Category: innovation

Half Jeans, half anticellulite treatment

How do you separate your line of denims from the rest of the pack in the 21st century? By combining them with beauty products. Meet the anticellulite jeans, probably one of marketing’s most impressive achievement in a while. These will sell like hotcakes.

In the spring of 2013, Wrangler is launching a line called “Denim Spa Therapy for Legs.”  The spa component consists of anticellulite and moisturizing elements infused into denim [...].  With the added components of vitamin E, amino acids, and antioxidants,claims their denim reduces cellulite and stretch marks while increasing collagen production.  Gsus says its aloe vera component protects the skin from environmental pollutants, thus preventing premature aging.

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The robot suitcase

I want one, just to see people’s faces when I walk down the hall at the airport…

Can you imagine if such a product reaches mass adoption? Automated suitcases will collide with one another, some people will have 3-4 of them following, there will be interferences with luggages going after the wrong passenger. I hope the people writing the next James Bond take notice, there is a seriously funny spy film to be made ;)

Looking into the future

Here is a snapshot of one of a presentation I am giving 20-30 times a year, when people ask me to tell them what’s happening in the world of innovation. In this August 2012 version, I explore the following trends:

From intellectual property to replicability
From intuition to reality mining
From asynchronous to realtime
From wired to mobile
From privacy to publicy
From secret to “transparent”
From top down to peer to peer
From creation to co-creation
From websites to social networks
From information to curation

I present more than 100 ideas and projects from startups and big companies alike. See the slides below, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to see the live version with sound ;)

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Pricing the lack of innovation

How much do you lose by focusing on preserving what you already have instead of developing the future? I wish I had a definitive, indisputable answer. Every time I sit down with someone to talk about the importance of innovation, I lack the hard cold numbers that would make my argument stronger. I usually end up telling the story of Nokia, going from $300b to $10b valuation because of giving decision power to those making money today – rather than those creating the potential to make money tomorrow.

But there is no number that people can bring to their context, to help quantify the potential losses created by immobility. Could iTunes’ 30% fee be the number I am looking for?

Let’s look at the music and movie industry. Their market was clearly going digital fifteen years ago. People wanted downloads and ipods, but ignorance and resistance resulted in the certainty CDs could be forced down the throats of clients against their will. In parallel, Apple invented an ecosystem in line with market expectations. An ecosystem that should have been an industry initiative, or at least launched by one of the majors.

I think it’s fair to say that Steve Jobs made a living off the lack of vision from industry executives, going their way just enough to make them feel secure. Remember how iTunes started with DRM to keep the labels happy. But when the power shifted and money started to flow, DRM was removed. Apple adapted to the pace of the industry, found a way to keep clients happy through the transition, and ended up taking 30% of the pie. Not a bad deal really, for moving 0 and 1 around and making your hardware more attractive in the process…

So perhaps I have a number now. I can say “if you don’t innovate you will end up paying 30% of your turnover to someone else”. What numbers have you found?

Cyril Dorsaz, Dov Rueff liked this post

What innovators can learn from Nokia’s demise

There are two ways to learn: do the mistakes yourself, or listen to those who made them and try to do better. The Wall Street Journal gives us a shot at the second solution, with an interesting article on Nokia’s fall from a $300 billion company to 1.83$ a share (6.85b valuation). Several lessons can be drawn:

Most of the time, the people who can innovate are already there. They are just buried deep into the organization, unable to rise to the top and catch decision maker’s attention:

“More than seven years before Apple Inc. rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen—all features today of the hot-selling Apple iPad.”

Do not let today’s profitable products define your strategy when market conditions are changing very rapidly. What is true today might not be true in two years. Those who are on top have little to gain, but a lot to lose. They will make more conservative decisions to try to protect their assets instead of looking ahead. Because looking ahead is looking beyond themselves:

“In late 2004, U.S. manufacturer Motorola scored a world-wide hit with its thin Razr flip-phones. Nokia weathered criticism from investors that it was expending too much effort on high-end smartphones while its rival ate into its lucrative business selling expensive ‘dumb’ phones to upwardly mobile people around the world. [The new CEO] merged Nokia’s smartphone and basic-phone operations. The result, said several former executives, was that the more profitable basic phone business started calling the shots.”

Don’t ever let success make you arrogant. Because arrogant means blind:

“Nokia engineers’ “tear-down” reports, according to people who saw them, emphasized that the iPhone was expensive to manufacture and only worked on second-generation networks—primitive compared with Nokia’s 3G technology. One report noted that the iPhone didn’t come close to passing Nokia’s rigorous “drop test,” in which a phone is dropped five feet onto concrete from a variety of angles. Yet consumers loved the iPhone”.

