Why its all about Bill Buxton

Check out this great MSN video - Bill Buxton: advertising’s future technology

In 2009 I was working with Microsoft advertising division as a consultant helping them create and sell products to media agencies. I was lucky to get the winning seat at lunch at their imagine conference. Typical advertising people chatting about advertising stuff, I was one of them so I fit right on. Until Bill Buxton comes along and says something that stuck with me ever since.

'If you want to know what is going to be big in 10 years time then look back to what was created 10 years ago.'

He said eBay was the best place to find what will be big. He should know as he has one of the biggest collections of technology objects known to man. On the day he pulled out a bunch of touchscreen technology created in the mid 80s.

5 years later Im half way through a masters in innovation and one comment I saw in the video above from him is the basis of my view of innovation.

' ….anything that is going to impact your life in 10 years is already 10 years old now that changes the nature of innovation from one of alchemy, starting some great idea out of scratch to one of prospecting and discovery, insights and relationships'

thanks Bill

Why Google is the ideal innovator

I have been researching innovation for the past 18 months as I have been doing my masters in innovation management at Central Saint Martins in London. A lot of people, friends and companies have been asking me what is it all about so I thought I would give an example combining some things Ive found as well as 14 years experience in advertising and personal obsession with technology and subcultures.

When I started this blog 8 odd years ago it was a scrapbook of thoughts to throw out there converse with others and hopefully build on or help articulate my point of view. I have been particularly bad at using it during my masters but I thought I would return here to try to simplify it all especially in light of Google’s recent spending spree which everyone is questioning. Here we go

The simple concept is that innovation is a strategic tool for growth. There are other ways to grow such as expansion into new markets, resource optimization for efficient delivery of you current market but it seems that innovation tends to get the headlines. What type of growth depends on where you are coming from financial for companies, understanding maybe for governments (I understand I shouldn’t smoke) or behavior change (social innovations if I buy a RED iPod money goes to Africa). There are a few quick categorisations of innovation we need to clarify first.  Growth for today is known as sustaining innovation it has a more short term approach. Growth for tomorrow is known as disruptive innovation with longer term metrics looking at what could potentially throw the market dynamics as they currently stand. Innovation as a process for me comes down to three simple steps Identify, Create, Exploit. 

Identify: is to find opportunities. In the short term they tend to be insights about the customers needs. In the longer term it is about patterns that lead to future needs.
Create: a product or service that addresses those needs. Then test, iterate and validate the product / service as well as the customer need.
Exploit: is to drive market adoption understanding.

Lets have a crack at how it works using Google as an example.  

How do you innovate for today.

The concept of sustaining innovation is the idea that you take an innovation already created (search) and you add additional benefits to it to gain more revenue from an existent market or customer. This approach consists of a lot of the innovation we currently see. Product extensions, add ons etc. An example would be that Google created google+ not to ‘disrupt’ or steal audience from facebook they did it purely to gain more data for their search terms to make more targeted ads to gain more revenue from their current audience.

Google Identified an insight using data from current customer’s past behavior that the more personalized search suggestions are the more likely people are to click.  Then Created a new platform, Google+ to gain additional data from their current audience’s online behaviour and interests. They then Exploited that platform through different approaches such as Chuck Hack a collaboration between Google Creative Labs + Converse + other creative companies including TechnologyWill Save us (in an act of transparency I am an Investor and advisor for TWSU and HirschandMann who helped with the project). This campaign looked to push smaller creative subcultures (or communities) to use the platform in a fun way.

In summary sustaining innovation is a pretty simple approach. Identify insights using data from past or current behavior of your or other current customers in your market. Create something new that offers more benefits to a current product but enables you to gain more revenue. Google have done this over and over again, maps, gmail, android, chromebooks etc . Last time I looked Google’s quarter financials on 1^st of February were up 17% so the short term sustaining innovation approach for growth seems to be working for them.

