Mark Jefford-Baker

Golden Tickets, golden relationships

There is a facinating story buzzing the media right now of the man who bought a Golden Ticket from an airline for 250 000 USD (or more). It entitled him to a lifetime of air travel - that was back in 1987. Since then the man has reportedly clocked up travel costing the airline over 20 million USD - and they drew in the Golden Ticket, saying they had discovered fraudulent use. 

I don’t want to go near the rights or wrongs of this case and others. The most important thing is that the business environment changes, usage changes, costs change (the airline in question filed for Chapter 11 a while ago, and whilst their situation can’t be blamed on Golden Tickets I can understand them wanting to review their revenue situation). But there’s a contract in the picture here. I think  the whole idea of loyalty needs to move towards a suite of products and customer relation rather than the ’big deal’.  

I have an ‘unlimited’ mobile calling and data plan - in practice that means a limit of 10GB per month. For me right now, that is as good as unlimited because I have no desire or need to turn my phone into a video streaming server, and I can cover all my needs without thinking about how close I am to the limit. I am happy - for now, but what happens when my needs change - or the operator’s for that matter? 

‘Unlimited’ usually can’t be - because almost everything has a limitation. A life without boundaries. Relationships work within boundaries, need boundaries and can evolve beautifully to meet an ever-changing future. A ‘gold membership’ or ‘gold relation’ sounds like it could be the basis of something future-proof. You keep paying for services above let’s say €40 and the operator makes sure those services are covering your needs - say (at least) by clicking on some relevant radio buttons in a survey each month. 

Will my network operator follow up my usage and come with a really attractive offer when my phone contract is up for renewal? I don’t know. I’d like to talk about it with them in the meantime. That would be shining in the right direction. 

Innovation - Heroes vs.the Wishing Well

Companies should encourage ideation to spur innovation from more people within their organization - right? 

Nja. 

(“Nja” is a wonderfully ambivalent Swedish word which is exactly what is says - “yesbutno” or “nobutyes”).  

If innovation’s all about execution then it’s about finding the game-changer (The person. The driver) not just the idea with the game-changing promise. The opposite is something I would call ‘the ‘wishing well syndrome’ - people have great ideas, submit them to an idea forum, the idea is voted to be a top idea and can even win a prize - then someone has to implement that idea, with something (ie an innovation budget, resources). If ‘someone’ isn’t available, or the right ‘someone’ then we wish we had ‘someone’ - which is why I think of the wishing well analogy. 

There is an incremental innovation that most of us can practice in our everyday activities. Ideation fora are great for that - but I’d rather talk about the innovations that transform business and disrupt other businesses. They are the only ones people will look back at as innovations - the other stuff becomes ‘development’. 

Every time I revisited game-changing success stories (and near-sucess) whether it was in ICT or aerospace, I found my heroes. Heroes are the people who grab their idea (even though it’s not perfect) and run with it into a brick wall, then try and bust their way through the wall or climb it.They are the people who you find working at their ‘baby’ after office hours (sometimes in secret). Their stubbornness is just what’s needed in the digital revolution - some of my ‘fave’ start-ups have had to change their business model three times in almost as many years. 

Today I believe more in finding and empowering the heroes (or hero teams) than finding the ideas. The heroes’ ideas have direction and energy, and like a guided missile can ‘lock on’ to a moving business target or acquire a seconary target.  

What’s Innovation?

This is a post that has been in my head, bugging me for months. When you start to think about something in the laundry room, then it is time to ventilate.

The ‘bug’ is this. The gap between what people call innovation and what actually is innovation. That could be a nice academic discussion, but the gap is glaringly obvious for big and small companies, and countries like Sweden top innovation ratings (e.g, PRO INNO) whilst in practice the number of ‘newly started’ companies is disproportionately low- and if we aren’t sure what we are talking about we are unsure of the gapfiller and we have a question of destiny on our hands.

