by Roger Dennis

Graffiti innovation

Graffiti in itself is an interesting art form. Free from the unspoken rules that govern many artforms, graffiti artists have a unique license to express themselves. Good graffiti can be beautiful as a quick look at Google images reveals

With that level of freedom you’d think it’d be hard to make a splash in the graffiti world and to push some boundaries. How would you innovate in a area where it’s always the creative season?

Here’s a guy who breaks the mould (so to speak).

Mould breaking

A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels

There’s more about the story here and the artists site can be found at this link

Thanks to Boing Boing (interestingly the original story is over two years old, but it surfaced on BB yesterday.)

by Roger Dennis

McKinsey talks about capitalising on customer insights

McKinsey graphic

The latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly has an article which discusses how to get an understanding of your customers in order to develop new markets and better understand existing ones.

It makes a few good points, and the sentiment is certainly correct. It’s a new world out there, and building markets based on assumptions, hunches and bad data won’t get a company very far.

However I take issue with the section on product development. As with much that is written about this area, it talks in general about observing customers being one avenue leading to new product design. Although it is clearly outside the scope of the article to go into details, ethnography, even when undertaken by experts, can give hazy guidance at the best of times.

The article states :

“A cell phone manufacturer looking for promising offerings in several profitable markets, for example, established customer segment panels, whose members were asked to maintain diaries detailing where and how they used PDAs and wireless devices. With this information in hand, the company’s brand and segment managers could ensure, at key stage-gate points in product development, that the teams of developers were truly meeting the needs of target customer segments in critical markets by proposing appropriate new-product and packaged-service ideas, such as business- or entertainment-oriented browser interface designs.”

I’d love to know how McKinsey proposes that these insights are ranked and quantified in order to provide some sort of priority for the design process. Also, exactly how did the brand and segment manager ‘ensure’ they met the needs of customers. Oh, and how much the customer panel process cost.

As a sideline, here’s my customer insight about McKinsey : It’s ironic that an organisation which preaches about customer insights and open innovation does not have a facility on it’s own site for people to leave comments or trackbacks. The tag-line for the Quarterly is “Required reading for the business elite.” Wake up guys.

by Roger Dennis

BusinessWeek talks about the fringes

The ever interesting Andrew Zolli writes in BusinessWeek about the importance of the fringes for spotting innovations. I’m a great believer in the potential of innovation that happens outside the core. Indeed most interesting developments are increasingly happening as far away from the core as you could imagine. Think Shawn Fanning, Marc Andressen and the iPod (after all, it wasn’t Apples idea).

Great ideas also pop out of the fringes when sectors collide. Creating an environment to achieve this is damn tricky, and not well understood.

What niche fields will contribute to tomorrow’s great innovations? Ecology, gaming, and social networking, for starters

Although the article appears to have been trimmed down to make it digestable for people who still believe that wearing suits and ties leads to better decision making, it’s worth a read, if only to confirm that yes, interesting things can happen in online virtual worlds.

Shopping in Second Life anyone?

Here’s the article.

by Roger Dennis

Frequent flyer innovation

After recently making a frequent flyer booking with Air New Zealand it occurred to me how much thinking the company had put into its processes to make it user friendly. I also belong to a couple of other frequent flyer programme, but rarely use these airlines now as the system they use for redeeming points is purposely murky.

Air New Zealand

So how has Air New Zealand developed innovation around a fairly standard set of automated processes?

1. You do not get points for your flights, you get Airpoints ‘dollars.’ You can easily find out how many dollars you get for each flight.
2. The balance of your frequent flyer account is in these Airpoints dollars.
3. You can redeem these dollars for seats on any flight at any time. There are no obscure rules about the number of seats allocated to frequent flyers, the classes of seats or when you can fly. It’s very simple – if there is a seat available on the flight you can book it with your Airpoints dollars.
4. When you book online you can choose to pay with ‘real’ dollars, or your Airpoints dollars.

When you think about it the innovation seems quite minor. However it makes for a great user experience, and its very easy to understand.

A friend in the airline industry tells me that airlines prefer to have frequent flyers using their points in a downturn, but when business is booming – like right now – they’d rather have fee paying customers. Because of this any system that helps people make use of their points is generally shunned by airlines, and that also means that other airlines will probably not adopt similar systems.