Another example I give is O2’s current Priority campaign. They Identified an insight that its current customers and customers within their market spend considerable money on entertainment. They Created Priority which added the benefit of early tickets to top events at O2 places as well as others to drive more usage from current customers as well as switching from others in the market. Then Exploited it with campaigns for Lady Gaga, English Rugby Union team etc.

How do you innovate for tomorrow.

Here comes the fun more interesting part. How does one innovate for tomorrow ? Everyone is questioning Google’s recent behavior of buying NEST that makes thermostats, Artificial Intelligence companies and what did they do with Motorola. Lets look at our model in the future innovation sense. ICE

Academic and ex editor of Harvard Business Review Ed Levitt came up with the concept of the marketing myopia in 1960s which is the idea that companies create products and technologies that don’t link closely with the wants and needs of their customers. The reality is technology advancement is so fast companies can create the next technology way before any customer even hints they need such a thing. Therefore it all becomes a matter of timing.

A number of years ago I met Bill Buxton Microsoft’s head of design research (hilarious guy reminded me of Doc from Back to the Future). Bill left me with something I will never forget. If you want to know what is going to be big in 10 years, look back 10 years to what was invented then. He explained the concept of the Long Nose of innovation he found in his research that from invention to market traction took ten years. He has one of the largest collections of technology objects in the world as validation for his research as what he found is that it takes a number of years for refinement and augmentation of the technology itself, then there is the need for market traction. He said his job at Microsoft was to go and find all the awesome invention in house and shrink that process. Surface was their first example of shrinking that process they cut it to 6 years. One approach to innovation I believe is the use of engineers who invent, refine and augment technologies to make sure they work. The designer / engineer combo takes that technology to the next level Creating (or designing) something that is user friendly. It is then the job of the marketing or other teams to Exploit it to the masses or gain traction through understanding their needs.

The problem with innovating for tomorrow is people don’t know what they want in the future and past data will not project 5- 10 years into the future. So identifying insights about peoples current articulated needs like I explained in sustaining innovation from online behavior, surveys, buyer or economic data isn’t sufficient.  There needs to be a more interpretive method that looks to people's future unarticulated needs. You need to Identify patterns that could drive those future needs. Levitt also asked an interesting question of train companies at the time who were later disrupted by airplanes. Which business are you in ?Are you a train company or a transportation company ?. So the question for Google is what business are you in ?? Search or Data.

Google is a data company and Google+ is just one way they show that in the short term. In the longer term they have identified patterns in the concept of the internet of things and the data it will create. Currently the only way the average person believes Google gets data is from the screens we interface with. PCs, Laptops, Phones, tablets which are closed interfaces behind the box we make changes to by touching screens, keys or our mouse. Google (as well as others) accumulate data from our online actions but that is only the beginning of what is available. Every action in the real world we do more and more will accumulate data. The term ‘smart’ is not new you may have seen the Smart Cities concept from IBM or smart fridges from Samsung or quantified self with market adoption of wearable technologies. This is the idea of interfaces everywhere creating data. Top IT analyst company Gartner forecasts 26 Billion devices connected to the internet by 2020. That is 6 years away.  So what did Google do?

Google Identified the pattern of the growth of devices creating more data and the need for more advanced computational methods to analyse all that data. Google was built off the back of an algorithm that made data into something of value for people. The idea of “Big Data’ is being thrown around businesses and governments as the future. The bigger question is who has the computational power to deal with that sort of data ?? Artificial intelligence has already shown promise in turning large amounts of data into value. You’ve seen Minority Report, the new film HER gives you a more emotive view of the concept. (If you want to see a fun example of AI objects reacting back to humans check out my friend Katrins conceptual piece ).

