Over at InnovatorInside, my new blog, I've put up quite a bit of new content:
I argue that Innovators aren't researchers, so stop the creativity stuff
How things have been going since I left the Civil Service in January
If you're doing innovation inside a corporate, some things a clever person told me
Why making the number is an important skill for an innovator
Why is that noone seems to spot a competitive threat till far too late?
Hope you enjoy!
Next Thursday evening in Central London, with some colleagues past and present, I'm going to be presenting some of my work that's going into a book I'm calling "How Hits Work". The event is being run by Spigit, the enterprise innovation platform company. I've been invovled with Spigit for a few years now, and they're the platform that power both Innovation Market at Lloyds and IdeaStreet at the Department.
The basic premise I'm exploring in my presentation is hits - those massive, immediate product successes that just take off - almost never happen because of radical innovation. That's counter-intuituve I know, but the mechanics of hits aren't easily explained by traditional innovation theories.
Traditional theory around the way new ideas spread suggest that mass media messages - like advertising - effectively target those individuals with a particular affinity for trying new things, who then communicate their successes or failures to other, like minded people. After a while of this happening, there is enough communication going on that expansion of the idea becomes self sustaining. That's the critical mass point that people always talk about, and it takes time to get there, because it takes time for people to communicate their experiences with each other.
But hits don't seem to work quite that way. They get to their critical mass point very quickly, much more quickly than this traditional approach would seem to allow. How is it possible, for example, that a revolutionary movie can become a hit in a single weekend? Why was the iPad an overnight success?
In every single case I can find, hits are the result of taking a well understood process, technology or service from some other, adjacent market and repurposing it in a new application. There is nothing innovative about the product or service or technology: the innovation is all in the way its applied.
On the other hand, truely groundbreaking, amazing innovations without precedent are rarely hits. That's why Microsoft, with the highest R&D spend in the industry and more truely innovative things in their labs than practically everyone else, is trailing Apple. Apple know how to take commodity, tried stuff and apply it in new ways.
There's more to it, of course. In pratcially every case of a hit, there's been something else also present, a twist which reinforces the unique application. There are only a few possible variations on the twist, actually, 5 that i've identifed thus far.
I'll also be presenting some interesting cases: Microsoft versus Apple, of course, but also the the TV series Glee, the rise of Steam and its defeat by Diesel, and thje story of the man that invented the diode that made wireless possible -and never made a penny.
Anyway, that's the topic of my talk on Thursday evening. Also on stage will be David Cotterill from the Department, whose going to speak about his innovation team and motivating innovation behaviour, and Steve Wakefield, who used to run Innovation Market at Lloyds.
I have 5 spaces, so ping me if you want a spot at [email protected].
Update: My seats are gone, but I am sure Spigit will be give me some spaces if I beg. Let me know if you missed out and I'll ask: [email protected]
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The www.LittleInnovationBook.com is an online book I’m proving free of charge for people thinking about starting an innovation effort.
Well, actually, its not quite free. There are ads and some other things there as well. The other thing are the most interesting.
Because I own the whole rights to the work, not my traditionalist publisher who has to do things in a certain way in order to fit in with the traditional publishing model, I have the liberty to use the book as a live innovation experiment.
I promised readers a while back that I’d update on how my experiments are going from time to time.
Firstly, let me tell you about the traffic build. The site got spidered pretty much immediately by all the search engines, because of the links here and the fact that the announcement I made on Twitter got retweeted extensively. Retweets are excellent predictors of Google’s pace at recognising content, I’ve found. The book was immediately number 7 for the keywords “innovation book” and for a range of other innovation words as well it was in the first page of results.
Traffic has been building steadily, and the book is presently getting about a hundred uniques a day after two months. During the build I ran two StumbleUpon campaigns just to see. You can buy relatively targeted traffic for $0.05USD a visitor, which quite cheap considering they are real visitors, not just bots. However, I did find the bounce rate on that traffic to be very high. In other words, visitors would stop at the landing page, and just move on without going deeper into the content. I’ve abandoned StumbleUpon for now.
FaceBook traffic and Google CPC traffic are better, but very expensive. It doesn’t look as though you can buy traffic for an online book and return a profit, as far as I can see.
