Tag: Innovation

How to measure innovation: a quick guide for managers and leaders

Over the past couple of months, I received multiple requests to explain how innovation can be measured. The Covid19 pandemic has caused managers at many organisations to consider innovating for the first time, as established business models were threatened and they began exploring new markets, products or services.

Here is a short note I thought I’d share for those interested. If you have thoughts, comments or resources to share, please post them in the comments section.

Measure dilligently, but be careful what you measure.

Continue reading “How to measure innovation: a quick guide for managers and leaders”

Podcasts on innovation by Tucci, Cassiman & O’Sullivan, Lim

I recently uploaded video podcasts for a couple of events organized by Melbourne Business School and IPRIA:

  • Chris Tucci presented last week on “Creative Destruction and Intellectual Property: What’s an Incumbent to Do?” Part 1 covers the key concepts and Part 2 presents examples from his research.
  • Bruno Cassiman and Don O’Sullivan presented several months back on R&D strategy and executive compensation, respectively. Bruno’s talk was on how collaboration on research and development (through open innovation and science linkages) can dramatically affect R&D outcomes. Don spoke on how the structure of executive compensation relates to the valuation of intangible assets.

Thanks to each speaker for allowing us to share their presentations online.

In addition I was recently featured in an interview on the University of Melbourne Up Close podcast. It is on the effect of acquisitions on inventor productivity and based on my research with Rahul Kapoor.

New Models for the Book Industry

MBS/CMCL/IPRIA Seminar on Book Publishing. 9 Feb 2011

Traditional book publishers have been increasingly challenged by e-books and other digital technologies. We decided to organize a public seminar with industry participants to learn about new opportunities in this area.

A common theme among our speakers was of the growing fault lines between those who create content and those who distribute it. From the point of view of content creators, digital technology is not a bad thing. It presents new ways to reach customers. To a firm like Lonely Planet, printed books, e-books and apps are alternative and useful delivery mechanisms. The heterogeneity is a good thing since each delivery mechanism has its strengths and weaknesses. For example a map-based application on your mobile phone may be useful for navigating the streets of Melbourne, while a printed travel book might be preferred if you are traveling the Australian outback (books are more durable than electronic devices; they also require no electrical power).

Authors are beginning to explore new pricing schemes. For example several authors are trying to sell a larger volume of e-books at lower prices (around $2.99 – $3.99) instead of a small number of regular books at higher prices (say, $10). Other authors are trying “pay what you want” schemes. Our guest speaker Max Barry will be selling his next book as a real time electronic serial, distributing it directly from his website in small chunks and for an attractive price ($6.95). It is too early to know which of these will work well and for whom because the book industry has many different segments of customers with different needs. Furthermore, there are concerns with e-books around the issue of digital piracy. However, we were reminded by one of the speakers that for many authors, obscurity is worse than piracy. Besides, piracy has long been a threat even with printed books: you will of course remember the photocopy machine which has existed for quite awhile, as well as those suspiciously inexpensive textbooks printed on poor quality paper brought in from various developing countries. It seems to me at least that in the digital world, selling a large volume of e-books at a low price makes a lot of sense. In this context, the serialized e-book has an added advantage because it builds a repeated interaction between the reader the author. Over time this may help create loyalty towards the author.

I see three areas of opportunity and these arise along the fault lines described above.

The first opportunity is with “apps”. It crossed my mind earlier this month that simply repackaging a book as an app gives the author tremendous freedom. With books, the author is stuck with publishing delays, parallel import laws and other legal impediments, not just the need to physically deliver products. With apps, all that is gone. Re-purpose a book as an app and it morphs into a software program, so different rules apply. If you go one step further and make the app exciting to use, you can counteract the myth that printed books are superior. Those who have tried The Elements on an iPad will find it hard to go back to a printed Periodic Table. Similarly, having compared both this app and the book version, I much prefer learning about photography using the app version which is more interactive and has built-in videos.

A second opportunity lies in offering new skills combinations. In order to serialize his next novel, Max Barry combined his computer programming expertise with a passion for writing: he is essentially selling each subscriber a private RSS feed as a separate product. Most people do not have this combination of skills, especially the generation of authors that went to journalism school and did not acquire a technical background. An opportunity exists for people who can bridge this divide and provide new tools and services to help content authors to craft their products and reach customers easily. For example, Graeme Connelly spoke to us about the new “expresso printer” at Melbourne University Bookstore which produces small print runs that were uneconomical in the past. I believe this is only a starting point, e.g., we don’t yet have the equivalent of WordPress for creating books with existing tools being either too complex or too amateurish.

The third opportunity lies in further disaggregating the value chain. I learned from the session that one of the benefits to authors of going with traditional book publishers is their expertise in editing. Publishers convert the messy raw material that is a manuscript into a curated experience that is proof-read, edited and checked. I suspect that the editing activity will split apart into a distinct industry segment, just as has happened in other industries such as semiconductors, which used to be vertically integrated but which now has some firms focusing exclusively on system development and others on chip design or manufacturing. This is pure speculation on my part, but I don’t see why the editing process, while valuable, needs to be tied much longer to the manufacture and distribution of physical products.

