Посты с тэгом: apple

The Stereotypy Trap

Published date: May 14, 2013 в 6:23 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

Struggling retailer JC Penny hired former Apple executive Ron Johnson as the CEO to save the company. Seventeen months later, he was ousted in what many consider a colossal failure. Why? Not because he failed to take action, but rather because he tried taking the same actions that worked for him at Apple. He was guilty of a managerial bias called stereotypy – the tendency to believe that what worked for you in the past will work for you in the future. From Time:

Johnson pictured coffee bars and rows of boutiques inside JC Penney stores. He wanted a bazaar-like feel to the shopping experience, and for JC Penney to be “America’s favorite place to shop.” He thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price.
Essentially, Johnson wanted JC Penney and its shoppers to be something that they’re not. He wanted them to be more like the scene at Apple Stores, or even Target, when in reality, there was probably more overlap with Macy’s, or even Walmart.

And why didn’t Johnson understand what JC Penney’s core customers enjoyed? Well, one reason is that he didn’t really ask them. When Johnson floated plans for the chain’s radical makeover, he was asked about the possibility of trying the new pricing strategies on a limited test basis. Johnson reportedly shot down the idea, responding, “We didn’t test at Apple.”

In medical terms, stereotypy is a repetitive or ritualistic movement, posture, or utterance. Stereotypies may be simple movements such as body rocking, or complex, such as self-caressing, crossing and uncrossing of legs, and marching in place. In managerial terms, it is a blind spot caused by force fitting your current situation into past situations, causing you to believe that what worked before will work again. Consider research by Posavac, Kardes, & Brakus (2005):


“MBAs were asked to consider four marketing strategies for increasing market share for an established product: increasing advertising, cutting prices, hiring more sales representatives, and investing in research and development. The MBAs were told that, to save time, they would be asked to focus on one randomly selected strategy and to judge how likely it was that this was the best strategy. In addition to overestimating the likelihood that this randomly selected strategy was the best, they predicted that the majority of the executive board would also prefer this strategy.”

People focus too quickly on a single option, even when the option is selected randomly and there is no a priori reason for preferring this option. Worse, when we actively evaluate the situation using pseudo-diagnostic information, we make erroneous choices. We get into a new situation like Ron Johnson did. We look at the current situation to see what elements are the same or similar. Despite the differences between then and now, we convince ourselves that the new situation is close enough. We embrace a single option and fail to appreciate how different the new situation is.

For innovation practitioners, the message is clear: ignore what you have done in the past. Innovate systematically around the new situation to create combinations of strategies you never would have come up with on your own. To do that, apply a method like Systematic Inventive Thinking to give yourself strategy options that are right for the moment. Forget the business model that worked well for you in the past. Create new business models that capitalize on the situation at hand.

The Fabulous Five: Loyalty Factor

Published date: February 4, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,,

Loyalty is defined as a strong feeling of support or allegiance. Companies fight for it because it correlates well to product sales. The Fabulous Five (Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and Facebook) are waging a spectacular battle against each other to earn customer loyalty.

A key to winning is to understand the types of loyalty. Professor Christie Nordhielm describes three types as part of her marketing strategy framework, The Big Picture:

Heart Loyalty is a strong emotional involvement with a particular brand. When a customer says, “I love my Macbook Pro,” they are exhibiting heart loyalty. We see this type of loyalty for “badge” or “neck-tie” products, products that are consumed in public and are thought to reflect something about the nature or identity of the person consuming them. This type of loyalty is very difficult for competitors to challenge because it is highly personal and emotional in nature and thus, resistant to rational appeals. Because a product choice based on heart loyalty is tied up with the consumers’ identity and ego, a competitive challenge to this choice can be perceived as a personal affront to the consumer. Heart loyal consumers don’t like to be told they should switch.

Innovation Sighting: Apple’s Smart Shoe

Published date: January 28, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

A tell-tale sign of the Attribute Dependency Technique is the word “smart” in any product description. Apple’s new patent for ‘smart shoes’ is a case in point.  As reported by PSFK:

Apple has patented ‘smart shoes’ that would come with embedded sensors
to track your activity and tell you when you needed a new pair. Instead
of wearing an additional sensor, people would just have to wear the
shoes, where the technology would be less visible and be a more seamless
part of your lifestyle than an external tracker.

Apple’s shoe wear-out sensor would either feature as a thin built-in
layer or be located in the heel. It would include a processor configured
to measure the use of the shoes and determine whether they were worn
out, and an alarm that informed the wearer when they were no longer
providing adequate protection for their feet.

