Erik Micheelsen on Simple Systems Innovation

In a recent conversation with someone I know, a remark fell regarding a Danish medico company (OMX C20) who for years and years have done very well.

That medico has during the past five years seen their market lead deminish. The executives of that company have so far cut back and Leaned out.

Today, leaders and employees who are not 100% allocated “core business” are no longer with the company. That means that the whole of the out-of-the-box creative layer has been sliced away.

This spring, the same medico asked their customers (as they always do) how they compare with competetor products. The answer was “we can’t see any difference between you”.

Now they are faced to bring themselves ahead. To set the agenda in the market. To find their edge and seize winning strategies. You’ve heard it before.

Except for this one! An executive at this company said just a couple days ago “we will reach our vision through incremental innovation”.

Now, I happen to know the vision, and it’s truely a radical innovation. It’s right there next to implementing the flying car as the standard transport vehicle.

The question on the table is “can that be done?!”

The answer in short is absolutly no way!!

I’ll tell you why. Incremental innovation by definition means “small transformation”; you keep the design, the function and the form.

Change any one of those (function, design or form) and you got radical innovation. Radical innovations don’t have to be huge folks! They simply introduce a new degree of freedom. That’s all. But that is also different than simply improving.

For instance;  if we are looking at, say, “Buying shoes”, well, we’re all used to going to the store. Buying them on the internet is a transformative innovation because it not only introduces a new degree of freedom. It acutally defines a new degree of freedom: That degree of freedom didn’t exist “just a moment ago”. The downside is that when you both define and introduce a new degree of freedom, your customers wont have a default practice for working with that degree of freedom. For the same reason only about 10% buy through the internet.

Obviously, you gotta make a half-way-point before or at the same time as introducing you’re transformative innovation. Who doesn’t get that? Take the introduction of the computer. Now how the heck do you work them?? Nobody knew at the time. So why didn’t that introduction become a HUGE failure? Because people could be entertained with the computer in a way they had never been entertained before. But to get there, people had to figure out how to work with this new degree of freedom.

Another way to introduce how to work with a new degree of freedom is to introduce things in small chunks instead of the whole package at once. For this program to work your company must design the whole of the package. That means that you know what the WHOLE of the transformative innovation is!!

If you instead take an existing product and alter this or that (from a customer need perspective or by technology introduction), what you’re really doing is keeping to the product you have. That is true until either the design, form or function is changed: A new degree of freedom is introduced).

Philips Europe got this point when they looked at TIVO. TIVO introduced an all hardisk recording unite to replace the ol’ VHS. But the jump was huge (transformative innovation).

Philips Europe introduced first a VHS/DVD and then DVD + DVD/harddisk. BUT the transformative innovation was actually well known by Philips.

The products and services your business has now follow a rule. Incremental innovation will keep you WELL within those rules. Radical innovation and transformative innovations will break those rules and introduce new ones.

Now either you break them or you don’t. Did I say “can’t”?

Here’s my final point. You can’t play it safe.

I think most of you know that I’m working on the CareCubicle program. A crew of people are working their b…s off to design the webbased platform. It’s really looking good!

But what is it? What is the CareCubicle program? Very simply put, it’s about a bunch of people co-creating infrastructure based on a need as dictated by the people with the need.

Here’s someone who really gets it! Enjoy

Cameron Sinclair on open-source architecture

The UN’s Climate Change Conference will be held this December in Copenhagen.

There is only one real focus to this huge event and that is for the countries to agree on reducing CO2 emissions. But how about innovating and presenting climate innovations in a well designed portfolio including graphics, illustrations and text descriptions. How about an exhibition site that also presents podcasts and vidoes of the need and the innovated concepts with animations and interaction? It will take 23 workshops from the 2 August to 25 November and physically include more than 800 people (idea-people, business employees & leaders, politicians, specialists, designers & illustrators and many more). There will have to be brilliant presentations with global insights, inspiring Clean & Bio Technologies and an innovation facilitation that is world class.

Well, that’s what we got and we’re going to do it. Let me tell you a little bit about it.

The UN’s Climate Change Conference will not deal with the global consequences of the climate changes today. And I understand why: Partially because we’re going to have to re-innovate a lot of infrastructure and that is such a complex task it seems impossible. The other reason is that administrators like measurables; they may be able to list the needs and problems but not the visions or what will work. This calls for a very different platform and a hugely different platform. Not to innovate products but to innovate infrastructures.

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve have been designing the worlds first Creating Platform, CareCubicle. Many many people have been involved so far but starting this august, we’re really going to be involving people. CareCubicle is based around a set of ideas and I’ll just mention one of them here: Knowledge Rules! If you want to innovate anything, you must know how to work knowledge and patch-work it together. There a many very good open innovation platforms and I can point you to the one you need in your open innovation effort. However, I have not seen a platform yet that even comes close to holding and working with the whole of the innovation process including a Creating Business Model. I’m twitting on what such a business model is about if you’re interested.

We want to show what you can do with the CareCubicle innovation method and tools. Climate Innovations seems like great testing grounds. Now, CareCubicle is designed for a webbased audience with a whole bunch of very new ways to work with innovation. We will test them using the old fashion crank-the-handle workshop method but still with the new tools.

A workshop series is 3 workshops not including what happens inbetween workshops. We will hold two series. Combined, the final 10 concepts that we present at the UN’s Change Climate Conference will have been thtough more than 800 people.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in: Maybe you’re brilliant with concepts or know about climate technologies or work with a government somewhere in the word; drop me a mail at erik[at]imaginethis.dk and we’ll take it from there.

I’ll let my favourate multi-media designer Rene Brokop introduce his interpretation.