A recent New York Times article discussed how American households spend their money. The article presented a graph on the rate of technology “consumption” amongst US households.
It shows, for example, that the Internet was adopted by just over 60% of households within a 15 year period (1990 - 2005), it took approximately 45 years (1927 - 1972) for the same percentage of households to adopt the washing machine, approximately 20 years (1927 - 1947) for 60% of households to adopt the refrigerator and approximately 10 years (1923 - 1933) for 60% of households to adopt radio. The graph suggests that while adoption of technology is taking less time, adoption rate is also linked to the consumers perceived value of the technology in question.
The World Bank’s recently released its Global Economic Prospects: technology diffusion in the developing world 2008 in which it documents that the rate of technology adoption in poor and middle income countries during the past century was far greater than that in “developed” countries (160%, 100%, 77% respectively).
With regard to the definition of technology achievement, the report describes it as:
a broad definition of technology and technological progress, one that encompasses the techniques (including the way the production process is organized) by which goods and services are produced, marketed, and made available to the public.
As for the reason behind the difference:
A sustained policy of increased openness to foreign trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), plus increased investments in human capital, have contributed to substantial improvements in technological achievement in developing countries over the past 15 years.
Links to New York Times article, graph and Global Economic Prospects: technology diffusion in the developing world 2008
I’ve seen it again recently. This is the scenario. A business decides that it wants to adopt technology in an effort to address some identified issue or capitalise on some identified opportunity. Hopefully it doesn’t start with wanting to adopt technology (although it often does) but rather wanting to improve the business. Either way, the business puts a lot of effort into capturing the requirements of the technical solution and then identifying or developing an appropriate solution. These pre-adoption stages are often heavily influenced by people who are technology savvy, who often want the technology for the sake of the technology itself. The "adoption team" slowly starts to loose sight of the issue/opportunity it is seeking to address and become immersed, and somewhat dazzled, in the technology on offer. The project moves into the deployment phase and the technology is finally switched on. The project team disband (or seriously slows down) as they feel their job is done. The original issue/opportunity remains, for the large part, un-addresses.
The adoption of technology into a business is as much about organisational development as it is about aligning business goals with technology solutions. The organisation has to be prepared for the change the technology will bring about. Peoples fears have to be addresses up-front, training has to be provided and new behaviours have to be enforced. The whole change process has to be effectively managed. If not, then the best one can hope for is that the performance of the business remains unaffected. At worst, business performance will decline.
Enterprise Ireland are currently running an Innovation Voucher Scheme for small businesses (fewer than 50 employees and has either an annual turnover and/or an annual Balance Sheet total not exceeding €10m) designed to help such businesses develop innovative solutions to an opportunity or problem they want to explore. The voucher, worth €5000, can only be used with approved “knowledge providers” of which Tipperary Institute is one. Knowledge providers are essentially 3rd level educational institutes that have been approved for the scheme. According to their web site, eligible activities include:
- new business model development
- new service delivery and customer interface
- new service development
- tailored training in innovation management
- innovation / technology audit
- acquiring knowledge of:
- efficiency audits, process change
- supply chain management and logistics
- product and service testing and economic impact assessment
“Vouchers can also be exchanged for knowledge transfer projects from the knowledge provider. For the purposes of this initiative, a knowledge transfer project is defined as one that transfers knowledge of a scientific, technological or innovative nature that it is new to the small enterprise. The small enterprise may then use the new knowledge to innovate a product, process or service.”
If you are interested you need to send in an application form to Enterprise Ireland and than seek out a knowledge provider who can best assist you.
How producers perceive their products can be quite different from how consumers perceive them. Do you view your mobile phone as a camera that can make calls or a phone that can take pictures? My son, who is two and a half, has a “toy” (which has been handed down to him from his cousin) called LeapPad which is essentially a book that sits into an electronic folder that has attached to it a stylus.
You can then use the stylus to trace over the words in the book and the words are spoken to you. My son is a little young for this toy but that still doesn’t stop him playing with it. Anyway, the other day my son asked me could he play with the broken book. The broken book? What was he talking about? As he continued to explain what it was he wanted to play with it dawned on me that he was in fact referring to his LeapPad. Why does he call it the broken book? Obvious. It has a pen that doesn’t write - it’s broken.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all view the world with such innocent, unconditioned, eyes. He sees a broken book, I see an electronic reading pad and stylus - the curse of knowledge.
The latest newsletter from TechSearch.ie provides a nice summary of the key points from their recent conference on “Innovating the Business Model - Using Open Innovation to grow your business in new directions”, with the keynote speaker being none other than Professor Henry Chesbrough (author of the excellent book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology“).
The key points are:
- Good ideas are widely distributed. If you accept that not all the smart people work for you, then you can recognise the need to open up the search for useful external ideas.
- Financial Managers must “play poker as well as chess” in that they must not dis-regard the potential value of projects which may fail conventional commercial assessments.
- Consider the need to Connect & Develop (C&D) as well as Research & Develop (R&D). To manage Intellectual Property (IP), we need to access external IP to develop our own businesses and we need to profit from our own IP by putting it into other business models.
- Business Model innovation is just as important as Technological innovation.
- Working in an Open Innovation environment requires an enormous level of trust between partners – it’s critical to maintain and guard this trust.
- By securing Global partnerships, smaller companies can scale globally.
