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Just thinking about current demands, and the halcyon days when I could take a look at the DUX 2003 conference site (where I chaired a panel session on constraints) and think that just the right thing to do was create this. Of course, a couple months later I went and started my own company, so my bandwidth for visual puns has dwindled.

I’ll be in Miami this week for the Information Architecture Summit. I’ll be teaching a day-long workshop on the Business of Experience: Building Buy-in So You Can Deliver Great Products and Services. During the main conference, I’m also talking about a model for designers to think about business in a more concrete, granular way to help practitioners target their efforts. Should be fun!

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.

We have dates for CanUX 2008. Our annual Canadian User Experience workshop will be held November 16-18, in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Looking forward to pulling the program together, with that blend of hands-on and big picture thinking that makes it a yearly personal highlight.

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.

Manuel Saez picks up on the Designer as CEO meme on the FC Blog. And positively, he doesn’t just focus on whether Jonathan Ive would be good for Apple - he looks at the bigger picture and asks if designers *in general* should sit in the C-suites. That’s an important distinction - it separates individual personalities from the overall question if design mindset and skillset can be harnessed to provide corporate leadership and vision.

So I just got off the phone with our Telus installer, who was able to walk me through the incantations needed to reconnect Shaw analog cable. Thanks Wade! So for now, we’ll stay with DSL and see how things work out.

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?