Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

    What Technology Wants is written by Kevin Kelly. If anyone deserves the term digerati its Kevin Kelly. Kelly worked on the Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy guide to useful stuff, he was involved in The WELL and was a founder of Wired magazine.

    What Technology Wants follows on from previous works that Kelly had written. Out of Control looked at how software created a parallel infrastructure to the real world. At the time ‘software agents’ were a thing and artificial intelligence was here but unevenly distributed. Out of Control was written in 1992, yet forecast ideas like ‘digital twins’ – software simulations that are currently in vogue.

    His book New Rules for the New Economy looked at the economic principles that technology and and web directly impacted. This seemed to build on work done to also write the Encyclopedia of the New Economy, which was published as a three part series in Wired magazine, the same year.

    So it seems appropriate that Kelly took a long term viewpoint and wrote What Technology Wants as a historical, economic and philosophical analysis of technological progress.

    Kelly puts forth the case that technological momentum, what he calls the technium has a momentum of its own and that it is inevitable. The idea that every innovation has its time. This is why innovation can seem lumpy and why innovations like television and the light bulb can claim to have dozens of inventors.

    The technium seems to build momentum with each key development put in place across fields science, technology and information theory.

    Short of societal collapse, it is not something that can be fought or turned back but can be managed to get the best from it. It also isn’t the kind of starry-eyed futurism that the likes of George Gilder had turned out in his book Telecosm. Kelly appreciates the double edged sword that technology represents.

    This then poses questions around a number of areas from economics to ecology.  I would expect this book to be dinner party fodder as a kind of thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell. More book reviews here.

  • 2010: How did I do?

    About this time last year I wrote my 2010 predictions on technology, media, consumer behaviour and online:

    I see 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up… We need to think about the implications for etiquette, ethics and what will be the new social norms that we have to deal with.

    This is very much a work in progress (at least in the UK); where the NHS feels that it is acceptable to leak information about an audience’s health concerns with Facebook and politician Nadine Dorries felt it was perfectly acceptable to lie to constituents at least 70 per cent of the time on their social media platform

    From a government perspective all this self-organising power can be dangerous: people getting together and standing up to authority – we’ve seen it before:

    • Climate–change protestors
    • Poll tax riots
    • Illegal raves

    Each time, the government has brought resources and legislation to bear against them. I expect this to be at least considered in the next year.

    Well beyond shilling for the media industry with the Digital Economy Bill and the coalition government’s proposals against net neutrality to favour News Corporation prominent UK media companies, there was the Crown Prosecution Service and police’ increasingly hard stance with everything from jokey Twitter users to websites. More interestingly comes a request for Nominet to provide a mechanism that would allow police to close down sites by taking control of domains at will.

    The UK will still have analogue intellectual property laws for an increasingly digital world, I don’t see a dramatic change to correct this coming anytime soon.

    Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the government was going to leave the Digital Economy Act intact. However TalkTalk and BT’s requested judicial review may temper some of the more draconian parts of the Act.

    Social media will no longer be special but part of the normal mix.

    There was discussions at the open panels I attended at the JUMP conference about dropping the ‘social’ from social media as it is not anything special, but the glue that binds all the marketing communications and business communications processes together.

    Changes in marketing spend will come partly at the expense of search advertising.

    Google’s growth is slowing in search advertising and flattened in some markets. I think that this is why Google’s prediction that mobile is the next big thing and the big investment in Android. For a long time there has been a theoretical ceiling for Google’s earnings that include the following factors:

    • Maximum cost of acquisition that a company is willing to pay for a customer – this varies business-by-business
    • Maximum number of businesses that can benefit from search advertising. Your local 7-Eleven relies on impulse purchases so Google Adwords even on local search or mobile apps may not make a lot of sense. Other businesses maybe regulated out of it, or search may not fit into a brand’s profile
    • Number of markets that Google operates in. Google’s new frontier is barely online continent of Africa

    So it was no surprise that Google has set up a wealth of ventures to try and continue to grow. However the culling of these ventures and relentless focus on earnings indicate that Google is maturing as a business. Part of this is down to the fact that Facebook is now serving 25 per cent of display adverts in North America. Coupon services like GroupOn are probably eating into local search advertising budgets as well.

    The good news for the search engines is that consumers are much more open to a curated web via friends and authorative individuals, many of the concepts of social search will be ready for an early majority audience in 2010.

    What really wrong-footed me on this one is that I thought services like Hunch and Quora would come from the search engine companies, that this maybe the ace-in-the-hole Yahoo! may have had to reinvent search, which is the reason why they gave the algorithmic side of the business away? I didn’t expect Caterina Fake come back and put a new spin on the social search work that was happening at Yahoo! when she was there. It’s early days on this but Gifts.com seems to find Hunch’s work with them is delivering real commercial returns. Quora feels like the kind of product that Yahoo! Answers should have been, it will be interesting to see how they monetise the product in the future.

