Tech IT Easy » innovation

Enterprise 2.0 Vs Diffusion of Innovation

ceciiil — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:32:04 +0000

After reading the excellent Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0 book, I was wondering if there was any point for Heavy Mental to publish yet another review. There already are plenty around with Venkatesh Rao’s on Enterprise 2.0 blog and Gil Yehuda’s probably being the most interesting ones.

It might be more valuable to offer a perspective focussing on the Adoption part of the book. By and large, the adoption topic has been the one sparking off most of the conversations and thinking on the Enterprise 2.0 topic. The idea is to confront McAfee work with a reference on the topic of adoption of innovation : Diffusion of Innovation : by Everett Rogers.

In all fairness, I haven’t read Diffusion of Innovation. I only know it through Scott Berkun presentation on innovation (already mentioned in a post on the subject). Scott quotes Everett Rogers work :

The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology. Here are the things technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innovation adoption are sociological ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc …

These are the factors according to E. Rodgers to evaluate how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :

Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
Triability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
Observability : How visible are the results ?

Enterprise 2.0 represents innovative ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge among distributed teams in the organizations. So let’s see how Mc Afee writings answer these questions …

Relative advantage : What value does it bring ?

Andrew Mc Afee mentions Bob Kaplan who co-authored Converting Intangible Assets Into Tangible Outcomes. In this book, Kaplan argues that

None of these intangible assets (human, organizational and informational capital – i.e databases, Information systems, networks, technology infrastructure) has value that can be measured separately or independently.

Baseline : you just can’t build a regular business case for IT with Enterprise 2.0.

Mc Afee still recommend to build some kind of business case with the following elements :

Costs and time lines : if benefits can’t be estimated, effort should be put in place to have some cost estimates. How long the project will lasts, what are the milestones, number of people involved. Even though one knows that these estimates must be considered very carefully. Remember General Eisenhower quote : plans are useless, but planning is indispensable
Expected benefits : Here McAfee recommends to include short cases studies or example. A great one could be Cisco Economics of Collaboration, reporting a whopping $US691M of operating savings and 4.9% of productivity increase in 2008 thanks to the introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise.
Technology footprint : the scale of a technology reach from geographical, organisational and functional perspectives. Enterprise Social Networks are like e-mail : they are supposed to be used all over the company. So their technological footprint is quite large.

Tech It Easy Comment

Mc Kinsey have published a comprehensive report on How companies can benefit from Web 2.0 . This could be a good entry point to provide some visibility of Enterprise 2.0 benefits.

Compatibility : How much effort to transition to this innovation ?

McAfee refers to Harvard Business School Marketing professor John Gourville and his article in Harvard Business Review “Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers“. Gourville looked into research on behavioral economics and reported the three principles of people solutions evaluation :

People make relative evaluations
Reference point is status quo
People are loss-adverse : a prospective loss of X is 3 times more painful that a gain of X is pleasurable.

These elements lead to the fact that we value what we have far more highly that what we could have instead. The result is what Gourville calls the 9x effect : people rate what they have 3 times more than their actual value and prospective items three times less than what they’re actually worth. A new item must therefore be at least 9 times better to justify the (perceived) effort required for the adoption.

Here, the risk is to overvalue prospective new tools (Wikis, Blogs, Twitter-like, Professional Profiles) in a view to increase or chance the reach the 9x threshold. Gourville thinks this may have disastrous consequences.

As a result, McAfee quotes Gourville and recommends not to oversell the collaborative platform and make it clear that the adoption will be a long phase.

Tech It Easy Comment

I also think the overselling approach is not good but for other reasons : this might alter the perception of our speech (buzzword, vaporware, consultants concepts etc …) and have opposite effects within our audience.

Instead, I am a firm believer that we should help knowledge workers rationalize their perceived value of the collaboration and communication tools they’ve been using for the last 15 years : MS Office, e-mails, Network File Repositories, Intranet etc …

Not by telling them these tools are not appropriate but rather by asking them painful questions. The objectives is to help them realize that these tools are the root cause of many of their daily work frustrations.

