Critical Leadership Behaviors

When considering what it takes to imagine and launch a game changing product or service I start with the following premise.  Great leaders:

The result is that the organizations they lead shape their futures, rather than being shaped by it.  They are game changers.

In a series of blogs post I plan to explore the first behavior.  See more clearly, and with greater insight where the future is headed.

What is the future exactly?

We are so used to analyzing data from the past, I thought I’d start by providing a perspective on how to analyze data from the future. Sounds a little weird but stick with me for a bit.

The future flows towards us.

We know we live in the present.  As we live and breathe, time passes by and the future arrives.  Here’s what that means.

Reading those last three sentences took about 5 seconds.  When you started reading those sentences the end of the third sentence was 5 seconds away in your future.  By the time you finished reading it, that future, previously 5 seconds away, was now in your present.  And by now, is about 6 seconds in your past.

Clear?  As time passes by the future flows towards us.

Our life and business trajectories are mostly stable.

Yet, during the time you were reading those sentences your life (business, personal, etc.)  did not change dramatically.  Who you love, your finances, your career trajectory, and the other things important to you stayed on course.  So while the future was flowing towards you its impact on your life/business and all your relationships was negligible.  In that regard, your present, your near past and your near future are all the same.  They have little to no impact on your trajectory.  Unless of course, you were involved in a catastrophe such as an earthquake.

So….we normally think of time as flowing past us smoothly, much like the graphic below where we sit in the now and move towards the future. . . .

However, when we consider the flow of time’s impact on the trajectory of our lives and businesses it behaves more like the next graphic where the past, present and future are all part of now. What I call the Knowable Now.  Time does not flow smoothly.  It passes by in chunks.  Which explains why all societies have created ceremonies to delineate between moving from one chunk to another: adulthood, marriage, children etc.  It’s a cultural recognition that time is felt in chunks, not smoothly.

We know the past, we know now, and for a certain period of time, we know the future too.  In fact, much of our lives is spent trying to make the future part of our knowable now.  That’s one reason why businesses go through annual planning cycles; to take future events and put them into the knowable now.

The future is divided into know-ability.

What this means is that the future can be grouped by its know-ability. We’ve just shown that when it comes to the fundamental trajectory of our business, barring an unpredictable event the future and the present are essentially the same:

• 5 seconds from now
• 5 minutes from now
• 5 hours from now
• 5 days from now
• 5 weeks from now
• 5 months from now

However, at some point we do reach a time where we don’t feel comfortable that the core issues and opportunities are knowable.  Our data projections are just too unreliable.  Therefore, the length of time between now, and that uncertainty point in our future, represents our knowable now.  Anything past that point we don’t feel comfortable that we can reliably predict our trajectory.   Our future, as we normally conceive of it as being unknowable, actually lies past that point.  Everything, of major importance, is mostly knowable between now and then.

So the future is, from a practical standpoint, divided into a period of time that is largely knowable, and a subsequent period of time that is mostly unknowable.   (Note: In a future post I will further subdivide the unknowable future into two other categories.)

Implications of time as chunky.

Here are some conclusions from this subdivision of the future on analyzing data from the future.

First, all value you will give and receive is in your future, some part of the knowable now and some part of the unknowable future.   Consequently, as business people responsible for  creating and delivering value (shareholder, customer, employee, etc.) we need to learn how to deal with the future.  It’s where we succeed or fail.  Success and failure lies ahead of us, not behind.

Second, I’ve blogged extensively about how innovation involves taking a technology, or new business process and deploying it in a way that allows new behaviors to emerge.

So let’s take the example of Apple’s recent launch of the iPad on Jan 27th, 2010 and determine what this chunking up of time means to us.

Implications of the iPad launch.

Prior to the launch, the capabilities of the iPad, it’s position in the computing market and functionality were largely unknown.

We knew something was coming but not what.  That knowledge resided in the unknowable future.  All that changed on the day of the launch.  Its capabilities, usability and functionality became part of the knowable now.  Of course, on the day of the launch we didn’t know the exact characteristics of all the apps that would be made.  BUT, we could make very intelligent guesses.  They became mostly knowable, as evidenced here and here.

Which means that if a business was thinking about using it to gain a competitive edge they were too late.  Why?  Because on the day of the launch all their competitors had the same data.  They could know the same capabilities and imagine the same kinds of uses.  There was no inherent advantage.  It simply became a race of the fastest and any leadership would only last until the competition caught up.

Working with data from the knowable now does not inherently provide game changing advantage.

