A new world warfare

I don’t often write about dangers as I am by nature, optimistic.  However this recent video article by Fast Company about Stuxnet is too compelling to ignore.  http://bit.ly/mMPZUg

In the article Cliff Kuang describes how the Stuxnet virus works and concludes:

There’s a powerful, under-reported takeaway here: The Stuxnet virus, having already done its job, now enjoys a scary afterlife. Its code is available online for anyone to look at and play with — and keep in mind, this is a virus capable of shutting down entire power grids. Could hackers re-engineer the virus to other ends, posing far greater threats to the international economy?

In 100 years, historians will probably look back at Stuxnet’s emergence as the Trinity Test for a new age of warfare — a harbinger of danger in an uncertain era.

It would seem that this virus has taken infection to a much higher level of sophistication.  It’s unclear as to whether we are ready for it.

Behavior disruption implications

So, how long before we see viruses:

• that transfer monies from one account to another
• that open up bank records or even vaults
• that gain access to ATM machines
• that capture internet credit card information
• that take down internet services like iTunes or Amazon.com
• that access government secret files
• on our favorite apps as sleepers to capture credit information on our mobile devices.

Should any of this happen, even in a small way, e-business would suffer tremendously.

It’s not a happy signal.

Given the risk level and underlying uncertainty of where’s it’s headed uncertainty it is a signal I believe we all should monitor for further developments .

Does anyone know who is tracking this phenomenon?

Thanks you for visiting http://ennova.ca

Play matters

As children we played and played.  As adults, especially in our jobs and careers – not so much.

That’s tragic.  If we learned how to play again we could innovate at twice  the speed we innovate now – for the betterment of us all.

So. . .

Here’s a play story.

This play story is constructed in 3 parts.

1. First, I listen attentively to two signals and pick out the salient points about a technological and/or behavioral change.
2. Second I pick an industry.
3. Third, I modify/use the technological/behavioral change to fit my target industry in such a way that it disrupts the behavioral norm of the industry, thereby changing the relationship dynamics of the industry.

With this universal game-changing pattern in mind, let’s construct our play story.

Signals

Our first signal is from the following Ted Talk by Bill Davenhall.

He describes how our susceptibility to chronic diseases is impacted by the towns where we have lived in our lives.  And, how there exists a massive data on location and disease incidents.

The good stuff starts around minute 3.

Anders Ynnerman describes how video graphics cards combined with new high-speed scanning machines let doctors conduct virtual 3D real time  inspections patients, right down to individual tissues layers.

The good stuff starts around minute 4.

Industry

For the industry I choose life insurance.

In the same way that a child plays in a sandbox with trucks, pails and shovels, so too I combine the signals and play with PC graphic cards that visualize terrabytes of location specific diseases.

Play

1. Actuaries and underwriters in life  insurance capture data on past addresses from  applicants.
2. They use that to visually plot the life expectancy of the applicants based on the long term risk exposure (positive and negative)  of the places they have lived.
3. Their pricing, acceptance rates are changed accordingly.
4. They price based on superior information, and so disrupt the norm.

Summary

1. Listen to signals from outside your industry.  The further from your industry the better.
2. Play with the signals in your area. Imagine, as children do in their day to day play how you might combine them together to provide an advantage in your industry.
3. By doing so you create disruption in your industry and bring the future into your present.

Questions to consider

1. How can you make  play a common occurance in your company?
2. How can you broaden the signals your people listen to on a regular basis?
3. How can you store and evaluate those ideas to move your company forward?

Thank you for visiting www.ennova.ca

Listening and interpreting signals

No-one is destined to be a me-too player. We can all be game-changers.

The fourth in a series of posts about how businesses can own their future.

Here is what we have covered so far.

1. Game Changing Part 1 – Analyzing the Future
2. Game Changing Part 2 – Sensing and Adapting
3. Game Changing Part 3 – Experimenting

There are interesting developments all around us.  Many of these flash by without notice.  It’s our future rushing by.  All we have to do is grab one or two to take control of our destiny.

Here’s three unrelated developments (signals) that when combined, give us a glimpse of the seemingly invisible opportunities that surround us.

Signal 1: Robot avatar

Anybots now sells a rolling robot avatar that lets you be available anywhere on-site, 24/7, in informal settings.  As noted in a recent Fast Company article:

Signal 2: Long distance natural motion control

Taylor Veltrop has connected a Microsoft Kinect to a miniature robot, controlling it through his own motions.  You can learn more about it here.

Kinect controlled robot

This is early stages so there are no commercial applications yet.

But then, there’s signal 3.