Business is a lot of work, intelligence, network and money. But luck and timing play a huge role too, and these you can not control:

“‘We had exactly the right view of what it was all about,’ says Mr. Ollila, who stepped down as chief executive in 2006 and retired as chairman in May. ‘We were about five years ahead.’”

Keep things simple. If there are more than 3 persons to make a decision, start to wonder what went wrong:

At some companies, such decisions might be made around a conference table. In Nokia’s case, the meeting involved gathering about 100 engineers and product managers from offices as far-flung as Massachusetts and China in a hotel ballroom in Mainz, Germany, two people who attended the meeting recall.

In time of crisis, making radical shifts and getting rid of past products can save your life. Nokia did it once in an impressive fashion:

“Nokia has a long history of successfully adapting to big market shifts. The company started out in 1865 as a lumber mill. Over the years, it diversified into electricity production and rubber products. At the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s collapse and recession in Europe caused demand for Nokia’s diverse slate of products to dry up, leaving the company in crisis. Jorma Ollila, a former Citibank banker, took over as CEO in 1992 and focused Nokia on cellphones.”

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Nokia has a great team working hard to put the company back on track. Their newest phones are surprisingly cool. Let’s hope a european company can stay in the hunt in the highly competitive mobile handsets market.

Raphael Briner, Sarah Meyer de Stadelhofen, Dov Rueff liked this post

None of the manufacturers of horse-drawn carriages became a successful automobile manufacturer

While not entirely true (some companies like Patterson made the transition and had limited success), this sentence I used in my recent Forum des 100 keynote and taken from Building Routes to Customers: Proven Strategies for Profitable Growth summarizes how, in the midst of major changes, markets and balances of power can switch dramatically in a very short time.

I used this statement to illustrate the dangers a country like Switzerland is facing at a time where the internet and other technologies are turning business upside down. A country both successful and conservative has a form of blindness, even a small but dangerous feeling of immunity.

While one feedback was that this is a “consultant’s statement” (I mostly agree), it really struck a chord as most of the interactions I had after the presentation was centered around these words. This certainly is a simplification (the founder of GM was building horse-carriages and is a notable exception), but it is also mostly true. Corporate innovators, if you are looking for a good strong statement to convince your bosses they should let you innovate and take risks, feel free to reuse!

Sophie Dubuis, Giorgio Pauletto, Dov Rueff, Philippe Lang liked this post

The speed camera lottery

One of the best idea I have seen in a while, coming out of a Volkswagen contest organized last year: The Speed Camera Lottery.

Speed cameras snap pictures of ALL cars.
People going over the limit get a fine, the money goes to a pot.
People going below the limit enter a lottery, and win money from the pot.

The result: reduction in speed of 22%!

Myths of the near future

Here is an interview I did for Canvas8, to discuss our constantly changing, sometimes troubled relationship with technology and the impact it has upon our lives. I explain why we already use the technologies of the future every day but barely notice them.

What are the biggest cultural shifts/drivers influencing technological innovation at the moment?

I think people themselves are making the most impact on technologies. It has been quite a shift, one that took a lot of time to happen. Back in the early days, technologies would show up without much effort being put into their usability. As users we simply had to adapt to them, and because technologies were mastered by a small elite, there was barely any feedback coming from the bottom to the top. Technologies provided such a leap from the past ways of doing things – the leap from the typewriter to the word processor, for example – that the general attitude would be “it’s good enough, I can live with the unfriendly interface and limitations”.

Then users started to be more savvy, to feel better about their own capacity to have an idea that could make a particular technology better. Many technologies became the work of teams open to feedback, and some projects even turned completely transparent and open source (not only in software, but also in hardware). Today, innovation is really driven by users, in all their diversity, with all their specific needs, and they are changing technology more than the technologists themselves, creating new uses for a specific tool by  translating it into their own languages, contributing bug reports and new ideas, and hacking commercial devices to make them better suited to their needs. For example, Twitter has developed into its own self-perpetuating ecosystem through the input of ordinary users.

What were the hot topics at Lift ’11 – the ideas that particularly resonated with people?

Two ideas really struck me: one speaker, Kevin Slavin, talked about the importance of algorithms. I heard again a couple of days ago an expert on financial markets explaining how the recent movements in the markets were “driven by computers” who “probably lacked some form of human supervision because of the August vacations”. Machines are playing a huge role in our society, to an extent that I was not aware of, and this raises a lot of questions. For example, who will be responsible when an accident happens involving an automated car?

