.
Passion has become an overused word in recent years. Still, it’s the level of enthusiasm and interest in work and life that makes someone stand out above the rest. It’s a fire that burns deeply within us. Once tapped, it can bring you to places that few other people can go.
Unlike values, passion is easy to spot. You either have it or you don’t. There is a spirit or fervor in people who have passion. You can often feel their energy. They also are infectious team members. They ignite the passion in others. They get others to care as much as they do about accomplishing the possible and the seemingly impossible.
My fourth hiring attribute is work ethic. I work hard. I do so because I’m passionate about the work I do, and I feel good when I’m highly productive. I expect the same from the people we hire. We want people who embrace work, who understand that it’s not something you do only to earn a living, but rather something that can help define who you are in this life.
During interviews, I try to get a feel for people how have a strong work ethic. You get that from learning they worked during high school and college, whether they worked weekends, what they sacrificed at times to work instead of play. At some level, work is about sacrifice: giving up some time with your friends or your family to perform your job at the highest possible level of excellence.
Finally, we come to experience. Experience, though important, is the last of the five things I look for because it’s something you can provide your staff. We can’t give them more intellect, better values, passion, or a strong work ethic. But we can give them experience by providing an opportunity to learn a discipline or a job. That’s why we can make a compromise when it comes to experience, but never on the first four.
When I recruit talent, I want to be as sure as possible that the person I’m hiring has all of these attributes. That requires patience and work. And then I will do whatever it takes to bring that exceptional person on board.
We work across domains like media, health care, retail, education, and banking, and the work always involves an element of “new.” A new platform or technology, a new business proposition, or new target users. We work at the front edge of mainstream, where innovation meets mass-market appeal. The constant presence of “new” in our work feeds our curiosity, and makes exploration a necessity.
In order to guide our work and inspire our clients, we constantly think about what tomorrow will bring. Each year, we ask our teams at to predict the major trends that will impact businesses and society next year. Here, we delve into five of our predictions for 2013 and share our thoughts on what designers should be doing to make sure they stay ahead of the curve.
The growing number of devices and sensors that we incorporate into our lives will set the scene for what we call “living services”--the point at which individual smart objects interconnect to form a support network for their owner. This is when a set of connected objects becomes greater than the sum of its parts: your “personal ecosystem.”
The past 18 months have seen the beginnings of mass-market adoption for a select few connected objects, driven by the services that make them meaningful. Nike+ FuelBand, Jawbone UP, and the Nest self-learning thermostat are early pacesetters. The “battle for the wrist” will hit the mainstream in earnest in 2013, with a variety of approaches coming to market focused on everything from health and wellness to information and entertainment.
We’ll soon start to see connected devices infiltrating more areas of our lives. As we are confronted with more data visualizations about our homes, jobs, and health, we are likely to develop what we’re calling “chart fatigue,” where information overload makes it difficult to extract meaning from data that should be valuable to us.
How to get in on the personal ecosystem:
• Increase focus on designing for the glance as wearable tech becomes more mainstream.
• Help users tie together elements of their object ecosystem to extract further value from a service.
• Segment interactions into things that are best seen and done on small dedicated devices, and things best done on the smartphone that they inevitably will connect to.
• Design for adaptability. Services that fit naturally into people’s lives and adapt to their habits and priorities will be the big winners in 2013.
As digital progress marches on, so does complexity. A growing family of personal devices, and ever-increasing volumes of data, constantly threaten the efforts of service designers to create elegant, focused, and simple solutions.
But at the same time, more organizations are finding that a focus on simplicity can have a transformative effect on services and businesses alike. As Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
Simplicity has a long track record of success and disruption. Ikea and Zipcar are good examples from the physical world. In the digital world, Skype was able to gain global market share with a very simple proposition, and Google disrupted the search-and-portal world with its singular focus and excellence. Other examples include Amazon’s one-click shopping, and Apple’s touch-focused iOS.
Now we’re seeing single-purpose apps and services gaining ground, feeding a desire for simplification. The payments startup Square is a good example: By simplifying the bureaucratic process of becoming a credit-card merchant, Square has managed to become a $3 billion company in under three years. Bank Simple has also changed the conversation in the financial-services sector with its radical approach to making finances transparent and easy.
Leaders in simplification will continue to disrupt and transform. As choices and options multiply, companies with solutions that can guide users through the mess will have an opportunity to become trusted advisers.
Simple rules for a K.I.S.S. world:
• Focus on what can be removed, rather than what could be added. Make sure every single feature, element, and interface drives real value for the user.
• Bravely go to the pain threshold that separates “extremely simple” from “plain dumb.”
• Use mobile as a primary tool to drive simplicity across products and services.
• Apply the principles of simplicity internally: How could your teams and your structure be leaner and more effective? Taking action to simplify internally will enable you to reflect that simplicity outward as well.
We’ve seen seismic shifts in the area of digital distribution of music, movies, and every other form of media. Users now expect their purchases to be portable and consumable on multiple platforms. We crave flexibility, and the way we buy and “own” is changing accordingly.
Spotify has proved that consumers are willing to pay to rent music if they feel they’re getting a valuable service. Services like AirBnB, 9flats, Getaround, and Lyft are making flat-sharing and car-sharing mainstream. The new competitor Jetsetter is helping to turn the concept of a luxury second home or family holiday on its head.
In the past, we projected our status and success through the things we owned--the car in the driveway, the vacation house, the books and the CDs that we displayed in our home. But increasingly status is now projected through our experiences and pursuits, and consequently the desire to “own” material objects fades.
Innovative new services will see companies generate increased revenue based on usage. For example, Microsoft’s Kinect technology could be used to charge for movies based on the number of people in the room.
As the focus shifts from ownership to access, these are key implications:
• Companies should design clear access models like renting, trading, and leasing. Ownership could simply become a standard “upgrade” function across categories.
• Include a variety of status-boosting elements in “access” services. For example, one-click ways to capture experiences and share them through social media networks, as well as “insight” sharing for those who prefer to project their intellectual pursuits.
• Create an “API for commerce” by atomizing your catalogue or offering. This could allow third parties to distribute your content, and it should also allow more flexibility, for example, by giving someone who’s bought a physical book the ability to take digital chapters along with them on their smartphone or tablet.
In 2012, the argument around use of personal data got heated. As users become more aware of what can be done with their information, they are beginning to demand access--and real value--in return for their data. With so many alternatives available for virtually any service, users are increasingly walking away from experiences that they find creepy or uncomfortable, and taking their business elsewhere.
We expect the wave of data visualization to continue to grow, driving value and building relationships between individuals and those who help them to extract value from their own behaviors.
How you can survive the personal data battle:
• Make the most of aggregated data. It can go a long way to improve your product and customer service without demanding hyper-personal information.
• Work to turn your customers’ data into actionable insights--for them.
• Be the one who makes sense of big data for the little guy.
Personalization is nothing new in the digital world, but in the world of retail, users often find that comparatively few services actually meet their needs. This is likely to change in 2013, as the online and offline retail environments merge, creating a more holistic and immersive customer experience.
A statistic to strike fear into the heart of any retailer: Almost half of U.S. smartphone users have used their devices in-store, and more than half of those have gone on to abandon their in-store purchase. For smartphone users, the distinction between online and in-store shopping has all but disappeared.
The key to retail success lies in creating experiences that make customers feel better. A shopping experience that feels smarter or easier can be more valuable for many customers than simply getting the best deal. Key factors that ensure success are increasingly going to be based on recognition, recommendation, follow-through, and support. Services like Intuit GoPayment and PayPal are already revolutionizing commerce for small retailers by simplifying payment, and the next natural step is to offer digital customer relationship management for these small merchants.