Signal 3 – Nintendo 3ds

Nintento recently launched its new hand-held game that features 3D viewing without the need for glasses.

Game-Changing Conclusions

Put them all together and what do you get?

A full size robot avatar, that you control from afar through natural body motions, that lets you see what’s going on in 3D.

Imagine the behaviour changes that will spawn:

1. in distance medicine
2. in servicing remote locations
3. in servicing important clients
4. in policing
5. in border security
6. in meetings

That’s how game-changing works.  You:

• see signals,
• put them together,
• project the behavior changes that will occur,
• and then imagine a way to use those new behaviors to make your company stand-out.

In so doing, you not only see into the future before your competitors do, you get on board early and learn how to use it before everyone else does.

Questions to consider

1. Are you and your company signal watching?  (formally? informally? at all?)
2. Do you meet to discuss what they might mean to your situation?
3. When assessing the signals do you discuss what new behaviours might emerge?

Thank-you for visiting www.ennova.ca

How to shape a publishing future

Here is an idea that builds on the concepts I’ve talked about to shape our future.  Enjoy.

JE: Hi I’m Jim Ellis and I’m the Managing Editor of Business week. I’d like to welcome you to today’s podcast. This podcast is the fourth in a series of six where we showcase the most intriguing innovations from 2014.

I’m pleased to have on today’s show Frank Nedamyer, President of CenterICE.com. For listeners on our show CenterICE is the New Sports fan experience that has swept the National Hockey League over the last three years.
Welcome Frank I’m so glad you could be with us.

FN: I’m happy to be here.

JE: Frank when I called you in February to inform you that our innovation team had selected you and your organization as one of the winners of our “Most Intriguing Innovators Award” I was thinking about CenterICE. Yet just two weeks ago you made an announcement about the NFL. Can you tell us a little more about that?

FN: I’d love to Jim. We’ve just signed an agreement with the NFL to create a similar fan experience for their fans which we’re going to call CenterField. It’s a 10 year contract to work with the teams using our proprietary “Fan at the center” technology. We expect to complete the roll-out in August just prior to the start of the season.

We’re especially excited because the NFL is the premier sport enterprise in the world and will help us migrate this platform to every major sports franchise.

JE: How did this all get started? If I remember correctly you started this back in late 2011 correct?

Disruption

FN: Actually, Jim it was earlier than that. It began in early 2010 when I was working at corporate headquarters and was given the task of developing a customer focused innovation capability. At the time we had a number of different companies one of which was the Jersey Publishing Company with a number of broadsheet newspapers as our core properties.

As happened to all of us in the newsprint business it was a time of great disruption. Craigslist had substantially reduced the most profitable source of revenue – classified ads. Page advertisers were leaving to go to Google ads where they could key word and location target. Readers, especially the younger generation were using alternative source of information like blogs.

All of this disruption in a time of increasing costs.

At the time of course, we were on the web with an on-line offering. It was successful enough as it goes, comparable to others, but we couldn’t seem to crack the nut. Our trajectory was not one of sustainable high profit growth. And then to top it off, the iPad was launched guaranteeing that further disruptions were coming our way. As you can imagine it was not a fun period.

JE: Is that when you first started to innovate?

FN: Not exactly. We had developed a very robust internal innovation process back in 2001. We had been very successful with it in the ensuring years, at least in terms of internal efficiencies. However, it had never really yielded anything of any significance in terms of growing the top line. They were mostly expense based innovations. So we knew something wasn’t right and started in the spring of 2010 to inform ourselves of what capabilities were required to innovate on the top line.

JE: This sounds very interesting what did you learn?

FN: Of my gosh all kinds of things. Fundamentally it’s a mindset change in how you look at your business. But if I was to summarize this change, three things really stood out. First, to create a customer-focused, fast-growing, profitable innovation you need to disrupt. And right there, that word, disrupt, was a challenge. We don’t normally think about innovation as disruptive. But it is.

And by disruption I mean you need to put something into the market that allows a new behavior to emerge in your target population. Here’s an example. When you looked at what we, and every other publisher, were doing on-line, it was copying the paper experience over. Sure users could search, and print, and read some blogs. But basically, everything was very similar. So from a user standpoint there was nothing really new in what they could do.

Read the paper, or read it on-line, it’s all the same – passive interaction with content. That’s why those models never really attracted many users. And without users, advertisers won’t come.

JE: Very insightful. What else?

Business Model as Core Capabilitites

FN: The second big insight we had was how to look at our business. We learned to stop seeing the business as publishing but more from a capabilities standpoint.