As first reported by AppleInsider, the patent described three main
components: a detector for sensing how worn-out the shoe becomes, a
processor to measure the shoe’s use, and an alarm to inform the owner
when the shoe’s time is up. The chosen sensor could be anything from an
accelerometer or pressure sensor to a pedometer or piezoelectric flexing
sensor.

Attribute Dependency is one of five techniques of the corporate innovation method called SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking).  It differs from the other techniques in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components. Start with an attribute list, then construct a matrix of these, pairing each against the others. Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product. Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.

This isn’t Apple’s first (or last) use of this powerful technique.  Apple earned a patent described as an “apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.”   It reveals a way to change aspects of a mobile device based on certain events or surroundings.  Given this pattern of using Attribute Dependency, it would appear Apple makes regular use of this technique and perhaps the full suite of SIT tools.

The Fabulous Five and the Scramble for Territory

Published date: January 21, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,,

Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, and Amazon are in a mad scramble to enter new territory and cover gaps in their strategies.  The one that gets ahead and stays ahead will earn bragging rights in what may be the most significant business battle of all time. These companies are the Fabulous Five.

Let's look at how each company is placed in the following domains: hardware design and manufacturing, software development and integration, consumer retailing, mobile, voice and digital communications, social, search, and entertainment.  Why these?  I believe the company that covers the biggest footprint across these domains and integrates them in a way that touches the most consumers will become the dominant lifestyle company.  Notice I did not call it B2B, B2C, or even the dominant tech company.  The battle being fought here is to become a part of the consumer's life in a way that allows the company to learn key insights that can be monetized.  It is the battle for the consumer subconscious in a way.

Here is where I see them today:

Slide1

No one should be surprised to see Google and Apple covering more territory than the others.  But notice the lack of coverage by Facebook. More than the others, the pressure on Facebook to enter new territories must be enormous.  That might explain its most recent announcement about Graph Search, a capability that will rival Google.  Here is an excerpt from CNET:

After nine years of colonizing the globe and corralling a billion people, Facebook has found a way to unlock the potential of its massive data collection — a basic semantic search engine that will let it build smarter services for travel, food, recruitment, dating and other verticals that will generate revenue that could rival Google's.  Graph Search is the beginning of the Enlightenment, the next major phase in Facebook's history, in which people gain the "power and tools to take any cut of the graph and make any query they want," as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the product launch event at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters earlier this week.

Graph Search is about providing answers, extracted from the data your friends feed into Facebook. It's not Web search, which typically generates a series of links for a query, with the exception of current stock prices, weather  and many other standard queries. But Graph Search is limited in scope and usefulness at this stage. It is in a beta phase that will last for many months.

Facebook will no doubt continue to enter new domains.  Its move into Communications with a Skype-like app is hardly enough, and one wonders whether it will make a move to acquire Blackberry.

Also notice the thin coverage in territory by Amazon.  Don't count them out just yet.  Amazon is also a viable contender for a Blackberry deal, and it has the resources to enter more domains.  The areas of Social and Search seem to be the most glarring ommissions.

Samsung has gaps, too.  It desparately needs its own operating system so it can break the chains with Google.  They are certainly headed in that direction given the announcment at CES about Tizen.

Pound for pound, Google has the others beat in terms of collecting monetizable insights.  But the price point for that data is low (for now) especially when you compare it to the premium prices (and margins) of Apple products.  High margins fund future projects.

The battle is far from over.

The Fabulous Five

Published date: January 7, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,,,,

Five

companies are slugging it out in what may be the most competitive and
unique business battle of all time. It is larger in scale with more at
stake than battles in other industries including transportation, energy,
and finance.

More
remarkable is how different the combatants are from one another.
Instead of similar companies competing (Toyota versus General Motors,
for example), these companies hail from different business bases: an electronics manufacturer, a lifestyle computing company, an
online
retailer, a search engine, and a social network.  In order: Samsung,
Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.  I call them the Fabulous Five.

What
are they fighting for? They are fighting for the right to define what
they are fighting
for. It is a category yet to emerge.  The battle is about who can get
the largest numbers of customers that generate deep
and meaningful insights.  Each company wants a massive following of
human beings using their products
and services in a way that generates monetizable information twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  Each of the
Fabulous Five has a strong and growing foothold to do exactly that.

