r+d

Posts on innovation, user experience, research and design
 

Tinkerbell and bird-like UCVs

 

Fascinating article on some work being done at MIT to create an automated algorithm that would allow an airplane to land like a bird on a wire. MIT Associate Professor Russ Tedrake, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Rick Cory, a PhD student in Tedrake's lab are pioneering the work.

While it's still very early in the development process, I really enjoyed the quote from Mr. Cory at the end of the article because it sums up the power of the creative/innovative mind:

Cory will be moving to California to take a job researching advanced robotics techniques for Disney, [but] he hopes to continue collaborating with Tedrake. "I visited the air force, and I visited Disney, and they actually have a lot in common," Cory says. "The air force wants an airplane that can land on a power line, and Disney wants a flying Tinker Bell that can land on a lantern."

And this is exactly right.

More interestingly, this also makes a strong statement about the innovativeness of Disney, which is looking at the same technology the Air Force is, only they just want to entertain people with it.

Video
Image via Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL)

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Air Force   airplane   aviation   biomimicry   Disney   innovation   MIT   technology   UCV   unmanned combat vehicle  
Posted July 20, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

On Curation

Recently, the word "curation" has been rising in popularity, driven by the growing recognition that the way in which things are combined can transform the ordinary into the superior. Most people don't think at the level of curation, and as a result obsess about minute details that are irrelevant to the goals—especially if those details are the only things for which they are responsible. If you put a sack of groceries in the hands of a talented chef, you'll get a great meal. If you put the same sack in front of Not Invented Here loving middle managers, they'll insist on inventing their own vegetables.

via Scott Berkun
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2010/id2010062_565850.htm 

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   curation   innovation   Scott Berkun  
Posted June 2, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

Five Lessons from Five Guys

I love Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Everything about the experience of going to our Five Guys around the corner is great. You're greeted cheerfully when you enter, the store is clean, there are salty peanuts to shell while you wait for your food, the burgers and fries are solid, and they do little things like putting little sticker numbers on the wrappers of the burgers that correspond to the order you ordered them, so you know which burger is which before opening it up. I know #1 is my wife's, number #2 is me and #3 is the one to split for my kids.

So even before I read this article in Inc. I was a fan, but the interview with Jerry Murrell really brings it all home. It's clear now why Five Guys stands head and shoulders above the competition: Mr. Murrell and his boys maintain a tight, Jobs-ian like grip on quality. They know exactly what they want their restaurants' customer experience to be about and they haven't compromised in executing it. 

The whole interview is great, but here are
 five lessons from Five Guys:

 

  1. Our best salesman is our customer. Treat that person right, he'll walk out the door and sell for you.
    Totally obvious, but completely overlooked countless times by so many companies. The reason many marketers see Facebook and other social networks as the ultimate marketing goldmine is because word of mouth recommendations are the most powerful marketing around. And really, lots of companies give lip service to this, but Five Guys is living it.
  2. We don't do coffee. We don't do milkshakes. We don't deliver. We don't have drive-thrus. If you're in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here .
    It's seems antithetical to say that great customer experience are often built around saying "no" to customer-requests, but in many cases it's absolutely true. Saying no to things that aren't core to your business allows you to spend more time and resources on excelling in your core areas: having a great product and out-executing your peers. A story from Mr. Murrell on this:

    "When we first opened, the Pentagon called and said, "We want 15 hamburgers; what time can you deliver?" I said, "What time can you pick them up? We don't deliver." There was an admiral running the place. So he called me up personally and said, "Mr. Murrell, everyone delivers food to the Pentagon." Matt and I got a 22-foot-long banner that said ABSOLUTELY NO DELIVERY and hung it in front of our store. And then our business from the Pentagon picked up."

  3. Stick with two tomato slices
    "About five years ago, hurricanes killed the tomato crop in Florida, and prices went from $17 to $50 a case. So a few of my franchisees called and said, "We're not using tomatoes. The prices are too high." I suggested using one slice instead of two. My kids were furious: "It should be two! Always!" They were right -- it's too easy to start slipping down that slope. We stuck with two slices, and so did our franchisees."