Once this frustration has surfaced and has been clearly described by the people, it will be natural for them to decrease the perceived value of these enterprise 1.0 tools. Therefore the value threshold Enterprise 2.0 tools need to meet to reach the 9 times value will decrease accordingly. And the effort to transition to E20 as well.

The Five Elevator Pitches suggests some of these painful questions to help rationalizing the perceived value of today’s enterprise tools.

Then you can ask what they are doing about these communication/organizational / knowledge sharing problems or what are they planning to do. Are they giving up despite all the new communication tools available ? Then you can talk about how Enterprise 2.0 can foster knowledge management, innovation, collaboration and productivity.

Complexity : How much learning is required to apply it ?

This is one of the main advantages of Enterprise 2.0 in terms of adoption. These tools are dead easy to use. This is the first of the three trends that yield better tools according to McAfee. It also is the A (Authorship) part of the S.L.A.T.E definition : ensuring every worker has easy access to enterprise 2.0 platforms.

Wiki, blogs, FAQ, Real Time Web, Personal Profile. Their universal adoption on the internet is a solid proof of how easy these platforms are.

Trialability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?

Again : it is extremely easy to test these tools. You can install main Enterprise 2.0 software solutions for free for 30 days and have people try the solution.

McAfee describes the case of Serena Software using public platforms (Facebook) with appropriate security settings as enterprise platform. If your company is happy with this approach, the trial can even be easier.

Tech It Easy comment

The concern with 30 days trial is that on such a small time frame, network effect won’t have the time to foster full benefits. These systems become more valuable as the number of users and the volume of injected data grows.

So a 30 days trial might not be enough to see the full benefits of such solutions. However it can still proves how easy it is to use them.

Observability : How visible are the results ?

A good strategy to make the results visible is to locate some teams of social networks enthusiasts (IT or HR departments might be a first good guess). And start to deploy the solution on such narrow teams.

Andrew McAfee recommends to measure the progress (number of blog posts, comments, wiki pages, personal profiles etc …) rather than the ROI. Besides, McAfee strongly encourages leadership in the form of valueing the people that enrich the platforms.

Tech It Easy Comment

In a transparency and observability purpose, it might be a good idea to monitor the knowledge workers perceived value of their tools and measure the progress. Preparing a questionnaire with a set of questions around the subject of collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management could be a good starting point.

Organization employees could then answer these questions before and after the launch of the E20 solution and then on a regular basis. This could be a good solution to see if E20 solution helps in reducing the frustration of knowledge workers in their daily work.

The final score

The end result is that McAffe book is the perfect entry point to set up a corporate Enterprise 2.0 strategy. It describes clearly and perfectly the tools, the context in which they were born and how appropriate they are within knowledge workers organizations, via some real life examples.

In terms of diffusion, McAfee provides all the principles and examples required to answer most of Everett Rogers questions.

What would you recommend to help diffuse Enterprise 2.0 ?

(Hi It’s Cecil here. A copy of this post is available on my blog Heavy Mental)

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Gold-Fishing, an inbound view on M&As in tec-space

Georgia Psyllidou — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:01:20 +0000

(attention, long vehicle)

Anand’s article touched an explosive combination of decision+change management+money. It was inspiring indeed, and got me to write down two or three thoughts looking the M&A from inside a house. To write this piece, time popped-up by chance and bad luck in the same time. Nevermind why I found myself out of gas and battery in the beginning of my Friday evening, I really enjoyed my decision to go back to cocooning.

The decision

This is the thing about deciding to do an M&A or change, it’s not wise to be 100% sure about the best direction. (Ok, don’t skip the due diligence). A choice might be considered as good by more people and for a longer time, but if you search too long your competitor will do your A and no M for you. So you have to make it early. For normal people with no 6th sense, this means they have to deal with the effects of their choice both personally and in their team .

Why you take the decision? Probably for financial value creation, technical synergies, or to phase out potential competitors.

How you take it? Depends on the decision model of your company : single minded, organizational, political, garbage can. (insights from Strategor, 4th edition, Dunond 2005)

Once the change is there, I’ve observed two styles of dealing with it and getting others to deal with it.

