“A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price”. That is the marketing message that Apple uses to convince us of the game-changing user experience of the iPad. With sales of the iPad exceeding initial expectations the question that comes into focus is how the iPad will influence your business. Finding an answer might be easier than you think.

Here are two videos of iPad users who you would probably not include in the typical group of users for such a device. Nevertheless the experience that this 2 year old kid and the 99 year old grandmother have with the iPad is once-in a lifetime experience. I think it is well worth your time if you invest the 10 minutes and just observe how they interact with the device.

A 2,5 Year-Old Has a First Encounter with An iPad

 

iPad Helps 99-Year-Old Woman Rediscover Writing

There is also a longer version available with an interview with Virginia.

After watching these clips of “extreme users”, you have observed two humans whose life has just changed:

• A 2 year old child who will never know what a world without tablet computers is like, and
• A 99 year old grandmother that becomes an active, creating part of a digital society.

And the core learning is: Contrary to many industry pundits and technology experts, users don’t care about multitasking or a webcam because the iPad opens up so many new opportunities for them that the device becomes a life-changer. These two videos are also an excellent starting point for a conversation in your organization what this new device category ultimately means for your business.

Nevertheless the question is not what application you could transfer to the iPad in the next 3 months. The ultimate question is: How can you solve your customers problems with this new device category? Which business opportunities will emerge with this new category of devices in the coming 18 to 24 months? How can you trigger new business opportunities and leverage existing ones?

New iPad applications: An opportunity for Customer Co-Design?

I have run several customer co-design workshops and the experiences I have made during these workshops confirmed that this is a useful approach to identify opportunities for product and service improvements.

In a customer co-design workshop you bridge the gap between designer (product management, software development, product design) and the customer by integrating the customer into the actual design process. This has the benefit that you don’t need to “extract” implicit knowledge from your customer but instead give him the tools and method to express his requirements.

The iPad is an an excellent opportunity to integrate customers into the design process and develop new ideas with your customers. And the best of all, you can probably do this by yourself:

1. Buy at few iPads – If you are not in the US you can either wait until they are available in Europe or tap into other sources (eBay, friends, your next business trip) to get a device.
2. Invite a few customers and use the iPads together with your customers, let customers explore the device and imagine how the iPad and applications on the iPad could help them solve their problems, run their business and enjoy life.
3. Brainstorm ideas, sketch prototypes for new applications and imagine different business models that utilize the iPad.

This is not a guarantee that you will indeed find the next breakthrough idea after one event, but it is a big step into that direction. Certainly the selection of customers is important and the workshop itself should not become an “all you can wish for” event but with the right approach it will help you find answers to the biggest question: How will the iPad impact your business?

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Leadership is one of the most written about yet still mystical topics in management literature. The terms leadership and management are very often mixed up and corporate environments are too often dominated by bureaucratic management systems instead of empowering leaders.

Yet leadership is essential for successful innovation since not just processes, methods and techniques are relevant but the key is the creation of the right environment. This has a far greater impact on the success of innovation projects than jumping on the next creativity technique to generate new ideas. The problem that large corporations face is not that their employees don’t have good ideas – the problem is that they are reluctant of sharing them because the environment doesn’t support them.

Leaders for innovation projects should ensure that the environment allows the emergence of these ideas. The first step to better understand leadership is to understand the different types of leadership.

Leadership Styles: Coordinator vs. Innovator

One such taxonomy of leadership styles has been developed by Quinn in 1984 which identified eight leadership roles organized around the two dimensions flexibility vs. stability and internal focus vs. external focus as shown in the following figure.