Shop staff will increasingly be equipped with tablets or smartphones to deliver improved individual service, and opt-in location-based services will help customers find precisely what they’re looking for, when they’re looking to buy, and will enable them to pay on the spot without queuing. Virtual shops, in other words, will also take hold in the physical world.
Suggestions for the shopping services of 2013:
• Design commerce services that make use of smartphone sensors and contextual data--camera, gyroscope, time of day, and location.
• Design innovative and simple solutions for small merchants. This is a big group of merchants, yet they are not digitally savvy at all. Inventory management, customer relationships, loyalty solutions, digital storefronts--these can be life-changing services for small retailers.
• Re-imagine the boring things and make them engaging. As PayPal and Square have shown, even something as painful as paying can be pretty cool.
These trends give a glimpse into the dramatic changes in people’s expectations, habits, and relationships that are being driven by the fast-changing digital service landscape. They have affected both people’s personal relationships and their interactions with services and brands. There is undoubtedly more change and transformation to come. Looking ahead, we believe that these are the fundamental lessons that designers need to embrace to have a real impact on business and society in 2013:
Design for a growing range of devices and a growing range of interaction modes. The new form factors include a much broader range of tablets, phablets, and hybrid devices (pc/tablet combos). They also include a fast-growing range of wearables--wrist bands, wrist watches, and much more. The interaction modes move from purely the graphical touch paradigm to include additional modes like voice and ambient information. Flexibility and adaptability will be key properties for successful designers.
Data is the currency of today, and data visualization is all about meaning. Designers will hold a key role in designing not just beautiful but also sharp and actionable insights. They will design data visualizations for large corporations, and make sense of big data for the little guy.
The digital/physical divide is disappearing. Bits and atoms used to be competing enemies; now they’re becoming friends that hang out together. Examples include digital real-world shopping, digital payments, wearable fitness and health technology, the ubiquity of mobile map usage, the connected car, etc. Designers need to be very thoughtful when designing things that people wear (comfort/fashion/durability considerations) and that affect people’s "real"-world experiences.
Today’s global economy is characterized by rapid and unpredictable change. The challenge of such turbulent times can only be met by employing an appropriate blend of the leadership and management mindsets.
Leaders in all sectors--industry, government, the military, academia, and non-profits--are being challenged to do more with less to better utilize their people’s time, physical assets, and budget. Your first response to a shrinking budget might be to do more yourself. An alternative is to delegate more to team members either proportionally or by getting your high potentials to take on extra work. In the first case, you are likely to burn out and have insufficient time to lead. In the latter two cases, you burn out either everyone or just the best people on your team. There is a better way: eliminate low-value tasks.
The core lesson is to think broadly in your definition of your team--it is more than just you and your direct reports. It includes everyone who has a stake in your success. Look for alliances that can dramatically expand the capabilities, resources, and reach of your team. A second lesson to understand is that when you do not ask a question, you are really the one who is saying no. When you ask questions, you tap into others’ knowledge so as to create new possibilities. The boundaries of your possible actions are no longer what you know, but rather what the organization and community know and can do.
At the end of the day, only action produces results. Building relationships, developing others, and making decisions lead to more effective actions; but it is the actions of you and your team along with the outcomes they produce that will build your reputation as a great leader.
1. Choose action or inaction wisely. Deciding when to take action is a basic leadership choice. You can lead your people into action quickly or let the energy build while they prepare for what must be done. Both approaches are appropriate at times. 2. Make teamwork a priority. Even high potentials must perform as a team to be successful. Conflicting actions or complaints about difficulties in getting agreement are symptoms of poor teamwork. Fix the teamwork issues first, and other challenges will be easier. 3. Hold planning conversations. The time you spend in up-front conversations will be less than the time you otherwise would spend correcting the unintended and costly consequences of poorly planned and misaligned actions. 4. Ensure that the plan is understood. Ask high potentials, especially those who did not participate in planning, to describe your organization’s goals and strategies. If their answers are accurate, congratulate yourself. If they are not, improve the methods you use to communicate the strategic plan to your people. 5. Plan obsolescence. Look at the products and services you offer today. Which will be irrelevant three years from now? Are you developing the next generation of offerings? Whether you are or not, someone else is. 6. Create a people strategy. Invest as much in creating the people strategy for your next major change as in developing new processes and systems. People will accept change when they feel it is necessary, when their inputs are heard, and when they believe that the process of change is fair. 7. Learn from success. Looking back, would you say you learned more from your failures than from your successes? If you said yes, spend more time examining your recent successes to determine how you can repeat and expand them. 8. Stretch the comfort zone. Think about your team’s biggest achievement last year. What have you learned since then that could have made it bigger? Push your people into the uncomfortable learning zone and coach them to higher levels of success. 9. Confirm alignment. Next time you finish a key meeting, ask each person what he or she plans to do--especially to support each other. Agreement is real only if all parties share the agreements, the actions to be taken, and the expected results.
10. Get comfortable with silence. Silence can be the prelude to a big decision or decisive action. Use silence in your conversations as thinking and reflecting time.
Every strategy consultant has one PowerPoint slide he regards as his opus. After eight years in the field, I had several contenders: a two-by-two matrix that made people rethink the very nature of x and y axes; a waterfall chart that redefined the relationship between revenue and expenses; a customer- profitability Mekko chart that would sit as easily at MoMA as it did in GoToMeeting. But my greatest gift to the value-adding arts was for a telco that feared it had no future in the Internet era. Using clip art of stacked cylinders to represent databases (did I mention I'm a brilliant artist?), I depicted the missed opportunities in the valuable customer info our client didn't use.
Internet companies could ask users to share their location, but telcos already knew where all their devices were. Facebook could talk up the "social graph," but what is the Call Detail Record but an indicator of true friendship? And payments? Phone companies are basically billing operations with fiber optics. They were leaving money, market share, and innovation on the table.
My team imagined telcos collecting, analyzing, and building APIs to provide access to customer data, making the world a more efficient, creative, and just place where freedom would ring for a thousand years--or at least until privacy concerns reined in growth. Our clients nodded their approval and promptly filed the slide in "The Department of Too Far Outside the Box."
When it comes to data, possession is perhaps only four-tenths of the law. Set-top boxes know our remote-control interactions. Vehicles know how much, how well, and how fast we drive. Credit card companies know what, when, and where we buy. Google knows, well, all the things. If the prevalence of chatter about "big data" is any indicator, data has evolved from something we collect with the vague promise of future value to something we analyze to retrieve that value.
This fall, I got to see this transition up close at DataGotham, an event celebrating New York's "data community" and showcasing how data analysis was transforming finance, fashion, startups, and urban life. Michael P. Flowers, director of the city's Policy and Strategic Planning Analytics Team (does your city have one of those?), explained how the N.Y.C. government had reduced emergency-response times by optimizing where it put idling ambulances, placing them close to likely trauma areas and 24-hour coffee shops with bathrooms.
There's another transition looming for the role of data in our world: of data into language itself. We can tell stories with data. We can make art (as the recent Art Hack Day, in Boston, did), and we can even demonstrate the true measure of one's language proficiency.
Just as smartphones revolutionized how we avoid talking to each other and food trucks changed our tolerance for eating while standing on the street, the emergence of data science as a vehicle for expression is going to radically change how we create. It gives us a new way to tell the story of the world around us.
