The Quality Movement Vs. The Innovation Movement.

I talked with Gary Hamel the other day. He did a book, as I recall, with CK Prahalad years ago that developed the concept of "core competence" and he's worked on innovation for many years. We talked about our personal experiences in trying to innovate within our own organizational cultures--how hard it is. And Hamel said something that stunned me. He said that it took 20 years for the Quality Movement to really take hold in Corporate America and that it would probably take 20 years for the Innovation Movement to do the same.

Wow. It makes sense. The father of quality, of course, was Dr. W. Edwards Demming, and he preached for a very long time before he was really heard. In fact, as I recall, Japanese companies first accepted Demmings teachings long before U.S. and European corporations.

Innovation is the new black among managers these days. Everyone talks about it. And many are starting to do the hard work to make it happen. But only a few realize that it may take an entire generation to make their corporations totally innovative, from the HR people to the scientists, from the engineers to the accountants. Google gets this, but then Google is a new company built from scratch. Most other companies are in the stage of building Innovation Gyms, tacking on innovation to their organizations. Some are going further by also doing workshops to change their culture and opening up and partnering up to bring in outside voices. But few realize just how hard it can be--or how long it will probably take. Do we have the time?

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Innovation in the Non-Profit Sector.

Lots of folks don't see either Bill Gates or Warren Buffet as innovators. Buffet often says he doesn't "get" technology and doesn't invest in it. Much of his company's money is in insurance. And you know the rap on Microsoft so there is little to add to that.

But the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does have a deserved reputation for innovation. By applying tough performance metrics in a non-profit space--drugs and vaccines for fighting and preventing malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS--this, the biggest charity in the world, is making significant progress. By making strategic investments with key partners, it acts more like a Silicon Valley VC firm than a traditional charity or foundation. It's a novel non-profit model, perhaps not for everyone. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have made huge inroads in battling disease and hunger over the decades. But for people looking for new models of organizational innovation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a place to examine.

Big Surprises in The Upcoming IDEA Design Awards.

I am crashing away, writing up the 2006 Industrial Designers Excellence Awards contest, and all I can say is that there are some pretty big surprises. Design/Innovation consultancies that have won in the past are absent and new design faces abound. Terrific.

Another surprise is Asia rising in design. This was a huge year for Asia in the IDEA awards. In 2004, the percentage of golds with design teams from Asia came to about 8%. In 2005, it was about the same. But this year, Asians took 26% of the golds.

What's at work? I'm not sure but clearly comnpanies and designers based in China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere in Asia are doing much better design/innovation work. Just look at Samsung, and LG. The level has risen tremendously. They are also learning how to win contests--an essential skill these days. That takes a bit of time but it looks like they have the knowledge now. And they are hooking up with US and European design firms to help them in their design. You see this time and again, especially in China.

The structure of the design/innovation business model is changing rapidly. I call it the commoditization of design. More in our big package due out the end of this week.

Negroponte's $100 Laptop Just Became the $140 Laptop.

The long-awaited $100 laptop for the bottom of the pyramid is heading toward production, according to it's champion, MIT's Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, but it will be a bit more expensive--$140 to start. With more volume, it could drop to $100 by 2008. Negroponte was talking before a Red Hat conference and predicted that one of the biggest impacts of the laptop would be to spread linux throughout the world. Red Hat is supplying the linux operating system and AMD the chip.

Actually, AMD and Intel, as most of you already know, have their own ideas of how to empower people in towns and villages throughout India, Africa and other BOP areas. AMD is already selling the AMD Personal Internet Communicator, designed by M3 Design (the now-$140 laptop was done by Design Continuum) which you plug into a screen and keyboard.

I have it on good authority that both won silver awards in the upcoming Industrial Design Excellence Awards--the AMD in the computers category and Negroponte's laptop in the Design Explorations category (as the Hundred Dollar Laptop Computer).

I'm hoping they both get out in mass soon so they do what they are intended to do--plug in hundreds of millions of people with little income to the net. These are two very difference approaches to solving that problem and I'd like to see which one works better.

Social Networking, Advertising and Innovation.

Anyone interested in the broader issue of innovation should take a look at some of the other BW blogs that have different monikers, such as Blogspotting and The Tech Beat. All the boundaries are blurring as to what constitutes "innovation," so, as you probably already know, you have to do some virtual traveling these days to find the best content to inform you on design and innovation.

