Personal Innovation

The recently launched New Age of Innovation blog is obviously a marketing vehicle for the new book by C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan, but that doesn't mean that the blog or the book aren't worth reading. I first heard of Prahalad when he spoke at an IT industry event about a year ago, and his ideas on the changing nature of competition and on innovation as business survival skill are as fascinating as they are important. I can't wait to read this new book.

A recent post on the blog, by guest blogger and venture capitalist William Glynn, mixes a bit of flag-waving encouragement with some harsh but not-undeserved criticism of those who cling to dead and dying business and economic models:

If the U.S. and its people would only wake up to the fact that we are the world's largest, most sophisticated fuel supply for innovation … and it isn't stopping or running dry. It's this identity crisis that holds us back, bound to rotting unions and auto plants, the working man, farmer, steel worker, plant worker, etc. We need an FDR-level plan to get people out of the industrial-age ghettos and into the light. We have to. I think we can all agree, we don't have a choice

(Read Glynn's entire post: New Age Of Innovation | Innovate in Real Time with Me -- Billy G | C.K. Prahalad)

Remarks like that will be a bitter pill for many in Cleveland and other Rust Belt cities. But there's no denying that times have changed, the world has changed, and that change will continue at a dizzying and ever-accelerating pace. It is important to recognize that change as an opportunity, rather than as a threat.

As I write this, NPR is running a John McCain soundbyte in which the candidate warns that he can't promise that manufacturing jobs will ever return, but promises that he will focus efforts on providing people with the education necessary to move into the new economy. As campaign promises go, that one's not bad -- at least his assessment of the situation is realistic. (That's not an endorsement.) So while I agree with Glynn in principle, and I firmly believe that we need the kind of "FDR-level plan" he suggests, doesn't the ultimate responsibility for adapting to changing times rest with the individual? 

Each of us is an individual participant in the global economy, in a very real sense a one-person company, regardless of who we work for, where we work, or what we do. That carries the awesome but unavoidable responsibility of remaining individually competitive and marketable.  If the market for your particular skill set evaporates, it's time to acquire new skills.

One very important aspect of this, particularly for those of us with Rust Belt roots, is to accept that the notion of secure, life-long (or even long-term) employment is as dead as 35-cent a gallon gasoline, 8-track players, and smoking in bars.  Real, long-term financial security isn't going to be handed down from any company or any government. If you want that security, you're going to have to figure out how to remain viable and marketable participant in an ever-changing economy. 

And that comes down to personal innovation. As individual participants in a changing global economy, innovation must become a personal survival skill. It won't be enough to simply accept change. We must manufacture our own individual security by embracing change, by leveraging change, and by driving change. Each of us must become an instrument of innovation.   

 

Technorati Tags: innovation,C K Prahalad,William Glynn,John McCain,rust belt,Cleveland,globalization,jobs,unions,FDR

Innovation or Extinction

I don't make a practice of self-bloggulation, but a post I recently wrote for one of my other blogs is relevant to Smallification:

The irony is that by making it increasingly easy to do remarkable things, modern information technology is raising the bar on remarkability. Survival in the global business environment is becoming ever more dependent on the enterprise's ability to innovate at will -- on the ability to out-innovate competitors. That can't happen if, as Basu and Jarnagin observe in their Wall Street Journal article, "there is still a tendency to think of IT as a basic utility, like plumbing or telephone service."

Phone service and plumbing are important, of course. But is investment in your company's phone service or plumbing going to keep your competitors awake at night?

"That's right! Automatic flush! Boo-Yah! Who's your daddy?"

Read the rest of Be the Purple Ninja Cow

Technorati Tags: business,innovation,extinction,Wall Street Journal,Seth Godin,enterprise transformation,Web 2.0

Web 2.0 and the Evolution of Marketing

David Pogue's column in yesterday's New York Times (online) offers a concise explanation of why Web 2.0 tools are so important in a connected more transparent world.