Understanding consumer behavior has become a vital component in design today. But there’s one important factor that designers don’t often consider when it comes to behavior change: our children.
As technology speeds up our world, it’s younger and younger children who are setting trends
Teens may have always been trendsetters, but as technology speeds up our world, it’s younger and younger children who are setting trends. How many times have we heard of the boomer grandparents who opened Facebook accounts to keep in touch with their millennial grandchildren; or the Gen X parents who lament that their grade-schoolers know how to use their iPhones better than they do? By creating a system that rewards perpetual exploration and discovery, Facebook and Apple have made their products appealing to children, at the same time increasing adoption by older generations. As adults struggle to keep up with the rate of technological change, they look to the more adaptable younger generation so they don’t get left behind.
This phenomenon may also be due to the changing relationship between parents and their kids--a generation or two ago, it was still common for parents to ascribe to the “children are better seen than heard” style of parenting. Parents now go out of their way to please their children, who are eager to share their opinions. We are not only listening, we are listening intently. For example, while recycling has been widely adopted by the mainstream, it’s often kids who are urging their parents to be even greener by using energy-efficient light bulbs or bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. In focus groups we have conducted, parents have reported to us that their children have complained about too much packaging being used in products they buy--motivating them to seek out greener packaging in the supermarket aisle.
When addressing complex issues of behavior change, an approach that includes a kid’s fresh perspective can give designers new tools to approach age-old problems. When we hear truisms like “children are our future,” we usually envision blank slates, eagerly waiting for our wise guidance and instruction. But children are becoming our today. They are soaking up what we teach them and mirroring it back to us in concentrated form. They are driving what our present is like, as we race to keep up with their appetite for the new.
Most entrepreneurs excel at communicating their business vision, but when it comes to websites and mobile apps, they sometimes lack the background to explain the finer details of what they are seeking.
If entrepreneurs simply let a product developer take the reins, they may be surprised and even frustrated when the end result is inconsistent with the vision. To minimize misunderstanding and save time and money, entrepreneurs should learn how to sketch board, wireframe and prototype their ideas, web pages and the screens of their application.
If this all sounds too technical, don't worry. Below are tools and tips that can help improve communication between you and your software engineer:
1. Sketch boards and storyboards: Sketch boarding is a simple technique that doesn't require any technology. Using a pen and paper, you should think through the specific parts of the user interface and draw a sketch for each of your application screens. You want to create a lot of quick sketches without worrying about how they look, discuss them and your ideas with your team, and pick the best solution.
Next, develop what's called the "user flow." This refers to how your user will navigate through and interact with all the screens and pages in your application. You can use tools such as templates and special markers when sketching out the user experience.
The sketches you create are also known as a storyboard, and the important thing with storyboards is to find the most optimal path for the user to accomplish a task. Because it's easy to shuffle sketches around, you can explore many possible solutions within minutes. 2. Flowcharts: In a flowchart, you use pre-defined symbols to represent each step of the process. The symbols are linked together with arrows showing the process flow direction.
The most common flow chart symbols are:
As an entrepreneur, you should use flowcharts to visually communicate your desired processes and user flows to developers. When you discuss flowcharts with your developers, you can identify flaws, bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the flow or process.
3. Business use cases: These explain how you should deal with specific situations. For example, if you have a web application with an event registration system, you might want to define how a user purchases a ticket, how a payment is processed and how refunds are issued.
It's important to define these situational use cases for developers because they probably won't be familiar with the inner workings of your business.
4. Wireframe with annotations and interaction flow: A wireframe is a visual guide that represents the blueprint of a web page and shows what it does. A wireframe usually contains the layout of the content, page elements and website navigation system and shows how they work together. Annotations are symbols used to add notes and details for developers about specific features and interactions.
As a guide, you can reference a sample wireframe I created for our development team for the TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs upcoming events page.
You can draw wireframe layouts using PowerPoint. If you need help, you can hire a wireframe expert, also known as a user experience designer, to guide you through this process.
5. Click-through prototypes with links: Click-through prototypes are clickable wireframes that allow users to interact with the screens. The first step is to create a wireframe for each of your pages. Then, you can connect the pages using the links feature that most wireframe tools provide.
Prototypes bring the screens to life, helping you see and understand the problem you are trying to solve and uncover any potential usability issues.
Brain interfaces are on the verge of becoming household technology. But something stands in the way of widespread adoption--namely, the myths we have about them that we’ve inferred from sci-fi movies and television shows, which base their ideas of brain interfaces on bad sciences.
In most sci-fi, moving information in or out of the brain is painful to the subject, even when the technology is noninvasive. Subjects’ heads are immobilized and their body reclined to a resting position, as if to minimize potential damage and discomfort. This frame is problematic because it isn’t true for today’s real-world, state-of-the-art technology, and isn’t likely to be true in the future, either.
In the real world, the closest science has come to putting data directly into the brain is with a procedure called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMI). At best, it can keep subjects alert and aware, and Australian TMI researcher Allan Snyder has shown it can improve subjects’ scores at math tasks. Otherwise it can dim localized faculties such as inhibition, cause involuntary jerking of muscles, or cause the subject to see white spots of light in their vision. At worst, it can induce seizures, but it doesn’t give subjects bodice-ripping migraines like sci-fi would have us believe. Nor has it deposited any “information” into anyone’s brain, and it is unlikely to.
The closest we’ve gotten to getting data directly out of the brain is with functional magnet resonance imaging (fMRI) neuron reading, an MRI procedure that measures blood flow to different areas of the brain. The resulting image is rather crude, certainly not a rich visual experience. Furthermore, the process isn’t painful.
Some sci-fi properties show skills and information being plugged in to the hard drive of the brain (either through a jack or through the eyes) and uploaded. Just wait for the painful progress bar, and--poof!--you know kung fu.
This metaphor is problematic because it runs counter to modern brain science, which says that the structure of the brain is the knowledge of the brain. Furthermore, this structure is holographic, meaning bits of information related to a single thought are distributed throughout the brain, and the neurons involved are also used for other thoughts. To “upload” information requires a precise physical restructuring of some significant portion of the 100 billion nerve cells in the gray matter. Neither flashes of light blasting the retina nor electrical impulses shooting through a jack will do it.
These two myths bias the regular consumer against brain interfaces, out of a fear of losing knowledge, personality, or sensory perception. But the truth is that our brains are neither that malleable nor our science that advanced to create the dramatic mind-altering effects we see on movie and television screens. Plenty of good ideas come from fiction, but when it comes to viable brain interfaces, the stories we generally find entertaining are just that--fiction.
Hiring the right people -- who really want to see you succeed -- is probably the biggest challenge in starting a business. The first five people you hire will determine whether you'll have a viable company. The first 20 people will likely determine whether you can create the culture to create the next masterpiece.
These are the traits I look for in prospective team members:
• Ambition – What fuels them to succeed? • Discipline – Are they willing to go through hell and back with me several times? • Purpose – Do they want to make a dent, make a difference – and why?
If your employees have all three qualities, they will become a tremendous asset to you. You also want to hire the smartest people you can find. Smart people make beautiful music together. Lots of smart people, working in unison, can have the power and beauty of a Beethoven symphony.
When building a team, remember that a company becomes successful when the culture of entrepreneurialism is deeply rooted in everything it does -- and never changes. Innovation does not have a stopwatch. You want to hire entrepreneurs, people who are natural problem solvers -- the ones who see opportunity when most see impossibility.
