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.

  • George Gilderism + more things

    George Gilderism

    An interesting debate on what I would term “George Gilderism” of the techno-utopia is just around the corner versus the concern that innovation is slowing. George Gilder is the author of Telecosm; which encapsulated techno-utopian optimism at its peak in the mid-1990s; just as the web was coming into its own. ‘George Gilderism’ has since been brought to issues such photo and video imaging through to a blockchain based web.

    I’ve been making my way slowly through The Rise and Fall of American Growth which makes a convincing argument against ‘George Gilderism’. Stewart Brand in his work The Whole Earth Discipline makes a tepid case for ‘George Gilderism’. Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants suggests that technological progress almost has a will to happen. And that will or technium as he puts it is running at increasing cadence which seems to counter the idea of slowing innovation. Kelly doesn’t make a compelling case for ‘George Gilderism’ either, technological progress brings its own problems. Innovation runs at different speeds at different times, in different fields.

    Here’s Intel executive Stacy Smith on what would have happened to the car industry if it had been able to reap the benefits of innovation in the same what the semiconductor field had:

    If you apply the same metric to something like gas mileage, it says you could drive to the sun from Earth on a single gallon of gas.’

    If there were a Moore’s Law in the car industry, you could drive to the sun on a gallon of gas – MarketWatch (April 1, 2017)

    Noah Smith makes the case for optimism here: Answering the Techno-Pessimists (complete) – Noahpinion and the Applied Divinity Studies blog makes the case for the great stagnation – Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism | Applied Divinity Studies

    Finance

    The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of bitcoin | Financial Times – so it’s a threat to offshore financial industry? There are so many things wrong with cryptocurrencies, but this seems like an odd flaw to pick on.

    Share price ‘pop’ in US IPOs falls by half | Financial Times – this could be a good thing, as it shows that IPOs are closer to being optimally priced rather than management teams leaving a large amount of money on the table

    FMCG

    Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy | Financial Times – they’re ok in moderation, but this will bring in a lot of shareholder pressure

    Ideas

    We Need More Public Space for Teen Girls – Bloomberg – “We had nothing to do and there was nowhere to go. So we’d go and hang out on the swings in the early evening and chat as the light slowly faded into dusk. It was better than sitting around at home.” – but why are spaces failing now where they didn’t in the past? I talked this through with a few friends of both genders who thought it odd. It sounded more like a law enforcement issue around public safety than a space issue. I could see an argument for a safe online space, for girls, boys and everyone in between – but that comes with its own complexity. I thought that the problem was that kids are the PlayStation generation or have their lives stuffed with activities by middle class parents.

    BUSINESS: Warren Buffett sinks climate measure, says world will adapt – www.eenews.net – completely missed this when it originally came out. On a related note I was listening to a podcast interview with Niall Ferguson promoting his book Doom and he mentioned that we have seen remarkably little volcanic activity over the past 200 years. When that picked up again, we could be dealing with global cooling. (This also explains why when I was a kid; the concern wasn’t global warming, but a new ice age). But even at that time, although the media missed it; the general consensus that carbon dioxide causing global warming was a bigger effect than short lived particles in the air reducing sun and causing global cooling. Even Richard Turco’s A Path Where No Man Thought which posited the idea of a nuclear winter has been proven wrong in subsequent analysis. There may be some cooling effect but not the kind of effect envisaged by massive nuclear conflicts.

    Xi Jinping on external propaganda and discursive power – China Neican 内参 – aka more and better Wolf Warrior. It was interested that this was misinterpreted by many people as a softening in tone by China. The reality is that the CPC views everything in terms of struggle, which is means their strategic approach is like a ratchet. It was interesting to read alongside the below article in The Spectator

    China is not as strong as it appears | The Spectator – The truth is that China is not as strong as it appears. As the Stanford scholar Elizabeth Economy points out, the country spent $216 billion on domestic security in 2019 — three times its expenditure of a decade before, and even more than what it spends on the People’s Liberation Army. Yet if Beijing’s internal problems continue to get worse, it will fall back on nationalism as a source of legitimacy. This will not be a comfortable experience for the West. ‘Communist China is bad, Han nationalist China will be worse,’ – the party is already validated by Han nationalism and has been a good while, so this worst case scenario is already here.