What
about traditional powerhouses like Microsoft?  Microsoft fell behind and is trying desperately to catch up with acquisitions
(think $8.5 billion for Skype).  Microsoft will regress into a word
processing, server, and gaming company.  Blackberry?  RIM lost one million
customers in the last three months of 2012.  Motorola? Sony? HP? Yahoo?  They
are watching the battle from the sidelines. PC’s
are becoming irrelevant as the tablet and smartphone takes hold.

That
said, there are some potential challengers to the Fabulous Five.
Twitter, for example, has an impressive subscriber base generating 500
million tweets a day that are being archived
by the US Library of Congress.  Despite the enormity of Twitter, it has
a serious gap.  Twitter (the company) lacks a way to own the insights
being generated.  Twitter is just an advertising portal.  More
concerning is the Fabulous Five can encroach this space fairly easily.
Some already have.

Which of the Fabulous Five will win is not a matter of financial resources.  What matters is their core competencies and their ability to stretch those into other domains.  More important is what each company learns about consumers to stretch further.

Who has the advantage?  Let’s look at sheer size and scope of each.

Google averages
nearly five billion searches per day.  Insights about keywords used to
search the Internet are extremely valuable.  Google learns what it takes
to make websites search engine friendly.  It sells that to companies
who want their websites optimized.  Google’s Droid operating system
gives it presence in smartphones.  Now they seek ways to stretch into
consumer electronics.

Amazon leads the nearly $300 billion online retail space.  It had nearly 8 million unique visitors on one day
(Black Friday).  Amazon learns how people shop, how they compare, and
what they are willing to pay across a wide range of consumer products.
It is stretching itself into the smartphone arena.  Amazon will continue to make bold moves.

Facebook
has over one billion users.  Despite all the criticism about its
privacy policies, Facebook has an enormous advantage in learning how
people socialize, communicate, and visualize their relationships.  But
it lacks a smartphone, entertainment platform, and shopping presence
that others have.

Samsung leads in technology development the way that Apple leads in design.  Samsung is well managed and aggressive.  It has massive resources
to put hundreds of millions of handheld units into any region of the
world.  The question is what they do with it – how much of the
information stream will come from the unit versus the operating system
within that unit.  Samsung knows it needs its own smartphone operating system to compete with Google.

Apple
is the most valuable company on the planet with a fiercely loyal base of
customers across every demographic.  It wins on design, integration,
and service.  More than the other combatants, Apple cuts across a wider
swath of a person’s daily life. Its next strategic move will likely set
the tone for the next wave of battles.  Fierce patent skirmishes with Samsung and others will subside so they can all focus on with the real battle – earning loyalty and staying relevant.

The
common theme for all five is innovation – the ability to stretch
into other domains and create new value systematically.  The choices they make to compete will be topics of future blog posts here.  2013 is
sure to be a milestone for this epic battle.

The LAB: Innovating the iPad with Attribute Dependency (January 2010)

Published date: January 31, 2010 в 4:07 pm

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

Lab_2

 

Apple’s iPad creates a new category of consumer electronic somewhere between smart phones and notebook computers.  Success depends on how well it embeds into our everyday routines at work, home, and elsewhere.   Success also depends on how well it creates new routines.  A great innovation tool for this is the Attribute Dependency template of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T..  This template creates (or breaks) dependencies between attributes of the product and the external environment.  The iPad already has many of these.  My favorite, for example, is the ability to show the correct display no matter how you hold the device.  There is no up or down.  It is an example of breaking a dependency between screen orientation and device orientation.

To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists.  The first is a list of internal attributes of the iPad.  The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under the control of the manufacturer, but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used.  Then create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis.  The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.  We take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways.  If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one.  If a dependency exists, we break it.  Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

I created a matrix when demonstrating the use of Attribute Dependency on the iPhone.  To save time, I am going to use the same matrix for the iPad.
Here are five new innovations for the iPad along with the attribute dependencies that led to the idea:

1.  LOCATION-JOB TYPE:  The iPad has GPS, so it knows what room it’s in at home or the office.  Once it senses its location, it automatically loads the application or screen display that is most suited for that location.  Alternatively, the iPad could default back to the last application that was in use at that particular location.  So if you walk into the kitchen with your iPad, it would automatically pull up the menu application.  If you walk into your boss’s office, it pulls up apps and information related to work.

2.  USER-MUSIC SOURCE:  The iPad will become a family appliance like many others in the home now (TV, microwave, etc).  Unlike other appliances, the iPad will sense which family member is using it (by touchpad sensors), and adjust settings such as source of music, font styles, multi-touch behavior, apps, etc.