So much for mechanisms where you pay for visitors. I’ve given up on them now and switched to Article Marketing. For those of you unfamiliar with it, what you do is write short, pithy article with lots of Google-friendly keywords. Then you submit them to various article directories, complete with a resource box containing URLS that link back to your site. The pundits all say you have to have published some hundreds of them before you notice a real difference, but that you get exponential traffic that lasts a long time once you do. I’ve been doing two a day since the start of March. I’ll come back to you on how successful that’s been in a month or so, but it looks promising for now.
But I know most of you will be interested in the “Pay what its worth” model I was trialling. Since then, I’ve also tried “Tip the Author a fixed amount” and as of this morning, I’m doing “Micropayments for Ad-Free content”. Let me run these three for a few weeks and I’ll come back to you with specific results.
Here’s the top line, though: “Pay What its Worth” works less well than the Tip scheme, and I think its because people don’t like having to make a decision on value AND tell me what they think it is. When I told them what the fixed amount was, they were far easier with it.
Anyway, as I said, let me come back to you with more specifics on that later in the next instalment. I’ll also be talking about the performance of AdSense, especially as I’ve now doubled the ad density in the book. My apologies to those of you who find them too annoying to continue.
PS: For those of you who have tipped, or paid otherwise, you’ll be getting book content in either ePub or PDF as soon as it is ready. And thank you for your support, and for continuing to read.
As you know, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, this week, I’ve been working at the front line of the Department – in a Job Centre in a challenging area in Scotland.
Banking readers: Job Centres are the UK goverment’s centres that help unemployed people find work. They are also the face to face contact points for administration of benefits that the govermment pays to people out of work.
Anyway, in my Job Centre, I’ve been working with the staff as they’ve dealt with a range of things, from bereavements to people with no money at all (as they’ve lost their benefit payments, and now may be sleeping out in the snow).
Did you know there are money illegal money lenders walking the streets, who forcibly take the money people on benefits get? They hover around outside and take away what people get to pay for food and shelter.
It is presently snowing here.
So you get all these people coming in who have nothing, who explain that they’ve “lost their money”, because they are worried what will happen to them if anyone from the Government knows they’ve dealt with an illegal financial service.
When you are sitting around after a crisis loan interview, hearing what is likely going on behind the face the customer has presented, the experience is extremely eye-opening. Staff were telling me about the (regular) times they’ve had to tap on the glass to wake up drug-affected people in interviews, for example.
Drug dealers and money lenders. Two financial traps for vulnerable people. You can imagine my wide-eyed response, having sat in my nice comfortable cocoon in London all this time.
But here is another thing I’ve found in this Job Centre, and it is something I’m not surprised about.
Staff build their own stuff to get around the limitations of systems we provide. There are Excel based spreadsheets which are used for diary management (“oh, I can’t have this open too long, otherwise no-one else will be able to make appointments”). There is email based workflow, where each step is a new inbox that gets manually monitored. And there’s any number of self-made data capturing things that are used for statistics and business reporting.
And all of it is stitched together with another technology: paper. They create their own forms, and their own paper based systems in order to supplement their jobs.
Consequently, the work is processed in a highly efficient way. I’d make a guess that each JobCentre does things slightly differently, depending on how good their custom additions to each of our centrally provided processes are.
If there was ever proof needed that decentralisation of the core is a good thing, then I’ve been immersed in it for the week so far.
I wonder what would happen if we put the appropriate end-user computing tools in the hands of these people and said “design the perfect Job Centre system”. My guess would be something good.
I’ve uploaded the latest rule for start-up innovation programmes to The Little Innovation Book. It’s an online experiment to see what happens when you try adding user commentary to every single page of a free book online. Few people are commenting yet though… far fewer than are actually reading, given the web stats I’m getting. I wonder if that mean people don’t like this particular way of reading?
Would love to hear your views on that.
Anyway, in the latest rule, I suggest you need to define the role of the innovators in an organisation, before you start innovating. This, of course, goes to the question of whether what you’re building is an innovation culture or an innovation team.
I also contrast the entrepreneurial versus the investor mentality in an innovation leader.
Both of these are fiery debates I’ve had in the past with practitioners and non-practitioners alike. They are questions that cause as many arguments, even, as the debate over “what constitutes innovation”.
Hope you enjoy.
Last week, I wrote down some of my thoughts for 2009. There have been both lows and highs, but mostly highs. 2009 was a good year. I’m expecting that there’ll be some pretty big highs in 2010 as well. As is everyone’s want to do at this time, I thought I’d make some guesses what the year holds ahead.