The behaviors

One is that you explode and overwhelm everybody with excitement yourself included, partying hard on change. People are normally happy before they realize what has hit them. The happy tail is guaranteed to last, varies on the party. Life stats say that happiness from a good home party last about 3 days, from a football final for about a month, from Olympic games about a year.

Another approach is that you go Zen, as if nothing has happened, act naturally etc. This works if with adult-ish organizations because routines are very important for adults, etc.

In both cases you surf slower, either because you focus on partying or because you surf tai-chi style.

To keep surfing fast, Brazilians have thought of Kapoeira (training masked in partying).

Ok, this is people, what about the business?

The money factor

Change+money is a bit more tricky, because it involves more tension and more aggressive effects. Culture of money asks for more traditionalism, thoughtfulness, respect.

Mutual respect :) and money-related expectations makes M&As such showstoppers for internal rhythms and decision making (the case of M&A driven by financial value creation). In my view, if the motivation is pure value creation the results risk being lost in translation. And M&A is a showstopper.

other motivations

If it is value+product synergies, the organizations quickly recover and from change and get productive on the common focus. In that case, the initial slow-down, frames significantly the savoir-faire and prevents chaos. The focus is scaling on innovation and this can happen within a few months. And M&A is an investment on strategy.

Let’s not forget that innovative products carry this identity either because they target niches or if not, they are innovative for a specific period of time, on their way to bannalization. So when the Big Fish frames how you scale on innovation, the Small Fish start changing skin. Shouldn’t it? It is very difficult to see in retrospection, what part of product or service the Small Fish has fit in since identity integration is necessary.

Last, if motivation is gulping competition early the M&A is a showstopper by design.

the project

Beyond initial motivation for the M&A , the time to market and style to market of an M&A-ed innovative stg is very much bound to internal Big Fish culture but also to many external factors such as market dynamics.

My basket of examples include,

Mobile payment : has travelled from developing countries to the developed ones like a financial and regulatory Benjamin Button. (TTM : ~7y, STM: sponsored by heavy banking industry to open-up consumers)
Peer-to-peer communications : have travelled from early experimental internet to the gray napsteric zones, masked in skypish applications to land through Big Fish in the B2B space as a feature of datacenter operating systems / “branch cache” how it is called in MSFT (TTM : ~15y, STM: integration into the mosaic, identity change)
Video semantics tracking : has travelled from academia to consumers in speed-light (less than a decade to launch project Natal) (TTM : ~10y, STM: innovation transforms the product)
Biscuit-flavored yoghurt : Marketing innovation, where you test a few recipes and you build on on insghts that people love biscuits but are too guilty to consume them at the rhythm of yoghurts. Also have to buy the rights of a favorite biscuit brand. (TTM : ~6m, STM: act naturally )
With this last one I want to emphasize that if software was simpler to build, simpler to adopt, and was sold in cheaper units, end users could possibly profit from and indulge in innovation faster and more naturally. This is why social-technology + M&As are a better match.

Hey I am not pocket-Gartner, so please feel free to challenge my examples.

After aaaall this analysis, I come up with a…question: We’re pretty much involved in producing innovation so it’s normal that we’re pretty demanding on change happening fast. However, how fast can an average consumer or ITpro absorb and adopt software innovation?

In virtualization for example, a lot of which passed through M&As, MSFT carries the burden of late TTM. By the time MSFT was into virtualization, it was no longer innovative. But still adoption rates by the market were loooooow and (relatively) sloooow moving. So buzz-wise TTM was late, but adoption-wise TTM was early. Crazy? just a paradox of software and friends. The attained benefit for MSFT was catching up with the buzz rhythm and also syncing with the adoption rhythm. Isn’t this a successful strategy?

Conclusion?

Overall, even though M&As slow down and phase out a lot of good stuff, technology is still a great industry for M&As because

A lot more of fresh attitudes survive in tec- fresh towards life and change as well.
The money culture is less pronounced
Creativity and innovation need change even in dinosaur size and style.

“Don’t feed the lions!” – please do….

