p.s. turning my data on to ‘fetch’ at 15 minute intervals instead of realtime push has made battery life bearable. And my DRMed apps started working again after some fiddling in the App Store.

I’ve been thinking about writing, conference presentations, etc. and realized that the articles, books, and talks that I enjoy the most have a rhythm that blends Concept, Story, and Method (Dave Gray might suggest Visual as a fourth tinker toy; I’m on the fence there). So with those building blocks, then you can start to graph your own writing, sessions, or others’ and see how it looks - something like this:

Interviewed by Bloomberg TV, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley discusses how Procter & Gamble is accelerating their innovation investment during the current downturn in order to increase their growth and improve their market position.

So Adam Richardson and I had a chance to chat for about 45 minutes last month. Instead of waiting until I can edit it down or transcribe the conversation, here’s a link to the complete mp3 file. (39mb until I figure out better compression utility).

It was a fascinating conversation, and we covered a range of topics. Some highlights:

• Chatting about the strategy practice at frog. Differences between traditional strategy offering from McKinsey or Bain. The advantages of integrating strategy with a more holistic practice including industrial and interaction designers, engineers, and others.
• Discussion of Org 2.0 companies and how they are better able to take on innovation and create compelling experience-based products, services, and systems. If you’re in an Org 1.0 company, start with a skunk works.
• Dealing with the innovation surplus. Companies that have embraced innovation now have no shortage of fantastic ideas. Now the challenge is prioritization and execution.
• Core insights. Like core competencies, core insights emerge from the unique combination of experience, skills, information, and activities of your organization. Core insights are hard to duplicate in the market, and offer significant competitive advantages.
• Some thoughts on influencing innovation - how can aspiring innovators escape the gravity well of the status quo? If you’re not in a company that embraces innovation, what can you do? Adam comes back to skunk works as one way to build momentum. Look for much more on this topic at bplusd in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks Adam for the chance to chat!

So, I.D. magazine published this trolling article, and I can’t resist linking to Down with Innovation, precisely because it (unintentionally) makes so many of my points about business fluency for me.

I sympathize that design thinking is getting a lot of attention the business press, leaving design doing without the love it deserves. But this sort of reaction is counterproductive. We’re here to co-opt innovation, not throw a tantrum because we aren’t understood. From the article:

"The problem that designers face now is the same problem they have faced all along: how to communicate with clients who lack a basic grounding in the visual arts and don’t seem to think it matters. Businesspeople don’t need to become designers. They need to learn that there are types of awareness and understanding expressed through visual form…"

The problem isn’t business people who don’t care. That’s just juvenile abdication. The real problem is designers who don’t care enough about business to understand how to communicate the value of their work. That’s why business fluency is so important. Until designers get there, complaining about business not getting it is just venting. Instead we could spend our time inventing better ways to work with business, even if that means embracing innovation and design thinking.
thanks Black Belt Jones for the link

When Bruce Nussbaum called out the iPhone platform as a pillar to fight recession, and then defended his selection by pointing to Kleiner Perkin’s iFund, he committed a classic error in assessing innovation opportunity: he focused on the elephant, and overlooked the ant.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to visit with an elephant, they are incredible animals. Beyond their sheer mass and unique look, elephants are smart and have complex social lives. And yet, with a global population under a million, their environmental impact is dwarfed by the global contribution of the lowly ant.

Though we rarely pay attention, ants are pretty amazing too. Taking advantage of their size, ants can lift 10-20 times their body mass, and have complex distributed social structures and behavior. Most importantly, ants are almost everywhere. They make up 15-20% of terrestrial animal biomass, and represent an extraordinary volume of ecological activity around the entire planet.

Looking at the innovation landscape, the iPhone looks like a bull elephant charging towards your Land Rover. It’s big. It’s moving fast. It’s unique. It’s novel. And its global economic impact is dwarfed by more mundane, more distributed innovations in sectors like healthcare and environmental products and services.

Like comparing elephants and ants, this is simply a matter of scale. Healthcare in the US is topping 2.25 trillion dollars annually. If you look at the things that green technology touches (food, energy, transport, building, communications, manufacturing, etc. etc.) the scale is similar. As I said before, that’s a heck of a lot of iPhones. In the Serengeti of Silicon Valley, there might even be the market penetration to give the illusion that the iPhone, like the elephant, rules the ecosystem. But that’s just an illusion - for every iPhone, there’s a user who consumes healthcare services and carries a deeply unsustainable footprint.

No one is arguing that the iPhone isn’t significant. It is, and it’s a leading indicator for a sea change in interaction design, from mobile to multitouch. It just pales in comparison to the broader sectors that Nussbaum also singled out for innovation investment. That’s the objection, and focusing on the iPhone might make for good copy, even good VC, but it’s poor economic policy.

Make no mistake - healthcare and the environment are the ants of the innovation landscape. If we’re going to innovate our way out of recession, that’s where to invest.