When you pick your "All World" team they will surround themselves with other A-list players who also solve problems -- whether it's from a product, technology, or sales perspective. A-list people want to work with other A-list people. Never surround yourself with deadweight.
Creativity also becomes the lifeblood of a company. You want to allow everyone to have a voice. People should know their opinions matter so it fosters innovation. You may not always agree with them – but at least their voices are heard. I know at times people sometimes feel nervous about voicing their opinion because they think it might come across as a stupid idea. But if you've hired A-list people – I can guarantee you one thing – no suggestion of theirs will be stupid.
And if you're wary of hiring entrepreneurs, thinking they'll just break away and start their own companies, remember that's fear creeping up again. As I've said before, the day you decide to live in fear is the day you've already lost your battle. Great people require trust. If they leave, that's okay. They were great for a reason and were there for a purpose. Foster the same DNA across your company, and losing one or two team members will never affect the livelihood of the company.
Once you hire the right team, and they are aligned on the same objective, you'll always innovate. Stagnation will be your worst enemy. You'll execute on your vision and you'll grow exponentially. And, more importantly, you'll create a culture that fosters speed, innovation, and winning. Fear and failure will never be part of the vocabulary.
Innovation is widely regarded as the single most important ingredient in today’s economy. But innovation as a destination isn’t enough.
Sustained innovation is a high-productivity state in which an organization to innovate in all aspects of its business, including management, divisions, operations, customers and suppliers. It requires a seamless, structured management approach that begins with board- and CEO-level leadership and connects all the way through technology investment and implementation. Above all, sustained innovation is a journey, not a destination. The enterprise doesn’t stop innovating after attaining one goal; it’s engaged in a continual process of reinvention, invention and discovery.
Sustained innovation is powered by people who come together to share ideas, compare observations and brainstorm solutions to complex problems. Enterprises with a strong focus on sustained innovation share three common principles that act as the glue binding people together in productive collaboration. They are:
1. Converged disciplines: Ideas aren’t isolated; they’re celebrated in groups that enable the entire organization to act as one entity. Of particular importance is the convergence of business and technology management to ensure that no one unit or division is missing the opportunity to capitalize on new ideas and possibilities.
2. Cross-boundary collaboration: No enterprise operates in a vacuum. Every manager, employee and contractor potentially has a piece of the puzzle to create a new breakthrough business opportunity. Suppliers, partners, distributors, and customers are an equally valuable source of information and ideas.
3. Innovative business structure: Not every organization can empower an unstructured development culture like the Lunatic Fringe who led innovation at ground-breaking tech pioneer Texas Instruments; most require structure that compels convergence of disciplines, management and operational units.
To bring these principles to life, enterprises operating with sustained innovation focus on three distinct, intimately related practices that require business/technology/management convergence to perform at a high level of organizational maturity.
Sustain Innovation Playbook
Designing and operating organizations capable of sustained innovation requires a playbook that demands a systemic process constructed around the following core steps:
• Listen broadly for ideas through vision, innovation and external networks. Listen to the customer. Listen to the front lines in your organization.
• Understand who your actual and potential customers are, what they want and need, what they will need and why those needs have not yet been met.
• Organize the innovation team to include those with a stake in the innovation, organize the innovation program and organize the resources and investments needed to address the problem.
• Create an environment and capability for innovation by giving the team the ability to fail. Create many alternative solutions by leveraging the cascaded innovation lifecycle.
• Experiment and learn from failure. Conduct many experiments in parallel, using prototyping and other iterative, feedback-driven techniques.
• Listen again to the customer to help them imagine. Use prototypes to elicit feedback. Listen to customer acceptance/buying criteria. Listen to what could go wrong, but don’t let the devil’s advocate take control.
• Design the concepts to address customer-centric values, such as cost, intuitive use, ease of change and sense of enhancement.
• Implement the final go/no-go decision. Consolidate or eliminate competing alternatives to a manageable number. Send concepts back for reinvention, retesting or redesign. Implement the second stage of the innovation lifecycle: manifestation.
Get out of the Garage
Sure, some people work better alone. But most people are more prolific as part of a team or extended community of ideas and talents that fosters some of the world’s most important inventions. Garage inventors can’t possibly compete with myriad breakthroughs born from sustained, systemic innovation. The first single chip microprocessor publicly introduced by Intel in 1971, the first car safety air bags offered in the 1973 model Chevrolet and the depression game changer drug Prozac in 1988, are all considered great innovations developed and perfected by teams, not individuals. Even Oppenheimer needed the Manhattan Project team to create the atomic bomb. The true test of sustained innovation isn’t the invention itself, but the ultimate and ongoing benefit produced by the innovation for the business.
Discipline and innovation are not opposites, but complements. Establishing an innovation culture consumes a great deal of organizational energy in overcoming the forces of inertia and entropy. But once an idea has been successfully commercialized, respected champions emerge to drive new sources of the energy, creativity, discipline and resources that sustain and grow an enduring culture of innovation. Successful organizations manage innovation from concept to commercialization so that good ideas not only get created, but also continually find their way into the products and services portfolio
For many, innovation has become synonymous with small, agile, and social.
But there’s a quiet revolution happening in corporate America. Big companies are applying startup strategies and tools to jump-start innovation. It’s not about pontificating on the innovation process. It’s about being lean, focused, and maniacally strategic.
• Intuit organizes multi-day “lean start-ins” that gather “intrapreneurs” together from across the company to teach them how to apply rapid experimentation to create new products, services, and business models.
• Kimberly-Clark promotes one-day “expert acceleration sessions” that bring hand-picked outside “thought leaders” face to face with business teams to bust mental models and create game-changing strategies.
• Whirlpool uses a network of innovation mentors (also called i-mentors), who are loaded with innovation tools and guidance to help business teams focused on challenging market “orthodoxies.”
Big companies that behave like small startups focus on two things. First, they accelerate the speed of innovation, just like a Silicon Valley incubator. Second, they give internal businesses and teams an outside-in perspective, similar to the type of reality-checking that comes from advisory boards or venture capitalists.
Intuit’s innovation success is tied to a value for finding and savoring customer surprises--unexpected insights about customer needs, problems, and desired experiences that can’t be anticipated or pre-defined. That’s why the company does customer “follow-me-homes,” where everyone from CEO to engineers and marketers immerse themselves in the customer’s natural environment to see how things are working (or not) in the real world.
Kimberly-Clark knows that insular thinking is the death knell of teams and organizations. That’s why they work with their businesses to define specific problems and opportunities that need a jolt of external insight. They then recruit a small group of “thought leaders” from other companies, universities, startups, or think-tanks to join a collaborative innovation session for a day to lend their expertise. These deep dives deliver strategic and practical insight that would otherwise take months to gather through traditional research.
Big innovations don’t necessarily have to begin by taking big risks or making bet-the-farm investments. Intuit, for example, provides guidance to its “intrepreneurial” teams that they should use the “lean startup” model. It’s not about waiting around for senior leadership to sponsor and fund the next big idea but rather rapidly testing ideas to identify the things teams can do to have the biggest impact.
4. Adapt and Innovate
Speed and agility come from realizing we don’t have to invent everything ourselves--either the approach or the innovation itself. When going after breakthroughs, it’s essential to dismiss the “not invented here” stigma, as Apple learned the hard way with its foray into mobile maps. There’s no shortage of tools and templates out there. The strategy is to use the best--like the one-page Business Model Generation tool (from the book with the same name)--and then adapt it or combine it with other approaches that work within the specific company context. Same goes for the innovation itself. The most innovative companies don’t always wait to build a new technology themselves--they look outside, find what exists, and then go from there.