The definition of these roles are:

• Innovator Role: The innovator is creative and inhibitions, encourages, and facilitates change.
• Broker Role: The broker is politically astute, ex-virus resources and maintains the units external legitimacy through the development, scanning, and maintenance of a network of external contacts.
• Producer Role: The producer is the task — oriented, work — focused role. The producer seeks closure, and motivates those behaviors that will result in the completion of the groups task.
• Director Role: The director engages in goalsetting and role clarification, sets objectives, and establishes clear expectations.
• Coordinator Role: The courting Nader maintained structure, does to scheduling, coordinating, and problem solving, and sees the rules and standards are met.
• Monitor Role: The Molitor collects and distributes information, checks on performance, and provides a sense of continuity and stability.
• Facilitator Role: The facilitator encourages the expression of opinions, seeks consensus, and negotiates compromise.
• Mentor Role: The mentor is aware of individual needs, listens actively, a sphere, supports the to be made requests, and attempts to facilitate the development of individuals.

Looking at this will it becomes obvious which kind of leadership style is supportive for innovation, change and empowerment off employees. Let’s dive a little bit deeper with another framework for leadership functions.

Leadership Functions: Directing vs. Empowering

Another approach to better understand the different types of leadership is to focus on the functions that leaders provide. Pearce et al. analyzed scientific literature and identified four types of leadership:

1. Directive leadership
2. Transactional leadership
3. 3. transformational leadership and
4. 4. empowering leadership

For each of these leadership types they have identified typical functions that are aligned with it:

Leadership type	Leadership functions
Directive leadership	· Organizing · Problem solving · Clarifying roles and objectives · Informing · Monitoring
Transactional leadership	· Recognizing · Rewarding
Transformational leadership	· Planning · Motivating and inspiring · Networking
Empowering leadership	· Consulting · Delegating · Supporting · Developing and mentoring · Managing conflict and teambuilding

Source: Pearce et. al., Transactors, transformers and beyond: A multi-method development of a theoretical typology of leadership.

The right leadership style for innovation

These two taxonomies of leadership styles help to understand which type of leadership is supportive for innovation. A flexible, internal oriented, empowering leadership style is necessary to help innovation teams achieve high performance where as a monitoring, controlling stability oriented leadership style will limit the emergence of breakthrough ideas.

Nevertheless concluding that externally focused, controlling leadership styles are useless would be superficial. A corporation is not just made up of departments delivering innovation but also of operations departments that staffed with managers who ensure that the corporation and administration keeps working. And there are enough projects in an organization that require a rigorous control and analysis as well as strategic projects that require externally oriented directors that present an organizations interest. Yet when you are aiming for innovation, when you are aiming to develop breakthrough products and services you will not succeed but creating a tighter controlled environment with more milestones and better reporting and a leader who wants to make decisions by himself.

Empowering employees, facilitating idea creation and experimentation as well as individual development of employees are necessary to lead an innovation team towards success. With these frameworks in mind it becomes easier to understand why it might be hard for managers in an organization to create innovative environments but it will also help to understand which group of managers can act as leaders for innovation projects and which group of managers is better in managing operational aspects within an organization.

Sources:

Quinn, R.E. (1984), Applying the Competing Values Approach to Leadership: Toward an Integrative Model

Pearce et. al. (2003), Transactors, transformers and beyond: A multi-method development of a theoretical typology of leadership

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The hype around Apple’s latest product, the iPad is ongoing and every pundit has given us reasons why the iPad will be a total success or why it will be total failure. We love these discussions, but they are a waste of time. There is simply no correct answer at this point in time whether the iPad will be a success or not. But that is exactly why everyone loves to talk about that since everybody can be right and everybody can be wrong. Just like discussions about religion, the performance of Mac computers vs. PCs, BMW vs. Audi – there is not right or wrong and that’s why we put so much passion into these discussions.

If you want to innovate, you should prevent such discussions because they lead nowhere. Of course there is a difference between a well-founded feedback session and polemic argument, but even the value of feedback is limited when you are truly innovating. Could anyone have imagined a situation like the one below?

 

Who would have thought that one day we would be communicating 140 characters at a time? At least not Mike Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, the largest technology blog online, who wrote in his first post about Twitter (which was still called Twttr at that time):

There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.

But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?

Today Twitter has become a global phenomen with 75+ million users and aims to become the number one platform for real-time conversations on the web.

 

Apple is the company that usually receives pretty bad feedback when they are releasing new products. Let’s have a look at the first comments about the iPod in the MacRumours forums, the number one outlet for Apple news:

Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where’s the Newton?!