    There are countless stories from Apple relating how Steve Jobs absolutely wouldn't relent on certain key interface or ergonomic issues. One button on the mouse. No battery access on the iPod, etc. Despite lots of compelling evidence that these choices didn't reflect the best experience for users, Steve adamantly believed these design decisions were critical to his vision for the device. That commitment to vision is critical to quality. You see that same commitment with Five Guys, only with tomatoes. Sure they are selling burgers, but more importantly, they're selling quality, repeatability, consistency. They can't get that if their product, experience and sense of corporate direction are swayed by the winds of market changes.

  4. Trouble over the details
    "We taste-tested 16 different types of mayonnaise to find the right one. We have two third-party audits in each store every week. One is called a secret shopper -- folks pretend they're customers and rate the crews on bathroom cleanliness, courtesy, and food preparation. Then we have safety audits -- they identify themselves and check all the kitchen equipment. The crews make about $8 or $9 an hour. If they get a good score, they will split another $1,000 among them, usually five or six people per crew. A press release goes out to every store announcing the winners. Right now, it's the top 200 stores. Last year, we paid out between $7 million and $8 million; this year, it will be $11 million or $12 million."

    This is sort of an add-on to #3 but it really brings it home. You have to trouble over all the details of you operation if you want to maintain the quality and integrity of your vision. Even the mayonnaise. Get involved in the details to demonstrate the direction for your team. Test to measure your effectiveness. Incent your team to drive the behaviors you value.

  5. Stick to what works
    "We make the same bun we started with. We hired the old guy who used to bake our bread for the first store, and one of his partners. They work in the Virginia bakery. We have 10 bakeries scattered around the nation. Our bread is baked daily, picked up by 3 p.m., and put on truck or plane so every store gets fresh bread every morning, even if they are 400 miles away from the nearest bakery."

    In some businesses, this mindset is poisonous to innovation. In others, it's the key to success. For Five Guys, sticking to what works is fundamental to the customer experience they are creating. The buns they started with were the best at the time and continue to meet their needs. Mr. Murrell says elsewhere that there are many vendors who could provide buns for less money, but right now that's not a concern of his. What is a concern is quality, which is his competitive strength. Now, if a competitor to Five Guys were to come along who undercut him on price and approximated the quality, sticking to this strategy might be a problem. But for right now, it's exactly what they need to simplify and maintain control over the experience.

Who's hungry?

 

 

 

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   associate experience   customer experience   Five Guys   innovation   quality   strategy  
Posted April 15, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

The hum of innovation

I haven't yet seen the new facilities at the MIT Media Lab, but I've been watching from afar as they opened their doors this week. I've had the opportunity to visit the Media Lab a couple of times over the past few years and had the privilege to work with a number of the faculty and staff of the lab, albeit briefly. To say that the Media Lab, even the old building, is an impressive place to experience is an understatement. It's like something out of the future.

What makes it so special isn't the individual talent that roams the halls day and night, it's the palpable sense of collaboration that permeates the halls. As Andrew Lippman stated in his comments to NPR about the new space, "you can stand [in the Media Lab] and literally feel the hum of what goes on". Now, I'm not sure if he really meant "literally" but with all the gear they've got you'll certainly hear something at any time of day around there. But figuratively, it's spot on. 

The Lab feels alive. It hums with activity.

The Hum of Innovation (and other hums)
There's something very appealing to such vibrancy. Coffee shops have it. Airports have it. Malls have it. It's a sense of activity and vibrancy; a din of human activity that is something sensable, if not measurable. The power of the Media Lab, however is in the source of this hum, which is different from the noise of an airport. 

An airport is a blend of high energy activity (catching your next flight, getting a quick bite to eat, rapidly getting unpacked and repacked during security) and low-activity energy (I'm at my gate and my plane is delayed). Through all of this, it's a cacophony of strangers. Families traveling as families and sticking to themselves. Businessmen and women traveling alone. Cleaning crews working alone. It's an extremely energetic, but highly individualistic experience. There's zero collaboration.

By contrast, the Media Lab, and all great centers of innovation, are different. They are filled with the kinetic energy of collaboration. The feeling of a collective experimentation permeates the air. It's similar to the dynamism of a start-up company or a development team about to roll into beta. It's the collegial feeling of a team helping each other reach shared goals. This is why the Media Lab has been turning out innovations left and right year after year. There are literally piles of ideas that could spawn successful companies sitting in cardboard boxes scattered all over the Lab. 

