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.

  • Wearable devices

    The Apple Watch launch gave me a chance to go back and revisit the development of wearable computing and my experience with wearable devices.

    Wearable computing had it’s genesis in academic research; some of it government funded. For instance DARPA had a hand in the US Army Land Warrior programme. France has it’s FÉLIN programme and Germany IdZ. All the programmes sought to provide soldiers with location data  and in communication with their colleagues.  Unsurprising  key issues for the soldiers involved included:

    • Weight
    • How cumbersome the equipment was
    • Battery life
    • Reliability / robust product design
    • Value of information provided

    It is worth bearing in mind these criteria when thinking about wearables in a consumer context.  SonyEricsson’s LiveView remote control for Android handsets launched the current spurt in ‘smart’ watches. Sony made a deliberate decision to position the LiveView as an augmentation to the smartphone. Think of it as a thin client for your wrist.

    Samsung and Apple in some of their communications have looked to muddy the water in the way that they presented their devices, despite the fact that both of them rely on the smartphone  in a slightly more sophisticated way than LiveView.

    Much of the early drive in wearables has been around health and fitness where the likes of Nike and Jawbone reinvented the kind of service provided to dedicated fitness enthusiasts by the likes of Polar and Suunto. These devices are primarily about simplification of design to democratise the technology.

    By contrast Samsung and Apple have a greater ambition for their devices in terms of the what they can do. I don’t know what the killer app is for a general purpose device and I suspect neither do Apple or Samsung.

    Wearables are not particularly robust by design. I have had three Nike Fuelbands fail in 12 months or so. Compare this to the Casio G-Shock and IWC watches that I generally wear. I don’t have to think about wearing my watch; I didn’t worry about washing my hands or stepping in the shower or the swimming pool with it on. You couldn’t do that with a Samsung Gear.

    A second unknown factor is how often consumers would be willing to upgrade a smart watch? When one thinks about the expected price point of Apple’s premium watches, it is similar to the products coming out of Switzerland. The cases and straps are well made, but the price of buying an Omega watch is also about buying into a service centre that will keep the watch going for decades to come. Apple’s iPod Classic barely lasted 13 years. The electronic innards of an iWatch would be built from components that would become obsolete, even if Apple wanted to service them.

    Would Apple compromise with a modular design that could make it easy to swap out smart watch innards in a case as an analogy to having a watch serviced? I don’t think so, if one looks at Apple’s design move over the past decade towards sealed computing appliances: the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the Retina MacBook.

    More information
    FÉLIN | Army Technology
    SonyEricsson LiveView remote and the changing face of mobile computing | renaissance chambara

  • BMW i8 & other things this week

    BMW made a video about the production of the BMW i8 to promote the car. However the tone of the video feels rather like a corporate video from the 1980s. Despite the 1980s vibes the BMW i8 carbon fibre monocoque chassis manfucturing is fascinating. As is the manufacture of the BMW i8 high voltage battery. Unfortunately all this effort in manufacturing doesn’t seem to result in high reliability of the vehicles it makes.

    Reebok’s classic range looked to draw on the history of Manchester in this video. It split opinions in the office. Many of my colleagues liked it, but I felt a dissonance between the big speech about building the future with visuals that came straight from 1988. The MA1 jacket, the Reebok Classic trainer – the chav proto-shoe, brutalist architecture, a nice house with 1970s architecture and a mid-to-late 1980s BMW M535i – allegedly beloved of drug dealers trying to shift a load. The car looked discreet about its performance, but could still go like the clappers

    Great demonstration by Grandmaster Flash (of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) of mixing circa 1983

    Kickstarter have a campaign running to reprint the New York Transit Authority’s standards manual which was much more than a style guide but went into things like the methodology of planning signage and usability of New York public transport. More design related content here.

    Anton Corbjin’s film A Most Wanted Man makes Hamburg amazing and gets great performances out of actors including Willem Defoe and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The film feels believable because it’s based on a John LeCarré novel of the same name. LeCarré’s post-cold war output was a critique of populism, globalisation and the political nature of the war on terror. As would be expected in the 21st century the US comes out of it pretty poorly. Corbjin gives an honest portrayal of the book.

  • First Apple Watch impressions

    I was underwhelmed by the Apple Watch wearable product. It is impressive what they have done, but from a product design point of view the case looks cumbersome rather like a slightly better Samsung Gear. The use of haptics was one of the smarter things that I saw in the demonstration and the use of emoji as an essential ‘social lubricant’ borrows heavily from Asian mobile usage of stickers on the likes of LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat.