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How Mergers and Acquisitions May Actually Narrows the Scope of Innovation

Anand — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:36:47 +0000

Be it Automobile , Aviation or Heavy Metal Industries, everyone felt the heat of recession but regardless IT fared better than most. In spite of worst economic meltdowns in history, acquisitions among big vendors continued to reshape the market, operating-system wars extended to mobile battlefields, microblogging became a powerful source of real-time information, and the take-up of small, Net-connected devices was stronger than ever.

But how good is this wave of mergers and acquisitions for the future? ( By future I mean upcoming innovation and future of Startups which target innovation not business)

Whenever your biggest competitor takes you over, it blunts the competitive spirit that can drive innovations. Thats what concerns me most, the spirit of innovation is somehow compromised because of takeovers.

Not always always a potential Merger or Takeover can be taken as a positive sign of ever increasing competition and globalization. And particularly not right now when it comes to web and social media startups, many of which are still more focused on innovation and building up audiences than on making profits. Rushing them into deals to fulfill long-delayed plans for an exit strategy could derail the evolution of a strong business plan.

From an investment standpoint, founders and venture capitalists have good reasons to cash out now. Market caps of public tech giants are rising — the Nasdaq gaining big time – and so are their cash stockpiles. For Instance Microsoft has a stock pile of about $49 billion in cash; similar is the story of Google with $24 billion. High-profile Multi Billion dollar deals like the ones we had in recent times have a way of spurring on other acquisitions.

TimeWarner buying AOL and eBay buying Skype come to mind. Even snapping up a hot startup for its technology or talent — Google buying Dodgeball or Yahoo buying Flickr – can lead to culture clashes, customer anger and other disappointing results.

I tried to re-compile the list of some major takeovers which are substantial enough to change the future of computing. We are talking about some multibillion dollar mergers and acquisitions, where the Big gets even Bigger.

Oracle eclipses the SUN @ $7.4 Billion

This Merger can be coined as “father of all the Tech Mergers” announced last year. If the announced the deal went through, Oracle, the industry’s largest database software vendor would get an entry into the server and storage markets worldwide.

The acquisition, still pending, was announced in April, and may even be blocked because European regulators are contending that combining Oracle’s technology with Sun’s open source MySQL database would violate competition laws. Lets see if this deal goes through.

Xerox snaps up ACS in $6.4 billion

Another major takeover, Xerox pays about $6.4 billion in cash and stock for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a large IT and outsourcing firm. With this merger Xerox hopes it will give it a bigger foothold in the business services space. While the deal will surely boost Xerox, investors wondered whether it overpriced the deal.

Calling the ACS deal “a game-changer” for Xerox, Burns, CEO of the company, said it would help Xerox “expand our business and benefit from stronger revenue and earnings growth.” The deal will triple the service component of Xerox’s revenue to roughly $10 billion annually from $3.5 billion, according to the company.

Dell – Perot Catch-Up Deal worth $ 3.9 Billion

Buying Perot was a part of Dell’s plan to expand its footprint in the IT services market, which was a necessity in a time when hardware sales were falling. Dell offered a staggering $3.9 billion for Perot Systems, a 68% premium over Perot’s actual stock value. Dell’s purchase can also be seen as a response to rival HP’s $13.9 billion acquisition the previous year of EDS — another services company founded by Perot.

Cisco-Tandberg worth $3.4 billion

Cisco, already a major player in collaboration products with WebEx and TelePresence, signed an agreement in October to purchase videoconferencing vendor Tandberg, which makes both video devices and network infrastructure products. The acquisition, if completed, could have both a direct and indirect impact on Cisco’s bottom line, because expanded use of videoconferencing may increase network traffic, letting Cisco sell more switches and routers.

HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion

HP launched a straightforward assault on Cisco in their own Game of Networks. HP’s increasing influence in data center networking and convergence markets will have a big boost with its purchase of 3Com, a maker of switches, routers and security products. HP says the acquisition will further its data center strategy “built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.” The acquisition of 3Com also help to expand HP’s Ethernet switching offerings, add routing solutions and significantly strengthen the company’s position in China thanks to 3Com’s strong presence in China. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

I have collected the figures and numbers from various sources including PCWorld, Gigaom and Wikipedia. Let me know if you have a suggestion or correction to make. Please forgive me for the grammar, I was always bad in Grammar since school

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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Enterprise 2.0 : fostering knowledge management, innovation and productivity

ceciiil — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:22:39 +0000

Hi ! it’s Cecil here.

Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation. Title : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity.

Best to see full screen

Enterprise 2.0 : Leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity

View more presentations from ceciiil.

Target audience is upper management.

The objective is to address key issues faced by organizations built around knowledge : management of not only knowledge but also innovation and productivity. First to see the current limitations with the tools and processes in place and then to see how collaborative platform and enterprise 2.0 approach can offer competitive advantages to the company.

I have not been really convinced by the material available on the topic. Mostly too buzzwordy and flashy, this often scares upper management out. Most of them then subsequently relate E2.0 to consultant-dollarmaking-vaporware material, hence the dedicated section in the presentation.

Besides, in my view, these presentations usually go from the existing social applications (and their many exciting features) into the enterprise. In order to convince management, they should rather go the other way round : from enterprise real problems to how they can be addressed by social software platforms.

Mostly influenced by this excellent presentation by Mr Enteprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee at PARC (link). Also by many of the videos, books, articles, blog posts refererred to in TechItEasy and Heavy Mental.

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Guerrilla Marketing: Social Innovation is looking for technology…

Georgia Psyllidou — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:48:19 +0000

By the sea, you mostly think about people, pedicure, skin, sand, seaweed, tennis balls and of course you try to make a link between innovation, start-ups and their connection with guerilla marketing.
what? you don’t? come on, you are not even geek enough …

Keyword of this head-on-the-sand brainstorming : Guerrilla Marketing
Always very impressive.
Knitting sockets for street-lamps, waking up your co-citizens, or printing you “tete” (head) on the floor out of the metro to sell records or ray ban glasses…. ah ! fascinating – respect for the brand / checked . prescription circle short-circuited and the brand needs a promotion to an icon.
I had kind of forgotten of this silly risky stuff going back to my mentally safe and rigid country-cocoon. Until a few days ago I stumbled over a campaign made for Media Markt from Leo Burnett that is actually a guerrilla marketing study-case. click it!
Media Markt Junkmen.
In two words the guys used an ancient hoaxing mechanism for the real world and attempted to turn it into a sales channel. Actually since it had a guerilla conotation the guys just tested reactions without really managing the channel. And of course they raised comments, digs and lifted eyebrows in various shapes.

Doesn’t advertising need it’s own R&D space? Second life what? Real life needed… To my attention, there are no real start-ups in the advertising space (end-to-end) so this risk had to be integrated into a big corporation’s structure like Leo Burnett. (ok maybe there are, but that’s another post)

Three comments from my side.
one : they and us have to get used to it, interactivity is here.
two : guerrilla has the same connotation as innovation, as for now (this is why geeks like that stuff)

three : next week, the time I hold my breath underwater I am going to take this further — How do you turn guerrilla heroes and heroism into sustainable business and transform surprise to respect from the mass and their structured values ?

some of your good ideas might help me … breathe better

Georgia

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TechItEasy Digest : Innovation

ceciiil — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:46:39 +0000

The aim of this new serie is to propose quick (errrm…) and synthetic overview of a key concept of the IT industry, based on various media and quotes. Lately, I have spent some time googling around for some innovation inputs and it took me a while to gather all this material. So this comes as some sort of digest.

Scott Berkun (again and again !) has been the constant inspiration of this digest. He will lead us through this bulletin with this brilliant video of his lecture on the topic @ Carnegie Mellon (50ish minutes – recommend to view after reading the post). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc]

Innovation : definition

This is the most satisfactory definition I could find, after a couple of days of relentless search (part-time). Actually a pretty good one : Innovation is the process that translates knowledge into economic growth and social well-being. (Autralian Research Council)

Innovation = Problem Solving

Looking into different material in search for the innovation Graal, I’ve noticed that many people interested in innovation come with the problem paradigm : If you want to innovate, don’t look for solutions, look for a problem (P. Graham @ StartUp School 08)

To which Google CIO echoes : To innovate, start with a problem not a solution (Douglas Merrill – Innovation at Google – this Douglas Merrill really makes me think of a silicon valley version of Quentin Tarantino – fast, hectic, excited.)

