Jabit

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.

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.

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:

1. Persistence
2. Remove Self-Limiting Inhibitions
3. Take Risks, Make Mistakes
4. Escape
5. Writing Things Down
6. Find Patterns & Create Combinations
7. Curiosity

For me it starts with escaping - limiting your thought process by your imagination only.

(Image By jpeepz)

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.