    Intellectual property

    Maine man sues his company, claiming it allowed Chinese access to US trade secrets | War Is Boring

    Luxury

    Busan’s Rich Have Only Malls to Spend Money on – The Chosun Ilbo

    Marketing

    Miller Lite, New Balance team up on ‘dad shoe’ beer koozie | Marketing Dive – Through the Shoezie, Miller Lite is hoping to appeal to the middle-aged men who represent an important cohort of beer drinkers and those who embrace dad fashion, which has become a trend as consumers retro looks. New Balance’s 624 Trainer — the model on which the koozie is based — is referred to as the classic “Dad Shoe” in the announcement. DDB San Francisco organized a modeling session for the Shoezie in which dads were placed in typical dad scenarios, such as cleaning the garage and searing a steak. By combining these elements of dad culture, Miller Lite is taking a lighthearted, relatable approach to Father’s Day

    Modern brands have forgotten that good ad slogans work (rest and play) | Business | The Times – Lloyds Banking Group, Pepsi and the food division of Marks & Spencer have brought some or all of their marketing in-house, partly as a cost-saving exercise. But partly, as Richard Warren, Lloyds’ head of marketing, claims: “No one can write in ad agencies any more.” Ouch. – So much here in factors causing this move. Relentless cost cutting has reduced agency talent bench, if you’re 40 you’re done. Agency focus on disruption and innovation over craft because of the media buying profits offered from online.

    Retailing

    How the Depop generation thinks | Vogue Business – so a lot of similarities with earlier generations at their age then. the Etsy acquisition of Depop is more about consolidating crafting and thrifting rather than a generational play per se.

    Tymbals – The edge @ ROI – The latest wonder to be rolled out of Nigel Scott’s RoboVC investment model. The DTC Dropship Arbitrage for evaluating the relative efficiency of eCommerce biz models

    Security

    Polish trial begins in Huawei-linked China espionage case | Reuters – Huawei, which fired Wang after his arrest but has helped finance his legal fees, told Reuters in a statement last month that its activities are “in accordance with the highest standards of transparency and adherence to laws and regulation.” – some interesting bits in the article. First of all, Huawei picking up a good deal of the legal fees for an employee that they ‘fired’. Secondly, Wang was interested in tapping of military optical fibres in Poland, which hints at technology theft and the depth of military and intelligence alliance between Russia and China

    Technology

    Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development | Ars Technica – All the evidence points to HarmonyOS being built on top of Android; but with Android mentions removed. Knowing Huawei they are probably violating GPL as well

    RISC vs. CISC Is the Wrong Lens for Comparing Modern x86, ARM CPUs – ExtremeTech

    Telecoms

    Bandwidth Boosts Could Help Unclog Space Communications | EE Times 

    Web of no web

    Killer drone ‘hunted down a human target’ without being told to – The March 2020 attack was in Libya and perpetrated by a Kargu-2 quadcopter drone produced by Turkish military tech company STM “during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction led by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army,” the Star reports, adding: “The Kargu-2 is fitted with an explosive charge and the drone can be directed at a target in a kamikaze attack, detonating on impact.” – At the start of my agency career, autonomous software agents would aid the consumer. I had a German dot com client called DealTime who had a Windows-only app for consumers. It would go out and find the best price on the web for items that they where interested in and keep an eye on those prices over time. Now we have Amazon and suicide drones.

  • Hydrogen & more stuff

    Max Fujita, head of European hydrogen fuel cells at Panasonic, discusses the importance of hydrogen technology. Hydrogen is the most widespread chemical element in the universe and could play a significant role in achieving zero net emission and other goals such as wind and geothermal power. Hydrogen is important for more environmentally friendly steel mills and foundries. It even offers a solution for the range anxiety caused by lithium ion battery cars.

    The Asia Society have a video on the story behind the Japan traditional craft revitalisation competition. If you read Monocle you will be well aware of Japan’s strength in traditional crafts, often within centuries old businesses. More Japan related content here.

    Interesting observations on culture and remote working. Interesting where they are talking about a culture crisis. For the past five years before the pandemic I saw company cultures changed as noise cancelling headphones went on and desks turned into long benches. This ironically damaged company culture. The pandemic shook up office space again, with the home office. I was quite fortunate as I had pretty much everything I needed after freelancing. But I did a lot of Zoom calls with people punched on the end of their bed. The range of views in this series of interviews shows that there will be wide mix of responses.

    Finally as a curry cup noodle fan, this next story appealed to me. Nissin (who make the iconic Cup Noodle) has a new strategy in the sustainability game by eliminating the “lid closing seal,” a thin strip of sellotape type material that holds your noodle cup closed while the ramen is cooking in boiling water. This very small change will save an estimated 33 tons of plastic waste per year produced by Nissin. Instead the lid will be held shut by two ‘ears’ on the lid film.