Secondly they now have one of the best design / engineering teams in the world in house to start to Create (or design) the best interfaces possible to create more data which is what Nest currently does. It is a way to create data about someones home and their energy usage. Google’s Project X Created Google Glass as a new data interface that they are testing and evaluating whilst testing an Exploitation approach through a game of scarcity. Have you got one, look at that weird guy on the tube with one. Have you seen the stupid things they have come up with. The reality is they are working to help translate what I have found in my research in Exploitation phase as a language gap between great technology that is created and great technology that is adopted. Have you ever seen a technical person try and explain what their technology does to someone who isn’t technical. My research has found that technical people will talk about what the technology does, early adopters are more interested in what the big change does for them or in other words the change in benefit, the early majority are only interested in how it makes their lives slightly better the late majority and laggards are sheep and will just follow. Giving the product to people to use and build on is an interpretive method that shows Google not just being myopic in its engineering or design approach that focuses on making a great product to a more interpretive approach to understanding what the customer wants to Exploit it at a later stage. One thing that has emerged from the Google Glass experiment is when people give the heart symbol with their hands in digital photos and Google's attempt to patent it. They are trying transfer a technical language images with data to a more human language where a human action becomes like a #.

What I have also found in my research is that you do need a completely separate business to create disruptive innovations for future use. As their metrics of success and timeframe  are much different to sustaining innovations. An example would be O2’s Priority vs O2’s disruptive innovation giffgaff. Priority’s first year targets were 1.5 million new customers paying £60 pm whilst giffgaff took 4 years to get to 1 million subscribers at around £15pm.  Including disruptive innovation in your daily business process will only get all projects cancelled before they identify an appropriate market and understand any value that could be created in that space. Do you remember when Sergey returned to Google shut down all those additional projects this was because they sat within the day to day business (some weren’t that good also). But he didn’t stop their innovation he just realized the need to separate short and longer term, sustaining and disruptive. Google X became the future space with different metrics, more money and more time. (also being public about the future innovation pipeline doesn’t hurt your share price even if no one understands any of it)

What is the role of Motorola ? Google has sped up the 10 year process by buying the already made patents or technologies. Keeping Motorola would’ve led to an expensive war in an already ridiculously competitive smartphone market (although Motorola teaming up with PhoneBloks is the future of technology and an example why I invested in TWSU but thats for another post). They will pass those patents over to Tony Fadell his new hardware team from NEST and Google who will start creating user driven products as interfaces for the world to add more data to the machine. Combine that with best computational technology or artificial intelligence to analyse the data to turn it into value. Google will then use what they have learnt from previous Exploitation methods from Google Creative Labs and others things across the world to begin to drive market traction for products.

Innovation is a strategic tool for growth that must look at identifying, creating and exploiting for today and tomorrow. Google have done a great job using previous and current data to Identify insights to Create new products and then Exploited them in fun to gain more data ways to sustain their current innovation of search. It is hard as today seems much clearer, when tomorrow is such a haze. Google's future pipeline looks even brighter by Identifying the pattern of IOT devices as new interfaces to growing available data. Gaining the technology to analyse that data and putting the best team together with a bunch of inventions to Create the future interfaces of data and then no doubt by then Google Creative Labs and other departments of Google will take Exploitation to the next level. They have created a very strategically strong duel approach to innovation that has an eye on the customer of today but never takes their eye of the customer of tomorrow.

Next post I will attempt to look at Amazon and why they are a bit one sided as they only focus on Disruptive or future innovations not sustaining ones in the short term.  One easy check is to look at their growth in revenue vs their loss in profit %'s in the past 5 years. 

What is the point of art school ?

'Creative Curiosity is always intellectually restless, its always 

lateral against the linearity of rationality' 

Jeremy Till, Pro Vice Chanceller of Central Saint Martins

I have been attending Central Saint Martins doing my masters in Innovation Management for around 9 months now. I have been particularly bad at writing here. Which is ironic as a key thing they continue to teach you is to reflect on your work which was kind of the point of this blog 7 years ago. One thing I have particularly loved moving to London and now even more so at CSM is the creation of cultural capital. 