There's a great piece on social networking, advertising and the media by Rob Hof at The Tech Beat. Here is what he has to say:

"Two of the biggest marketers in the world showed up at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today and sounded more like Web 2.0 zealots than brand giants. Michael Wiley, director of new media, GM Communications, at General Motors, who's responsible for GM blogs, sounded the most radical: "The existing advertising paradigm sucks," he said. "It's woefully inefficient. We give consumers virtually no information."

He and colleague Curt Hecht, executive VP and chief digital officer at GM, have been meeting with social networking and media companies in the area the last couple of days, and Wiley sounds like a fan: "We see the new social media space as a place we can become engaged," he said.

Likewise, Stan Joosten, Procter & Gamble's innovation manager for holistic customer communication (how's that for a title?), said P&G; needs to experiment more with social media--carefully. "We have to stay out of some places" where people don't want to see ads, he noted. But he says P&G; wants to engage with customers wherever they are online. "People want to talk about things they care about and you give them a platform to do that."

Interesting stuff from companies that have helped define mass-market advertising for decades."

And there's another great piece on social networking and the media by Heather Green on Blogspotting. Here it is:

"I was talking recently with Ben McConnell and Jackie Hubb, consultants who run the Church of the Customer blog, and they explained their theories on the rise of customer evangelism. One point that struck me was the role that the services such as Flickr and YouTube have had in making social media take off. Putting up a video clip or a photo is an expression of self creativity and is another form of media that contributes to the splintering of the mass market.

But having a service where you can aggregate those mini pieces of media together and that helps you share them even more broadly, to syndicate them in fact, turbocharges that new media. This way, content begets content, McConnell and Hubb explained. That's classic network effects. That means that the percieved benefit of content grows as the community does.

I remember when I first started looking at video blogs around 18 months ago, what struck me was how they exploded the traditional video model. But they still needed something to help more of them break out. iTunes clearly helped, but the network effects of these other platforms is even more powerful. "

That's pretty interesting stuff from Rob and Heather. I live inside the world of media, working in both the online and print media, and the shift to social networking and social production of content has got to be one of the most revolutionizing changes in recent decades. It goes way beyong disaggregation and digitalization. In fact, I think it is part of a great trend toward what I call Direct Design or what others call Participatory Design. It's the next step beyond the User Experience.

Is Brainstorming For Real? You Bet.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a piece deriding brainstorming and suggesting that individuals alone can come up with more and better ideas than a group sitting in a room. It really bothered me to read it because I've put some time into studying the art of brainstorming, indeed, the art of having a productive meeting in general, and the WSJ piece was just so wrong on so many levels.

I can't get into the WSJ site but here are snippits from the IFTF site:

"G]reat brainstorming sessions are possible, but they require the planning of a state dinner, plenty of rules, and the suspension of ego, ingratiation and political railroading. Hosts have to hope that people won't expend creative energy trying to tell others their ideas are bad without actually telling them that -- admittedly a real business skill. And they have to cross their fingers that the session won't deteriorate into what some people call "blamestorming" or "coblabberation," where you get nowhere or settle on something mediocre to be done with it....

[I]f you don't carefully follow procedures, you risk wasting a lot of energy. "If you leave groups to their own devices, they're going to do a very miserable job," says Prof. [Paul] B. Paulus, [a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington]....

When the goal really is ideas, some companies resort to hiring facilitators. Outsiders don't have political dogs in the fight and can, as Bill Hall learned, make people "get back in line." The last time Mr. Hall tried to conduct a session himself on how to save his organization money, "it quickly degenerated into a worthless day," he says.

Prof. Paulus conducted research on the number and quality of ideas of four people brainstorming together versus four people brainstorming by themselves. Typically, group brainstormers perform at about half the level they would if they brainstormed alone.... [I]f people brainstorm alone after the group brainstorming session, it can [also] be productive, he says, adding, "It's ironic: You tap the benefits of groups alone. Everyone still presumes the best brainstorming is group brainstorming."

David Perkins, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, warns that sometimes group sessions can result in one person's bad idea tainting and limiting the range of others' ideas. "The best way to get good ideas is to get people to write them down privately and then bring them in," he says.

That's it from the WSJ piece. My own experience is that if you craft the meeting, mix the people correctly, set rules on not interrupting and "yes, butting," and keep the focus, brainstorming sessions can be incredibly productive.