Innovation is about taking something to market, ahead of the market and reaping the benefit (great players don’t follow the ball, they go where it’s going to be). The ‘newness’ part of innovation is in the ‘ahead of the market’. One can talk about product innovation, process innovation etc. but the commercial aspect is the proof of the pudding.  

It’s not in the idea but in the execution. innovation is possible without anything we should define as invention, and invention does not necessarily induce innovation

Everyone wants it, not everyone wants to pay for it - innovation is about managing risk.
There is an alternative - if you stick with the core business you can keep your shareholders happy this quarter, maybe the next —- until the quarter you get disrupted. The dramatic shift in power in the mobile phone vendor space is as much about non-innovation as about innovation. which brings us to…
Yesterday”s innovation is no longer innovation - patents are assets with a ‘best before’ date.
The team that has a record of possessing the ball 60% during the match does not necessarily score the next goal .

Innovation is Disruptive. If something is incremental, it probably won’t disrupt your existing business. If you won’t disrupt your own business by innovating, someone else will do the job for you.

Everyone feels the effects of innovation and most people can describe innovation from those effects. I recently heard a doctor with some innovation title explain how there were so many definitions of innovation - but he had no problem in giving examples of successful innovation (and those were examples I would have given too).

So it’s partly about strategy. Good tech, good ideas, bad strategy = no innovation.

Most importantly it’s about people. If we have the tech and the ideas but no passionate, talented driver of something they believe in then innovation is elusive. More on that in the next post.

From Unplugged to Uncluttered

The game console is great with its wireless hand controllers. But there are four cables to everything else. The remote controls for TV and media players are wireless but … multiple. In a villa you could build a false wall and stuff all your media cables in there, but that’s not an option for many. 

IKEA has gone the logical next step and cut the cable spaghetti that gathers dust under the TV. I’ve just been talking to their press and sales - and understood that the phone lines have been glowing. 

Bravo, IKEA.  

Titanic mistakes are usually policy not tech

I’ve been following TitanicVoyage on Twitter, rather eerie to get imaginary 100-year old tweets. Some have commented that the Titanic was one of the first disasters where there was an over-faith in modern technology. To a degree, I would rather say it was policy getting the better part of common sense (when it’s not policy, it’s usually ignorance, Or both). Unfortunately tech doesn’t usually cover up such fundamental flaws, though that doesn’t stop people trying to blame the particular implementation of tech after things are messed up. 

I once saw a plane crash. I’m glad to say the only things broken apart from the plane were probably some egos. It happened at an international trade show where people in general have tended to push their wares to the limits to help secure a billion-dollar contract. In this case, flying was close to the limit and a tail wind helped to push things beyond the limit. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmYpP-6r7Lo

If we put our faith in a connected world - then we can get a nasty shock when we get disconnected and there is no contingency plan (just think … in disconnected space, no-one can read your scream. And even the orchestra won’t play to calm you if they’re on Spotify). If your organization has no ‘disconnect’ contingency plan, it probably should - let’s talk, i can help. 

With good (comprehensive) policy, you can even get along with poor tech (well, for most of the time).  Even Murphy and his law is a whole lot easier to get on with. 

Life’s too short to be a tech snob

It’s wierd to see a headline about people getting upset about Instagram getting exposed to the Android rabble … and just a few days latter the service gets bought by Facebook. Now you can talk of exposure … and the outrage continues. 
http://news.yahoo.com/instagram-snobs-instahate-facebook-deal-132634005.html 

I appreciate photos that aren’t perfect but that convey heart and soul. If broadening the Instagram user base can give me more such pics then it’s OK with me.

The thing that surprises me is that it looks like people can get agitated over ‘outsiders’ having access to a service that is free - and that is barely two years old. Hej, I might find some ‘better’ pictures if I’m not afraid of the risk of someone coming with ‘junk’. 