How Corporate Innovators Can Learn to Hum
That's great for MIT, but what can we learn from this to help innovation in more structured corporate environments.Replicating such a lab is difficult but it's important to instilling a culture of innovation and creativity in an organization. Co-location is a huge component, and you can't really get anything close to the Media Lab's success without it. The entire space is physically designed to share information; the new building only accentuates that attribute.

Share
But in an age of increasing decentralization of corporate knowledge workers, how can you approximate co-location when you can't actually achieve it physically? Personally I think you can get a long way toward the collaborative environment simply by actively sharing information around an organization. Make sharing a core competency for product teams. I don't mean sharing findings after the product has launched, but rather sharing throughout the conceptualization, prototyping and evaluation. The simple act of passing on information that may, or may not, be of use to others is largely overlooked by teams because they are so focused on execution. 

Find the Signal Together
Teams are great at getting products out the door, but this misses opportunities to explore adjacent opportunities. This is an airport model of innovation. High energy focused on individual goals. In aggregate, the hum of disparate product teams feverishly working on products doesn't sound like a hum. It sounds like noise. The real collaborative power, the innovative signal, is lost in the noise. Sharing helps turn that cacophony into the symphonic sound of an innovative organization. 

Create Virtual Sight Lines
Thinking back to the Media Lab writeup linked above, Dr. Mitchell explains that the Media Lab "fosters a serendipitous exchange of ideas among the intensely cross-disciplinary researchers by making the laboratory spaces exceptionally open, with broad and often surprising sight lines from one working space to another." I like that. Sight lines.

This is what corporate innovators should be seeking to replicate, even if they don't physically sit next to one another. Share early. share often. Share everywhere. Find ways to physically and conceptually open the lines of sight between businesses and product teams. Strengthen communications. Share insights and don't be afraid to ask questions you don't have the answer to (even if people think maybe you should have them). 

All of these things open lines of sight. They're also the sources of that collaborative hum, from which insights and innovations are more likely to be heard.

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   collaboration   colocation   innovation   MIT Media Lab  
Posted March 11, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

Innovation and Imaginary Tigers

Like many people around the world, reading Calvin and Hobbes was always the highlight of the Sunday morning paper. The weekly strips were good, but those sprawling comic masterpieces on Sunday were worth every penny of the newspaper by themselves. The strip's creator, Bill Watterson, has always been known for being a legendary recluse so when he stopped writing the strip in 1995 (final comic shown above), Calvin and Hobbes went off the grid. Completely. This was a sad day for me. While the final comic itself was a fittingly poignant end to a wonderful work of art, it didn't dull the harsh reality that Calvin and Hobbes was over. Sort of like watching Jordan's last championship as a Chicago Bull, it was the end of an era. You just couldn't savor enough of the experience. What was I supposed to read next Sunday?

Now, 15 years after the last strip ran, Watterson has emerged for a brief interview with the local press. While the interview is short, there is a great passage in there that speaks to creativity and passion, which is applicable to all innovators and creatives:
I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can't explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.
There's a lot to glean in that one little passage. Honesty, understanding your audience, meticulous craftsmanship, experimentation. All of these things coalesce in the portfolio of any great brand, artist or innovator. And he's right, even if you have a great product and understand your market better than anyone, sometimes you still need a little luck to go your way. Lucky for us, all the stars aligned for Calvin and Hobbes.
Bonus: There's more in the interview about going out on top of one's game (easier said than done) and life continuing on for all the days after you've had your all-time best seller (reminds me of a fantastic recent TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert). Worth a read.

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Calvin and Hobbes   creativity   innovation  
Posted February 1, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

Google Adds Wayfinding Inukshuk Everywhere

 

I just continue to be impressed with the development and innovation coming out of Google. Using a combination of crowdsourced content contributed via Google Map Maker, and some good old fashioned data power, Google has been able to transform Indian road-based directions to landmark-based. While the whole post on Google's Blog is worth a read, here are the two juicy research nuggets:

We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names. Spotting a pink building on a corner or remembering to turn after a gas station is much easier than trying to recall an unfamiliar street name. Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out.

We also discovered that there are three situations in which people resort to landmarks. The first is when people need to orient themselves — for instance, they just exited a subway station and are not sure which way to go. Google Maps would say: "Head southeast for 0.2 miles." A person would say: "Start walking away from the McDonald's." The second situation is when people use a landmark to describe a turn: "Turn right after the Starbucks." The third use, however, is the most interesting. We discovered that often people simply want to confirm that they are still on the right track and haven't missed their turn.