It is hard to predict how things will work out and I don’t think the traditional book will completely disappear. This industry is definitely going to be interesting to watch over the next few years.

Videos now available for “Who Owns The News?” seminar

Click Image for Video Album

Last week MBS hosted a public seminar on “Who Owns the News?” exploring the impact of the internet on the news industry. The event was organized by IPRIA, CMCL and MBS CITE. It serves to clarify the key issues and lays the groundwork for a discussion of these issues. I had fun and hope that the 110+ people who attended it did too.

Sam Ricketson, Professor at Melbourne Law School, chaired the event and did a great job orchestrating the Q&A session. Mark Davison from Monash spoke about changes in copyright law and expressed concerns over the “Hot News” doctrine, an approach currently being proposed by news organizations in the US to prevent others from copying their content. Stephen King outlined the economic issues and has posted his very thoughtful comments at https://economics.com.au/?p=5909.

As the discussant, I described what I had learnt from Mark and Stephen and also tried to consider various options faced by a CEO in this industry. My pdf slides are at http://works.bepress.com/kwanghui/18. While my comments might have been perceived as pessimistic by Stephen and others, I am actually quite optimistic about the future of the industry, but mainly for individuals and firms trying out innovative ways of gathering and delivering the news. I am however pessimistic about existing firms: if history has taught us anything, it is that many of them will struggle to adapt with these drastic changes.

The video recordings for “Who Owns the News?” are now available. I have posted them at http://vimeo.com/album/253549. Portions were removed to protect the identity of audience members. We thank the speakers for permission to share their insights online. Enjoy the show ?

Lara Bingle and the cost of privacy

My colleagues at the Law School have just written an interesting analysis of the Lara Bingle nude photo case. They think she doesn’t have a strong legal case based on either privacy law or defamation law. Lara appears to be earning a tidy sum from the publicity generated, so I suppose its not an entirely bad strategy. The Bingle incident is one of an increasing number of clashes among conflicting goals to maintain privacy, copyright protection, and freedom. It is tempting to blame the technology (cellphones, cameras, iphones, etc.), and to suggest that people should not be allowed to take photographs or videos unless permitted. Countries like the UK and USA now have strict but vague rules on what you can photograph. The problem is that it is difficult to articulate what these parameters would be in a way that is generally acceptable. This creates high enforcement costs and generates unfortunate incidents where people are stopped for doing seemingly legitimate things. Blanket bans do not work well and lead to a climate of censorship and fear. Instead of focusing on the creation of images, a better solution is to concentrate on managing how images are used. Allow people to take photos and videos unfettered. There are so many photos and videos being taken these days that most of these will never see the light of day anyways. Meanwhile establish clearer guidelines on what kinds of images may not be used for various applications: the arts, news, online blogs, commercial advertising and education (also, in each case be clear whether permission is needed from those in the image). While this suggestion may not entirely solve the problem, it will at least take us partways there. Social and legal systems have some ways to go before catching up with the reality of living in a media-rich world.

Is Secrecy Always A Good Thing? The Tale of Apple Aperture vs Adobe Lightroom

Apple is known for its penchant for secrecy. Products are developed as top-secret projects and unveiled to the public with great fanfare. This has brought it tremendous benefit, for example with during the dramatic launch of the iphone by Steve Jobs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZYlhShD2oQ#t=2m20s). However secrecy carries costs, and in some cases the costs outweigh the benefits. Yet Apple retains this approach across a whole range of its products; secrecy is apparently “baked into the corporate culture” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/technology/23apple.html). Consider Aperture 3.0, the newly updated photo-management product by Apple aimed at professional photographers. It was launched last week following Apple’s usual “secret till the last minute” approach. It is instructive to compare Aperture to Lightroom, a very similar product by Apple’s rival Adobe which has taken a very different approach.

There have been two effects of the secrecy surrounding Apple’s Aperture 3.0. First, the direct effect of launching poorly-tested software. Twitter and the Apple forums are full of complaints by anguished customers who have been unable to upgrade older photo libraries (e.g., http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2331026). No doubt there is a selection bias and users with a trouble-free experience are less likely to visit these forums and complain. But this is hardly the “awesome” and polished experience that is expected from Apple, a company that uses “it just works” as a tagline. Among the reports are complaints by customers whose computers have totally frozen during the upgrade, those who succeeded in upgrading but then found it unstable, and those who gave up but were unable to reinstall earlier versions of that software. It is clear from these reports that Aperture 3 was insufficiently tested before being sold, especially against real-world photo libraries in use by existing users.