I like Bruce Nussbaum a lot. He’s a huge proponent of business and design, and I think that he’s done a lot to get corporate America to recognize the value of innovation and design (thinking and doing). Maybe because I admire his efforts so much, I have a hard time when he calls out the iPhone as one of the key platforms for escaping from recession. More particularly, innovation based on the iPhone SDK is touted as comparable economic benefit to innovation in healthcare and in environmental technology (energy / water / building / manufacturing / food / waste). Really? Healthcare isn’t a 2.1 billion dollar industry - it’s a 2.1 trillion dollar industry…that’s a heck of a lot of iPhones.

I agree that innovation investment is our best hope for combating economic slowdown, but innovation hype doesn’t help, it hurts.

iPhone and social media aside, it would be great to see investment in clean energy or in new healthcare models on par with the New Deal of the 1930s.

The triple play means providing customers with voice, video, and data (or phone, tv, and internet if you prefer). This week, I had a hands-on experience that made me shake my head.

I switched TV providers, from my local cable company to my local phone company, based on a sweetheart deal to move to digital TV from my stone age analog service. The deal comes as the phone company moves into video, offering freebies to carve share from the local cable monopoly.

The install went well, my shiny digital set top box joined my Tivo and other entertainment unit dwellers, and I embarked to explore the wonders of video on demand and granular control of channel selection.

My first foray into a VOD request crashed that shiny set top box.

My next foray into VOD revealed a decent top 10 list comparable to Blockbuster’s top 10 rentals - but selection evaporated after that. Oh, unless I liked ’steamy thrillers’. Softcore seemed to be about 40% of available titles. Given that a major motivation to upgrade was to improve our family experience, this didn’t bode well.

That same channel exploration revealed that there was no comparable community channel to the local cable company - not an issue for many, but for us we dedicate an entire weekend for the whole family twice a year to specialty programming rebroadcast through that local channel. Without it, we’ve got to bundle the whole family into the minivan.

My new DSL service came in at about 600kbps, a quarter of my middling cable bandwidth. A few calls with the phone company revealed that running TV over the same line as DSL bogged down internet bandwidth.

All was not well in convergence-land - instead of a triple play, we’ve got three strikes, and the phone company is out - we moved TV and landline over to the cable company, and free of the burden of video, DSL now flies at a decent 3300kbps. Looks like IPTV is too fat for decent performance on phone lines.

The real lesson is that telcos are still struggline to monetize existing infrastructure as legacy landline service fades in the face of VOIP and mobile adoption. IPTV may be part of that solution, but not at my house.

Two days ago I suggested that Bruce Nussbaum’s Davos panel was too focused on product, and didn’t recognize service and ecosystem innovation enough, particularly financial innovations that have led to our subprime woes.

With that in mind, I thought it was excellent that Bruce shared his observation yesterday that the biggest innovations discussed at Davos are financial innovations - the ones that have gone sideways to create the current crisis in the US economy.

Tim Brown suggests that this comes from poor innovation practice - Wall Street didn’t prototype these loans. I’m not sure that’s the reason they led to the current situation - a friend who was a VP at Wachovia flagged these loans as extremely high risk 5 year ago. Loans like this were initially developed for wealthy investors with a deep understanding of the inherent risk. As such, they’re useful financial instruments in certain situations. But like other innovations, offering something developed for one audience to another just doesn’t always go the way you wanted it.

Bruce Nussbaum and various innovation luminaries will be offering a panel at Davos this year discussing the best innovations of 2007. Sadly, the conversation seems to be focused on products (with a couple exceptions).

I would suggest that ecosystems and platforms point to the best innovations in 2007, or any given year…

• Amazon had a big year in innovation:
  • Led the charge to DRM-free music downloads (shifting the online music ecosystem that is dominated by Apple and setting the stage for a major re-thinking of intellectual property protection).
  • As picked by Larry Keeley, Kindle - which may have some challenges building share given American’s overall apathy to reading, but is aimed at creating a new market. Sadly DRM hobbled and locked down to the point that it may not make the leap to becoming a platform.
  • Amazon’s Web Services stack rounded out in 2007 with all the bits and pieces to run an entire system in the cloud.
• Much less covered by the TechCrunches of the world, DayJet gained traction providing private plane convenience for business air travel at prices competitive to major airlines (because not everyone has a Halo). DayJets mesh network model for air travel has the potential to disrupt regional hub-and-spoke carriers. I particularly like their Time Value Pricing transparency vs. the pricing voodoo of traditional airlines.
• It’s in the focus on the product over the platform that may trip up the OLPC initiative, though that remains to be seen. Designing the educational ecosystem that integrates XO laptops is a colossal challenge and opportunity.

Finally, the biggest (though far from best) innovation story of 2007 isn’t about technology, it’s about finance. Subprime loans and repackaged paper were deep innovations in finance that have had vast unintended consequences. Let’s hope more positive innovation can salvage the economic outlook in 2008. What platforms or ecosystems do you see shifting and forming this year?