No doubt, we’ll all look back at this next year and laugh. That’s the fun of it of course.
Anyway, onto my top predictions for the coming year.
1. Banks, governments and everyone will get really, really, serious about innovation
The last couple of years have seen a lot of talking about innovation, but not really all that much doing it. There are enough high profile innovation successes starting to emerge though (even though they may have happened by accident) that people can now begin to see the power of this stuff when applied properly.
I think this is going to result in a number of very big programmes starting this year. It will all be copycat, of course (“What? They’ve spent that on innovation? We have to double that…!”), and I’d expect a few very high profile programme cancellations in the next 18 months. But overall, the momentum is going to be huge in 2010.
And that is going to lead to some game changing plays from organisations we’d always thought were anything but innovative. I would not be surprised to see a bank doing something so unusual that people’s mouths drop. Like, for example, someone running a similar model to Caja Navarra’s here in the UK.
Or a government department reaching out to citizens and bringing them right inside service delivery.
Or a major corporate releasing a hit product that’s been 100% designed by customers, and which climbs the adoption curve so quickly that their large competitors go out of business.
All that will drive us to an “Innovation Frenzy” by the end of 2010, and if you are a corporate innovator, you can expect 2010 to be a very big year.
2. Citizens will start to deploy tools that do the things that big companies and governments used to do.
Governments and corporates are beginning to make their data available online so that citizens can do what they want with it. But I predict that if government doesn’t make its data available quickly enough, citizens will find ways to get it anyway. Screen scraping works, you know. Then they’ll build what they want, and waiting for government to provide stuff… well why?
3. Crowd-think emerges
This is the year someone senior in a large corporation is going to discover that if you put 10 Gen-Yers in a room and give them a project, the outcome is likely to better than if you put a single, experienced person with 10 years on it. The next generation of workers is quite different to what we’ve been used to, and their hyper-connection means their work operates in a parallel, and highly synergistic fashion.
Then I’d say we’ll begin to see strategic decisions being made by committees of these people. They’ll be small at first but the power of these groups of generation – Y thinkers will get more obvious. Success will breed more success.
It will be 2010 when the signs this is happening really become obvious.
In the next decade, by the way, these are the same people who will be in real management positions in their own right, and crowd-think will happen no matter what the current managers think, whether they like it or not.
And what will happen to the experienced people of today? They’ll still have a role of course, but they’ll be advisors to the decision makers rather than decision makers themselves.
Don’t believe me?
Check out your graduate programme, if you have one, and watch how those people are interacting now. Watch them work together on a project, and don’t fail to notice that no single leader emerges in overall control. Leadership moves around dynamically based on skills and competence.
Then project that forward a few years when we starting giving them management jobs of real importance.
4. Those who don’t get “social” will never get a decent performance review again.
I’ve written about the difference between those who are connected (online) and those who aren’t, and suggested that there’s a visible performance gap between the two groups.
Well, I’m of the view that this is the year that the difference is going to make itself felt at performance review time. Oh, not everyone will likely recognise the fact that they’re being marked down because they aren’t connected enough, but it will begin to happen anyway.
Here’s why.
Those with the right connections have much superior, and much much more timely data at their fingertips. They consequently make robust decisions fast, and their pace of output goes up. Their work is not only produced more quickly, its quality rises.
One person in my team, for example, can turn around a report in a day or two, whereas everyone else quotes weeks – even a month sometimes – to do the same thing.
Now, when you’re the manager in that position, who do you give the top marks to?
This will all be bad news, of course to those who “don’t have time to read blogs”, or whatever social media tool is currently in fashion. It will also be bad news to those who think that you get to turn off the moment you leave the office.
Those days are gone. There is a new level of performance emerging, and the bar is getting raised in 2010. People are going to have step up this year, or expect there will be personal consequences.
And not, as I said earlier, because anyone will do anything deliberate, like impose a performance improvement plan or something. It will be because all the top marks will go to those who are connected from now on.
Experience is important, but performance is the new yardstick in 2010
Welcome to 2010, everyone, and I hope you have a fantastic year.
Well, I’m back from Austria, and I can tell you, the skiing there was awesome. And I know those of you with families will probably be horrified to know this, but I have to say that taking oneself off during Christmas and not having to do more than calling a few people back home was just an amazing relief. You know how stressful all that Christmas stuff can be. We even skipped Christmas lunch, opting instead for a nice Goulash in a ski-in cafe on the slopes.