Rather than framing all our conversations about innovation and top line growth from a publishing bias, we learned to frame it from a core capability perspective. For us, what we excelled at was gathering and assimilating information and turning it into stories and insights very rapidly. That was our core.

JE: Is that when you came up with the idea for CenterICE?

FN: Almost, there was one more piece left. Our last big learning was about motivations. Identifying a target group of people who have deep seated motivations to explore and express themselves in new ways. Then figure out what we now call the sweet spot.

Choose a target you have familiarity with including their motivations, and using your core capabilities aligned with creative use of technology, create an environment where they can do things they have never done before. Create an experience that they could never do before because your offering did not exist.

It’s like the phone. No-one ever knew they needed to be able to connect with people across town instantly until the phone arrived. Once it showed up people started behaving differently. They called instead of writing.

No-one knew they needed to make videos to share with their friends and family until YouTube arrived. Now 13 hours are uploaded every minute. That‘s the equivalent of 57,000 hours of Hollywood feature length films a week.

It goes all the way back to our heritage. No-one knew they needed fire until our ancestors figured out how to capture it a move it from place to place.

Take any significant innovation, from fire, to the printing press, to electricity, to the iPhone, to CenterICE, and it always follows the same pattern.

JE: So what was the thinking behind CenterICE?

FN: Well, when we looked at the business through this new disruptive lens a couple of targets immediately came to light: Sports fans and Political followers.

Both groups are passionate about their fields. We choose Sports fans because the risk was lower and they have lots of fanatics. Fanatics can’t get enough.

And because a large portion of fans are of younger age they would be open to new experiences. The key motivational factor was fans don’t want to just cheer. They want to coach! Go to any bar and the conversations are about what the coach should have done. So, that’s the experience we created for them.

We started in late 2011 with an on-line site where they could simultaneously watch the game and provide live analysis.

This was supported by our top sports columnists who were live analyzing the game as well. All the participants rated the views provided by both the pro journalists as well as the fans “scribes”. Overtime, the fan journalists who did well, as voted on by the group, achieved status rankings ranging all the way from Newbies up to Pro.

It really took off when we signed an agreement with the Philadelphia Flyers and they invited the “Pro” writers to interview the players. Fans went crazy trying to achieve the Pro status and volume on the site grew.

JE: How were you making money?

FN: Initially it was just advertising. In the beginning it was free for the fans. But, because we had their complete profiles we were able to charge premium rates to advertisers to have access to our site. After the Flyers joined we went into joint ventures on product placement etc.

Now, we’re ruining journalist boot camps on-line for wannabe sport journalists and we charge for that. Finally, to have access to the behind the scenes information we charge premium subscriptions to fans. All our “Pros” get that free. Those working up the ranking system, have to pay. It’s a multi-tiered monetization scheme.

The sports fans love it and the teams love it as we are delivering to them more dedicated fans. That’s why in 2014 we were able to negotiate with the NHL commissioner a league wide offering.

JE: So why did you start with hockey?

Risk Mitigation

FN: It was part of our risk mitigation. Look, the NFL is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. You don’t want to bring an idea to them that’s not been fully worked out. The NHL on the other hand is the weakest of the major franchises. That made them more open to our concept.

JE: Weren’t you worried about the other leagues stealing your idea once you got going.

FN: Once again our risk mitigation strategy kicked in. We created an unassailable patent wall around this offering. I can’t get into the particulars but it was a three year effort. Some leagues tried but soon found out it wasn’t possible to breach it.

JE: What about “Behind the Bench”?

FN: That was in 2013. By then we had 237 fans who had reached pro status. And boy, were they fast and good. With the instant feeds between them and a digital based collaboration site they could jointly analyze a game in real time.

Imagine, two hundred thirty-seven experts all working at the same time collaboratively. We started to recognize that they were seeing things that the coaches behind the bench couldn’t see. So we approached Peter Laviolette, the Flyers coach and ran a little pilot program. Five minutes before the end of the period a representative from the group would debrief someone from the coaching staff.

It was slick. They had video clips and diagrams and the whole lot. Then they would pass it on to the coach to use or not use as he saw fit.

Remember in April after the game when the Flyers made it into the play-offs and Peter mentioned that he owed a lot to the CenterICE team for their analysis between the second and third periods? After that endorsement our fan base jumped 30% in the three teams we had platforms for. As they say in hockey, sometimes the puck bounces your way.

JE: How about building it out. How difficult was that?

FN: We stumbled a bit in the beginning until we realized that you can’t take people who have a fulltime job in traditional publishing and expect them to work on an idea as different as this in their spare time. Not only is it too stressful to balance both, you inevitably put them into a conflict of interest. Do I work on sustaining the publishing business or work on this new business that might hurt the publishing business? That’s a trade-off you can’t ask people to make.