While Scott Berkun on Harvard Business site extends the vocabulary :while explaining why Innovation is overrated : Inventors, creators and leaders (…) rarely used that word themselves. Instead their vocabularies leaned heavily on words like problem, experiment, risks, prototype.

Not to forget DHH@StartupSchool08 : Good innovation comes from just solving simple problems that you’re intimately involved with.

Innovation = A good product

Another strong trend amongst these e-public figures, is that innovation is a natural offspring of good product, not the other way round : Instead of asking “How can we be innovative”, a toothless and vague question with mostly useless answers, we should be asking “How can we make great things” (Scott Berkun)

This great product thing has to be a common aspiration for people working on it : Q: How do you manage for innovation. A : We hire people who want to make the best things in the world (Steve Jobs)

A great product can only be the result of strong focus as Steve Jobs answered to Business Week : Innovation comes from saying no to 1000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much

And this product HAS to bring competitive advantage and revenue : Innovation is only as good as the business value it has created (D. Merrill). Innovation : a mean to get a competitive advantage by meeting a business need (Erwann Neau)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GtgSkmDnbQ]

Innovation = Risk Taking

Eventhough the target of the book is more marketing, it is still strongly recommended to read the Purple Cow by marketing guru Seth Godin : The old ways (of marketing) are dead and being safe is now to risky

You didnt’ think we would complete this bulletin on innovation without mentioning Kathy Sierra did you ? Risk Aversion is the single biggest innovation killer

The next quote from Peter Drucker is more general business related. However, I think it completely applies to innovation management in IT industry : Each time you see a successfull business tell yourself there is a brave desicion behind

Fostering Innovation

Quite a few quality material on this topic. Linda Naiman (Creativity at works) and cio.com both agree on the need to have a clear vision and strategy to align innovation onto : Make sure vision is clearly communicated (Linda Naiman). Innovation workers must be able to integrate corporate strategy into their evaluation of possible innovation paths (cio.com)

Setting up the appropriate climate is also one of the main success factor for innovation. Most important thing for innovation is create a climate for it. Some companies are trying to build this climate : safety, participation, where people are involved and comfortable with voicing new ideas. Strangely it doesn’t happen often enough. (Ranjay Gulati – PHD, teacher Harvard Business School on CNBC)

Another key item is to provoke and encourage engagement. The reason why we serve food at google it is because at lunch time people engage discuss and exchange ideas (D. Merrill).

Steve Jobs basically designed Pixar building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. He put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center so that you run into everybody during the course of a day, then make eye contact and then things happen. (Brad Bird)

Constant (L. Neiman) and inter disciplinary learning also is strongly encouraged : If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. (Brad Bird answering gigaom)

Another common recipe to foster innovation is to look for diversity. Again, L. Neiman and Douglas Merrill agree on this one as the latter puts it : We live out load, we have arguments. We believe the best way to find a new idea is to get different people thinking about the same problem

Managing Innovation

Strategy is clear, innovation is aligned, defined and encouraged. How about managing it ? Let’s first ask Steve Jobs how can we systemize innovation : The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.

It’s a pretty delicate issue, though. As Douglas Merrill puts it : Innovation is a fragile flower. Dont try to structure it. At Google, 20% of our engineers time is dedicated to their own project. They just manage this time as they want. Chaos brings creativity.

Innovation is such a fragile flower that no measure is drastic enough to protect it : Brad Bird it’s pretty straightforward : What undermine innovation ? Passaive aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.

Also : watch out the devil’s advocate. Kathy Sierra quotes Tom Kelley (The ten faces of innovation) from IDEO on that very topic : Tom Kelley–general manager of IDEO–believes that “devil’s advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today.” Invoking “the awesome protective power” lets the devil’s advocate be incredibly negative and slash your idea to shreds, all while appearing not only innocent but reasoned, balanced, intelligent…

And then there is the reward policy. Basically : reward innovation and don’t blame failure. Douglas Merrill, Linda Neiman all cio.com agree on this approach, perpetuating William Mc Knight philosophy (Via Scott Berkun video) : Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

Diffusing Innovation

The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology (Everett Rogers – Diffusion of Innovation)

Here the thing technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innnovation adoption are sociologic ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc … These are the most common negative reactions according to the Myths of Innovation from Scott Berkun.