    I expect there to be an increase in social media rightshoring.

    Rightshoring didn’t take off in the way that I thought it might in 2010, this is maybe because of the recession has made the UK more viable, at least for the time being.

    Social media will be looked at to provide solutions to problems that businesses continue to wrestle with: from knowledge management to customer relationships and workflow.

    Altimeter Group has been doing a lot of work wrestling with the implications of social CRM as part of this process of using social media to solve business problems.

    One of the break out trends for 2009 was ‘the web of no web’ where a mix of QR codes and augmented reality allow consumers to interact with the real world with online information. This has a huge potential, but there are two key challenges, the most dangerous one being that someone comes up with a creative execution so bad that consumers reject the ‘web of no web’ concept.

    The web of no web has broken out in a couple of new directions in 2010. Firstly a much more serious focus on location with this year’s star Foursquare and the hangers on like SCVNGR and Gowalla. This isn’t a new area per se location has been incorporated into Twitter for a while and Yahoo!’s ZoneTag and FireEagle were doing this years ago, but failed to get sufficient traction. From a business perspective this has been partly driven by the coupon market as online and offline businesses discount to get consumers through the door – thank you financial crisis.

    A secondary aspect of these applications is that they are less draining on a battery than the AR stuff getting heat last year. Barcodes rather than QRcodes may make the biggest impact yet as ‘augmented retailing’ takes off, it is no coincidence that the latest eBay and Amazon US iPhone apps include a barcode scanning function to allow real-time real-world price comparison. What did 2010 in tech mean to you?

  • Zero History by William Gibson

    Zero History is an ideal book If you enjoyed William Gibson’s previous two works Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like the previous two books it dwells in the now, which is appropriate given Gibson’s oft quoted koan:

    ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’.

    I have written the review in terms of general themes so that I don’t put in any plot spoilers.

    It brings many of the major protagonists from the previous books in the Pattern Recognition series back and ties the plot together quite neatly. There are two ways to look at Zero History, in terms of chronology it arrives at the end of a logical order of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country; but in terms of its themes Zero History sits between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like Pattern Recognition it questions the nature of brands, design and art. It borrows elements of locative art from Spook Country and throws private military companies and the military industrial complex into the mix.

    Marketing is portrayed as amoral, understanding the price of everything, yet having the value of nothing outside its grasp. The discussion of brands in Zero History is less about a well-designed logo and more about the brand authenticity – the way it matches the product – how much truth from it is designed into the product.

    There is also a sense that the quality of manufactured goods is in decline and creatives are trying to recapture this quality by going vintage and re-manufacturing old products. This creative effort is then concealed from marketers who would despoil it. Gibson forces the reader to think about how they relate to the brands they like and the marketing that they see around them, he also uses the story to address the rise of the corporation as a military entity a la AEGIS, Xe or Halliburton. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Dopplr death & more news

    Dopplr

    The slow death of Dopplr | guardian.co.uk – on its own the death of Dopplr is not really news, the interesting timing  of this article by The Guardian put out this evisceration of Nokia’s web service ambitions. I’m not saying that Jemima Kiss got it wrong, but the timing was interesting: published last Friday – right on the eve of Nokia World. Dopplr is similar to other startups that have gotten lost after having been acquired. Dopplr allowed users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey. It was known for the quality of its user experience design in comparison to other apps.

    China

    String of Holidays in China Bring Time Off, With Complications – NYTimes.com – complex yes, but I can’t help feeling for the bureaucrats who came up with this who thought that they were doing the best they could for the people and now must be as popular as tax collectors

    Economics

    Inflation in China Is Rising at a Fast Pace – NYTimes.com – the downside of continual double digit growth

    Environment

    MIT: We’ve Got Plenty of Uranium | Fast Company – nuclear power not the washout environment naysayers think

    FMCG

    Deal Profile: Unilever to Buy Alberto-Culver for $3.7 Billion – WSJ – interesting move that strengthens Unilever by taking out a competitor. It does make me wonder about all the brands that Unilever sold a few years ago though

    Japan

    Japan Surrenders – The Atlantic – interesting though very American focused article on changes in Japanese society over the past three decades

    Marketing

    Some of Sharecare.com’s Health Advice Will Be From Advertisers – NYTimes.com – this was where I thought Hunch and Yahoo! Answers could have done more. Ideal opportunity for branded content as trusted brands are experts in some areas and expertise could help imbue trust in a new brand

    Media

    Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch | guardian.co.uk – interesting that he is going down an email newsletter route. It potentially cuts social sharing a la Twitter and Facebook as well as social bookmarking off at the knees

    The real cost of free | guardian.co.uk – Cory Doctorow in praise of free and dealing with ill-informed critics

