Overcoming Inventoritis: A Review

Atomica Creative founders Peter Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa have a new book out called Overcoming Inventoritis. Best yet you can get your free copy of it here.

The book is an interesting discussion about making sure that your product actually solves a problem for the consumer. Easy to say, hard to do. Additionally the book takes a look at, dare I say it, Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovations and it's sometimes misapplication in industry and is filled full of relevant facts (no correlation between R&D spending and sales growth?)

Some good advice at the end, but as is typical, it has to be high level in order to be applicable to a wide variety of folks. It is up to you to translate the advice into action for your own organization.

Ru-roh Raggy!

I have a friend in commercial real-estate that forwarded the above graph to me. It seems that the gift of ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) is the gift that keeps on giving. Per the graph the peak period of rate resets won't hit until September of this year.

This of course will hit right at the election fever peaks. The actual number of resets itself is not that concerting as the sub-prime mess isn't a large part of the overall machine, but rather it's the fear of the high reset number that is causing the equity players to keep their money in their mattresses. It's the not knowing which way things are going that is keeping liquidity out of the market as people prefer to hold onto their money.

I have been keenly fascinated to watch this entire too-big-to-fail machine slowly devolve. Part of the fascination comes from the fact that we are watching history. As pensions goes the way of cassette tape more an more money is pouring into the stock market. Compound this with the fact that Baby-Boomers are increasing their market deposit rate because they would like to retire and you have the largest influx of dollars into the market ever. The really-smart-guy financial houses who get to invest all this money find themselves large movers and shakers in the Nation's capital system And they find themselves without government oversight. The lack of oversight being attributed to the fact that Federal governments traditionally only had to worry about the Banks as they had historically been the ones who could wreck havoc on the economy.

The other reason that I have been so interested in this debacle is because the root cause failure of this entire financial system (which is really just a social system) is greed unchecked. Everyone in the system knew it wasn't sustainable, what they didn't know was when it would go down. The game then was to try and make the buck while you could.

Just because it is big and a bunch of smart people are doing it doesn't make it right or sustainable. And this is where Innovation comes in. There is always a better way, something that can be built upon a previous layer as an improvement. THERE IS ALWAYS A BETTER WAY. Just because it is big and a bunch of smart people are doing it doesn't make it right or sustainable.

Neat Idea

It used to be that if you wanted to fly with children the safest restraint was to bring their car seat along.

Severe air turbulence, while not widely common, has been known to cause serious injury. According to the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority "from 1981 through 1997 there were 342 reports of turbulence affecting major air carriers. Three passengers died, two of these fatalities were not wearing their seat belt while the sign was on. 80 suffered serious injuries, 73 of these passengers were also not wearing their seat belts." Link

What makes CARES such a great product is that it offers parents a safe way to travel by air with their children without the hassle of lugging a car seat around.

The best part of the story is that this 2008 Good Housekeeping Award winning product was invented by a Grandmother of 9.

(images via kidsflysafe.com and inventorspot.com. Story via inventorspot.com)

Innovation Zen

Windows Ripe for Disruption?
According to Christensen's disruption model, when a company's products deliver more features than the average user can absorb than that user is apt to shift to an alternate solution. So, if you are Microsoft, the last thing you want to hear is that you product is collapsing because of its breadth and complexity and users don't understand the latest benefits. Link

Will Innovation Save Ford?
It seems that after losing $15 billion in two years Ford is revising it's marketing campaign. Jim Farley, who came from Toyota, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal that he hopes that his latest advertising campaign is the automaker's equivalent to Nike's "Just Do It". While great marketing can't fix crappy product, it can help to change people's willingness to look at a Ford. Known in the industry as "consideration" the number of people willing to consider a Ford lags behind the competition despite being competitive with the like of Toyota on initial quality. Still, wouldn't the money be better spent on leaning out the plant and figuring out what kinds of cars consumers want to buy rather than dazzle them with gloss?

Cool Links
The Fail Blog Celebrating the Fail
Photoshop Disasters Celebrating the Fail of Photoshopping
Not Hired Celebrating the Fail of Job Hunting
Evil HR Lady Some honest and useful advice regarding people issues
Customer Experience Matters A VP from the Forrester shares insight

Whale Facts

Things that quite possibly only interest me....

Oprah is 54 years old

13.7% of Captain Kirk's Star Trek crew died during their three year television mission. 73% of the deaths were the guys in the red shirts. Source: Click Tracks

Julie Andrews was 28 when she made Mary Poppins, her first screen role.