What we did was create semi-permanent innovation teams who reported in to head office and were tasked to take an idea from prototype to pilot very quickly on a (mostly) full-time basis. While the operating groups complained about taking their people away we were able to negotiate our way through this.

What was interesting in this process is how we found ourselves unlearning a lot about risk. Traditionally, we had applied traditional business risk principles to innovation. In particular, eliminate uncertainty. From a practical standpoint what that meant in the past was if the idea was bold, reduce the “boldness” of the idea so it reduces the uncertainty and hence the risk. That’s how you end up with an on-line offering that mirrors the paper version.

What we learned to do successfully was to keep the idea bold and therefore keep the uncertainty high. BUT, use other techniques to reduce the uncertainty.

All in all, customer-focused innovation is very different. And while we bolted the new system on to our tracking and creativity processes that we had in place, we learned that it takes a different mindset and structure to make it work.

JE: So what’s next for you?

FN: As you know we’ve started dialogues with NBA and MLB, and have had representatives from both the IOC and the FIFA World Cup approach us.

JE: Well on behalf of our listeners I’d like to thank you for joining today’s show and being one of the 2015 most innovative companies.

FN: My pleasure Jim. We hope to see you at the game and CenterICE.

I hope you enjoyed the story.

Thank you for visting www.ennova.ca

If this is not a Value-Disruptor I’m not sure what is.

Value-disruptors disrupt the norm and bring value into our lives.

Fast Company featured an article this week about a smart contact lens.

As they stated:

Although it might sound like something from a science fiction novel, scientists at the University of Washington are working on solar powered contact lenses with transparent LEDs embedded onto the lens. This technology could be applied in countless ways, from health monitoring to text translation right in front of the wearer’s eyes.

And of course they gave us a cute picture of a consumer application.

When confronted with such astounding technology our first reaction is to typically dismiss it.  Who would ever use such a thing?  It reminds us of what everyone said in 1903 when the Wright brothers first flew.  However as leaders in our field we need to project into the future and imagine the possibilities.  Otherwise, how would we ever innovate?

So here’s my 5 minute take on 10 business applications that will allow new behaviors to emerge and in so doing create value in our lives.  Perhaps after you read them you can figure out ways you could use this technology to make your lives better.

10 business applications from a disruptive technology.

1. Financial traders on the stock exchanges will use it to see the trajectory of trades they are following.
2. CEOs will use it to walk around their organizations and see  information on who they are talking to, their area of responsibility and the performance of their teams.
3. Pilots will use it to keep their eyes outside the window.
4. Police officers will use it, along with face recognition, to identify who’s in the car when they approach.
5. Surgeons will use it to see updates on the status of their patients without diverting their attention from the patient.
6. Real estate agents will use it to see comparisons of the house they are showing clients with recent real-time sale prices in the area.
7. Repair people will use it to identify parts on an object they are repairing that is new to them.
8. Retailers will use it to look at items on the shelf and see which brands and sizes are moving with the greatest velocity that day.
9. Landscapers will use it to identify grubs in the lawn to apply the correct insecticide.
10. Politicians will use it to identify the big campaign contributors in a crowd.

What applications can you imagine?

Thank you for visiting http://ennova.ca

Is Innovation Risky?

A common perception is that innovation is risky.  The bolder the innovation the greater the risk.  Ask 100 people whether the previous statement is true and most would agree.  But is that really true?  I’m going to argue no.

Behaviour Space

To make that argument I’m going to suggest, that at its core, all innovation is about the creation of behaviour space. Perhaps it’s an internally focused innovation, like the value disruption project I’m currently blogging about where they want a new system to collaborate.  Or it’s an external innovation like the iPad.  But in all cases it’s about creating new behaviour space.  And, if you understand behaviour space you can reduce your risk.

What exactly is Behaviour Space?

Here’s what I mean by behaviour space. Take pens and pencils for example.

Imagine for a moment that pencils had never been invented and all we had to write with was pens.  Everything was written in ink.  Now, imagine introducing pencils to that situation.

Once the pencil becomes available you can perform (behave) new tasks you couldn’t do before.  Tasks such as writing upside down, erasing, writing on surfaces you previously could not because the ink would blot.  You see, the advent of pencils allows you to perform new behaviors.

Note though, that the pencil itself is useless until you use it.  It’s the behaviour that the pencil enables that provides us value, not the pencil.  In reality, the innovation is not the pencil.  The innovation is the new behaviour space.  The pencil is simply the disruptor that enables the behavior to emerge.  It’s role is to disrupt how we normally do things to allow new behaviours to emerge.