    Looking at the demonstrations, I still think that the use case for a wearable still isn’t there for mainstream consumers. The use cases for haptic communications for instance were downright creepy and I wasn’t convinced by the cloud of spots interface. The fitness app and workout apps were similar to products from the likes of Suunto and Polar or the miCoach app by adidas for a smartphone. There needs to be more general purpose apps, then the Apple fitness option might be able to drive out the fitness sector.

    In terms of the industrial design, I was particularly interested in the strap. Apple has borrowed a distinctive looking catch and strap connector  from one of the strap designs from the now defunct Ikepod Watch company co-founded by Marc Newson who recently joined Apple’s design team.

    Ikepod Megapod strap
    ikepod

    First Apple Watch strap. This probably explains why Marc Newson was brought on board as part of Jonny Ive’s team; as the Ikepod strap was something that he had designed back in the mid to late 1990s. You can see it on the Hemipod watch design here.
    applewatch

    While the case shape looks suspiciously like a homage to H Moser, I think that luxury brands won’t be particularly concerned, at least at this first Apple Watch, lets hope that future iterations prove me wrong. More on design here.

  • Jacob & Co. Epic SF24

    The EPIC SF24 is a bit of a curate’s egg. Jacob & Co. is a brand that I knew of through it’s connection to hip-hop culture. They are referenced in the lyrics of 50Cent, Jay Z and Kanye West. The brand is positioning itself with more conventional luxury customers with a mix of high-end jewellery and watches. They had a recent exhibition in Monaco of their latest range on August 5 – 23, 2014.

    Whilst none where something I would normally pay attention to; the most visually interesting watch they came out with was the EPIC SF24 which had an unusual take on creating a world time display. The top is a 24-hour time indicator that seems to flip around like an electromechanical airport or railway station sign giving the watch a steam punk vibe.
    Epic SF24
    Some of the other details like the crown on the side of the watch reminded me a little of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Master Compressor series, but with a more practical lower profile that would avoid snagging whilst on the wrist. The movement is said to be a JCAA02 with SF24 module; I don’t know whether the movement is in-house designed; or more likely, a modified version of an existing movement by one of the big movement manufacturers like ETA. Raiding the parts bin is perfectly respectable in Swiss watchmaking.

    It comes in a number of types of gold and titanium – titanium is a particularly interesting choice given the challenges working with the metal on such an intricate case design. Its aimed at the kind of person who thinks that Hublot is no longer making statement watches and Frank Mueller bores them to tears. We’re talking a tiny global customer base. More luxury related content here.

    More information

    Jacob & Co. website profile page for the Epic SF24
    Jacob & Co. Annual Timepice And Jewelry Exhibition In Monte Carlo | Cision

  • Dual class listings + more things

    Don’t change listing rules until lawyers have to change theirs | South China Morning Post – interesting take on dual class listings. Not viable unless there are other protection measures in place like class-action lawsuits and contingency fees – which makes sense when one thinks about how Facebook, Google and Alibaba have gamed the dual class listing system in the US against shareholders. I am surprised that dual class listings hadn’t come into Hong Kong earlier to support control of local businesses by their oligarch family founders. I can understand why dual class listings would be attractive to the kind of mainland companies now looking to list in Hong Kong (paywall)

    ‘Closest thing China has to a presidential debate’: face-off between two geeks over a mobile phone | South China Morning Post – not too sure how much good this did either brand, but it did seem to provide good entertainment. I would love to see Richard Yu of Huawei do one :-)

    Wakie.com — Social Alarm Clock – I really like the idea of this, plays to the dynamics of sleeping through an alarm whilst becoming wide awake from a call

    Lessons to be learned from Yahoo’s native ads | VentureBeat – interesting op-ed by an OutBrain executive

    Fujifilm just one of several struggling manufacturers jumping into medicine | Japanese Times – it used to be that Japanese companies were pointed in the direction of markets by a government ministry, it is interesting that they are all now flocking towards healthcare

    Charting the rise of Generation Yawn: 20 is the new 40 – Telegraph – I heard a similar thing about gen-x, particularly around apparent apathy for causes. Don’t believe it, generations aren’t amorphous: for every hippy there was a young conservative in the boomer generation

    Fast-moving consumer goods market saturated in China | WantChinaTimes – bad news for Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive in the FMCG space. It is in these kind of circumstances where local brands will break out

    Technohyperbole | The Economist – takes on Gartner’s hype curve

    Apple To Developers: No Selling HealthKit Data To Advertisers – does this mean that marketers can’t use the data for other things? For instance, pre-screening for insurance premiums or weight loss classes?

    Beijing Scientists Replace A Boy’s Vertebra With A 3D-Printed Bone — The First Surgery Of Its Kind – titanium used, so I suspect sintered metal powder rather than a printing process