  • AgXeed + more news

    AgXeed

    Claas acquires share in Dutch robot manufacturer | Irish Farmers Journal – Claas has acquired a minority shareholding in Dutch start-up AgXeed B.V, with the aim of co-operating on the development and commercialisation of autonomous agricultural machines. AgXeed makes robot tracked tractors that look suspiciously like vehicles from the first Terminator movie. Automation like AgXeed is going to become more important in agriculture at labour moves to the cities and farming consolidates. You can see how unskilled factory work is also having to look at automation in the below piece from the South China Morning Post. AgXeed is the flip side of the coin to industrial robotics.

    As China’s working population falls, factories turn to machines to pick up the slack | South China Morning Post – makes a lot of sense for a brand like Midea who needs less precision than say a smartphone assembly line

    Beauty

    What’s driving the Chinese boom in cosmetics for children? | Vogue Business – In China, it’s more socially acceptable these days to show individual identity in looks. Parents born in the 1980s or 1990s are less likely to curb their daughters’ interest in beauty products and may even encourage it. The current boom is certainly one to watch: according to data from Kaola, in May 2020, sales in China of children’s cosmetics were up by more than 1,200 per cent year-on-year. Disney’s sales alone were up by 100 per cent over the same period. 

    In China, children’s cosmetics are defined as those for children aged 12 and under. On e-commerce platforms, a quick search for children’s cosmetics brings up dozens of brands and thousands of products, with prices ranging widely. Products are typically sold in sets, including colourful eye shadows, blush, lip gloss, nail polish, compact powder and makeup brushes

    Consumer behaviour

    What Gen Z Really Think And Why You Should Care – GWI – at least the author was thinking about life stages when they wrote this copy

    Energy

    Hydrogen plant planned for Cork but viable market yet to emerge 26 May 2021 | The Irish Farmers Journal – but if there isn’t hydrogen production, there won’t be hydrogen infrastructure and marketplace.

    Hong Kong

    EXCLUSIVE Hong Kong threatens Lai’s bankers with jail if they deal in his accounts | Reuters – “We can now see that any banking relationship you have centred on Hong Kong makes you vulnerable under the national security law – that is going to be a big wake-up call for the wealth management industry here, and their rich clients,“

    China’s Communist Party chips away at Hong Kong business houses | The Economist – Expropriations may violate local law. But laws can be changed, as the imposition of new security and electoral rules show. Such an outcome looks “all too believable”, says Mr Blennerhassett. The tycoons thought “they didn’t have to do anything as long as they didn’t question Beijing”, says Joseph Fan of Chinese University of Hong Kong. Now the Communist Party will not even settle for overt expressions of fealty. It appears intent on extracting value, too. – not terribly surprising. The hubris of Hong Kong business people is surprising, even to someone like me

    Legal

    British Business in China: Position Paper – British Chamber of Commerce in China | Beijing – Chinese data protection rules a key issue

    Luxury

    Can Gucci Sell High-End Watches To China? | Jing Daily – “Gucci’s high-priced watches are lacking legitimacy. Real watch collectors will not buy,” Müller concludes. In fact, the expansion into high-end watches may not help Gucci attract new clientele but will undoubtedly enhance the Italian maison’s prestige. As the luxury entry barrier lowers, the brand is required to expand in the high-end sphere to retain its exclusivity and appeal to local high net worth buyers

    Marketing

    The Test Screening That Almost Killed Fast Times at Ridgemont High | Slate – such a great interview, but would you have a cultural moment like that now; or would it be over like yesterday’s news or a TikTok meme?

    Media

    China’s Hottest Livestream Trend: Fraud – The episode was a disaster for Li. Her company had paid 200,000 yuan ($31,000) upfront just to secure a spot on the influencer’s show. It had also stocked over 4,000 boxes of shakes, anticipating a sales bonanza. But in the end, they hadn’t earned a single yuan. “Apart from the financial losses, we felt humiliated,” says Li. “All the other employees at the company were whispering that our team was totally fooled.” – ad fraud is universal but this one seems to be particularly shocking

    Technology

    iFixit tells the sad story of how Samsung “ruined” its upcycling program | Ars Technica – “Samsung, like every manufacturer, should set their old phones free. Open up their bootloaders. Let people use their cameras, sensors, antennas, and screens for all kinds of purposes, using whatever software people can dream up. The world needs fun, exciting, and money-saving ways to reuse older phones, not a second-rate tie-in to yet another branded internet-of-things ecosystem.“

    Web of no web

    Europe looks to the end of the mobile phone | EE News Europe – The aim is AR glasses that are wearable all day and weigh less than 60g with a 500mW power consumption. “We can achieve that this year with 1000nits for outdoor brightness, compared to 500nits that needs darkened lenses, and a 30 to 50 degree field of view (FoV) is enough,” he said. 