3.  BATTERY LIFE-TIME:  Same as the iPhone idea, the user can switch to a “battery conservation mode” that will power down features not needed (color screen goes to black and white, wi-fi off, vibration off).  Or, the iPad does it automatically depending on time of day such as at nighttime.  For travelers who like to keep the device on all night in their hotel room, this would save time and battery life.

4.  FUNCTION-TIME:  The iPad knows what day of week it is, so it would adjust its settings and functions to that day of week.  The “Sunday” iPad acts and works differently than the “Friday” iPad.  It knows our routines day-by-day, and it adjusts to an optimal configuration accordingly.

5. LINKAGES-VIDEO QUALITY:  As the linkages to things like email, SMS, YouTube, etc. change, so does the video quality.  This is an odd one because you would think the user would want the same video quality for everything. Perhaps the advantage here is that the screen optimizes size, resolution, brightness, and other qualities to adjust to the application being used.

Innovation Muscle

Published date: May 18, 2008 в 12:37 pm

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

The best Fortune 100 companies see innovation as an ongoing capability, not a one time event.  These companies work hard to build muscle around this capability so they can deploy it when they need it, where they need it, tackling their hardest problems.  Companies do this to keep up with the ever changing landscape both inside and outside the firm.
What does it mean to build innovation muscle?  I think of it as the number of people trained, the frequency of using an innovation method, and the percentage of internal departments that have an innovation capability.  Call it an Innovation Muscle Index:  N (number of trained employees) x F (number of formal ideation events per year using a method) x P (percent of company departments with at least one employee trained in an effective innovation method).   IMI = N x F x P .
Building innovation muscle is not much different than building body muscle.  Let’s turn to an authority, http://www.muscleprogram.com/, and see how to build body muscle.  Here is an exact quote taken from that website.  Then I have overlaid my interpretation of it from an innovation point-of-view in parenthesis and in bold font.

“You need to decide what kind of (innovation) muscle form you’re looking to achieve. Drawing on examples nearly everyone is familiar with, you need to decide if you want to look like Arnold (GE) Schwarzenegger (bigger bulk) or Bruce (Apple) Lee (lean and toned). This decision will help you determine which kinds of exercises you do and how you do them.

Now, with all of that out of the way, let’s look at some things you can do to build your (innovation) muscles!
If you don’t already, start getting your body (company) used to working out. Start running (innovating) every day, not jogging (brainstorming) or walking (copying others), to help get your blood (growth) moving and your (innovation) muscles primed for building. You’re not running a race so you don’t need to be a speed demon. Instead, maintain a comfortable and steady pace, taking long and powerful strides (initiatives).
If you want to have the lean, Bruce (Apple) Lee appearance, you need to work with lighter weights and have a higher number of repetitions (innovation workshops) in each set. By doing this, you are toning and shaping your (innovation) muscles into longer and thinner forms. If you want the Arnold (GE) look, you need to work heavier weights (more departments using innovation) and do fewer repetitions. By doing this, you are toning and shaping your (innovation) muscles into short and thicker forms.
Ensure that you have a regular plan, focusing on specific (innovation) muscle groups, and stick to it. Don’t try to work every (innovation) muscle in your body every day of the week. At best, this will lead to burnout (budget crunch) and at worst it will lead to injury (downsizing). Your (innovation) muscles will be getting worked hard, so they need to have time to recuperate.
However, you should rotate your plan every month. For example, let’s say that you are working on your chest, shoulders and biceps (new products) on Monday; your abdomen, forearms and upper back (new services) on Wednesday; and your lower back and legs (new strategies) on Friday. Every four weeks, rotate one day so that you’ll be working on your lower back and legs on Monday; your chest, shoulders and biceps on Wednesday; and your abdomen, forearms and upper back on Friday. The following month, rotate one more day.
This will allow each of your (innovation) muscle groups to take advantage of the fact that you probably workout differently on each of those days. If you simply stick with the exact same schedule forever, then you’ll find yourself quickly running into what are known as “plateaus,” where you just can’t seem to build that (innovation) muscle group past a certain point. With a rotation schedule, you will avoid this problem by giving each (innovation) muscle group the benefit of your natural changing body (company) rhythm.
If you keep these general guidelines in mind and consistently work at your plan with passion and intensity, your body (company) will be more toned (competitive) and shaped (growing) than you ever imagined it could be. While it won’t happen overnight, it probably won’t take as long as you’re afraid it will.”

Get our innovation model that has worked for 1000+ companies.

    No thanks, not now.