by Roger Dennis

The problem with Eric von Hippel’s innovation style

The excellent Business Week design/innovation blog has a piece on Eric von Hippels thoery of user led innovation. If you don’t know the theory, it focuses on getting what von Hippel terms ‘lead users’ to generate new product/service ideas for you, based on the idea that as a ‘lead user’ they know the use – and intended use – of your product.

While this is a step in the right direction for many corporations there are a couple of issues :
1. It assumes that even within a strict framework users know your product best. At face value this may seem logical, but if you read Anthony Ulwicks thoughts on innovation you will see the flaws in this approach
2. It’s damn expensive, and probably prohibitively so for all but the largest companies (I wrote an article about how you combat this for the Stanford University d.School magazine which you can find here)

Read the Business Week post here

by Roger Dennis

Podcasts of interest…

If a picture tells a thousand words, then a podcast tells…err…lots more. The beauty about them is that rather than attending various expensive conferences, you can use sites like IT Conversations to find gold nuggets without having to endure cattle class seating, endless taxi rides and bad hotels.

What’s more, nobody minds if you listen to their presentation while munching a bag of really noisey crisps.

Here’s a selection of some recent favourites :
IT Conversations: Clayton Christensen – Capturing the Upside

IT Conversations: Malcolm Gladwell – Human Nature

IT Conversations: Tom Kelley – Tech Nation

by Roger Dennis

Etsy – an extraordinary online shop

It’s almost a riddle – what has the feel of a blog, the design of graphic art site and a slick interface that would make Apple proud? It’s called Etsy and it’s an extraordinary marketplace place to buy handmade items from around the world.

Etsy

Browse by country, by category, by almost anything.

It enables individuals who handmake products to put up a very slick site and link into a global market to source unique products. My litmus test for the word ‘global’ is very simple – are there any New Zealand shops? In this case the the answer is yes.

The interface is almost game like, and with nods to Google Earth it begs you to go searching around the world for shops. Or, if you prefer, search by colour. Now here’s the interesting bit – what would the bricks and motar equivalent of an Etsy shop look like?

by Roger Dennis

New wheelchair design

From the BBC comes this article about a Formula One engineer who decided to re-design the wheelchair. He notes that the basic design of a wheelchair chassis dates back to vintage car days.

This product cuts across a couple of fields, arbitraging the best of racing car design (a carbon fibre monocoque) to bring about a radical redesign for the wheelchair.

What is more interesting is that the designer was not disabled himself, and was not a wheelchair user. He has founded a company called Trekinetic. Since the BBC story it looks like the site has got so much traffic that it is temporarily down. It’s not surprising, since a lot of wheelchair users are probably very frustrated.

The carbon fibre wheelchair

Next in line for a re-design should be those terrible looking mobility scooters – with a rapidly aging population it surprises me that this has not been tackled already.

by Roger Dennis

Telecom New Zealand – a textbook example of customer dis-service

Although this post is not directly related to innovation, it relates to the stifling of innovation, and how not to treat your customers.

Background : In New Zealand Telecom is the dominant ex-govt telco. Even though it is now privatised, it has fought tooth and claw to prevent regulation which would force it to unbundle the local loop, thereby allowing ISPs to compete on an even field for broadband offerings.

In March the CEO of Telecom was recorded at an analyst briefing saying that telcos created confusion via their marketing plans in order to prevent customers making direct comparisons on pricing plans. That it itself was an interesting admission for a telco CEO, and one that Virgin Mobile in the UK made the most of when it stormed the market with simple pricing plans.

That audio clip made it’s way into a video mashup, which mixed the CEOs comments with clips of Telecoms own advertising. Needless to say, the message was less than complimentary. The clip went viral very quickly with over 35,000 views on YouTube and Google video before Telecoms lawyers went to work. By the way, following this link under the ‘2006’ section on Wikipedia will point you to the new clip location.

So what’s interesting about this?
1. Telecom basically admitted that it actively creates customer confusion in the market. There’s an opportunity here for an innovative company which talks to customer in plain English.
2. Customers are so annoyed at Telecom, that they take that message and repackage it before sending it out to a receptive audience. They don’t bother to use the old channels, but make use of new web tools to get their message across.
3. The message is very well received by other annoyed customers, and even makes it onto national television news.
4. Telecom, obviously not quite learning that the rules have changed, send it’s lawyers after the clip.

When will a company like this – and those like it – realise that the ground beneath their feet it moving. And despite what they might try and tell you, it’s very hard to fight an earthquake with lawyers.

by Roger Dennis

Is innovation really a trend?

Google has launched a service which tracks the popularity of various search words over time. It acknowledges that it’s only a snapshot of it’s full search traffic, but it’s an interesting tool nonetheless.

If the magazines are to be believed, then innovation is the next big thing in management. If that is true you would expect that searching for innovation on Google would increase dramatically over the last couple of years. Not so. Take a look at this graph which tracks the volume of searches for the word ‘innovation’ over the last couple of years :

Google's view of innovation trend

While the values of the axis are unknown, and bearing in mind the cliche about statistics and damn lies, it appears that the level of searching for the word innovation has not seen the massive jump that the hype would have you believe. Infact, it has taken a bit of a dip. Of course without seeing what the graph was like in 2000 it’s hard to tell.

However if you look at the number of incidences tracked by the ‘news’ part of the graph, you can clearly see the level of hype increasing.

by Roger Dennis

Virtual world. Real cash

It was only a matter of time. The virtual gaming economy world has crossed over to the real world economy. From the BBC :

A real world cash card that allows gamers to spend money earned in a virtual universe has been launched.
Gamers can use the card at cash machines around the world to convert virtual dollars into real currency.

The card is offered by the developers of Project Entropia, an online role-playing game that has a real world cash economy. Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006.

The new cash card blurs the boundary between the virtual and physical world even further. It allows people to access their virtually acquired PEDs and convert them into real world money at any cash machine in the world. The card, issued by MindArk, is associated with the players Entropia Universe account and has all of the features of a real world bank account.

Players can transfer, withdraw, deposit and even view account balances using the system.

I remember raising this idea with the Chief Marketing Officer of one of the UKs largest banks three years ago. he didn’t get it. Maybe another bank will, but you can bet it won’t be one of the old-school players. Maybe someone like ING Direct or WaMu.

By having a bank at the back end of the system you add credibility to the system, and provide re-assurance that your cash is not going to be spirited away by some relatively unknown gaming company with no financial services experience.

Does your bank have a branch here? :

Virtual world, real cash.

It’s only a matter of time.