    “In the end there is a tradeoff in power consumption. The way you build the relay optics is where you lose the field of view. Increasing the field of view means the energy is relayed into the comb of the lenses so the limitation is on the capabilty of the waveguide to have a good colour uniformity across the field of view, and we are working with waveguide makers to get to 60 to 70deg. Today Hololens has 55 degree field of view for example but the military were asking for 85 degrees.” – more related content here.

    US-China tech war: China’s GPS rival BeiDou poised to support industry worth US$156 billion by 2025 | South China Morning Post 

  • Get Tough by William E Fairbairn

    What is Get Tough?

    Get Tough is a book on hand-to-hand fighting originally published in 1942. It is important for what it represents as much as it is with regards its content.

    Fairbairn as an author

    By the time Get Tough was written in 1942; Fairbairn was an experienced published author. In 1926, Fairbairn wrote the book Defendu. This was a step-by-step guide to Fairbairn’s fighting system that distilled his experience in street fights, alongside the jujuitsu he learned from early Japanese teachers that went abroad. In this respect Fairbairn, was similar to the Gracie family in Brazil, Imi Lichtenfeld’s Krav Maga and the Soviet founders of SAMBO. Globalisation drove hybrid fighting styles. Something we’d later see with mixed martial arts in general.

    Defendu as a title didn’t catch on that well as a title so it was republished as Scientific Self-Defence in 1931.

    The second world war resulted in Fairbairn’s most prolific period as an author. He wrote Shooting to Live with a colleague and firearms expert Eric Sykes. All-In Fighting was written by Fairbairn as a manual in close quarters combat. Though a section on using firearms in a close up situation was contributed by P.N. Walbridge.

    Get Tough was an American and Australian edition of All-in Fighting, but without the section by P.N. Walbridge. Where All-in Fighting was aimed at the soldiers Fairbairn and his colleagues taught, Get Tough looked to appeal to a wider audience.

    Fairbairn provided an edited version of his work called Self Defence For Women and Girls, which is about a quarter of the pages of Get Tough. There was also an American edition retitled Hands-Off!

    Fairbairn managed to write the book whilst training British commandos. Fairbairn and Sykes had a falling out sometime in 1942 and were never reconciled. Fairbairn took his expertise to to the US and Canada. Sykes carried on teaching in the UK.

    Get Tough and colonialism

    Get Tough was a distillation of experience that Fairbairn had in Korea and then later in Shanghai. As a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police he had been involved in hundreds of fights with local and international residents of the port city.

    The experience led to Fairbairn to play a role in developing:

    • Anti-riot techniques
    • Police sniping techniques with Eric Sykes
    • The Defendu fighting style
    • Two types of knives. The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A slender but sharp double sided stiletto blade designed the weapon to strike at the vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body, especially the vital organs. The original version was known as the Shanghai knife and had a 6 inch blade. It was likely part of the cache of illegal weapons that Fairbairn and Sykes brought back to the UK from Shanghai during the war. The military versions were 1.5 inches longer, to get through winter clothing. The Smachet, a large broad knife almost like a machete or a Roman sword

    Fairbairn’s work was based on the health and lives of colonial subjects. Fairbairn often enjoys exclusive credit for this work, but the reality was that it was a collaborative effort from several officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police including Eric Sykes and Dermot O’Neill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was what modern organisational theorists would have termed a ‘learning organisation’.

    Part of this learning culture was forced upon them by events. The Shanghai Municipal Police killed four members of a protest in May 1925 because they didn’t have enough police on duty to manage a demonstration. This felt rather similar to the Amritsar shootings of 1919, which shattered support for British rule in India by both Indians and people in the UK.

    This led to the Shanghai Municipal Police founding the first modern SWAT team called the reserve unit; this unit was also responsible for modern methods of policing riots.

    The Get Tough legacy

    Defendu had been taught to hundreds of policemen who rotated through Shanghai before the second world war. They then went on to work in other outposts of the British Empire in a policing or military capacity.

    When Sykes and Fairbairn brought their particular set of skills back to the UK in 1940. They were put to work training commandos and and secret agents in their skills. These skills were taught to military age men and women, the women were predominantly going to be dropped by parachute into occupied Europe.

    Again hundreds, if not thousands of people passed through the schools that they ran in Scotland and the south coast of England. Some of the people who went through those schools were from overseas. When they eventually went home, the ideas and training that they learned went with them and were put to use. At first trying to retain colonial rule. Then later, building up nascent special forces units including units from the US, Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

    Over time these countries evolved their techniques to match modern war, but the principles where still there.