Anyway, now that I’m back, I’ve been thinking about 2009, and some of the highs and lows. Mostly, its been a great year.
At the start of the year, I was pretty sure interesting things would be happening. At Lloyds Banking Group, we were just gearing up for the big integration exercise, and no-one was certain what would be happening from one month to next.
The innovation team and I were still trying to work out how to adapt the innovation strategy given the number one priority for everyone was going to be incrementalism for the foreseeable future. Luckily, that was the strategy we’d already been pursuing, even during the boom times. For some institutions, and Lloyds is one of them, you simply can’t have a play-to-win innovation strategy and get away with it. So, as it turned out, there weren’t that many changes there for us. We just kept going on with Innovation Market and all the other things we’d started. I think we managed to achieve some valuable things for the bank.
Nonetheless, I knew that I’d be leaving the bank in 2009, but didn’t know where I’d be going yet. Sometimes, you just know that the time is right. Anyway, I’m firmly of the belief that when you’re an innovation guy, you really want to make sure that you turn your people over every couple of years or so. You want that fresh perspective, that new way of looking at things. Why should it be any different for the person in charge of the innovation programme?
By the end of January I was in a bit of a panic, because I was months late with the manuscript of Futureproofing and just didn’t see how I was going to get it done. So I started getting up at 3AM every morning to write, and now that’s a habit I just can’t shake. Lucky, actually, because my next book is now also months overdue, so the 3AM writing is back on again.
One of the highlights of the first part of the year for me was a trip to Australia, to attend Annalie’s AMPlify festival. I’ve written about it here before, and its a case study in my book. Now, the content of the event was interesting, of course, but it taught me a major lesson: you can’t overlook design in anything you do. Fit and finish is everything, and once you have that right, everything else flows naturally.
My current team are pretty sick of hearing me rant on about this, actually, and they also keep reminding me that just because Annalie had butterflies hatching out of chrysalides at the exact moment people were coming into her event on the last day, does not translate into appropriate expenditure in a non-corporate environment. Actually, I already knew that, but adjusting to the sometimes arcane rules of the public sector has been eye-opening.
When I joined the Department for Work and Pensions in August, it was a bit of a relief, actually. The bank had become increasingly difficult. Although most of us were confirmed in roles by that stage, there were constant announcements of reorganisations, teams being shut down, people being transferred, and of course, the “death by a thousand cuts” as we kept announcing round after round of layoffs due to integration. Everyone was on edge.
Leaving was neither a simple decision, nor was it done in haste. After all, what would I know about working in the public sector?
Many of my colleagues in banking were somewhat surprised that I joined the civil service (“What on earth would you do that for?”), but it has worked out to be a rather pleasant surprise.
The fact of the matter is that there are few bigger IT environments anywhere. Neither is the innovation upside larger than here. To that, add the challenge of designing innovation systems and processes where profit is not the driving motive, and I think you can get an idea of why this move was so attractive to me.
I’ve been in post now for about 4 months, and I’m really looking forward to talking about some of the things we’ve been up to in that time. There’s really a lot that’s very exciting going on.
The other big thing for me in 2009 was the release of my first book, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank. I have really been overwhelmed by the response to this. I recall at the time I was sending it out for the last time to the publisher, I did it with complete trepidation, knowing that there would be nothing i could do it bombed.
Apparently, that is the normal fear of writers before they send things out.
Anyway, sales of the title are good, and my publisher is pleased. And word is spreading, so month on month sales seem to be growing at a reasonable rate in every country that the book’s avaialble in. Since the book is so ultra-niche, it is much more than I expected.
Anyway, that leads me to the end of the year, and my current projects. One of them, The Little Innovation Book, is an online set of essays based on my writings here in the last four years. Publishers – particularly mine – don’t like to sell things that are already in the public domain, so they aren’t very interested in books based on blogs.
But Future Proof Bank is pretty text-booky, to be honest, and I wanted to have something much more approachable. The Little Innovation Book will hopefully fill that need. I’m hoping to have it done and online in a month or so.
The other, much bigger, project I have on, though, is my second real book. Its tentatively called One Big Thing, and its about single innovations. In particular, based on a set of observations from history and more recently, I’m making the argument that radical innovation isn’t where the money is.