Why this is great? The obvious reason is that this form of getting and giving directions is instinctual. When I read Google's post I was immediately reminded of some complementary wayfinding insights from Jared Spool of UIE from a few years back. When describing wayfinding on websites he brought up the concept of inukshuk.

Per Wikipedia:
Inukshuk vary in shape and size, with deep roots in the Inuit culture. The word inuksuk means "something which acts for or performs the function of a person." The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for hunting grounds, or as a food cache. Historically the most common type of inuksuit is a single stone positioned in an upright manner.
The concept of using landmarks, in the Inuit's case man-made towers of rocks, (which makes sense considering not much stands out in an icy plain in the dead of winter) goes way back. We all seem to have this directional system baked in. Humanity, via Google, has simply reached the point where we are now able to turn everyday landmarks into inukshuks on a grand scale. That little fruitstand on the side of 104th Street? It's an inukshuk now. So is the fountain across the street. 

Tagging is the new inukshuk building. Google Maps is simply enabling the ability to see these inukshuks in context. Whereas the Inuit assigned meaning to towers of stones that was only understood by the tacit knowledge of their culture, Google is enabling anyone to assign meaning to anything in such a way that everyone can interpret that meaning in any number of different contexts. Google is helping us read and interpret ambient meaning, in real time, as we go about our day. 

It's just in time wayfinding.

But this is just the start. A quick look at the other tools in Google's arsenal and you can begin to see a more complete picture of what we may be hearing in the not too distant future on our turn-by-turn directions read aloud. Say you're an amateur astronomer, what if Google allows you to sign up for an Google Sky-enabled feed that you can import into your turn-by-turn directions. All of a sudden the crowdsourced inukshuks are there, but so are spatial inukshuks. Your drive to the movie theater just got a lot more interesting:

"You're approaching a Taco Bell. Turn right onto Highway 12 after the Taco Bell. You'll stay on this street for 3 miles. As you finish your turn, you'll see the Atlanta skyline directly ahead of you. Just above the Bank of America Plaza, you'll see the moon rising. It's the first full moon of the year. While you can't see it because of the ambient light, just to the right of the moon, Mars, Jupiter and Venus are aligned with Earth. This is the last time these planets will be aligned with Earth for 14 years..."

History buffs could import historical overlays. "The Walmart you are about to pass by was the site of the first skirmish in the Civil War in Georgia..."

The possibilities are endless.

Understanding where you are, what you're seeing via tagged landmarks opens up a tremendous opportunity to enrich the world around us as we're experiencing it. It's just a fascinating time to be seeing technology being molded to serve humans in richer and more familiar ways than ever before.

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Google   GPS   innovation   inukshuk   wayfinding  
Posted January 21, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

Apple Sets the Bar for Ford

Core77 had a short but interesting interview with Moray Callum, Ford's executive director of design. An interesting tidbit:

Core77: Stefan Lamm [executive designer, Ford Focus exterior] mentioned earlier today that things like the iPod and iPhone have changed how Ford approaches vehicles, because consumers are now used to these highly designed, really refined products. Do you find that to be the case?

MC: Absolutely, it's the point of entry for us now. Consumers are much more aware of fit and finish, quality.
I've had many conversations with business partners and web service providers concerning customer expectations in which I've mentioned that the bar isn't set at what's expected for industry X, the bar is set by Google and Amazon and eBay - the companies that have defined what the web is supposed to behave like. It's interesting here to see the same disruptive power, this time from Apple, extending far beyond competitors in the iPod's adjacent fields (consumer electronics). 

Great design not only has the ability to disrupt the industry it applies to, but also any number of other seemingly unrelated industries and interfaces. Ten years ago, who would have ever thought that an MP3 player would be a driving factor for design decisions made about Ford's flagship electric vehicle.