    Online

    Yahoo: Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced? – Quora – insightful answer. Possibly yes as part of a process to take Yahoo! private. The critique of Bartz is telling:

    • She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company
    • She wasted over $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric)
    • She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo ad exchange system).
    • Yahoo left between $500M to $1B of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo deal team)
    • She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn’t work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo in the tech and business community

    Alibaba and Yahoo quagmire: a battle of the wills | FT.com – the FT is very slow to this story. I suspect that this isn’t only about corporate wills, but also about Ma pleasing the Chinese government as well and if he manages to get even richer by doing so: win-win

    Combing Your Friends’ Tastes, Not the Whole Web’s – NYTimes.com – social search market analysis

    Software

    N900 plug-in for OSX iSync – makes Nokia N900 into a a viable option

    Technology

    China Catching India As Asia’s Service Provider? – WSJ – China’s technology service industry catching up with India

    Web of no web

    DOCOMO and University of Tokyo to Conduct Joint Research for Urban Planning Based on Mobile Spatial Statistics | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting work here, kind of reminds me of The Dark Knight were Batman maps out the building in Hong Kong using mobile phone signals and captures mafia money man Lau

    Wireless

    Nokia’s problem – QuirksBlog – interesting thoughts on Nokia from a software developer

  • Closing the innovation gap – Judy Estrin

    Closing The Innovation Gap is a rare breed of book. It looks with a clear eye at the subject of innovation and Silicon Valley.

    Innovation is an overused word, companies like to have it associated with their brand, products and services as it affects both the share price: covering management sins and providing investors with a veneer of hope for future growth. In a previous life, I worked at a firm where we used to talk about doing ‘innovation communications’. Where the theory went, we helped innovative companies communicate the fact that they were innovative.

    All this pre-supposed that we had a clear definition of what innovation was. From my time there, there seemed to be an assumption that all IT and biomedical related businesses were essentially innovative (unless they competed against our existing client base).

    Whereas a food business that borrowed the ‘virtual fab’ model from chipmakers in the semiconductor industry to take on big guns like Proctor & Gamble or PepsiCo wasn’t. I guess the bottom line I am trying to get across is that innovation is critically important, yet tragically misunderstood by many people.

    Judy Estrin has a genuine pedigree in innovation coming from a family of innovators. Her father worked with John von Neumann (the father of modern digital computing) at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and her mother was a professor at the computer science department of UCLA.  Judy has a Silicon Valley pedigree having had senior roles or been a board member at: Sun Microsystem (who build servers on which banks, telecoms providers and many dot.coms depended – now part of Oracle), Cisco (who pretty much are the internet infrastructure) and FedEx.

    The book addresses the challenge of innovation that we currently have.

    I have had a gut feeling about the decline in pace of innovation over the past decade or so. In a lot of respects improvements in computing have lost their sparkle, they longer feel like a leap forward, but more of the same.

    When I think about the dot com period there were meaningful improvements in telecoms hardware, web technology, software and business processes – not all of them where financially successful but things felt as if they moved forward.

    If I think about web 2.0 – the biggest single improvement was more of a software engineering improvement with a deliberate focus by the likes of 37signals and the original flickr team on avoiding feature bloat at the expense of usability.

    Facebook is an evolution from the likes of The WELL, Friendster, Friends Reunited and MySpace – rather than a true innovation.

    The iPhone whilst beautifully crafted in terms of software and hardware, increasingly reminds me of my long departed Palm Vx PDA – but with a shitty battery life.

    In Closing the innovation gap, I found the book to fall into three distinct sections:

    • Charting the origins and progress of what I will call ‘innovation entropy’ in the west. This talks about how the cold war was entwined with the rise and stall of innovative research that helped in creation of technology that we take for granted today: keyhole surgery, the internet, modern computers, cellular phones and CCDs (coupled-charged device which go into digital cameras.)
    • The economic and cultural effects of ‘innovation entropy’. In this respect Estrin echoes the work of Will Hutton’s The state we’re in published in 1996 which I read in college. Like Hutton, Estrin is a critic of short-termism in business, the financial markets, academia and government spending. Some of this short-termism was unintentional as the law of unintended consequences kicked in due to changes in regulations that were designed to encourage innovation. A secondary factor that Estrin points out is a corresponding lack of appetite for risk – or the rise of risk management which has helped cripple long-term research which begat big innovation
    • How to address ‘innovation entropy’. In Closing The Innovation Gap Estrin maps out the areas where educators, government, financiers and businesses need to change and collaborate on. This collaboration requires root-and-branch change

    Estrin’s book is powerful as she pulls together a coherent story which makes it easy to read. As a prominent person within Silicon Valley she gains access to many people who are at the head of organisations driving innovation at the present time. More related content here.