Preliminary conclusions of working in the knowable now

1. When it comes to our lives and business trajectories time passes by in chunks.
   • Part of the future includes data that is largely knowable.  That data is in the now. Not in the future. Therefore, now includes part of the future called the knowable now.
2. When speaking about the future businesses should define the time period that represents their knowable now.
   • There will likely be different lengths of time for different topics.
3. Businesses and competitors have access to essentially the same data.  Consequently, if the data businesses are using to make their plans and develop  offerings comes from the knowable now they have no inherent advantage as it’s available to everyone.  They can’t see the future any more clearly than any one else.
4. The development of business strategies needs to embrace capturing data and using it from the unknowable future.
   • In my experience, that behavior, embracing the unknown is counterintuitive for most business people as they perceive it as highly risky.  So I will address how to effectively analyze largely unknowable data in my next post.
5. Businesses that mostly work in the knowable now condemn themselves to hard-fought, never-ending competition.
   • Game changing ideas come from the unknowable future, not the knowable now.

How far out is your knowable now?

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

Value Disruption Alert

Wow, if this is true a massive value-disruption is about to occur.

Fast Company reports that Microsoft’s Translating! Telephone, exhibited at the Silicon Valley TechFair, brings Universal communication unhindered by language differences a little closer to reality. This VoIP program combines three Microsoft technologies–speech recognition, translation, and text to speech–to create a speech to speech and text to speech translator that’s surprisingly accurate.

The Fast Company article says it’s currently about 80% accurate, but good enough that two programmers (German and English) were able to debug a program.

So now, project this technology forward in 2-4 years when a mobile version becomes available and consider the behavior space implications.

1. Instead of being stranded helpless in a foreign country not understanding the signs on the buildings, or even able to ask simple directions you can now become independent.
2. People who wanted to work in foreign countries but couldn’t because of language restrictions, can get postings.
3. The number of people you can collaborate with virtually has gone from millions to billions.
4. You understand what those arrogant French waiters in Paris are saying about you and can give back in kind.
5. Marriages between two people who don’t speak each other’s language will take place.  A little help to “Love conquers all”.
6. An entire industry crops up to deal with the issue of translating technical terms in support of the tool.  So, what exactly does quantum physics really mean in English?
7. Immigration costs plummet as new immigrants can assimilate more rapidly into a country without relying on taking “XXX as a second language” courses.
8. And my favorite.  They figure out how to translate Politician speak and we finally find out what they are actually saying. (Which I suspect is essentially nothing.)

Questions

By now, if you’ve been following this blog, you’ll recognize that all great innovations create new behaviors.

1. What new behaviors do you see emerging?
2. How would you use it personally?
3. How could you use it in your business to drive more revenue?

Thank you for visiting http://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

The factors that define value creation

I’ve been blogging recently about  how Behavior Space predicts new product or service success.  This post uses a recent announcement by FORD to drill down into value creation by exposing the role Relationship Space plays.

Ford recently announced an agreement with Microsoft to incorporate its Hohm technology into Ford’s new Electric Vehicle.  As the article in Fast Company explains

“. . .the home energy management service will be integrated into the Ford Focus Electric in 2011, another unnamed hybrid in 2012, and a third, yet unnamed hybrid in 2013.  Hohm will assist drivers in figuring out the best time to juice up their vehicles based on when electricity rates are lowest. The service might indicate, for example, that electricity is cheapest between midnight and 6 a.m. on a certain day–a potentially money-saving piece of data. In addition to saving drivers cash, the feature will also hopefully help utilities reduce consumption during times of heavy stress on the electric grid.”

In previous posts I’ve talked about how new behavior space helps create value.  Specifically this post about the Apple iPad and this post about the Google Nexus.  The concept I introduced in those posts was that a new product or service creates value by allowing new behaviors to emerge.  The product or service is only as good as the new behavior that it enables the user to express.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  New behavior space is simply a stepping stone to where value is actually created.  Let’s look at the Ford example above to understand why.  While the Ford’s New Electric Vehicle has many new capabilities I’m only going to focus on the Hohm system and the fact that it will help users “figure out the best time to juice up their vehicles based on when electricity rates are lowest.”

In this case, the Hohm system enables the user to automatically pre-schedule when to buy energy (electricity) based on reliable forecasts of energy costs.  That sounds neat.  Instead of being at the mercy of daily price swings in gasoline I now have more control over the price I pay for energy by scheduling “fill-ups at home” when energy costs are lower.

So a new behavior emerges – pre-scheduling energy fill-ups.  But, there isn’t really any value in the behavior by itself.  Who cares that I can pre-schedule?  The benefit is lower prices for energy, not the behavior that enables it.

So do all behaviors have to end in lower prices to create value?  Of course not. There’s more going on here.   I’m going to take a moment and introduce the new concept of Relationship Space.  And then, tie them both together.

Life = Relationships

All of us exist in time and space.  As we move through time and space we interact with the things around us.  So at its most fundamental, our lives are comprised of all the many and varied relationships we have with:

• time (when we are)
• space (where we are)
• ourselves (who we are)
• other people (by themselves and in groups)
• objects (inanimate and living)
• ideas (how and why we are)

Of course its very complex and interactive.  But, if we could add up all our relationships, taking into account the good and the bad, we could conceptually measure the size and quality of our lives.   We could compute for ourselves our Relationship Space.

So what creates value?   Value is created when you improve someone’s Relationship Space by making it bigger or improving its quality.