In the UK, some people make a big deal on putting cream before the jam on their scones. Or vice-versa. And it’s pronounced ‘sconnz’. Or ‘scohhnz’ - if you get snobby about that. If you come to my house and get scones (or Savoy Buns - basically the same thing) you can have just jam with them. Or cheese if you like. With coffee, or tea. Because I would want you to enjoy that time together with me. That’s the meaning of scones. 

I spent almost four years with Android phones, it didn’t stop me making a switch to iOS … I miss some stuff, enjoy other new things and am glad I experienced something new. I was close to make a switch to Windows phone and may well do in the future … because that would be different too. From what I’ve seen, I might find something new that I like and can recommend to others. 

Life is wee too short to be too snobby. Scones? Maybe. But not for tech that’s been around for less time than a childhood… please. 

The photo is from the ’80s, I just found on a fading transparency and my cousin kindly digitized it.
It’s not filtered. I took it spontaneously (it actually looked like that). I still like it. I hope you do too.  

Mobile Worlds Convene in Barcelona

Last weekend I was still recovering from three days in Barcelona, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. They say if you’re a delegate and not hurting by the end, then you’re not doing it right. Well, I slept for 14h after two days of networking, walking, and walking so I must have been doing well or just getting older.

I started my tour at the MWC Connected House - and after three metres into the connected living room, I got a sense of deja vu. I’d seen much of it before at the show in 2006. except then it was visionary demos of how it would work over an operator network. This time it was looking at TVs and consoles  that I could get today, glued together with services in what is collectively called ‘the cloud’ 

Mobile World Congress is a meeting place for multiple worlds. Apple is a  transforming device catalyst that is never there in the flesh but radiates from another dimension.  The application-centric players had their own hall or ‘App Planet’, mixing it with device manufacturers.

Android had its own world within a world (dig the bumblebee girl coming down the chute. And the queue to the ‘Crane’ amusement machine where you could grab a cuddly green Android toy would have done Disneyland proud). This was partytime, in stark contrast to some of the smaller networking equipment stands which were in comparison rather sterile. Network equipment and the advances therein are vital - I’m talking about the contrast with the consumer-orientated parts of the show which keeps increasing. 

Big vendors like Ericsson, Huawei (network part) and Alcatel-Lucent had imnpressive spreads but these were concentrated in their own ‘invitation only’ worlds and understandably because of the strong B2B orientation. 

There is the ‘Fringe’ which co-exists with Mobile World Congress but outside its walls. Here one could hear and interact with some new and innovative companies (as you see the interaction is sometimes dense)  

All of these worlds collide convene for one week in February. They need to. As Mary Meeker say , we have a mobile industry experiencing ‘unprecendented growth’ and touching almost all other industries (why else would you find a Ford stand at MWC?) and no-one has a monopoly on how to best cope, and there is something for everyone to win.  

Telephony as we knew it has been permanently disrupted, and it takes its place alongside the voice and data services we connect to every day. 
MWC is becoming more of a mobile solar system, and trying to cover it in a few days is a huge journey. No, I shouldn’t really feel so bad about being exhausted at the end of it…

Album photos (with comments) 

Innovation and Brain Drains

 Sweden is ranked #2 in the INSEAD Global Innovation Index. At the same time, there’s been some debate in the country on ‘brain drain’ catalyzed by Astra Zeneca putting Swedish R&D centres on ice.  (sorry, Swedish, use Google Translate). 
Innovation is a broad term, I know. But most people expect a correlation  

There is a trend where some big companies tend to move from ‘Research and Development’ to ‘Search and Development’ - and Sweden has proportionally a lot of innovative small companies that pop up in search results. 
Of course, where one searches is not necessarily where one then develops (production=many jobs) and that is maybe closer to the heart of the matter. 

Compare that with the now classic ‘iPhone made in US’ debate. 

An innovation index is good, an ‘innovation gain/drain’ perspective (e.g patent exchange/expiry, where R&D gets implemented and by who) is a good complement, I think.