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Apple   design   ergonomics   Ford   human factors   innovation   interface   ui  
Posted January 12, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

The Death of "Late Night"

Hutch Carpenter, VP for Insights as Spigit, dug up this gem from Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare. In Rashmi's post "Is it time to reimagine your product/service?" she notes:

The problem with being the vintage of your launch year is that the domain gets reimagined. You get left behind even if you are doing everything right. This is the classic problem that so many companies face – they are innovative when they launch. They continue on the path they launch with, which they get traction with initially. At a certain point, they are executing so well, that they get left behind. Their success contains the seeds of their becoming obsolete

This is a great insight I've seen on display in many products throughout my career. Products, that once addressed a glaring value denial gradually fell out of touch with the direction their market was moving. By the time they realized the ground had moved beneath them, it was often too late. With this in mind, I found Jimmy Fallon's comments to NY Mag about the brouhaha surrounding the late night lineup at NBC to be particularly insightful:
The late-shifting at NBC may send Jay Leno back to 11:35 and push Conan to midnight (or another network) but at least Jimmy Fallon isn't [upset] about doing his show a half hour later. "I'll do my show at 3 in the morning," Fallon told New York Times reporter Bill Carter during a talk at the Times' Arts & Leisure Weekend last night. "I'm just happy I have a job." Fallon pointed out that his younger, DVR-loving audience doesn't watch him play beer pong with Betty White in real time anyway. "Time doesn't really matter to me," he said. "We're in a different age. Time is like... I don't even know what time 'Jersey Shore' is on. It doesn't matter - I'll see it." 

I love that comment about Jersey Shore, btw. In any case, as this drama unfolds, NBC, Conan and Jay are the incumbents with years of labor and accomplishments on the line. Fallon's a startup playing with house money. He's like a kid with a dream job he fully expects to lose at any moment but is thrilled to have it while it lasts. He's the guy who has nothing to lose. I love that mentality.

More importantly, he represents a younger generation and carries with him a different perspective on media consumption that is native to that generation. Not that Conan and Jay aren't acutely aware of DVR's impact on their viewership, but they and NBC and their affiliates remain fixated on a time-based structure that is in the process of being disrupted. From a near-term business standpoint, it makes perfect sense and I would be loathe to suggest a different tactic to preseve their revenue stream. 

However, this is exactly the point that Rashmi is making: it's hard to innovate when you have such a reason for stasis baked into your business model. NBC's concerns feel more like "but that's the way it works best". What they aren't paying enough attention to is the fact that the need to conform to some artificial time structure is disappearing. Already, "prime time" and "late night" are radically decoupled from their monikers. With Hulu, DVR, and any number of other technologies, "late night" is whenever consumers want it to be. Hence Fallon's point. The key to their success is content.If the content isn't good, it won't be on consumers' screens . . . at any time of the day. And that's where NBC should be focusing its time and efforts. Content. 

Maybe Jay's show isn't all that great and maybe it is killing the affiliate lead-in. But affiliates need to consider that in a few years the concept of a "lead-in" will be utterly archaic. When consumers everywhere are making their own TV playlist, there won't ever be a lead-in. Ever. If you don't have compelling content, you won't be seen by anyone. Affiliates take careful note of this point. Jay's weak show isn't the cause of your struggles. It's a canary in the mine.

Updated (1/12/2009)
 After posting this, the NY Times had a great writeup on the topic. Some remarks that speak to the Rashmi's point and my additional commentary (juicy stuff in bold):
Not since New Coke has a storied brand been so thoroughly maimed. “The Tonight Show,” once a gilded entertainment franchise, is now just one more broken toy in the mistake pile. “You have the combination of expired content, in terms of current public taste, appearing at the wrong time on a medium that has lost its salience, by whatever standards you use,” said Paul Levinson, professor of communication at Fordham University.

The message to the younger talent is one thing — wait for a turn that may never come or may be taken back at any second — but the message to younger audiences is even clearer: a legacy industry will default to legacy assets and ride them down to the bitter end.The network model explains why Ted Koppel is favored over younger talent to serve as interlocutor on “This Week” and why, when networks make what they see as a risky move — hey, let’s put a woman in the anchor chair — it will be someone like Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer, both of whom have been on television for decades.

That's it exactly.

 

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Conan O'Brian   DVR   Hulu   innovation   Jay Leno   Jimmy Fallon   Late Night   media   NBC   strategy  
Posted January 11, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

Nokia's Coke-Powered Phone

No comment on the feasibility of this (sticky keys? residue?), but I love this idea. Of course Coke isn't the only thing it would run on, but I think there's something to marketing it as the Coke phone, particularly in emerging markets. Why? Coke is everywhere. Almost literally. 