Art, design, film all this cultural capital that expresses itself in a multitude of ways is one of the reasons I would struggle to return to Australia. Everyone jokes about the lack of culture in Australia but it was never more evident than when I showed my father an article in Monocle magazine about CSM and a project I was working on. 'Oh you go to an art school'. Its what a lot of people think. But I feel the opposite. I was educated in a linear rationale way that I never understood. I always struggled with a world that was created around assumptions. Why do we do that. Just because we do. That makes no sense. I used to say to my father when I was younger. I was exceptionally curious and that has never faulted as I got older. I then got to the UK where a huge history built a structure of even more assumptions. But the interesting thing was that their was an alternative. An alternative for people that didnt just want to live one way just because. That wanted to explore beyond that for themselves but also for a greater purpose.

The problem now is that the opportunity and environment in which you are encouraged to open up your point of view is being controlled. It is being held back by those rational people who dont see the value in art. CSM ran a conference recently called 'Whats the point of art school?'. It would take me too long to write my point of view and to be honest its still a prototype. But I have seen the value not just for myself but for the wider construct of the world in which we live. I think a key component of this argument is talk in the language in which the rationale's will understanding. I have been looking at the list of Alumni from CSM recently. What if you picked the top 100 CSM alumni and compared it to a business school like Warwick. Then compared the value they have brought to the economy but also other elements of society. Also look to minus the bad elements like money pulled out of the markets. This maybe would start to see that in order to get out of the mess that the rationales got us into. That the business school model of looking at previous casestudies to better establish what to do doesnt work.That you are going to need some pretty bloody creative people to get us out of it.

Connecting weird things

I have always been a huge fan of connecting weird things in life to create something even better. But I was reading an article over at fastcodesign which had an amazing connection for the iPod that I wanted to share.

Here’s another example of how bringing two seemingly unrelated thoughts together. One morning, a designer sprang into the frog studio. “I know why everyone says the iPod looks clean!” he exclaimed. Ask anyone what’s so appealing about the design of the iPod, and, almost without exception, they answer, “I like it because it looks clean.”.................

“So,” the visiting designer said, “as I was sitting on the toilet this morning, I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin, and then it hit me! The iPod is ‘clean’ because it references bathroom materials.”

There were a few seconds of silence, followed quickly by laughter. We were laughing because we knew that Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, came to Apple from a London- based design consultancy where he worked on a lot of lavatory basins.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But, at the very least, it’s an example of how anything, no matter how unconnected, can spark new perceptions. Often, the more incompatible the connection, the more useful it may be.

Hahaha ... brilliant. Check out the rest of a great article on what hinders innovation here.

Grass Roots Innovation

Two years ago I wrote a piece on what I saw as a more resourceful group of individuals that innovated with what they had in front of them. I called it the MacGyver formula. If you know of the 90s TV show this guy could get himself out of anything situation with a pen knife and what was in front of him. I highlighted how I saw this on a recent trip to South Africa when I spent some time in the townships working on a pitch. It seems that in the light of the economic situation that the world is starting to look to the developing nations as a smarter way to innovate with what you have already

The video above is for a great magazine called Makeshift that has just launched thanks to some help on kickstarter which delves deeper into this trend of DIY innovation. It is something that is utilised across the world by different societies to push against scarcity to make things to enable them to survive.

The interesting thing is that now the global consultants are also jumping on it and highlighting it as a way to innovate the western world out of the current crisis and gain growth from what we already have.

What interests me about it, is boundaries. Everyone talks about freedom to innovate but actually creating boundaries is what makes people maximise what they have in front of them. Simon Waldwell highlights it in his book Creative Disruption where when he was running the digital innovation team for the Guardian actually having freedom in time and opportunity made the team somewhat lazy.

So go out make some boundaries and see how resourceful you can be. Im thinking about buying a swiss army knife just in case.

As a creative I felt frsutrated, as a consumer I felt violated..

I think everyone working in advertising has this feeling. But I think the cost and simplicity of doing your own ideas can in fact be quite rewarding. I have done some side work for smaller companies before and I think it helps keep your mind in check and not too restricted.

Its also interersted that he put his money where is mouth was and paid for a lot of it.