These big-company strategies aren’t about ivory-tower innovation departments, wacky hats, or Kumbaya creativity. They’re focused on pushing entrepreneurial thinking and practices into the places they’re needed the most--inside established businesses. And their explicit objective isn’t about reaching that elusive holy grail of creating a “culture of innovation” (though it can be the by-product of these efforts). Their strategies combine strategic thinking with the practical tools required for driving forward new products, services, and strategies, all focused first and foremost on leapfrogging to the next big thing.
Here’s what you probably know about Bain Capital, the private equity company cofounded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 1984: It buys up shares of companies like KB Toys and Dunkin’ Donuts, offering sweet bonuses to board members and loading the company up with debt in order to finance “dividend recapitalizations.”
Now here’s what you probably don’t know: If you’re a fan of receiving quick shipments from Amazon, use Apple’s iCloud to store your favorite songs, or recently updated your LinkedIn profile, you’ve boosted the bottom line of Bain Capital.
Let’s connect the dots.
How do you think that box from Amazon gets outside your front door just 48 hours after you place an order--with free shipping, to boot? You’ve got Massachusetts-based Kiva Systems to thank for that, and Kiva Systems has Bain Capital Ventures to thank for most of the seed money that got it off the ground. Kiva created a fulfillment model based on burly, but compact, orange robots that shuttle stacks of inventory around massive warehouses.
If you’ve recently purchased the iPhone 5 or upgraded your legacy device to iOS 6, you’re taking advantage of the software’s cloud-based music management properties developed by Lala, a company backed by BCV that was acquired by Apple (another MIC--you seeing the trend here?) in 2009. BCV led multiple financing pushes, including the Series A round in January 2005, that helped move the company’s business strategy from CD-swapping to cloud-based uploading and licensing of songs. Apple acquired the company for $80 million in December 2009 after bidding against Google.
Over half of the $103 million in venture funding LinkedIn raised from 2003 until its IPO in 2011 came in 2008 when Bain Capital Ventures and three other companies made a Series D investment. That round of funding helped the business networking service expand by nearly a factor of 10--from just over 100 employees to 1,000, and from 17 million members to 100 million.
Bain Capital Ventures has over 100 companies in its portfolio, and each has its own story. But Bain’s work with Kiva Systems from 2004-2012 seems standard enough to be educational. And it resulted in Kiva being purchased by Amazon in March for $775 million.
Bain has been involved in a lot of successful companies, it depends on how you measure it before rattling off BCV connections with LinkedIn, Doubleclick, Liberty Dialysis, and SolarWinds. (There’s Tennis Channel, Vonage, Princeton Review, Minute Clinic, and others, too.)
But Bain were investors pre-revenue, and they were the largest shareholder, and … the absolute return on dollars was significant.The limited partners and folks at Bain were thrilled about it, it was a very good outcome and an outstanding outcome for the team.
After a few years, what some potential investors saw as a $100 million risk started generating cash with just a third of that investment. Eventually it became an appealing target for Amazon.
This is all proof that Mitt can get this country back on it's feet.
Mobile advertising is becoming more popular as people use mobile devices to access websites, shop and make purchases. For business owners, now can be a good time to start experimenting with mobile advertising -- especially while it's still highly affordable.
If you're on the fence about whether advertising on mobile might be right for you, consider some new research from Williamsburg, Va.-based research firm Borrell Associates: nearly half of small-business owners are somewhat or very likely to purchase mobile advertising in the next year, while more than one in four expect to increase mobile ad spending.
How can you figure out how mobile advertising might best benefit your business?
1. Determine where your customers are. Most mobile ad networks allow geo-targeting so that only mobile users in a defined area see the ads. But narrow targeting to only a zip code or two will likely yield few prospects and little new business.
Mobile ads offer the best return on investment for businesses that can serve clients who are located anywhere, or at least throughout a major metropolitan area. A jewelry designer who ships anywhere or a motel owner near a popular tourist destination might be a great match for mobile advertising. But a massage therapist who relies mainly on local customers probably should spend her ad dollars elsewhere for now.
In a couple of years, however, that may change as technologies improve and mobile users begin to outpace computer users in conducting local internet searches.
2. Define your conversion points. If you develop a mobile advertising strategy, you not only want to tell mobile users your business exists, but also encourage them to take action.
What can people do on their smartphones or tablets that can help your business? Plenty. They can call or email you, submit their contact information via an online form, make an appointment or reservation, follow you on social media, sign up for your email newsletter or text alerts, register for your events, or buy something from you online.
These actions are measurable "conversion points." Tracking your conversion rate (number of mobile site visitors divided by the number of actions taken) is how you'll discover which kinds of mobile ads work best.
3. Build a mobile landing page. Your existing website, even if it's mobile friendly, might not be the most effective destination for your mobile ad. You need a useful landing page designed to convert mobile visitors into customers.
Your mobile landing page should link to your main website, of course. But it's even more important that it display your address on a map, list your phone number and hours, indicate the region you serve, and offer features, such as online appointment scheduling, that are directly relevant to the pitch you made in your mobile ad.
If you can build a mobile landing page in your existing website platform, that's great. If not, your mobile landing page doesn't need to be part of your main site.
You can build a simple mobile landing page and access analytics data about traffic to the page and users' activity on it. DudeMobile also offers free mobile landing pages with analytics. You may want to set up more than one mobile landing page if you're running multiple campaigns targeting different market segments or making different pitches or offers.
4. Explore other mobile ad networks. You'll need to supply a mobile banner ad for other networks, most of which deliver ads to apps and some mobile websites.
The cost, reach, targeting and other features of these networks vary widely. Most allow you to specify your maximum daily spend. The MobiThinking "Guide to Mobile Advertising Networks offers useful overviews of the different types of networks and detailed reviews.
The 2012 American election season is humming, Dem and Republican party activists have been pulling out all the stops for November. These days, cutting-edge software packages are borrowing techniques from the worlds of marketing and retail to let election campaigns analyze the daily lives of voters in minute detail. A series of new products have recently been released that make microtargeted junk mail--and swaying voters--as easy as cake. Some products are aimed squarely at Republicans; others at Democrats. Other products are party-agnostic and designed for whichever campaign will pay the right among of green. Either way, it's big business.
VoterMapping.com is one of the most interesting party-agnostic campaign tools out there. A product of voter data clearinghouse Labels and Lists, VoterMapping.com is a web-based, subscription product that allows campaigns to instantly browse household-by-household voter data via the Bing Maps API. Consultants, pollsters, and others can view millions of data points (purchased separately from Labels and Lists or third parties) in real time. Voter registration data is included; using the website, users can instantly see the names and ages of residents, voting habits, likely ethnicity, and other data points in real time across homes, neighborhoods, and voting districts without any lag or downtime while data processes.
“The combination of the most accurately processed voter data available and the speed of the geo-spatial visualization gives users unprecedented analytical power. It gives consultants the ability to micro-target in minutes and actually see the results instead of combing through pages and pages of spreadsheets. No other technology can pan through millions of voters at the speeds VoterMapping.com does,” Labels and Lists'.