It makes an Atlantan proud that our home company is the most recognized brand in the world and is available in some of the most remote locations in the world. Given its relative ubquity, why not harness it as a fuel? Because it's also the world's #1 brand, what a great way to generate some buzz. Even if you live in impoverished Afghanistan, you still have access to Coke, which if you're using this phone, means you still have access to your phone (and therefore other people). Given Nokia's research into emerging markets (I'm sure Jan Chipchase sees Coke everywhere he goes) this Coke fuel cell mashup isn't entirely surprising though it is thought-provoking.  

Turn one of the world's most commercially available and recognized products into an ad-hoc fuel for your device. I love it. See the full post here at Dezeen.

             
Click here to download:
Nokias_Coke-Powered_Phone_tag_.zip (292 KB)

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   developing   eco   emerging   green   innovation  
Posted January 8, 2010
// 0 Comments
 

Innovation and Business Success

A colleague of mine posited a question to my team this morning after reading a provocative blog post from CFO Magazine entitled "Do Banks Care About Innovation". Here's an excerpt:
"..In a survey on innovation from Accenture that polled vice presidents, directors, and managers at 640 large U.S. and U.K. companies, responses from executives at banks and capital-market firms stood out. More than two-thirds of those execs said their organizations prioritize short-term financial results over investing for the long term. Very few saw innovation playing an important role in efforts to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. And more so than executives in any other industry, they characterized their quest for innovation as searching for the next "silver bullet" rather than "a diverse pursuit of new opportunities."

Based on the demographic from the survey, the question should really be refined to: "Do Big Banks Care About Innovation?" But even that's misleading. There's a nuance in here that deals with misconceptions about innovation. Innovation does not necessarily mean "invention" but it sounds as though some of the execs interviewed were thinking about silver bullet/breakthrough innovations. But being innovative is more like the Tour de France. Many people who win the early stages (the actual inventors) are not the ones who develop winning business models around those inventions. As Jim Collins notes in "The Most Creative Product Ever", being inventive or first to market often doesn't necessarily mean all that much. You can be innovative but be very, very late to the game. See MP3 Players/Apple/iPod for a great recent example. Here's how Jim puts it.  

Great companies do not necessarily have innovation as a central part of their vision or strategy. They are just as likely to be followers as they are to be leaders with pioneering products and leading-edge services. IBM, for example, grew from a one-building small business into one of the largest corporations in the world because of its professional sales force, not its product innovation. In fact, when IBM fully launched into computers, in the early 1960s, it already lagged far behind rival companies, such as Burroughs, in innovative computer technology. And it was Diner’s Club, not American Express, that invented the modern credit card. American Express didn’t introduce its card until eight years after the debut of Diner’s Club—hardly leading-edge behavior. Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, McKinsey, Marriott—none of those companies attained success primarily through innovation.

Certainly, some great companies—notably Sony, Johnson & Johnson, W.L. Gore, and 3M—have innovation as a core value or an integral part of their strategy. So, you can be innovative and great. But the fact remains: you do not need to have innovative products, services or technologies, or visionary market ideas, to create a great company.

Jim's article was written in 1997, before the Internet arguably became one of the most compelling and powerful technological AND social innovation in a very long time (Guttenberg’s press maybe is on par). However, his point was clear - innovation isn’t critical to a company being “great”. So this brings me back to Vincent's question: "Do big banks care about innovation?"

Why pick on banks? Why not any company? The question is probably best positioned as "Should anyone care about innovation?" and do some degree the answer is both yes and no. You certainly can't be a luddite and excel in today's world. But putting too much emphasis on forcing breakthrough inventions is also not likely to be a winning strategy for most companies. 

When all is said and done, people don't remember that Edison didn't invent the first lightbulb (22 others came before him), Apple didn't invent the MP3 player (countless others came before them), or Ford the first car (Karl Benz had the patents nearly 30 years before the Model T), we just remember who did these things better than anyone who came before them and generated lasting success.

Breakthrough innovation is great and important, but a company's ability to "innovate" processes and business models that allow them to out-execute their peers/competitors is every bit as important to a company's success.

PS - If you read the Collins article, try not to smile too much over Jim's pseudo-eulogy for Apple. What a difference 12 years can make. Apple has gone from a coulda-been-a-contend/also-ran to the poster child for innovation. In Jim’s defense, the way Apple has roared back to life is by being VERY late to the game in a lot of core areas but very acutely attuned to the social aspects of the technology they developed. Apple came back to life through the very social innovation Jim holds up as critical to greatness.

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Apple   innovation   Jim Collins   strategy  
Posted December 18, 2009
// 1 Comment