Granted the size of the behaviour space is limited, especially if we compare it to something like the iPad.  Which leads us to our second conclusion; the value of an innovation is the size of the new behaviour space it enables times the size of the population that desires that new behavior space.

The same holds true for internal innovation like the collaboration example above.  Why does a company look to acquire new technology (to collaborate)?  Simple.  They are looking for their people to behave differently: to perform new collaborative and communication  tasks that they are not able to do.  Technology, new business models, new services, by themselves are useless.  It’s the behaviour that they enable that creates the value.

Why Understanding Behavior Space Reduces Risk

So, how exactly does understanding behaviour space help us reduce risk?  There are lots of ways.  In this blog post I’m going to talk about just one – Assessing potential innovation success.  In subsequent posts I’ll explore other ways understanding behaviour space reduces risk.

Measuring Innovation Success

One of the challenges in innovation is deciding which idea has the better potential (e.g.  market potential or productivity potential).

Does idea #1 have the best potential or idea #2.  Into which one should we invest scare resources in exploring?

Here’s how understanding behaviour space reduces risk.

Upon grasping the concept of behaviour space you are quickly able to compare the value potential of  one idea to another.

Try this test.

Take a few moments and think about the behaviour space the Kindle provides as a B/W screen to download books and magazines.   Jot down all the times and places you’d want to do that (Use the pencil we talked about).  Okay, finished ?

Now compare that to the potential behaviour space of the colour iPad connected to the iTunes stores and 10s of thousands of app developers.   Jot down all the behaviors the iPad could bring to fruition, along with the times and places you’d want to do that.  Okay, finished?  (BTW You can find additional ideas here.)

After 5 seconds of behaviour space analysis it becomes self-evident that the behavior space potential for the iPad far surpasses that of Kindle.  That’s why I predicted in this post that the iPad will soar where the Kindle did not.  Just in as I’m writing this post; in this article they talk about how Barnes and Noble are adding an app to the iPad to download books.  Already, the size of the iPad behaviour space footprint is growing.

What does this analysis mean to you?

Well, when you compare two ideas competing for resources on their ability to create behavioral space you start to measure which has the greater potential.  In addition, behaviour space analysis allows you to tweak the design of your product or service to enlarge its behavior space footprint.   So your ideas have better value potential before you spend precious resources in implementing them.

Summary of how behaviour space reduces risk

1. Innovation is the creation of new behaviour space.
2. The product or service is simply the disruptor that enables new behaviour space to emerge.
3. The size of the behavior space footprint represents the size of the potential value your are offering.
4. The greater your value potential the greater your monetization potential.
5. Using behaviour space to analyze innovation ideas lets you compare two competing ideas for their value potential.
6. Also, using behaviour space analysis lets you tweak ideas to enlarge their behavior space footprint and hence their value potential.

Thank you for visiting http://ennova.ca

I originally had written about the Apple iPad in this post postulating its success because of the new behaviors it would enable.  Last week I crowd-sourced the following question on LinkedIn.

What are your best ideas on how the Apple iPad will value-disrupt the publishing and game industry?

Here are the three best answers I received.

Jeffrey Speiser

1. Publishers know that they can’t ignore Apple.  Book Shelf is going to take over the ebook market in the next few years the way itunes did. There’s a price war in the publishing industry already and this is just going to help Apple.  Consumers are already getting used to paying $9.99 for best selling hardcover books. Now they’ll be able to get them digitally for the same price.
2. Magazine subscriptions can now be distributed digitally. Same with comic books, trade journals, and newsletters. No costly printing, and users can easily archive all the issues they want without stacks of paper in their homes.  Unlike the Kindle or other readers the iPad is going to closely simulate the real world experience of reading a magazine, making it more accessible for older users, and cool enough for younger ones.
3. On the gaming front, users get instant access to the app store with thousands of games. They won’t be as graphic intense as a console unit, but that’s not the purpose of these games. Most of the best selling app games are more strategic in nature which is perfect for the iPad format.

Darren Yan

1. It’s my belief that the education sector will lead the adoption of the iPad as the preferred e-book tool, and it’ll be the students who will act as the brand ambassadors for the iPad who’ll take the product mainstream.  This strategy will disrupt the value chain for academic publishing businesses worldwide, with online libraries managed by companies such as Reed Elsevier uniquely placed to deliver an integrated research tool for students in universities.
2. Moving forward, traditional newspaper and magazine organizations should take advantage of this promising tool by turning all their published contents to be “click-able” and integrated across all major social networks that allow the content to move beyond the reader (i.e. iPad user) to the network, thereby allowing the same content to evolve into a viral distribution.   However, most newspaper and magazine companies have not invested adequately in their content management system that effectively integrates keywords to the Internet where complementary content can be incorporated in the content developed by the organization.  Moreover, the traditional editorial approach to content development in these organizations makes the adoption of an integrated news story difficult. Most editors and journalists take great pride in their work, and appending external links to add the social elements in the content could inadvertently be construed as their work being incomplete.