Another major political tech provider to both Democrats and Republicans is the partnership of Aristotle and Intermarkets, who offer campaigns software packages for fundraising, advertising placement, and political microtargeting. Although Intermarkets comes from a decidedly conservative and Republican neighborhood--their ad network is centered around right-wing stalwarts such as the Drudge Report, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin—they have also been aggressively offering their services to Democratic campaigns. Intermarkets has separate marketing teams targeting Democratic and Republican campaigns; chief marketing officer Michael Loy told industry publication Campaigns and Elections that “I think our approach is similar to Google or Facebook […] We take a nonpartisan approach to technology, but there are partisan aspects to the staffing we’ve developed. It does allow our reps on the ground to interact with clients at a partisan level.”
While Intermarkets is an example of a GOP-connected firm that's targeting Democratic candidates, NationBuilder has Democratic roots, but has been pitching their voter-engagement platform to Republican campaigns. The service, which makes its profits through a subscription-fee base that's supplemented by high-cost email and SMS text message blast fees, pitches to candidates from both major parties. Although the company's meat-and-potato clients are labor unions and Democratic campaigns, Mashable reported in July that NationBuilder signed an exclusive contract with the Republican State Leadership Committee, which bought NationBuilder's services to approximately 7500 Republican candidates for state office nationwide.
Other political software firms instead find it useful to be expressly partisan. NGP VAN specializes in fundraising tools for Democratic campaigns, and newcomers DSPolitical are the self-proclaimed “home of the political cookie.” DSPolitical helps Democratic campaigns offer internet users microtargeted political advertisements based on their web surfing habits.
Meanwhile, the right-wing sibling team of Charles and David Koch are allegedly bankrolling an ambitious conservative political technology project called Themis. Themis, which has no website, was the subject of a recent Reuters article, which claims the firm is working on high-end data modeling for Republican campaigns. Another Republican-leaning technology firm, i-360, specializes in data analysis for right-wing campaigns.
The Republican National Committee itself is also directly involved in election tech. In August 2011, the RNC established Data Trust, another website-lacking project, to manage their voter database. Data Trust is overseen by former RNC officials to finetune voter outreach effort through the kind of marketing analytics usually used by big box and online retailers.
The future is already here--it’s just not evenly distributed perfectly captures the increasing divide between the social sector and the rest of the world. The future is already here for the mainstream global economy, built on open data, mobile and social connectivity, and the wisdom of crowds. The social sector, by contrast, is showing few signs of the future, continuing to operate in an increasingly outdated paradigm that places a premium on control; a reliance on experts and one-way communication flows; and exists purely in the physical world.
The orientation of most of the social sector is akin to that of a crew team during a race--furiously rowing to reach its goal, all the while with its back to the future. In today’s environment, with even greater demands on already stretched budgets, high-performing, public-purpose organizations should be asking themselves how these five transformational forces--forces that should be driving the social sector into the future but aren’t--can change the way they work.
As the central vehicle that individuals--regardless of race, income, and age--use for information, social connectivity, and more, the mobile phone has become a platform for infinite innovation. Because of the mobile device, Information is now portable, participatory, and personal.
Scores of businesses are fully aware of the transformative nature of this tool and are innovating with it. Over 600,000 apps have been developed in the last three years. They have been downloaded 10.9 billion times. If Instagram can attract 80 million users who share 4 billion photos, why aren’t we seeing more creative uses of these technologies to tackle unemployment, increase government accountability, and improve the scope of social services?
Ushahidi--an open-source software platform that lets users “crowdmap” information in real time via text messages--is an example of what is possible when mobile phones are deployed for social change. Ushahidi was developed in Kenya in 2008 to map reports of post-election violence when almost all other media was down, and it has since been deployed around the world for disaster relief, election monitoring, and documenting human rights and environmental violations.
Today, there is a new 'social operating system’ that is in stark contrast to the one that was built around geography and small tight-knit groups. People--connected by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and online discussion forums--are now part of broad, loose, and complex networks that readily share information and mobilize.
We have seen how these technologies can be used to drive social movements and democratize the creation and dissemination of information, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. And the proliferation of the largely online sharing economy is creating new marketplaces that connect people to everything from transportation (Zipcar) to accommodation (AirBnB). The private sector is recognizing that the future requires them to rewire their business models to account for these shifts in how people buy, share, and communicate. Why aren’t these technologies being used to better connect people to child care, social services, and jobs in new ways?
From the Twittersphere to the wealth of available government data, more data is being created and harnessed today than ever before. The great promise of Big Data is that it can become “humanity’s dashboard" providing us with better ways of understanding ourselves and determining where our resources should be concentrated to make the biggest difference.
Today, businesses spend more than $5 billion on consultants to help them harness Big Data’s power to better understand their customers, dynamically alter pricing based on real-time demand, and even change their business models.
The social sector’s use of Big Data is nascent. There is great promise in civic tech, or the building of apps based on public data. This movement has resulted in real-time bus schedules and virtual land-use planning. However, one can imagine many more transformational applications that could benefit low-income people, from altering the relationship between police and neighborhoods to enabling online enrollment for public benefits.
Big Data is not only relevant to municipal governments--social sector organizations can also leverage it to enable more accurate impact evaluation, identify needs of target populations, and understand possibilities for new business models to serve low-income communities.
Historically, social change organizations in America have been slow to embrace technology, often citing cost as an excuse. Yet across the developing world, the concept of "frugal innovation" is being applied to create lean solutions that deliver improved or previously non-existent services by stripping down products to the level of basic need and identifying imaginative ways of using old technology.
Companies big and small are taking note of the opportunity to provide affordable goods and services to the poor and recognize frugal innovation as the way to do it. In India, this led to the $2,000 Tata Nano car. And through cheap, stripped down mobile phones, financial services have been extended to previously unbanked populations. For example, 70% of financial transactions in Kenya are now handled by M-PESA, a mobile money platform.
Not surprisingly, the conversation about frugal innovation is largely focused on the developing world. Yet wouldn’t the same principles be valuable in the United States, where we continue to struggle with a digital divide, unaffordable health care, and inefficient service delivery?
The business community has realized that going it alone in a hyperconnected, globalized economy is counter-productive. Today’s challenges are too interconnected and complex for any one organization or sector to address on its own.
Two key results of this new way of working are not in the DNA of the social sector but need to be: letting go of information and the invention of new collaborative problem-solving mechanisms to achieve larger goals.
Today, organizations are using crowdsourcing platforms to leverage a distributed virtual labor pool. InnoCentive, a platform created by Eli Lilly to tap into the wisdom of customers, partners, and others, is a great example of how the business community is giving up what was long considered proprietary information in order to solve problems.
Letting go of information is also about recognizing the importance of being part of a problem-solving network. In today’s world, influential members of those networks must harness technology to share ideas, get real-time feedback, and build collective knowledge.
The longer it takes for the future to come to the social sector, the greater the gap will grow between wealthy and poor communities. Billions of venture capital dollars and thousands of organizations are working in the mainstream global economy to profit from the future every day. The same level of commitment from public and private organizations committed to a more just society is needed now more than ever.
The way is to disrupt your industry is to attune your ear to what people (i.e., your potential customers) are saying. Countless innovation books underscore the importance of studying context and behavior to unlock untapped market potential. And they’re right. Identifying market norms and untested constraints, situating products and services in the broad landscape of the customer’s day-to-day life, and understanding the triggers, motivations, and influences on people’s behavior all contribute strongly to an organization’s ability to innovate.
Not to say that creating a disruptive product is easy. Even the most innovative companies struggle to identify disruptive innovations more than once or twice. But if you want to completely shake up an industry, the best approach is to develop a deep insight into some group of people--customers or non-customers, buyers or influencers.