- In terms of evolving new business models, managers need to challenge themselves to “think outside the box”
(source: http://www.inspiration.ie/techsearch/december2007/innovating_business.htm)
Why are some people good innovators and others not? Can one choose to be an innovator? What are the characteristics of an innovator? The people over at Think Simple Now have summarised some of the habits of innovators from Scott Berkun’s book, “The Myths of Innovation“.
They are:
- Persistence
- Remove Self-Limiting Inhibitions
- Take Risks, Make Mistakes
- Escape
- Writing Things Down
- Find Patterns & Create Combinations
- Curiosity
For me it starts with escaping - limiting your thought process by your imagination only.
(Image By jpeepz)
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice-president of Technology Strategy and Innovation at IBM, writes a very interesting blog entitled Business, Innovation and Survival. The blogs describes some of Irving’s experiences with regard to IBM and innovation. For me, it’s core message is that successful innovation isn’t simply about a good idea. Indeed you could be sitting on the best idea/technology in the world but if your organisation hasn’t a culture of innovation then realising your innovation is next to impossible.
So your an inventor but are you an entrepreneur? You can develop the technology but can you commercialise it? Lets say we’re talking about a computer game here (an apt example seeing that Tipperary Institute is the home of Robocode Ireland) and lets assume that the game you have developed is actually really good. So where do you go from here?
First things first, having a really good game (even the best game ever) isn’t worth diddly squat unless you can actually commercialise it. You basically have two choices, go it alone or find a partner. Going it alone will require you to develop business skills (namely marketing, sales and finance) and getting your hands on a lot of cash. This is what is known as the closed innovation model - doing it all yourself. The other option is finding a partner that will commercialise your product for you. This is known as the open innovation model, where companies acquire your technology and commercialise it. This is a model that is being used more and more by companies today as they realise that they can’t possibly come up with all the good ideas and that they need to be open to accepting ideas from outside their company. Selecting the right partner isn’t easy. Some potential partners will show high interest, then stall (which Guy Kawasaki, in his book Art of the Start, calls “S-H-I-T-S” tactics). Why would a potential partner use such tactics? For a number of reasons but mainly due to the fact that they like your idea, they don’t want the idea going anywhere else but they don’t have the time/resources to do anything with it just now. If they can stall you long enough the value of the idea may lessen and with it its potential threat.
So what’s the moral of the story? Know what you know, know what you don’t know and know what you need to know. Be patient and prudent. Plan for failure, that’s not the same as planing to fail but if you do fail then learn from it and move on. If you want to make money from your game their is a time at which you will have to concentrate less on the game and more on the gaming business. Remember there is no such thing as a free lunch. Believe in your abilities, get help where necessary, and if you make millions, which I genuinely hope you do, remember who gave you this advice.
Today, I read an interesting article in the Irish Sunday Independent by Roisin Burke entitled ‘Adapting and surviving: Reports of the demise of Irish manufacturing have been exaggerated, but the nature of the sector is changing here as it is everywhere.’. Roisin correctly identifies a shift in the manufacturing sector and states that the “manufacturing is no longer a function in isolation and is becoming integrated with other areas such as customer and technical support, supply chain management and research and development to produce complete product lines…Companies will become extended enterprises, which are flexible and responsive to customer needs.“. So what are extended enterprises?
Extended enterprises have, according to the researchers Browne and Zhang (1999), have three main characterisitics:
- Manufacturing organisations concentrate on their core business and technical activities and outsource all other non-core activities.
- Manufacturing organisations establish long tern relationships with key customers and treats them as key business partners.
- Methods, business processes and technology are available to support business activities that cross traditional enterprise boundaries. These methods particularly support supplier-customer integration through the interchange of commercial and technical information, seamlessly and effectively.
The extended enterprise is a collection of organisations working together, all concentrating on their own core competences, in the sale of a product. What brings them together is an increased focus on customer service and a knowledge that modern day customers demand more than just high quality customisable products but clear advantages from the intangible services and accessories that come with the product (such as customer support, finance, recycling, etc). For example, car dealers, car manufacturing, finance companies all coming together on the car lot, through the embodiement of the sales person, to offer you everything you need to purchase a car.
Why extended enterprises are of interest to me is because extended enterprises achieve competitive adavantage through the integration, using technology, of information and the efficient flow of products, goods and services between the organisations involved in the enterprierse and ultimately to the customer who purchases the “extended product” (the product is extended with such services as customer support, finance options, etc). It is the use of technology in such a way that is of real interest to me. Organisations can start to become extended only if they enable external access, to collaborating partners in the extended enterprise, to their key information systems. This allows everyone in the enterprise, i.e. other organisations, to use everyone elses systems so as to improve the sale of the product. Web services offer great potential in assisting organisations to become more integrated and mobile and wireless technologies (such as RFID) promise to improve the efficiency of information flow.
- Browne, J. & Zhang, J. (1999) Extended and virtual enterprises - similarities and differences. International Journal of Agile Management Systems, 1, 30-36.
Addition 8/1/07:
Irving Wladawsky-Berger has just posted an interesting blog on this subject
A recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EUI) suggests that many EU companies are favouring an open approach to innovation. “In the past, companies tended to invest in in-house R&D and ring fence their ideas and technologies, believing it to be the best way to protect and benefit economically from their IP. However, in today’s information-rich environment, many believe this approach to IP protection and business to be obsolete, favouring instead a more open approach to innovation, where ideas flow in and out of companies.”
