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.

  • Huawei expansion into smartphone market

    Huawei expansion into smartphone market has started to be reflected int their released their annual results for 2015 last week. By going through their press release library and annual reports I have tried to piece together a picture of their consumer business and how it has grown over time.

    Huawei isn’t like other businesses you might be used to in terms of corporate structure. It is based around worker participation in profits with Chinese colleagues benefiting from profit share. It is a private company so it’s numbers don’t have the same level of disclosure requirements as public companies. It’s books are audited by a reputable accounting  firm.

    I found some inconsistencies in the way information is disclosed. For a number of years Huawei used to quote US dollar equivalents to its numbers, but has stopped doing so in the 2015 report.

    Other inconsistencies:

    • High-end device sales are only listed for the past three years as the company started to focus on the premium marketplace
    • Honor sub-brand device shipments were disclosed for 2014 and 2015 as the brand filled the low-to-mid market segments Huawei’s range had previously extended down to
    • I only have two years worth of revenue numbers from Western Europe, if I get more I can then start looking at trends over time
    • In 2014, they disclosed the proportion of sales from e-commerce and the number of Huawei branded stores. In 2015, they disclosed the total number of retail outlets worldwide that sold Huawei phones

    Between the currency fluctuations and the slight changes in information there may be some errors in my numbers – please bare this in mind.

    I have outlined my charts below as JPEGs and have embedded a presentation at the bottom for convenience.
    Consumer devices shipped
    Consumer average revenue / device
    Huawei consumer business growth over time

    What does 2016 and beyond bring?
    Overall sector outlook
    Looking at forecasts from market analysts and The World Bank Huawei will experience tougher market conditions with lower growth forecast across major markets like China. Smartphone market maturity will mean lower exceptions of sector growth as well.
    Macro economic data
    As a presentation

  • Friendly foxes + more things

    Friendly foxes pull in tourists to give Tohoku region a boost – AJW by The Asahi Shimbun – interesting that Tohoku’s friendly foxes awareness is word-of-mouth driven across so many different cultures. More Japan related posts here.

    Avicii Has Announced His Retirement – Magnetic Magazine – probably makes sense when you look at the current state of SFX. I suspect Avicii will still produce under one alias or another

    HKTB taps influencers to discover hidden gems in Hong Kong | Marketing Interactive – interesting passion-led campaign

    RuTracker to Bypass Web Blockade With IM Delivered Torrents – TorrentFreak – using a bot system to deliver torrents in Telegram messenger

    Mouse Movements Could Identify Tor Users’ Real IP Address | Greycoder – not terribly surprising given that back in WWII, radio operators were identifiable by their morse code key style

    Instagram Users Are Losing It over the Company’s Impending Switch | Vanity Fair – they’ve seen how algorithmic models have nuked influence in favour of brand advertising

    AP Investigation: How con man used China to launder millions – Law enforcement has not globalized as fast as crime, and the legal firewall that surrounds China has added to its appeal as a money-laundering hub. 

    Chinese authorities generally have done little to help Western companies defrauded in Chikli-style scams recover their money, according to European intelligence documents reviewed by the AP. 

    The U.S. State Department, in a report this month, reproached China for lackluster performance on money-laundering investigations. 

    “China has not cooperated sufficiently on financial investigations and does not provide adequate responses to requests for financial investigation information,” the State Department wrote.

    Xiaomi Exec: ‘We’re Playing a Completely Different Game’ | TIME – ‘we’re in the business of getting internet users’ -hmm sounds familar

    The next big thing in phones may not be a phone | VentureBeat  – “Everything in the phone industry now is incremental: slightly faster, slightly bigger, slightly more storage or better resolution,” said Christian Lindholm, inventor of the easy text-messaging keyboards in old Nokia phones that made them the best-selling mobile devices of all time – lumpy innovation

    How to Transfer Your Notes from Evernote to Apple Notes | Lifehacker –  this article and Microsoft’s migration path for Evernote users gives me a good idea of how in trouble Evernote must mean

    Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems by Gold, Colman and Pulford – the trolley problem is whether you allow 5 people to die on a tram or divert it with a switch and only kill one person instead. Ordinary British people will pull a switch between 63 and 91% of the time but Chinese people would do so between 33% and 71% of the time. Chinese decision making seems to be based on belief in fate (PDF)

  • Starboard threat + more news

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer downplayed Starboard threat – Business Insider – thinking about the Starboard threat, she didn’t see that Microsoft could use its money to leverage a more friendly board. Mayer has quite rightly looked to better monetise search. I don’t agree with a lot of what’s she’s done but her instinct on this was right. More on Yahoo! here

    Those Entry-Level Startup Jobs? They’re Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks — Backchannel — Medium – looking at this, even Silicon Valley doesn’t value Cluetrain Manifesto

    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

    Facing 35 percent ad-block rates, Future decided to drastically cut ad impressions | Digiday – interesting and probably smart approach to ad blocking

    Jean-Claude Biver: ‘The Watch Industry Is Not in Trouble, The World Is.’ | BoF – TAG Heuer has latched on to wearables

    Domo, Slack and Tableau: How the disruptors are already facing disruption | VentureBeat – not terribly surprising: easy rather than hard innovation with low barriers to entry. The barrier to entry is brand, marketing and user inertia

    The FTC Cracks Down On March 2015 Lord & Taylor Social Media Launch: Native Advertisers Beware! | Fashion & Apparel Law Blog – native advertising, not quite the wild west it had been

    Dynamic battery for the future developed by Japanese team  – A lithium-ion battery more than three times as powerful as normal that could be used in vehicles and power grids has been developed by a team of academic and corporate researchers in Japan

  • Platform utility

    Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The  presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

    Key takeouts from the presentation

    • A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it

    Network effect benefits

    • Create barriers to exit for existing users
    • Create barriers to entry for new companies
    • Protect from competitors eating away at margins
    • Creates a winner takes all style market

    Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility

    • Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
    • Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
    • Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants

    If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

    User modes

    • Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
    • ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
    • Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
    • Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
    • What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?

    Case studies

    • Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
    • Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
    • Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
    • Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
    • WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
    • AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
    • Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.

  • 6 things learned in a corporate environment

    The idea for 6 things learned  in a corporate environment came from having spent four months working day-in, day-out onsite at a large corporate.

      • The working environment is very different to an agency. My desk had to become much more portable. Since the space was all hot-desking with only team PAs assigned permanent desks.  This meant no reference charts stuck up or post-its around the monitor. Instead I boiled my process down to the laptop, a notebook that acted as my organisation memory and a day book that focused on my tasks. That was it, no further paper work
      • Many of the traditional spaces for memos weren’t available. So the back of a toilet door with its regularly updated notices was a lifeline to what was happening where. The coffee machine, once a traditional networking point was less useful as hot desking meant that your serendipitous meetings are random in nature. They often lack the depth of what you have an agency environment. These aren’t shallow people, its a level of impermanence built into the working space
      • The importance of mobile was brought home to me. Each desk space had a phone. You keyed in your number and a PIN and your direct dial number moved with you. But 20 per cent of these phones were out of action at any given time. This wasn’t a problem as people tended to use their mobile phones a lot. We used to talk a lot, over bridged conference call numbers. You would see people on calls pacing the floor listening and talking on their calls via headsets plugged into their mobile handsets. For the first few minutes it feels slightly weird
      • Sustainability and being environmentally friendly were more than having a prominent recycling bin. There is an application that reminded me any time I printed something just how bad I was for the environment. Being green was thoughtfully built into processes rather than bolted on as an afterthought
      • Admittedly, my time at Yahoo! was in a very different company and culture, but being a client is very much a team sport. You only have a limited amount of control, a lot of work has to be done by consensus and through a process. You feel like a very small cog in that process and every small gain was an appreciable win. Making this happen takes up an inordinate amount of time
      • It seemed to be timely when writing this post that I read this article Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – new enterprise software like Workday is still as reassuring clunky as their forebears. Many of the same problems of collaboration and information sharing are still being resolved

    What other things learned in a corporate environment have you come across?