The second idea which I found fascinating emerged from the talk of Hasan Elahi. He showed how technologies can be turned back, and provide a form of privacy through over-sharing. He basically games the system of surveillance, and gives us a nice hint for the future. We might not be losing our privacy; privacy is simply not something you are granted at birth as in the past. Now you have to build a smokescreen around your identity.

Why do technologies fail? Is it enough to create something that’s relevant or useful – and how do you define those terms?

Because we mostly think about technologies, rarely about their usage. For a long time, innovation was in the hands of people who could not necessarily show the appropriate level of empathy. What I mean is that it takes a certain mindset, and some distance, to be able to say “this is how people will use my product”. Most of the time, we fall in love with the technology we create, and we forget to take that love out of the equation when evaluating whether our work will be used by people or not. It is a basic mistake, very true in video games for example. People get fascinated by their own creation, only to find out that it has no appeal to the general public. The truth is, users determine whether a technology is successful. They don’t care about the technical achievement, or the beauty of a particular solution. They want answers to their problems, and some technologies provide that, while others bring more complications than solutions.

To what extent does adoption of technology play into social dynamics?

Adoption mirrors social dynamics. Think of Facebook or Google+: if you are the only user, these technologies have no interest at all. Just like in social dynamics, we need groups to achieve certain things, and technologies do not allow us to escape life’s fundamental rules. We are connected, but still talking about views, attention, feedback, likes, visits. Technology mirrors ‘real life’ most of the time.

There’s been lots of discussion and development but, beyond science fiction, why are robots relevant to us now?

Robots are not science fiction. They are part of our daily life, but we barely notice them. Movies brought the dream of having an humanoid helper in every home – and the bestselling robot in 2011 is an autonomous vacuum cleaner. This revolution is happening, but most people (and the media) are missing it for two reasons: it has been promised to us for such a long time it is hardly at the front of many people’s minds, and what we expected is not what is happening, hence a false sense of inertia while it is one of the most active fields today.They are relevant to us because their logic is increasingly part of our lives. Robots are basically a way to automate tasks we don’t want to do, or that can be done better by computers. And when we look around us we see more and more automation, more and more self-controlled devices.

There’s an emerging trend for quantifying the self and others, driven by a desire for self-improvement. How might this evolve?

We are not just using machines to do what we do not want to do, but rather to do supplementary things, to augment our lives. This opens new possibilities that I find interesting, because we could become more aware of how we live. At the same time, this quantification is scary. I believe all the technology in the world will never replace a good discussion between a patient and a doctor, and this computerisation of our lives also disconnects us from more natural processes. It’s like talking to a friend to know that you are not doing enough sport, rather than having your watch remind you your body fat just went up.

What, to you, is the most significant technological development of the last five years and how do you see it evolving in the next five?

I think open and free-for-all collaboration was massive. The evolution of Wikipedia is interesting. At first, it made sense to open contributions to all, as there was no structure inside the community. There were no experts, nobody had a track record of providing consistently good information, nobody wanted to vandalise the pages because a Wikipedia page was meaningless. That was the first step, when we discovered the potential of opening things up, and letting people collaborate.
But then success came in, and brought with it a number of side effects: a link from Wikipedia was worth a lot, so people started to pollute articles with links to their own sites. Vandals defaced some pages and many debates opened up on controversial topics. Rules had to be put in place to limit openness, and several fundamentals had to be reinvented. People were not equal any more, and super users began to appear.

I find it fascinating how collective intelligence will evolve under the attacks of ‘massification’ and success, how those processes of open collaboration and trust will scale to millions of people and projects around the world. That’s a very, very hard problem and I believe a new order will emerge in the next five years.

How do you see technology use shifting in the near future, and what’s driving it?

I believe one of the things that will happen is that we will push back technology. An increasing number of people are worried about the effect of technologies on their life. For example, the more we connect on Facebook, the more we seem to disconnect from the things that matter to us (real friends). Or the time it takes to deal with email, which at this pace will soon become an ‘unproductivity’ tool.

The next evolution I see happening with some early adopters is that technology is put back in its place: as a tool, not an end in itself. People control how many networks they participate in, choose to shut down their phones more often, declare some ‘no-email days’, and decide to delete all emails that came during their vacations. More and more signs point to us reclaiming a bit of space from those technologies that have invaded our lives to an extent that was barely imaginable 15 years ago.

Interview conducted by Debbi Evans

Full article on canvas8.com