Five key secrets to innovation... its an obsession not a job description

This article from cnn has been doing the rounds on how to innovate. They seem so simple yet not diluted in anyway. Sometimes I feel that simple is now turning into easy to understand. Which is not always the case. I do truly think that innovation is simple...in theory but relentless in action. Innovators never stop doing any of the below. Whether on the toilet, in the pub with friends or away on holiday. Its an obsession not a job descritpion

FIVE KEYS TO INNOVATION

Researchers say they have identified five skills that drive innovation:

Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.

Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask "why?", "why not?" and "what if?"

Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.

Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.

Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.

The rules that made Apple the comeback kid

Here is a great list of things we can learn from Apple on how to be innovative that I found at fastcompany. They seem to simple but truthful all the same.

Rule #1
Orchestrate and integrate. Ideas can come from anywhere, including outside the company. For example, the iPod was originally dreamt up by a consultant and most of its parts were off the shelf.

Rule #2
Build products around the needs of users. This may sound obvious but too many products are still designed by engineers or marketers for engineers or marketers.
Thus Apple places the emphasis on simplicity (such as design) rather than complexity. For example, the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player into the market but it was probably the first that was easy to use.

Rule #3
Trust your instinct. Don’t allow the customer to dictate what you do. This may seem contradictory to Rule #2 but customers can only tell you about what already exists.
As Akito Morita (the founder of Sony) once said: "The public doesn’t know what is possible but we do.” Also don’t forget that as well as measuring public opinion or tracking the latest trends you can create both.

Rule #4
There’s no success like failure. Fail often, fail fast and fail well. In other words, don’t be afraid to make a mistake but always learn from your mistakes – in Apple’s case products like the Apple Lisa and Newton.

Rule #5
Safe is risky. Develop products that define new categories and markets rather than products that compete in existing markets.

Great presentations on innovation from Idris Mootee

Lessons Of Innovation Idris Mootee

View more presentations from imootee.

I put Idris Mootee from Idea Couture on my blog roll quite a while ago. I have stolen some great quotes from him over the past year or so. But I have made a bit more of an effort to go through some of the work he has posted lately. He has some great work that is a really simple way to look at and discuss innovation. I believe the simple easy to explain language is the way to do it. Its not complicated.... the most complicated thing is changing the culture of a business to drive innovation. Have a read through some of his presentations on slideshare.

I hate brainstorms....

Brainstorming

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: brainstorming ideation)

I have always had a huge problem with brainstorms. I think its almost a socialist way to make people feel good about themselves and be apart of the process. But the truth is it can limit true creativity. I believe the smart and truly inspiring people get pulled down by the broader group, who arent as open minded.

The realisation is you only have a small amount of time in a brainstorm and often its a one off thought you dont have time to think through and fully form. Then it takes too long to explain it to everyone. So it gets lost in the 'I dont get it' pile. Couple that with the difference in egos vs non egos... and you start to see the barriers to creativity. I can't say much as I am often the loudest (trying to hold back more) in a lot of these sessions. But I will put my hand up and say that I think I restrict, often quieter but hell more brilliant people than me.

I also hate that people dont understand the information that is really important to address an issue. We do strategy and research to fully form our thinking to sell to clients. One off ideas from people who dont know all the other parts usually wont address that (sometimes they can). I love the idea of the book Blink, that our brain is so fast it can come up with these ideas and we often post rationalise. But my viewpoint is we have to feed our brains with all the right information to get there in the first place.

My thinking and hatred was then finally saved.. I found this great article in Contagious Magazine.

I love how it addresses a number of the things I hate. But also gives some really useful ways to breakdown those issues. Slackers is a great one detailing the people who often are not that interested and pull the group down. I love the idea of flying solo and then what they call 'shifting' or bringing your thinking into the group for greater builds and sense checking. Sorry about the bad copy but have a read if you can.

Co-Creation Companies

On from my post about brand using co-creation. I found a company over at RMM London that is all about bringing seekers and solvers together over at Innocentive. Thats pretty cool