I'm a Scoundrel

I took an AP English class my Senior Year of High School. The teacher was a no nonsense Lithuanian who had no time for nonsense.

In fact, if you didn't do your assignment she preferred that you wrote on the top of the page that you were a scoundrel rather than force her to read whatever drivel you were able to muster that morning.

More than once I admitted to my scoundrel-ness, but still was able to pull a decent grade. It seems, at least to Ms. Litvanis, that honesty was as important as hard work.

Unfortunately it seems that this novel idea doesn't always translate to business. Not every product is going to be a fit for every company. As a salesman the goal then is to find the win-win scenario and cordially walk away from the win-lose situations. It seems not every one subscribes to this philosophy.

Recently I have had sales people doggedly stay on message despite the obvious lack of fit. I mean they have said some crazy things in order to keep the conversation going, rather than face discuss the fact that there was not a mutual best interest.

Innovation is pulling together puzzle pieces in a way which everyone wins while helping to solve a customer problem. Call me idealistic, but I would much rather walk away friends with integrity than stay together dishonestly.

What We Know

The breadth and depth of human achievement never ceases to amaze me.

Here, for example, is Teacraft a consultancy on tea manufacturing.

The truly extraordinary thing is that we humans, via the Internet, have figured out a way to share this knowledge with everyone. In the past we've lost great advances, think Mayan, because there were no sharing mechanisms in place.

The Basics , The Basics, The Basics

The $300 billion auction rate security market (see here) seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. On April 7 the NY Times reported that handset maker Palm Inc. took a $25 million charge associated with the February market collapse.

Auction rate securities had been hyped as cash equivalents but with a better yield.

Alas, all that glitters is not gold. Just because a bunch of really smart people say that something is OK doesn't make it so. For something to work, and last, it has to create value in a tangible way.

The same is true with Innovation. Technology is giving us all sorts of tools for world wide collaboration and data management and everyone is espousing how it will make your company more Innovation. The truth is that these tools only help to automate existing processes. If you don't have the existing process the tools are useless.

To make Innovative products the same old rules apply. Figure out what problem you want to solve. Think of some good ideas. Try them. Try them again. Try them one more time. Once it works figure out how to reduce cost. Launch. Have a team party with pizza and t-shirts. Fix all the launch problems.

Whale Facts

Things that quite possible interest only me

From the PBS Documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

It took 16 years to grow Enron from $10 billion to $65 billion.

It took 24 days to go bankrupt.

Ken Lay, Chairman and CEO, was paid $300 million in four years.

When the company went bankrupt 20,000 people were laid off and $2 billion in pensions disappeared.

Being Nice Saves Money

Consider these two quotes from the current April issue of Fortune.

The first quote is from an article on Apple and Steve Jobs:

"Jobs feared that his inner circle was ripe for poaching. In October 2000, Jobs started talking to the directors about giving the executive team a big grant to place them in golden handcuffs."

The second quote was about Honda:

"Employees are paid less than at the competition, and advancement is limited, given Honda's flat organization. Their satisfaction and fierce loyalty to the company come from being around people like themselves - tinkerers who are obsessed with making things work."

This is the closest correlation I've seen between a positive work environment and hard dollar savings.

Innovation is a social process. Creating an environment where people want to (not, have to) work can actually save the company money.

Whale Facts

Things that quite possibly only interest me

Age, not the size of the chicken, determines the size of the egg. The older the chicken the larger the egg.

From yesterday's Wall Street Journal
1. Over the past three decades, the 401(k) plan has gradually supplanted pension plans as the main source of retirement coverage for U.S. workers in the private sector, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit group. In 1979, it says, 62% of U.S. employees participated only in a pension plan. By 2005, 63% of workers reported that they participated only in a 401(k) plan.

2. Between 1988 and 2007, the percentage of large companies offering retiree health benefits fell by half, to 33%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

From the March 28th Wall Street Journal
3. The auction rate securities I mentioned here are having material effects on company profits; Metro PCS just took an $83 million charge.

From the March 5th USA Today
4. Patients received a mild electric shock after taking one of two pills and then asked to describe the amount of pain that they felt. In both cases the same amount of shock was administered but 85% of people who took the "more expensive pill" said they felt less pain afterwards compared to 61% of people who took the "less expensive" pill. Both pills administered were the same sugar pill.