I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently!

Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!

We have all experienced the revolution of the music industry that was triggered by the iPod. Not much more needs to be said.

Fortunately, Marc Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, did not listen to his Harvard Professor’s recommendation either, who told him sincerely, that it doesn’t make sense to further pursue Facebook.

Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time — both for the users and those developing the sites — so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you’re going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time. After all, didn’t he want to graduate? And make an A in CS161 while he was at it?

What is the key take away?

Nobody can predict the future and even the "experts" will never fully grasp the impact of some innovations when they where interacting with them the first time. You will always find somebody who can give you hundreds of reasons why it will not work. But the goal is not to find the idea that is not facing any obstacles – the goal is to find an idea that is worth overcoming these obstacles.

But maybe even more important: What does it mean when even pundits fail to predict the success of breakthrough products and services like Twitter, the iPod and Facebook? How much can you really trust the naysayers?

Innovation leaders and entrepreneurs need to be aware of this, ignore the pundits and focus on building traction for their ideas. While others are discussing, the leaders are acting. And even though one might fail, only by trying to invent the future you can achieve success. Solely discussing and predicting what the future might hold will never lead to a different future.

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You know Facebook right? Good. Ever heard about Farmville? No? Well it is what 80 million people do on Facebook. Growing their virtual farms in Farmville, earning virtual money and helping Zynga – the company that developed Farmville – earn around 100 million USD in 2009. What’s going on here?

Facebook is a becoming huge and with 400 millions users it is currently the second most visited site in the US behind Google. Yet the biggest share in the “body of knowledge” about Facebook is about Facebook as a tool for social media, social networking and business – most of if superficial and not worth the effort to read.  But from time to time some smart people analyze the underlying patterns and contribute towards an explanation into a social motivation and behavior that makes Facebook such a success.

Robin Hunicke did a great speech at lift08 about Facebook as a game that makes you feel loved. A new perspective that helps to understand the dynamics and motivation to join and use Facebook. But there is still the question why are 80 million people growing virtual foods on a virtual farm?

 

The answer to this is given in the talk “Design Outside the Box” by Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell who explains the Farmville phenomenon, how you can make millions of dollars with virtual money and lays out a vision of the future in which our lives will become one big role-playing game. The talk is 28 minutes long, it is worth every minute and after that you can skip reading mainstream articles about Facebook for the next year.

I have embedded the talk below, if you can’t see it watch it online.

Posted in consumer behaviour, idea worth spreading, innovation | Permalink | 1 Comment »

My favourite article about Design Thinking is an article called “Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking” which describes the fundamental principles of design and defines the relationship between innovation and design. The article has been published already in 2007 and it has just received the Accenture Award of the California Management Review.

This award is given each year to the authors of the article published in the preceding volume of the California Management Review that has made the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.

About the Article

In their article, Beckman and Barry outline four core elements of design thinking — observation, framing, imperatives (needs or design principles), and solutions.
They ground these elements of design thinking in models of how people learn, describing which learning style is best suited to each element of design thinking. By doing so, they provide a model for achieving innovation among members of a team with different learning styles. Their model can be applied across a wide range of sectors, from hardware and software products to services to architecture.

“The innovation process as a learning model suggests that teams be composed of individuals who are polar opposites in how they take in and transform information,” Beckman and Barry write. They add, “Good teams behave like bicycle racing teams, where individuals are assigned positions in the race because of their strengths, not because of seniority or some other measure.”

And here is a video that summarizes the core ideas from the article. This is also an excellent example how you can condense information from a 30 page article into a compelling 5 minute video.

Innovation as a Learning Process from Roger Shealy on Vimeo.

The best about this award is that the article is now available as a free download, so you can access it even if you don’t usually have access to the California Management Review.

Unfortunately the download is not free anymore, but you purchase a copy here, it’s a must read. You could also try to use Google with this search query and see if you find a copy online somewhere.

Posted in design thinking, innovation | Permalink | 3 Comments »