A second effect of secrecy is that professionals have been increasingly adopting Adobe Lightroom. While the buzz of unveiling a new product may matter for consumer-oriented products like the iphone or ipad, Aperture is aimed at professional photographers, design companies and media organisations. For this audience, surprise may be less important and even counterproductive. Instead , advance knowledge of upcoming features and a stable product at launch time are probably more important. These allow the client to anticipate changes and plan for its integration into existing workflows and business processes.

In contrast to Apple, Adobe has taken a different approach with Lightroom. In October last year it launched the new version as a public beta, available for anyone to download and try for free (the software expires automatically at the launch of the actual product). The public beta gives Adobe precious information from real-world customers on a massive scale. In addition, customers are able to experiment with features likely to be included in the final version, rather than being kept in the dark with no way to anticipate and plan their own businesses around Adobe’s roadmap. Lightroom has its share of detractors, but generally the response online has been positive. The important thing to point out is that Adobe isn’t one of these “open source” players. Lightroom is commercial software that is quite expensive and the guts of the software are heavily protected. However, by being less secretive than Apple, Adobe is able to engage better with its customers. This applies not just to the public beta: in earlier versions of Lightroom, Adobe took a more open stance towards allowing third-party plugins and introducing user-created presets.

Looking more broadly, my sense is that Apple’s secrecy is costing it not just with Aperture but also with other recent product launches. For example, iPad developers are in a scramble to develop software for the new device which ships in about 2 months. Apparently even Apple’s close allies were introduced to the iPad just weeks before it was publicly announced. Even Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system had its share of bad surprises after it was launched, causing some cases of data corruption. To this day, none of my colleagues are able to print from it to our enterprise-quality printer down the hallway using the Safari web browser or the Preview tool without causing the software to crash. The lesson to be learnt is that while secrecy may be useful for some products, firms (including Apple) should revisit the question as to whether they need to be secretive across all their products.

Do share your thoughts and comments on our discussion board.

—- update on 17 March 2010

A quick update – after writing this article I received a surprising number of emails. Quite a few photographers and media professionals wrote to say they agreed with my perspective. A few disagreed, including some folks who said Adobe also had its share of problems. A few people also wrote to complain that I am biased and “anti-Apple”; I contend this is untrue seeing that I personally own a lot of Apple products.

A couple of people asked what the benefits were of secrecy, and to give a quick answer, it generates greater consumer buzz when the product is launched (as mentioned). In addition, secrecy is one of the mechanisms by which firms attempt to protect intellectual property (e.g., the oft-told story of Coca Cola’s secret recipe). Keeping something secret may also help prevent competitors from hiring the relevant people to develop similar products, although this is controversial as it depends on how scarce the relevant skills are. I hope this helps give my article some balance. I’m not saying secrecy is bad in general, but that it should be used when appropriate. It may be somewhat less effective for professional rather than consumer products, especially software which involves network effects and benefits from a cohesive developer community.

A spokesperson from Apple wrote to me to say that a number of photographers did work with Apple on the beta prior to launch (but as I understand it from people in the industry, this was a private beta and a non-disclosure agreement was involved). Apple also said many of the issues have been addressed in a recent upgrade to the software, and they dispute the market share data used by John Nack which I linked to in my article. They also made a few other points. I am sharing this so that their view is represented and they are welcome to post a reply too, however I don’t think it takes away from the main points of my article. Subsequent to my post, I learnt that Apple’s secrecy was also a concern raised by various photography blogs (e.g., http://photofocus.com/2010/02/17/aperture-3-0-very-cool-but-not-ready-for-prime-time/). Moreover, the extensive fixes that were made soon after Aperture’s release shouldn’t have been needed in the first place if the software had been properly field-tested. Fundamentally, secrecy means missing out on engaging with the professional community and developers in an extensive way prior to the product’s launch. That is the price to pay, and while in some cases this is worthwhile, in other cases its not always a net benefit.

The Reliability of User Reviews

User generated reviews are one of the great innovations that came with the growth of the Internet. They are now pervasive, and cover everything from automobiles, to music, books, movies, and restaurants. I suspect the arrival of user reviews on interactive mobile platforms (such as urbanspoon and amazon) will bring upon us a new wave of interest in such content.

Yet, user-generated reviews suffer from informational problems. Firstly, why would you trust the product recommendations from an online stranger any more than you might somebody else? Secondly, user reviews are often tediously long, contain huge volumes of inconsistent information, and sometimes even degenerate into personal mudslinging matches. This imposes search costs upon the person trying to make sense of reviews. For example I was recently searching for a new lens for my SLR camera (a little hobby on the side), and it took a bit more time than I had expected to visit various photography forums to sort out which products were really good, versus other lenses that suffered quality control problems. Thirdly, there is a growing phenomenon of companies manipulating online information for their own benefit. For instance, last week Seagate was found to be deleting user postings from their website about high defect rates, while a Belkin official was caught out offering cash for good reviews.

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