Category: Innovation

The Future Summit 2: Artificial divides

I took a lot from the Melbourne Future Summit, many good and some worrying.

One of the worrying aspects was the hostility from the “creative thinkers” towards Engineers and scientists.

I took a lot from the Melbourne Future Summit, much of it good and some of it worrying.

One of the worrying aspects was the hostility from the “creative thinkers” towards Engineers and scientists.

This was apparent in the Innovation Imperative seminar where many of the panel’s and audiences’ comments were notable for their hostility towards Engineers and scientists along with their view it was time for some “creative thinking”.

Most of questioners from the floor went as far to blame Engineers and scientists for the Global Financial Crisis.

This is odd as scientists and Engineers are no more responsible for the banking sector’s financial engineering any more than artists are responsible for the bankers’ creative accounting.

Creating artificial barriers between “creative” and “scientific” thinkers is dangerous and foolish. Our greatest Engineering and scientists are creative thinkers by definition. Many great artists have applied science to their work.

If we force people into these pigeon holes where an Engineer can’t be creative and an artist can’t use science then we are all the poorer for it and less equipped for the challenges ahead of us.

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Ignoring your customers

The new Facebook design has picked up lots of critics with nearly 800,000 users giving it the thumbs down.

However Dare Obasanjo claims Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg doesn’t care. Apparently Mark’s view is “the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers“.

That’s true – Steve jobs ignored the howls of protest when Apple dropped support for floppy disks and the Apple Desktop Bus which left millions of Mac users stranded with obsolete equipment.

Even more famously, Henry Ford told customers they could have any colour Model T they liked as long as it was black.

Both were right and the customers followed them, although not without some grumbling.

So you can succeed by knowing your customers needs better than they know them, but it’s a risky ask as Microsoft found with Windows Vista, Ford with the Edsel and Coca-Cola with New Coke.

Time will tell if Mark Zuckerburg’s right. It’s a high risk strategy though.

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Every business is different

different

One of the things I’ve always believed is every business is unique.

Your character, your staff, your processes, your customers, your premises and every little thing your business does makes it totally different to every other business in the world.

That’s the beauty of business and it’s why any advice you recieve should be tempered by the knowledge that no-one knows your operation better than you.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t listen to advice. You should because a fresh pair of eyes or ears can alert you to something you’ve missed.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t experiment with new ways. Those businesses who don’t will probably not survive the next five years.

But what’s works for the guy up the road won’t necessarily work for you. His blog might be successful while yours may fail; she might be able to ditch the Yellow Pages while you cannot; they might be able to use social media while your contacts ignore it.

So understand your own businesses, its staff and the customers.

And most of all understand your own strengths and weaknesses.

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Does IT kill competition?

Andrew Mcafee’s article of the effects of IT on competition and businesses raises some interesting points .

http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/curiouser_and_curiouser/

His conclusion is technology isn’t a leveller between businesses – instead it creats a greater concentration of market power.

I wonder if those results Andrew cites are biased because of the economic boom and easy credit we recently been through; start ups were bought out by cashed up bigger players and that’s why we saw a concentration of businesses.

Regardless of the reasons, there’s a caveat for the bigger players; Andrew’s view is this because “good ideas and good execution separate winners from losers” and technology is what allows these good ideas to spread in a well run company.

This week’s collapse of Wedgwood is a good example of when a company’s culture stifles ideas and innovation. The New York Times has an excellent description of what went wrong and Seth Godin has some wise comments on the NYT strory.

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Should Australian tech startups head to Silicon Valley?

Paul Graham’s VC blog has a provocative story on why startups should move to Silicon Valley to improve their chances of success. This raises the question should Australian startups follow his advice.

My view is a firm “yes”. Not only are Australian investors inexperienced in finding and nuturing startups but they are notoriously reluctant about putting money into anything remotely innovative or “outside the box”.

So it’s probably even more important Australian innovators to go the US than it is for their British, Irish or Indian counterparts.

What’s always amazed me with Australian investors is how they will keep backing known dogs. The best example was One.Tel where the founders repeated the mistakes they’d made in previous ventures but we’re able to keep the investor’s cash coming in because they were the right people who’d gone to the right schools.

For an unknown kid without connections and with a truly original idea (and One.Tel was certainly not an original idea) it’s difficult to see how they’d have any reason not to be on the first plane to San Francisco.

Interestingly, Paul Graham’s follow up blog post on the future of startups says “you don’t beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant”.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the incumbent Australian investors are going to deal with the new economy. Will they just sit on their behinds and enjoy the blessings of the current commodities boom and wait for the next housing boom? Or will they learn new tricks?

Or will a new generation come along and redefine the problem?

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