In the meantime however I’ll be making as many international flights as possible on Air New Zealand.

by Roger Dennis

How do banks keep customers?

With the advent of new parking meters in my home city, one of the last bastions of cash has gone. I can now pay for parking by using my credit card or by text message. The slow but inescapable death of cash has been coming for a while, especially in New Zealand where debit card payments – even for the smallest transactions – has been common place for at least 15 years.

I can remember walking into a local burger bar in the early 90’s and getting some chips (or fries) and $20 cash. About the same time I started to go to bank branches less and less.

At the other end of the spectrum mortgage brokers are now the preferred contact point for larger transactions, and people would rather spend time getting impartial advice from them and not their customer banking service rep.

These two trends would be worrying for any business on their own, but couple that with the internet creating perfectly informed customers – who, if they like, can find out just competitive their bank isn’t – and banks have a real problem.

Traditionally they have relied on branches as the touchpoint where their staff could press the flesh of their customers, not to mention feel the width of their wallets. But now they have to be very clever with how they deal with their customers, especially online and on the phone.

In New Zealand at my bank I’m told I’m a valued customer, and that comes complete with a personal banking contact and a special customer service number. It also means I get monthly printed ‘personalised updates’ from ‘the desk of my manager’ which aren’t worth their weight in recycling. The underwhelming effect of these initiatives makes me wonder what the ‘normal’ customer experience is like. Also, bear in mind that my bank is consistently voted as having the best service and best offerings in New Zealand.

Some organisations around the world have risen to the challenge. Zopa in the UK and Washington Mutual in the States are two examples that spring to mind. However in general ‘banking’ and ‘innovation’ are usually found in the same sentences with the frequency of the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘teapot’ appearing side by side.

I’d love to be proved wrong.

by Roger Dennis

Crowdsourcing – an example from Japan

Following on from the HBS article (see this post) which makes the point that for crowdsourcing to really work, the cost of development must be in reach of a single user, comes this example from Japan.

In Japan there’s an interesting trend in bookstores which give away from book jackets from colourful display stands. The catch – if you can call it a catch – is that the jackets are heavily branded. The idea is that when you are reading a book, the cover is open and therefore on display for the world to see. The benefit for the reader is that the cover protects the book. So where did this idea come from?

The jackets are the brainchild of the advertising company Setup Inc. “We noticed that on the trains, many women were reading books covered by jackets they had made themselves, so we thought that if we could make covers that were nice to look at and easy to use, then they might serve as a good advertising medium,” says Setup.

Free book jacket stand

Get the full story from Web Japan here

by Roger Dennis

Mobiles phones are a victim of complexity

From the consistently thought provoking blog Putting People First comes this gob-smacking statistic :
“63% of mobile devices returned [for repair] are in perfect working order”

While not reknowned for being an innovator, Vodafone has certainly started to address this when it introduced ‘simple’ handsets. Although aimed at older users (read : Silver Surfers) it’s a fairly safe guess that they would have found a market which extends beyond that.

After all, it’s a classic rule of technology products that 80% of your users will only use 20% of your product’s features.

by Roger Dennis

Take a Risk. Create a hit.

Slight mad, slightly gay and slighty drunk.

From This Blog Sits at the is this great post about Disney’s approach to risk taking, and Johnny Depps response.

[T]he eccentricity of Depp’s approach sent ripples of panic through Disney’s executive suites. Frantic phone calls were placed to Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Depp’s agent: Why is he walking funny? Why is he talking like that? Is he gay? Is he drunk?

And it wasn’t only the suits who were concerned: ”The first scene I did with Johnny, I was like, What the fuck are you doing?” Knightley says. ”None of us knew if it was going to work.”

Depp was not to be deterred. ”It was just fuel to go further,” he says. ”Not because I wanted to piss Disney off, but because I believed it was the right thing to do. Finally, I said, ‘Look, you hired me to do the gig. If you can’t trust me, you can fire me. But I can’t change it.’ It was a hard thing to say, but fuck it.” (Rottenburg)

Sticking to the safe ground only produces more blandness.

It’s the edgy, different and risky stuff which makes life interesting.