But I'll leave it to Bob Sutton, who is a professor of management science and engineering at the Engineering School at Stanford to critique the WSJ. He's just started a new blog and it's good.

A hybrid sports car from Toyota?

One of my favorite car sites, Winding Road, has an item out of Toyota quoting an exec saying he proposed developing a hot hybrid sports car. Now keep in mind that Audi won the Le Mans overall with a diesel sports car. Yes, it's a way of emphasizing performance over gas saving--but it's also a way of showing off alternative energy power trains in a dramatic fashion.

Social Networks and Architecture. Think About It.

This from Jessi Hempel, now covering innovation full-time with me:

Hey Bruce, a quick note for the blog: This morning I spoke with Michael Fazio, a Chicago-based architect and principal with Archideas, about the work he’s done with Jump Associates. He worked with Dev Patniak and the Jumpsters to design the new Jump space. He described the community-based planning model that he uses to approach design in which he maps the informal social networks that dominate an organization. Before designing a new space, Fazio surveys employees, asking a number of questions like: Who would you bounce ideas off of? And: Who would you hang out with?

Fazio says that identifying the strength and density of these networks leads to “a spider chart of relationships that is more powerful than the org chart in terms of how work gets done.” Apparently others appreciate his strategy. He has just been retained by Chicago’s Institute of Design to work with them to design their space. Fazio will work with ID initially to evaluate whether to remodel their existing building, remodel one of a half-dozen nearby buildings, or design a new structure."

Is this going to be a new core competence for architects? Is any school teaching this stuff?

LG Design Gets it Hot.

If you're not getting DesignBytes from the IDSA, you are missing out a lot on news on innovation and design from all over the world. This week's issue is chock full of interesting goodies.

Check out this piece on how LG Electronics is making a cell phone that responds to your touch. Seems to have a red-glowing, touch senstive cover and other goodies. Building on its now famous Chocolate Phone, LG is pushing the envelop in design. Some real competition for Samsung--and Nokia and Motorola-perhaps.

And guess what? The chief of mobile phone design is Kim Jin, a woman. Lots of change in once-conservative Confucian Korea in recent years. All making for better innovation, sales and profits.

Eric von Hippel and Consumer Co-Creation. Beyond Ethnography to Participatory Design.

One of the strongest voices in the innovation and design space these days is MIT's Eric von Hippel, who is head of the innovation and entrepreneurship program at the Sloan School of Management. Von Hippel writes a lot about user-led innovation, by which he means letting consumers get more and more involved in the design and execution of new products and services. Von Hippel is quoted in the Sunday NYT piece "To Charge Up Customers, Put Customers in Charge," (nice head guys).

Here is one quote from the story: "It's getting cheaper and cheaper for users to innovate on their own," Professor von Hippel said. "This is not traditional market research — asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business."

Something big is happening here. Technology is allowing people to design their own stuff and companies are increasingly in the business of providing tools, not products, to consumers. Today, people are making ads for companies. Tomorrow, entire services. This is one cool trend we need to follow.

Liz Sanders of maketools.com tells me that "ethnographically-informed participatory design" is the next trend. It goes beyond ethnography and involves the active participation of people in the design and making of their products and services. I want to know more about participatory design.

Design Thinking and Innovation for Social Issues.

Applying design thinking outside the corporate sphere in civil society is one of our great challenges--and opportunities. Chicago's mayor Daley is into using design to solve education, transportation and other problems and I believe the mayors of San Francisco and New York (and of course Portland, OR) are open to it as well.

But Europe is way ahead. The Brits, Danes, Dutch and Scandanavians are using design to solve major socio-economic problems and we need to follow what they are doing and apply it here in the US. A recent conference in Northumbria University, put on by the Centre for Design Research, at the School of Design, brought a host of speakers to talk about delivering better services through design.

I talked with Tamara Giltsoff of live/work, a British service design/innovation firm, recently. The firms moto is "you are what you use, not what you own." Love it. live/work was at the conference. Tamara showed me how the local government in that rural area of Britain hired live/work to help solve a major transporation problem. An increasingly elderly population needed to get around and many couldn't drive and/or afford taxis to go everywhere. Instead of looking at the number of physical buses/cabs/cars available, live/work asked about availability of movement at any given time. How many seats were open in the various means of transportation in the morning, afternoon and evening? Then it suggested putting each into a computer so that a person needing a ride to a doctor at say 11AM, could check in and order up whatever is available. Prices could be negotiated, subsidized, paid in full, whatever.