Even though we’re looking to create something unconventional, our current customers speak to our core strengths. They’re also typically the most accessible and usually the most friendly. Look to understand this group’s activity and the motivations for their behavior. Pay attention to how your product or service fits into their day-to-day activities. And look for the workarounds they’ve put in place to integrate your product/service into their lives. Addressing the cause of these workarounds might help to unlock a lot of value.
What is your customer trying to achieve? When you look at your customers’ behavior, you may find opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise seen.
The challenge for the designer is to find them, even though people tend not to mention them or even notice them. They show up as patterns: repeated comments and observations, often off-hand. The customer simply accepts them as part of the inherent frustration of the activity.
Designing in concert with the behaviors of your customers and the context within which their activities take place leads to opportunities for unconventional thinking and disruptive innovation. But that often requires looking beyond the obvious and staring directly into the blind spots of our accepted norms. By understanding what drives behavior and why, and working with business owners to challenge conventions, interaction designers can continue to have an enormous impact.
In basements, garages, startup spaces, and university laboratories, DIY researchers, scientists, programmers, and neurologists are collaborating on brain interfaces that can control video games with human thoughts. They’re growing flesh that’s augmented with transistors and implanting Bluetooth sensors under their own living skin to send vital signs to mobile phones. They’re growing in-vitro edible steaks and leather without using living beings. They’re even helping severely disabled individuals speak using only their brainwaves. And most of them still consider this a hobby.
The grinders (DIY cybernetics enthusiasts) and their comrades in arms--biohackers working on improving human source code, quantified self enthusiasts who arm themselves with constant bodily data feeds, and independent DIY biotechnology enthusiasts--are moonlighting for now in basements, shared spaces, and makeshift labs. But they’re ultimately aiming to change the world. Think of how bionic legs like those belonging to Oscar Pistorius and cochlear implants that let the deaf hear have changed everyday life for so many people. Then multiply that by a million. A million people. And millions of dollars.
Not only has the new wave of do-it-yourself (DIY) cybernetics moved well beyond science fiction, it’s going to cause a business boom in the not-too-distant future.
West Coast biohackers and grinders were the pioneers of this tech-driven, California brand of utopianism. They’ve taken a big tent approach to their goal of hacking humanity: Paleo diets and meditation are just as likely to figure into things as cybernetic finger implants or controlling computer apps with brainwaves. For biohackers everywhere, augmentation of humanity itself--whether through technology or more traditional methods--is the primary goal. Common conversations points include DIY cyborgs, the quantified self and diet- and meditation- based improvement movements.
But a growing community on the East Coast--in greater New York, Boston, and Pittsburg--is synthesizing Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial DNA for it's unique innovation model. Experimentation and science here is not only an exercise in advancing humanity through tech but is often is applied toward creating viable cybernetic products for the market.
In New York City, biohackers are united by the extremely active Biohackers NYC Meetup group and several startups, incubators, and workspaces scattered across the outer boroughs.
Just a few hours up I-95 at Harvard University, researchers have created the world's first cyborg flesh. They have successfully created rat flesh that is seamlessly melded with a network of wires and transistors that monitor the individual behavior of each cell. Harvard's groundbreaking research integrated electrically active scaffolds into rat cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells. Incredibly small wires and transistors were embedded in scaffolding made with collagen and wires; using the cybernetic tissue, researchers could keep track of the minute behavior of cells during drug reactions. Harvard's experiment is far more than just the weird science of creating cybernetic rats, though. In the future, projects built on this technology could be used to do away with animal or human testing for drugs, and to create cybernetic implants to repair damaged hearts.
Another project, the Heleed, is a cybernetic medical tracking device. Users implant the Bic lighter-sized device in their body, which then automatically sends biomedical information to the internet via a Bluetooth interface. The strictly experimental Heleed can also be programmed to display health warnings--sent to the recipient via an Android app--on the user's skin with LED lights.
One of the biggest boom areas for the DIY cybernetics community is controlling software and applications with brain waves. Crucially, it is the one technology for which we currently have robust development tools and a price point which allows hobbyists to easily experiment. Brain-computer interfaces are increasingly commonplace; in their most common commercial incarnation, users control computer software--most frequently games or simple applications--with brainwave-reading electrodes.
There is an undeniable science fiction factor to the idea of DIY cybernetics such as the robotic
exoskeleton for paraplegics. However, one important thing has to be remembered: Man and machine have been merging for a long time. Cochlear implants and bionic legs are just the latest in a long long of human augmentation that ranges from pacemakers to eyeglasses.
These technologies aren’t just for the future either; they’re being monetized and put to market on a mass scale today. Austrian firm g.tec released a product for patients with motor disabilities that lets them spell words using their brainwaves. Using the product, users who have severe difficulty communicating otherwise can attain a spelling rate of 5 to 10 letters per minute.
20 or 30 years from now, we’ll likely look back on the biohacker and grinder communities like we currently look back on Silicon Valley, Stanford or Harvard when dedicated hobbyists and small business people built software and computers in garages and small offices and founded companies such as Apple and Google.
A trend that I have noticed is that nearly every book I’d seen in the last year, never say what they’re about. Almost as a rule, hardcover books (and increasingly e-books) favor laudatory blurbs over descriptions--opting for short quotes from important authors, CEOs, or media outlets to make their case.
Wouldn’t it be better to use that space to describe the contents of the book? Isn’t that what customers would want? Why bury the content on the inside?
I was missing a fundamental change that has occurred in the publishing business, particularly for authors. Faced with declining sales and the disappearance of book retailers like Borders, authors have diversified their income streams, and many make substantially more money through new business generated by a book, rather than from it.
Today, authors are in the idea-making business, not the book business. In short, this means that publishing a book is less about sales and much more about creating a brand. The real customers of books are no longer just readers but now include speaking agents, CEOs and startups.
For an author looking to break into this market, it wouldn’t be about courting critics or seeking award nominations. Rather, their book needs to prove that they are an interesting or with relevant ideas.
Many authors I spoke with were discovering similar niches. For instance, in Silicon Valley, authors have parlayed books into gigs as advisors to startups that need their expertise in certain areas. The author takes a small equity stake in the company in exchange for this advice.
Books and articles for writers of the 21st century have become billboards for the messengers. This equation profoundly changes the publishing game, from the way books are designed to the way they are written--and who writes them.
It also explains why books have blurbs instead of descriptions. It’s far better to brand a book with names like Peter Thiel, Seth Godin, or Malcolm Gladwell via positive blurbs than with a rousing or intriguing summary.
Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility signals.
When Thomas Watson Jr. told Wharton students that good design is good business, the idea seemed quixotic, silly even. To many people, design still meant the superficial polish of nicer homes and cleaner graphics. But Watson had earned the right to his beliefs. The recently retired IBM CEO was a business oracle, having grown the company tenfold during his tenure by transforming its signature product line from cash registers to computer mainframes. Along the way, the perception of IBM had changed irrevocably. Once rooted in the grime of cogs and springs, they had become the face of a new computer age. And as IBM transformed, it became synonymous with the rise of modernism. Logos and buildings, nice as they were, weren’t central to how IBM actually made money--not compared with the engineers who were figuring out how to build ever more powerful mainframes. Back then, design was marketing by another name. The design and business symbiosis that Watson was advocating at the time was more prophecy than reality.
Only now, 19 years after his death in 1993, is Watson being proved right. Innovation today is inextricably linked with design--and design has become a decisive advantage in countless industries, not to mention a crucial tool to ward off commoditization. Companies singing the design gospel range from Comcast to Pinterest to Starbucks. You will see dozens of them in the pages that follow. But why now? What makes this moment different?