And these are the factors according to E. Rodgers as reported by Scott Berkun to measure how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :

Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
Trialability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
Observability : How visible are the results ?

Myths of Innovation

Last but not least, let’s honor our tutor for this first post of the serie with reference to his Myths Of Innovation book. These are the most common ones :

Innovation happens as epiphany Epiphany is the tip of a creative iceberg. It happens as a result of long thoughts process
Disruptive ideas come out from out of the blue. Disruptive ideas are a combination of other ideas. New ideas out of the void are extremely seldom
Great innovators are usually egostical mavericks. Innovation mostly is a collaborative process
People love new ideas. People fill unsafe with novelty, innovation inspire fear.
Innovators know, they have a plan. Many innovations are accident. The biggest challenge is to know when it’s good enough.

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Is 2008 the year of instant communication nirvana?

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:23:17 +0000

On the web, 2007 was the year of the social web. Things like Facebook and Twitter have accelerated the way people can interact socially even at a distance. It’s a bit obvious to say that our possibilities to communicate will only get better next year. Internet is a communication network beneath it all.

Innovation isn’t about copying and yet no doubt we’ll see copies of aforementioned services in 2008. This of course depends on how the US economy and therefore VC funds will hold up. As we have seen before, changes are quick and some of the huge web properties might end up irrelevant next year. Will something like OpenSocial really matter? We’ll see.

Below all this Facebook SaaS Web as a cloud ideology, there’s an undercurrent that I find very interesting. As I wrote in October when Google bought Jaiku, XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk is a technology to watch for. Since the acquisition, we haven’t heard much about Google’s plans for Jaiku. As I also wrote, I think it was the technology they were after, not the service itself. Could a social notification system built on RSS feeds, mobile phones and XMPP somehow fit Google’s strategy?

Google has strongly positioned GTalk as the communications platform across its many services. GTalk has been integrated for a while in GMail and to some extent this is similar what you get in Yahoo Mail/Messenger and Microsoft Live Mail/Messenger. You might have read about Google’s recent poorly received integration of GTalk into Google Reader. You may have noticed that Google Docs now offer collaboration through Google Talk. There’s even GTalk integration in Orkut and my sources tell me more is on the way. Even YouTube has availability information of people watching the same video as you (This isn’t probably based on XMPP, but could be?).

Because of their closed nature, MSN/Live Messenger, AIM or Yahoo Messenger cannot leverage their networks outside their own properties. Google Talk users can interact (to some extent) with any XMPP user and other developers can create services for Google Talk users. This is important in a world that is not desktop-bound, but where services and applications are in the web cloud.

For some time XMPP had the problem that it was too ahead of its time and could not compete with the big players. Social web and Google has changed these. Now Live Messenger is playing catch-up with upcoming features like “Multiple points of presence support”, which is something essential to the XMPP-protocol. Microsoft could overthrow other players in the IM market through distributing Messenger with their operating system, like they did with Internet Explorer. The rules of the game have changed on the web and Google has realized they can be the next IM king by integrating their solution everywhere they can. They can introduce Google Talk to anyone with a Gmail account and without any download.

If it isn’t clear enough from above, what I predict to continue in 2008 is integration of IM or instant communication on the web. We won’t see one unified network to rule them all or anything like it. We’ll see advances to a future telecom operators and their ads would want to us believe is today. Yet they’re the ones stonewalling the development of internet on mobile phones. In reality, they are defending their networks against their Internet and web-based rivals. We won’t see iPhone or Android making a big impact on the mobile market, not yet.

What I hope is that devices like Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch and platforms like Google’s Android will make SMS obsolete preferably through something open and web-friendly like XMPP and not something cooked-up by telecom operators. Microsoft is already offering Live Messenger on mobiles, but these are deals with telecom operators. My hope lies with Google and Nokia in this one. (See for example Nokia’s Gizmo client for S60. Coincidentally, Gizmo uses XMPP for IM.)

And yes, I’m predicting an instant communication nirvana even though my contact list is still mostly empty.

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