    After the second world war, the colonial policemen of the Shanghai Municipal Police who survived scattered across the British empire. Fairbairn went to Cyprus to train police in his techniques. He then ran two sessions in Singapore for the newly formed riot squad unit.

    The contents of Get Tough

    Fairbairn wrote Get Tough for a wide range of readers, not just the military as Fairbairn himself said:

    It is not the armed forces of the United Nations alone who can profit by learning about how to win in hand-to-hand fighting. Every civilian, man or woman, who ever walks a deserted road at mid-night, or goes in fear of his life in the dark places of a city, should acquaint himself with these methods.

    Get Tough by William E. Fairbairn

    The book covers:

    • Blows
    • Releases – how to get out of holds by an assailant
    • Holds
    • Throws
    • Miscellaneous advice – mostly covering improvised weapons from things at hands
    • Use of the knife – Fairbairn talks about using the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife
    • The Smatchet – use of a short machete type weapon designed by Fairbairn
    • Disarming an opponent of his pistol

    If you’ve trained in a martial art, you’ll have done drills of some sort like katas in karate. Fairbairn’s work doesn’t have drills per se. The idea is that if you do the hold or the blow, you are unlikely to need follow up.

    More book reviews here.

  • Military civil fusion response + more

    Military civil fusion

    How Should the U.S. Respond to China’s Military Civil Fusion Strategy? | ChinaFile – Over the past four years, the U.S. government has invoked military civil fusion (MCF) to justify a range of policies. For instance, MCF was among the rationales for the reform and expansion of export controls to include certain “emerging” and “foundational” technologies, as well as for the addition of companies and universities to the “Entity List” and “Unverified List” that the Department of Commerce maintains. The Trump administration partially justified attempts to ban WeChat and TikTok from the United States through initial claims about the companies’ alleged linkage to MCF. Moreover, a presidential proclamation on Chinese students and researchers studying in the United States cited students’ proximity to entities engaged in MCF as grounds for denying or revoking visas – military civil fusion is probably one of the biggest things that will affect innovation over the next couple of decades. It will shape the prioritisation of innovation topics in the west as a reaction to what happens in China.

    Luxury

    The Limits of Luxury Livestreaming | Jing Daily 

    Marketing

    Bitcoin declined substantially in value this week. The inciting incident seems to be Elon Musk waking up to the environmental impact of cryptomining. Papa Johns Pizza put out an offer in the UK which seems to bet a rise in the value of bitcoin.

    Promotional offer from Papa Johns Pizza UK

    This offer could democratise ownership of bitcoin, but it’s unlikely. Instead it feels like a PR driven story that could turn into the Hoover’s free flight debacle of 1992. It is apparently to celebrate Bitcoin pizza day.

    Media

    What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks – Columbia Journalism Review – really interesting findings, though I am surprised that the percentage link rot is only 25% – I was expecting it to be much higher given the range of years covered. When you have 72% link rot from 1998, it gives a counterpoint to ‘on the web is forever’. My friend Ian often talks about how he can’t find a video demonstration of Orange’ home of the future from the dot com era. This data supports his empirical experience. The work that the Internet Archive do is immensely important. But it misses the interconnectivity between content; which is an important part of the medium and the context of online.

    These Ex-Journalists Are Using AI to Catch Online Defamation | WIRED – so you’ve spotted it, what next?

    Security

    The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told | WIRED – interesting story that foreshadowed the SolarWinds breach a decade later

    Technology

    New 2021 Ford Focus RS hot hatch axed | CAR Magazine – interesting story. It implies that motor companies won’t be able to do niches and halo cars. This will have a knock on for suppliers, forcing consolidation. It also has implications in terms of the need for design houses and design teams, motorsport participation and brand differentiation. And the software aspects of car experience looks even worse for the consumer – ‘The uncomfortable future of in-car upgrades has begun’ | CAR Magazine

    Ford’s Ever-Smarter Robots Are Speeding Up the Assembly Line | WIRED – up to now manufacturing robots have been programmed to do a series of movements, not that dissimilar to a CNC machine. This means that they are intolerant of inconsistency. Ford, Nissan and Toyota are looking to use machine learning to handle inconsistency. The man on the line is fine if his screwdriver, is placed in roughly the same place as it was when he put it down. He or she doesn’t mind what part of a bolt they pick up in the parts bin. Yet that kind of thing requires a lot of machine learning work for robots. It will be incremental gains on tasks like this that moves automation forwards