We all know, intellectually, that no matter what image a corporation tries to project, it's made up of ordinary people with personalities, insecurities and lives. But because the marketing and P.R. teams work so hard to scrub, control and package a company's image, the public ordinarily sees none of that human side.

When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

Read the entire column: Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times

 

Technorati Tags: marketing,Web 2.0,innovation,transparency,communication

Separating the Medium and the Message

Maybe it's a Boomer thing (shout-out to my peeps!), but even ten or fifteen or however many years we are into the Internet Age, it can be  difficult to shake outmoded but deeply ingrained concepts that fuse and confuse content delivery with content consumption. 

I consciously understand the difference. Hell, I make my living producing content that is often consumed in a variety of formats. But the fact that the final paragraph in Randall Stross's New York Times article about Amazon's Kindle e-book got my attention says something about my unconscious frame of reference. 

Stross writes:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

Stross's article brought to mind a recent Wired article in which David Byrne discusses future of the music business. In that article, Byrne offers this:

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over.

Both articles address, to varying degrees and from different angles, how changes in the tools of content consumption continue to change the both the experience of that consumption and the business models built around that experience. What I find fascinating is that the pace of that evolution for music has been so much faster than that for books.

Market forces may be a part of that difference, given that people who buy recorded music, in any form or format, far outnumber those who buy books. But that's nothing new, is it?

The most striking difference, the reason that consumers have been far more willing to accept changes in the tools of music consumption than changes in the tools of the consumption of book content just might be that books were already well ahead of the curve.

By the time tiny, inexpensive transistor radios arrived on the scene in the 1960s, the book, as a tool of consumption, had centuries before achieved comparable levels of portability and user-friendliness. The advent of the paperback in the first half of the last century only increased the book's low-tech technological advantage.  What was the evolution of music delivery technologies, from brittle 78s to vinyl LPs to eight-track to cassette to CD and finally to today's MP3, but an attempt to catch up to the book?

So the struggle to introduce the various new technological tools for reading may have less to do with book lovers' stodgy, bespectacled refusal to let go of the familiar experience of reading a paper-and-ink book, and more to do with the idea that the format had long ago achieved some level of perfection.

Of course, that argument completely ignores the idea of storage. My collection of some 8,000-plus songs fits on one small USB drive the size of a single hardcover book, whereas my modest collection of books occupies ("overwhelms" is more accurate) three long shelves in my den, and six small bookcases in my living room.  So I can see how a well-designed reading device and a digitized library might improve my overall reading experience.

Revolution, coming around again

Nicholas Carr, in his Financial Times article , A revolution is taking shape, says this about the evolution and increasing use of "software as a service":

What is happening to computing today is a revolution, the biggest upheaval since the invention of the PC in the 1970s. But it is not without precedent. It bears a close resemblance to what happened to mechanical power 100 years ago.

True. But elsewhere in the article he adds this:

The transformation in the supply of computing promises to have equally sweeping consequences. Software programs already control or mediate not only industry and commerce but entertainment, journalism, education, even politics and national defence. The shock waves produced by a shift in computing technology will thus be intense and far-reaching.

I'm not sure that I'd agree with Carr's prediction of the extent of that impact. If anything, SaaS is IT catching up to itself, and to the Three D's -- democratization, decentralization, and distribution -- that blogs, social computing, peer-to-peer file sharing, telecommuting, and other concepts have brought to bear on long-established business models and practices, politics, and pretty much everything else. With disruptive concepts like "the long tail," "the flat world," and "the wisdom of crowds" already ingrained elements of the Web-driven global socio-economic environment, I don't see SaaS as having that much of an impact outside of the software industry itself.

Yes, it will allow devices to become smaller and more mobile by eliminating the need to install software on those devices. And yes, that will have an impact on when, where, and how we use the Web. But that's an incremental change to a landscape that is already familiar to technology consumers (which is to say, damn near everybody in the developed world).

The real issue here is that SaaS is to the software industry -- at least in one respect -- what the MP3 was to the music industry. The software industry will soon be out of the business of selling silver disks. It will be interesting to see if the software industry does a better job of adjusting to this new reality than the music industry.