Apple’s rise offers a few important lessons about today’s connection between design and business. The easiest is that design allows you to stoke consumer lust--and demand higher prices as a result. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who owns a $600 iPhone, but Apple’s model suggests some harder-to-digest lessons. One is the value of thinking of product systems rather than solely products. An instructive example comes from Frog, the design consultancy that fashioned the case for the legendary Apple IIc. Today, one of its marquee clients is GE. You might wonder what design can possibly have to do with the success of a jet engine or an MRI machine. But hospitals and power plants are now linking their machines into ecosystems. And well-designed iPad apps are the simplest way to manage them. Our hypothesis is that we can build a better solution. Designers are the ones best situated to figure out how a kit of parts can become something more--they’re the ones who can figure out the human interface for a vast chain. If they do their job right, the result--a working ecosystem--is a far better platform for innovation than an isolated product. Just think about Apple and how its products have expanded from iMacs to iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and iPads, all linked via its iCloud.
Innovation usually cycles between periods of raw, technical inventiveness and the finer task of packaging it for mass adoption. In personal tech, for example, we’re in an integration phase that comes on the heels of fundamental advances such as the Internet and mobile computing. With back-end magic becoming a cheap utility, user interfaces are now a startup’s best chance to break out.
Consider Bump, an app that lets users swap data between phones simply by bumping them together. In our app economy, everything has changed. Bump had 1 million users before it spent $4,000. It didn’t need infrastructure, thanks to Amazon’s server-hosting service; it didn’t need advertising because of social media; and the App Store solved any distribution problem. Development was a breeze, too, because of Apple’s software developer’s kit. "These are all things that used to cost millions.
Although these dynamics seem specific to the tech business, they’re analogous to what happens in any maturing industry. The back-end nuts and bolts eventually fade as a competitive advantage: Your manufacturing prowess, once a reliable bulwark, moves to China; your distribution channels, once the best, are now beaten by the Internet. When that happens, how can you sell anything--from a new thermostat to a new passenger plane--without fundamental design improvements that prove their worth to consumers with every use? And whom do you trust to cultivate that relationship between your product and your customer? An engineer? Or a designer? Silicon Valley is currently engaged in an all-out talent war over designers
"Product guys," rather than engineers, steer many of the startups that draw the greatest buzz. "The market for engineers is always white-hot. But for designers, it’s hotter,"
When designers lack influence, superb products become almost impossible. Good designs seldom stay good for very long if they must navigate a gauntlet of corporate approval. That’s because the design process is as much reductive as anything else--figuring what can be simplified and taken out. Corporate approvals are usually about adding things on to appease internal overseers. When something has been approved by everyone, it may be loved by none. Just look at what happened to Microsoft in the 2000s and how only now is it trying to redefine itself by building a more design-driven culture. That culture spawned Windows 8, whose design intent has remained remarkably pure from beginning to end.
The main question remaining for VCs and old-line companies alike is whether design can deliver a sustainable edge. There’s reason to think that it can. Unlike a few more features or marginal increases in computing speed, a better user experience can mean everything. VCs are starting to see that having designer founders pays off in the long run. A reliance on design-driven innovation poses a challenge for the companies that live by it: You can’t easily patent how something looks, or the feel of a user interface. Features, subtleties, and finishes spawn imitators with unprecedented speed. That means that design-led companies must innovate constantly to maintain their edge.
Microsoft, having stagnated as Apple turned the vision of perfectly integrated software and hardware into an ocean of cash, now has its own road map in place, aimed squarely at the evolving future of mobile computing. The central plank of that strategy is a radical redesign of Windows 8, built for the touch-screen revolution and ready to power Microsoft’s first major foray into hardware, the Surface tablet. For Microsoft, the question is, how intuitive will users find Windows 8? Natural enough that it won’t suffer the disastrous fate of Vista? Strong enough to withstand the critiques that inevitably follow from rethinking one of the most heavily used products on the planet?Design isn’t being looked at as a solution to only business problems. Its practitioners are now taking up roles that used to be dominated by not-for-profits and governments, seeking new ways to raise the fortunes of the developing world.
Once a brand has been established, one option for growth is to stretch itself into different categories. This usually takes the form of extensions--new, spinoff products that seem like natural outgrowths of what’s come before. That’s a tricky business, but to simplify matters, companies could benefit by asking themselves this: "What’s the business of my brand?"
By business, I mean the strategic dimension of your brand that consumers recognize and consider an advantage over other brands. It’s what we call a brand’s extendable equity, and it’s the foundation for finding brand extension success.
But, first we need to take a step back. Many brand extensions fail simply because the philosophy of brand extension is not well understood or implemented correctly.
In essence, a winning brand extension:
So, you can’t just introduce a new variety of the same product; that would be a line extension. It has to be an original product that creates new competition and attracts new consumers. A new flavor of Special K Cereal is a line extension; Special K Crackers is a brand extension.
Successful brand extensions hinge on consumers already knowing your brand’s name. Your neighborhood coffee shop has no equity to extend into K-Cups; Starbucks, however, does.
Something that is concrete or easily communicated can be extended to the new category and there must be a strong reason why a consumer will prefer it over their current brand. Bic’s extendable equity is disposability. They had leverage when it came to disposable razors. Bic perfume, not so much.
In a study conducted by my company Parham Santana, and Dr. Edward M. Tauber, we examined more than 500 brand extensions to discover 10 sure ways a brand can successfully extend. Here, we illustrate five using familiar brands with clearly defined extendable equities.
Under this category, brands offer products that are frequently used alongside with the parent brand. For instance, is Duracell in the battery business, or in the business of long-lasting power? By defining its extendable equity as durability, Duracell has brought to market a line of Duracell PowerMats, a portable cordless charging system that uses "inductive energy transfer" to charge all your mobile devices.
Take a component, flavor, ingredient, scent, etc., that is closely associated with the brand and create a different product where this element makes sense.
Is Old Bay in the seasoning and spice business, or the business of bold fun flavors? By defining its extendable equity as its flavor, Old Bay has created a whole new category of business with a line of frozen crab cakes packed with the distinctive Old Bay seasoning.
You can also change the form of an existing product by modifying its method of delivery, preservation, store placement, or ingredient profile.Take Barilla, which, by defining its extendable equity as “the taste of Italy,” has launched a line of microwavable meals. Barilla is still the brand we love and trust; it just now has a quick-serve solution.
To reverse the fortunes of a brand that has accumulated negative perceptions, incorporate modifier words that repurpose those unfavorables or enhance the applicability of the product to a new category. Clorox may essentially be known for germ-killing but foul-smelling bleach, but recently it announced a line of scented cleaning products called Clorox Fraganzia, which modifies the perception of Clorox and bleach to be both tough and fragrant for a new brand extension and customer base.
Your brand, too, represents many dimensions, and each one represents a unique strategic possibility. These dimensions might include service, expertise, benefits, or ingredients. Your extendable equity might relate to any one of those dimensions. But have you defined your extendable equity and the business of your brand?
The brands above have. They are proceeding from a clear and narrowly defined extendable equity. Durability. Bold Flavor. Really Dirty. Taste of Italy. Bleach. Once defined, they’ve utilized classic brand-extension techniques to find logical new categories of business where they enjoy a competitive advantage. All these brands surround the new proposition with their proprietary credentials, technology, and ingredients to further “bullet proof” the new offering. That’s why they’re exciting and why, I think, they stand a good chance of succeeding. What do you think?
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