Hence, many challenges remain, and the degree of disruption to the value chain will take time.

George Hazapis

1. Apple is shaking up the digital book market like it did the music industry with the iPod & iTunes music store. The agency model is a departure from the way Amazon has been doing business with book publishers. With Kindle, Amazon sold digital versions cheaply to drive sales of its e-reader. Publishers make less on each e-book sale under the new model but are willing to accept a lower return for e-book sales because they can control the value of their product, that is, books and content. Consequently, the distribution and pricing models will be redrawn.
2. iPad seeems to revolutionize the digital media and may offer publishers a new way to present content and charge for it.  Apple has been able to control the price of music while boosting the sales of iPods without bringing the music industry much money.  Apple’s iphone gives content producers a platform on which to charge for their products/services. The iPad brings innovations to the market and appears to be a convergent electronic device as telecom firms, computer makers and consumer electronic firms are set to produce the same product.

In other iPad value-disruption  news

1. CBS plans to reduce prices to $1 on some iTunes TV episodes
2. Disney turning its attention on iPad for games, Marvel comics, TV
3. iPad Revolutionizes Online Continuing Education
4. Apple iPad to Have Big Impact on Online Poker

My take

As with all innovations, the greater the number, types, and breadth of new behaviors a disruptor (iPad) causes to emerge, the higher the probability that it will create new value.

New value in the form of new relationships between the user and:

• Self
• Space
• Friends
• Family
• Co-workers
• Communities
• Companies
• etc.

Now re-think iPad.  Imagine new relationships that individuals, groups, communities, content suppliers can build because of its capabilities.  Only then can you begin to see its trajectory.  And having seen how behaviour and relationships can so readily predict outcomes can you then begin to decode where we’ve come from:

• Language
• Fire
• Writing
• Printing Press
• Morse code
• Phone
• Internet
• Mobile phone
• Smartphone

and use that trajectory to predict where we’re going:

• iPad
• pure voice activation
• symbiotic measurement
• etc.

Value-disruption questions

1. What behavior can you see yourself now doing?
2. How would it impact your relationships?

Thank-you for visiting http://ennova.ca

There has been a lot of  negative press about Apple’s launch of the iPad.  Some commentators have focused on the name choice.  Others have lamented the lack of features: no multitasking, no video, no touch keyboard, to name just a few.

Missing the point

They’re missing the point about creating new market spaces.  Creating a new market space occurs when you enable new behaviors to emerge in a target population.  Specifically, if your offering (the disruptor) allows people to do something they couldn’t do previously, and many people want to do that, then it takes off.  The new behavior disrupts the norm of how people interact with each other and with space and in so doing, creates new value.

The power of new behavior space

For example, the Blackberry brought us push email.  That allowed us to stay connected everywhere.  New behaviors emerged, not all of them desirable mind you (emailing during a meeting).  This new behavior enabled by the Blackberry disrupted other phones and organizers (the Palm).

iPhone utilized the programmable touch screen.  That allowed more intuitive interfaces and a whole slew of new behaviors to emerge.  Face-Book, Twitter, Traffic alerts, conversion calculators, games, games and more games, etc.  Over 100,000 apps have been created in all sorts of areas with a corresponding increase in new mobile behaviors.

What they, and others (the telephone, steam engines to name a few oldies) did was create new behavior space.  As new behavior space grows, so too new market space grows.

(Behavior space = the number of people x the frequency at which they demonstrate a behavior.)

The iPad’s new behavior space

So what new behavior will the iPad allow to emerge?  When you inspect the core functionality of the iPad through the lens of behavior space you see that it was built primarily for two purposes, both of which do not currently have large “mobile” behavior spaces.

1. Playing games
2. Viewing media content (books, movies, magazines, newspapers, etc.)

Let’s just explore the latter.

Yes, the Kindle and Sony Reader already exist.  However, their adoption rates are small.  They haven’t swept the market.  I suggest two reasons for this lack of explosive growth.