Value = Growth in Relationship Space

Now back to Ford and Hohm.  So, the Hohm system enables a pre-scheduling of fill-ups to emerge (a new behavior).  That changes the users’ relationship with an object (the car), and themselves.  The relationship with the car changes because the price to operate goes down.  The relationship with themselves changes because they feel more in control.  To receive these two relationship benefits all they have to do is adopt a new behavior – pre-schedule fill-ups.

A side note and harbinger of more to come on the topic of value creation:  If Ford is smart they will make the actions to do the pre-scheduling very easy.  (Apple easy mind you, not Microsoft easy)

Summary

1. Our lives are the summation of all our relationships (Our Relationship Space).
2. Value is created when our Relationship Space grows.  (Value = Improvement in quantity or quality of Relationship Space)
3. New behaviors change Relationship Space  (both positively and negatively).
4. New products and services that create value, (versus mimicking existing value), enable new behaviors to emerge that improve Relationship Space.  (iPad, Wii, Hohm system above)
5. The actions a user needs to take to allow the new behaviors plays a role (More on this phenomenon in later posts).
6. So, when thinking of new products or services, work your way through the new behaviors your product will cause to emerge and how will it impact your users’ relationships.

Questions to consider

Test yourself with the following.  Think about a recent purchase that excited you.

1. What were your new behaviors?
2. Which relationships did it improve?
3. How did it improve them?

Oh, and if you’re not convinced about life = relationships, see if you can describe anything in your life that is not a relationship in one form or another.  If you find something, please let me know in the comments.

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

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 three in a series that is expected to run until mid May.

Previous value-disruption project posts

1. Introduction
2. Project Scope

We often hear about the generational divide that exists when discussing web 2.0.  Those under 35 or so, live social networking and therefore get it.  Many of  those over 35 find social networking strange and don’t understand where and why it’s useful.

With that in mind Jonathan and I have been watching the reaction of the participants in this project to determine the degree to which this phenomenon is playing itself out.

After 60 days my assessment is that this phenomenon is somewhat valid, but with other more important drivers at play.

It’s been true that older generations struggle with what this web 2.0 project is all about.  For example:

• Older participants, especially outside the core team in the wiki collaboration project are not participating in the 3 wiki trials with the same vigor as younger participants.
• We are using a project wiki ourselves to manage the project.  Some of the older participants need more hand-holding to get them up and running.
• When discussing potential applications the younger generation is able to forecast how they and others can use it quickly.  The older ones, not so much.

On the other hand, there are participants in their 50s and older who are right in there.   They are engaged, enthusiastic, and running experiments such as trial blogs, mini collaboration projects, or notification groups with micro-blogging.  And they can forecast how it will benefit them as good or better than some younger folks.  Furthermore there are employees in their 20s who are showing no interest whatsoever.

So what gives?  What really distinguishes between those who are engaged and those who are not.  Is it really age that drives engagement with Web 2.0?

My take on the generation divide

While it has some validity I don’t think that’s the key driver.  From watching this diverse group of employees I believe two others drivers are just as important in determining who is engaged and who is not.

1. Their level of curiosity
2. They see a personal return

Level of Curiosity

You know these kinds of folks.  They are always curious.  They are the ones that watch documentaries and provide historical anecdotes in conversations at parties.  So when something new comes along it provides them a way to feed their curiosity.  That’s why there are great-grandmothers out there in their late 80′s in local community centers teaching Microsoft Word and PowerPoint  to recently retired executives (my mother).  I’ve noticed this characteristic is prevalent in those with high levels of engagement in this project.  Curious people are just more comfortable dealing with the ambiguities and uncertainty of a value-disruption project.  However, curiosity only partially predicts engagement.

See a Personal Return

Curiosity by itself  isn’t enough.  People who are deeply engaged also see a personal return.  They perceive that what they are working on will directly impact them and provide them some kind of personal work-benefit.  For example, greater recognition, faster access to experts, easier tracking of documents, whatever.  When a team member sees a direct correlation between what they are working on and how it will benefit their specific situation, engagement goes up.

So, my take is that curiosity and personal returns are far more predictive than age in determining who will be attracted to web 2.0 in the workplace.

Implications

Here are four implications I see.

1. When populating your innovation team, whether web 2.0 or other, make sure you have a good mixture of curious people.
2. Screen the team to ensure they have a  personal stake in success.  Explicitly uncover what will it mean to them.
3. Extending that idea further, share the personal returns amongst team members.  When John understands why Jeanille is attracted to the project he can make subtle changes to his team interactions and deliverables to support what Jeanille is looking for, and vice versa.
4. On a consistent basis during reviews ask people to share their greatest learning, even if it doesn’t directly support the project deliverables.   This sharing of learning will reinforce their drive for curiosity and indirectly, their engagement.

Your thoughts

• What is your experience on web 2.0 and the age divide?
• What effects of curiosity and personal return have you seen on your projects?

Thanks you for visiting http://www.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