I don't know how feasible the concept really is but it is beautiful design thinking that we should apply to our own transportation and education issues. It is not the things--the cars or school buildings that are a problem but the flow, the movement, the content of the issue that should be addressed. And not the ownership, but the use.

Live/work also worked with Streetcar to launch the flexible car rental company that rents cars by the hour in London. It's a growing trend in the US as well.

Why can't government use design thinking to solve problems?

Innovation in China.

The oddest story on innovation in China appears in Saturday's Washington Post. It combines a personal lead from a woman's fashion designer with quotes from Beijing bureaucrats about the importance of innovation and technology. There's a quote from President Hu Jintao telling Chinese scientists and engineers they must make China "a nation of innovators."

The usual statistics on China's spending on R&D; (1.1% of gdp compared to 2.6% for the US nd 3.2% for Japan)are given. Then there is a discussion about Confucian culture and whether or not it stymies originality and innovation.

Very boring indeed. I'm glad to see the WP discovering the issue of innovation in China and putting it on page one (bottom right) but it has to do better. Newspapers in general have been way behind in dealing with the issue. The NYT still mostly defines "design" in terms of fashion, not strategy, thinking or tactics. And innovation remains as much a mystery to most reporters as it is to most CEOs.

Better for the WP's reporter to have talked with the folks at Lenovo, Cherry or Haier than a fashion designer.

Was Bill Gates an Innovator?

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine has interesting insights into the legacy of Bill Gates and what he did at Microsoft. Jarvis is far more critical of him as an "innovator" than the corporate managerial class, reflected in the BCG survey that made up The Most Innovative Companies cover we ran a few months back. Check it out.

Jarvis says that Gates was no inventor, visionary or innovator but an exploiter of other's ideas, starting with CP/M. Jarvis says "Gates took others’ innovations and turned them into products and profits. Every great invention needs a business genius to bring it to market. For software, that was Gates."

And then came the internet and Google, right?

Innovation In India--Conferences You Might Want to Attend.

There are upcoming meetings and conferences taking place this week that deal with innovation in India, according to The Economic Times of India. I've found that the Times, and much of the English-language press of India, available on the web, is a good source for business, innovation and political news.

One big conference is being held on Friday in Washington, DC, following up on President Bush's trip to India a few months ago. It's called 'India's Changing Innovation System: Achievements, Challenges and Opportunities for US-India Cooperation,' according to The Economic Times.

The Economic Times says that "India is being represented by Kapil Sibal, Minister for Science and Technology, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, R A Mashelkar, Chairman, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Ronen Sen, Ambassador of India to the United States and Surinder Kapur, Chairman, CII Mission for Innovation in Manufacturing and CMD, Sona Group.

US side is being represented by Samuel Bodman, US Secretary of Energy, John Marburger, Director, White House Office of Science and Technology and Ralph Cicerone, President, National Academy of Sciences among others will address the conference. Over 350 interested scientists, engineers, and businessmen are attending the day-long conference."

The India Business Forum is also being launched in NYC on June 22, by Kamal Nath, the Minister of Commerce and Industry.

Getting to Consumer Culture in India.

Thanks to Niti Bhan, I jumped into Dina Mehta's fascinating blog and its insights into the various cultures of India--the cultures of business, the cultures of consumption, the cultures of technology and more. Not the usual "culture" you expect from this kind of discussion.

Dinah has a second part to her series. Check it out.

This is what she has to say about attitudes towards rules and regulations:
No rule is absolute, everything can be worked around, finding loopholes in regulations is perceived as smart
Paying hard earned money to government as taxes is considered dumb.
Attitude towards wealth - Goddess Laxmi resides in your house in the form of wealth; if you please her and are attached to her she will flourish, if you let her "slip through your fingers," she will desert you.

Bribery is rampant everywhere: from acquiring a birth certificate to getting into a good school - it is 'commission,' almost like a service charge paid to the concerned person for doing your work.

This type of approach to rules and regulations has deeper cultural roots; Brahmins had to be paid 'dakshina' - fees to conduct rituals to invoke the gods, they were 'brokers' to reach God
Indians paid 'lagaan' - taxes in the feudal system, which went first to the Rajas and then the Moguls and British
Hierarchies are important to Indians - but at the same time, knowing how to work around them and the system is considered smart and right."

Fascinating. Niti is my guide to India. Her blog is must reading.