1. Their offering is mostly one dimensional.  They only offer reading.  More critically, there is no obvious path for a potential consumer for new behavior growth. Consequently, potential buyers only have one reason to buy.  Do I want to be able to read in a mobile environment?  If yes they buy.  If no they don’t.  They’ve hung their hat (mostly) on one behavior.
2. Their business model does not include the potential for rapid evolution of content experience.  You can buy a book from Amazon, or you can download it.  In either case the book is largely the same.  Where is the capability to change the nature of the book, or magazine to take advantage of the new technology (disruptor)?

Look at how the iPad value-disrupts

1. iPad offers room for growth.  It has both games and media content (including movies) so it is multi-purposed to begin with.  Combine that with iphone apps and the device has more room to grow.  People will buy the iPad because there is more behavior capability there, and there is an expectation that those capabilities will grow even further.  This is especially true given Apple’s reputation.
2. With the app capabilities expect to see all kinds of new media content.
   • Self book-publishers will now publish their books through the iPad.  I worked with a self-publisher (Dr. Alex Osterwalder) on his recent book Business Model Generation.  Now he can publish on the iPad and make the experience far more interactive and rich.
   • Apps will allow successful bloggers to monetize their blogs.
   • The newspaper industry, which is in death throes, will do what the music industry did – migrate their offering to the iPad.  Some have calculated that printing The NYT costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle.  With a multipurpose iPad it will make sense for them to build their own apps for their newspaper.
   • Creative magazines and newspapers will use color, 3G connections, GPS locators, video-play and gaming capabilities to develop an incredibly rich multi-media, multi-connected, location-specific experience to the user.  Think about that for a moment from a behavioral perspective.  What will the world be like when you can be at the corner of Main and Water street in your home town and point to a building and be presented with a multi-media array of games, news, background information, promotions, etc. all relevant to the entities you are pointing at?  Or, imagine what a “NYT experience” could be.  Even better, imagine what a small town paper could do (the Saskatoon Phoenix experience).  How exactly does Kindle compete against that?

The secret to market space is in creating new behavior space through a value disruptor.  The iPad, like the iPhone before it, and the iPod before that, is their next value-disruptor.

Watch the publishing industry be value-disrupted

So, no the iPad is not a replacement for the laptop.  No, it doesn’t do multitasking, or have video, nor phone capabilities.  It doesn’t need to.  It’s going after a much larger market.

100′s of thousands of  iPhone app developers combined with a mobile multi-media device creates the potential for a massive increase in behavior space in the publishing industry.  Apple will do to the publishing industry what they did to the music industry.  They will value-disrupt it.

What new behaviors can you imagine emerging?  In gaming?  In publishing?  How will the business models of publishers change?

You can learn more about value-disruption from the following posts.

1. How to differentiate - a story about a small janitorial firm
2. How LinkedIn is disrupting the recruiting industry
3. Pepsi uses crowdsourcing. Commoditizes Superbowl advertising
4. Will Google’s Nexus disrupt the smart phone industry.  Not yet
5. Companies value-disrupting their markets; a dialogue

Thank you for visiting http://ennova.ca

In an earlier post I mentioned that Jonathan Burns and myself were given permission to blog about a web 2.0 value disruption project that is currently underway.  This post is number two in the series that is expected to run until mid May.

Value disruption project posts

1. Introduction

Note: Clients names are kept confidential and/or disguised.

Value Disruption Project Scope

In November of last year we completed our three stage web 2.0 solutions program and delivered to our clients a project plan to develop three web 2.0 applications: expert blogging, internal collaboration, and a friends of ___ site.  We used a wall sized Implementation Canvas^TM to develop, with their team, strategies for reducing the risks and optimizing the rewards of the project.

A canvas to manage risk and rewards

Project Scope Items

The power of the canvas is that a team can simultaneously see all the strategic elements of a project.  And the design of the canvas forces users to adopt a risk-reduction, reward-optimization approach.  We completed a canvas for each web 2.0 application: Blogging, Collaboration, and Friends of___.

In terms of project risk:

• Blogging is the simplest of the applications with the least ambiguity and hence uncertainty.
• Collaboration is middle of the road and
• Friends of ___ is the  most uncertain and hence the most risky.

Here are highlights of three areas from the Collaboration Implementation Canvas: Risk, Rewards, and Uncertainties.

Collaboration Risks

• We can’t get the staff to use it so people view the project as a failure
• ISO compliance issues
• Not sufficient administration of system security
• We get the balance wrong on the scale of openness/lack of structure/ease of use and security/ISO compliance and end up with a tool that’s too complex and hard to use.
• There is unintended disclosure, we are highly regulated.