Neither is it in incrementalism, by the way, to those of you who know I am fan of small, sharp innovations done at scale.
Anyway, I won’t say much more about that right now, but will certainly keep you apprised of progress throughout the year.
So, for me, 2009 has been an exciting, and very impactful year. I am very confident that 2010 will be equally exciting. There is just so much going on, and I love it when its busy.
I’ll be back tomorrow with my top 10 predictions for 2010. I am quite often wrong, mind you, but I can’t resist joining in with everyone who always makes their forecasts at this time.
Actually, my boss at the Department has this down to an art. At every Christmas-do he has, he asks everyone their predictions, notes them down, and reads them out the next year.
I forgot to make predictions on the blog last year, but the year before I was pretty much wrong, wrong, wrong. Its much more fun to read back and realise how wrong you were than be right anyway.
The best of the season to you.
I’m stranded due to snow in Manchester. Rumour is that the airport has run out of runway de-icing fluid. I suppose that doesn’t matter, because I’ve also heard that at Heathrow Terminal 5, they’ve run out of staff to man gates, because everyone is running up and down runways doing de-icing.
Isn’t it interesting how these bits of passenger information percolate through queues of frustrated people? I was tempted to make something up and just see how long it took to get from one end of the airport to the other.
Then I remembered its Christmas, and Santa always knows when you misbehave.
Anyway, it has been a fantastic 2009 in so many respects, and I wanted to thank you all so much for your continued readership. There is rarely a day that goes by when I don’t wonder what I’d be doing today if I hadn’t started writing here. There are so many opportunities I’ve only had because of you who read here.
So thank you again.
I’m off on holidays for the next week over Christmas, but will be back to post the traditional 2010 predictions just before New Year… I don’t suppose anyone with a blog fails to do that any more.
And then I’m back to my ordinary schedule when I return to the office on January 4.
So Merry Christmas everyone, and have a wonderful holiday season.
Last night, I’m on this train home from the office in London. Whilst squashed into my seat in typical commuter fashion, I started to reflect on some inspirational people I’ve met over my career, and the lessons I’ve learned from them. That’s an interesting idea for a post, I thought, so I’ve created a list of the top 5 who are most influencing my work at the moment.
It is firstly impossible to go past Janet Parker, founder of a startup I worked in as CTO some years ago. The most inspirational person I’ve ever seen in front of an audience, then or since. She could get up in front of a crowd and make you believe things. I recall being in a room and hearing her speak about a potential opportunity in the cards (as in credit cards) business, and having a tear in my eye, she was so good. Janet taught me something I’ve never forgotten: the ability to motivate and inspire is the key skill you must have when you lead. I’ve struggled ever since to be even half as good at it as she was.
Next up, my first career coach, who is the ex-MD of P&O in Australia. He told me that if you want to get anywhere, you first need to be part of the money. In other words, connect to the business you’re in, then make a difference. This will automatically get you moved up. Hovering around the edges in support functions doesn’t do that. Its why most CEOs are from sales or marketing.
Annalie Killian, who is Catalyst for Magic at AMP, and the producer of their bi-annual innovation conference AMPlify is on the list. Annalie showed me the powerful effect you can have when you add design to things. Oh, I get the fact that the iPhone, for example, was interesting because it was beautiful. But I didn’t feel the power of design until Annalie showed me at her conference what you could do. She was using a butterfly logo, for example, and on the last day had chrysalises at entrance to her event, timed to hatch as people arrived. It was beautiful. And it was remarkable, enough so that you’d never forget it. Because of Annalie, I now insist that everything we do has that kind of design about it. You really can’t believe what a difference it makes.
Miss Pamela Hinde, my 2nd grade teacher at Lane Cove Public, in Sydney Australia, and now retired. She taught me to read and write, after I’d repeated 2nd grade for not being able to do so. Obviously, the fact that I get to write blogs and books now, is all because of her. I can’t imagine how my life would be different now without her.
And finally, my fast entry graduates, now, and in all roles previously. They make you think differently about the way you’ve been brought up to do work. They also, if they’re any good at all, tell you you’re crap from time to time. I’ve had lots that have changed my thinking about things, and I rely on them not knowing what can’t be done to know which impossible things we should do next. They are also very useful for translating next generation thinking into stuff oldies can understand. I still can’t believe I’m now one of the oldies...
Who are your top 5? Shall we start a meme?
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