Collaboration Rewards

• Get projects done faster
• Improved productivity, find information faster -  Reduce email
• Keep track of what projects we are doing (macro level – not the details)
• Knowledge transfer to new staff
• Do repeat projects faster
• Retain IP of alumni
• Increase employee satisfaction
• Better logging of who edits the docs, revisions vs current “I drive” method
• Visible lessons learned
• Concurrent report writing (faster!)

After completing the risks and rewards they analyzed them to determine what they didn’t know.  In other words, they determined what they were uncertain about.

The challenge on all projects is not what you know, it’s what you don’t know.  So mapping the uncertainties, what you don’t know, is a critical step to reducing risks (as well as making sure the rewards are realized).  So, instead of making assumptions, determine what you don’t know and then go find answers to those questions.

Collaboration Uncertainties

• Who controls the level of access?
• How do we fit into the ISO document management requirements?
• What are the rules for a document becoming ISO official?
• What are the roles of the people in the walled-off garden?
• How do we migrate old technology?
• What are our metrics of success?
• How will this change our work-flow patterns?
• What projects types will we pilot on?

Mapping these uncertainties allowed them to structure the project, select the appropriate team and develop an initial set of actions to resolve the uncertainties.  They created a starting point.

Learning

Here’s what we found after using the canvases.

1. Each team was on board with the project.   The ability to see all the project elements in one place made them feel more comfortable that we, collectively, understood all the risks and had a good starting point for how to resolve the uncertainties.
2. It was a quick process.  The team was able to develop three implementation plans in about 4 hours.  Visualization of the entire project enabled the quick speed, in a team of 12 people.  (All 12 people agreed.)
3. The CEO, David L. appreciated the focus on risk management.  His role is to move the organization forward without exposing the organization to undue risk.  Explicitly determining the risks, as well as the rewards,  prioritizing them into the greatest areas of uncertainties, and then developing plans to turn uncertainties into known quantities made him feel confident his team has a deep handle on the issues.  When the CEO feels comfortable with the team that energy translates into enthusiasm.
4. Explicitly dealing with risks and their uncertainties brought us together as a team.  As we worked through the different applications we started to see how each individual had a contribution to make in dealing with the uncertainties.

Top Three Tips

Here’s my top three tips from this experience.

1. Explicitly focus project planning on risk-mitigation.  Pay particular attention to those risks (and rewards) that are uncertain.  Uncertainties represent the biggest failure point, especially in projects with high degrees of ambiguity.  You can learn more about risks and managing ambiguous projects that here and here.
2. Use a blank wall or wall canvas to map the project.  It makes all the elements visible to everyone so  conversations become more directive and integrative.  If you’d like to use our canvas, contact us at iCanvas@ennova.ca
3. As a seller of services, embracing risk is powerful.  The reason clients most often don’t do projects is because they legitimately see risks that they don’t know how to deal with.  Putting your team and their team together to explicitly discuss the risks and develop solutions for mitigating them is the most creative way to resolve this roadblock.  If you and your client team can’t find a way to mitigate the risks then you shouldn’t be doing the project anyway.

What risk mitigation strategies have you used?  What kinds of ambiguous projects do you run?  What other topics would you like us to blog about in this project?

Thank you for visiting http:ennova.ca

Jonathan Burns and I are currently working on a web 2.0 project with a client in the services industry.  We’ve received permission to blog on the project as it happens, agreeing to keep the names confidential.

Our purpose – Share value-disruption learning

It was formally launched on January 6th and it’s scheduled to run to mid May 2010.  The project scope involves creating three applications: blogs, internal collaboration, and A Friends of ____  site.  As a business model design expert with a practice in transforming businesses so they can value-disrupt a market, I’m most interested in blogging about our experiences in the following areas.

1. The generational divide
2. Methods for creating and managing risk reduced plans
3. Building and maintaining project momentum
4. Dealing with ambiguity resulting from project scope design
5. Disruption effects on the business model
6. Disruption effects on their markets
7. Team interactions and the role of trust and evangelists
8. The role of web 2.0  technology in managing the project.

Of course, what I post on is contingent on what happens so I won’t necessarily be following these topics in order.

Jonathan is web 2.0 technology guru, amongst other things, and so he’ll likely be blogging from a more technical side.  You can see his blog here.  I’m planning to blog once a week, time and constraints permitting.  Monitoring both blogs should give you interesting insights on:

• Web 2.0 installations
• Business technologies that are available
• How to deal effectively (or not) with ambiguous projects
• The power of disruptions and
• A host of other insights we can’t yet anticipate.

We’re excited about sharing our insights as they happen.

So stop by, or better yet, connect to us via the RSS feed on the blog as we tell the story of this project.

What other topics would you like to see?  Are you running any disruption projects that you can share?

Thank-you for visiting http:ennova.ca