I recently had a run in with the feed: URI scheme. As an unsuspecting user of WordPress and Safari, I didn’t realize my RSS feeds were formed using the feed: http:// format, as everything “just worked” since the Safari browser has a built-in support. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case for IE and a large number of other RSS aggregators.

A quick background search on the feed: URI shows that the scheme was published as a pre-draft in late 2003, and you can find it in the unofficial but common URI schemes list. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be any activity to officially register it with a standards body. The supporters of the feed: URI scheme indicate this format makes subscribing to the feeds easier. The opponents argue that the solution is not perfect, it goes against the Web architecture and it is basically a hack. At the end, none of these arguments matter if the client’s aggregator is not supporting the protocol. The process of subscribing to the feed results in a poor user experience, as he/she wonders what happened since not every application reports the ‘unsupported protocol’ message. Based on my late night experiment and research, this negative experience seems to be the norm rather than the exception for many unsuspecting users. It is worth it to note that I am not unfamiliar with Internet technology, and this gave me considerable trouble – the experience can only be worse for the average user.

This experience certainly highlights the importance of understanding the technology adoption for successful and enduring innovations. The technology adoption life-cycle by Moore, and the Technology Acceptance Model, and diffusion/adoption theories (Innovation Decision Process, Individual Innovativeness theory, Rate of Adoption theory, and Perceived Attributes theory) by Rogers are a few models that describe how technology adoption and dissemination occurs. Models aside, here are a few of the common factors that influence technology adoption.

- Technology maturity: for an adoption to occur, there needs to be perceived benefit and value to its adopter. This might include cost benefit, ease-of-use, or better performance, ultimately enabling its adaptor to do his/her job better. In this particular case, there is certainly a perceived benefit of using the feed: protocol, as it makes finding and subscribing to RSS feeds easier. However, it is not sufficient by itself, as in this case the ecosystem support is needed for its diffusion and adoption. Marketing books are full of case studies of superior technologies (remember Betamax?) that lost the battle to lesser rivals.

- Ecosystem support: network effect indicates that the value of the technology to a user increases with the number of total users in the network. Ecosystem for the feed: protocol would require the support of aggregators, upgrades for the deployed software and the client system to specify the usage of the protocol. Based on the difficulty I had with finding proper RSS readers, I would conclude that the ecosystem is not in place for feed: protocol. Also, note that not every web publishing tool is using feed: by default – if that were the case then there would be no argument to using feed: to support aggregators: you either do it or “no soup for you”.

- Technology champions and influencers: pretty much every marketing book discusses the importance of the technology influencers as well as champions. Another well known theory in this area is by Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, where he discusses the roles of ‘connector’, ‘maven’ and the ‘salesman’ with respect to human behavior; these are necessary foundations for starting a viral marketing campaign. In the case of the feed: protocol, it is not clear who its champions and influencers are, especially given the fact that there is no progress on pushing its registration with standards body.

- Beware of substitutes: it is always possible that something new will come along as a substitute technology, negating all your development efforts. However, sometimes when a new innovation is a close substitute for an existing technology, then the old technology could also put in the effort to retain its market position. This would also impact the diffusion of the new technology. Since the feed: protocol is not firmly entrenched, it is vulnerable to this type of takeover. Once it becomes a standard (de-facto or ratified) then it will have strength to stand up against newcomers, even if they are somewhat superior.

As an innovator, it is crucial to incorporate your assumptions around the barriers and drivers for your technology adoption and how it will disseminate within your target market. You can utilize scenario planning as a tool to model your assumptions and decisions in order to determine how to maximize your technology adoption and diffusion strategy. After all, the rate that your innovation spreads will dictate the rate that you will start to collect returns on your effort.

So, what is my conclusion on feed: URI? My search through the Internet showed that: 1) none of the sites I visited actually used the feed: URI for RSS feeds; and 2) it was a challenge to find RSS aggregators that supported the feed: protocol. With that, there is no compelling data for using the feed: URI in my blogs. I will gladly reconsider changing back when we are reaching the tipping point for its acceptance.

Have you seen Microsoft’s full page ad for Live.com? It was on The Wall Street Journal this past Friday, October 27th, 2006. I enjoyed the ad, including Bill’s photo that is used for demonstrating the slider bar. Here is their starting statement:

“Before we begin, let us state the obvious. We’re late to the game. We admit it. But instead of shrugging our shoulders and becoming a footnote in search history, we’ve decided to write a few new chapters. Because, quite frankly, it’s just the beginning. In fact, 7 million new pages are added to the Internet every day. Can you say, “Whoa”?”

This is part of the new advertising trend on making things more personal. Well, it worked! Not only I used Live.com for few of my searches that day, but I even provided feedback. Can you say “Whoa”? ☺

Technorati Tags: Microsoft

As I gave my 8-year-old son his LEGO © shopping catalog, he immediately started happily singing and flipping pages. Shortly after, the predictable “I want thats” interrupted his singing. As a family-owned enterprise for generations, LEGO products has been providing a fun, creative and safe play environment to children of all ages. As a parent, I certainly appreciate the quietness around the house during play time with LEGO blocks, when compared to more modern, “electrified” entertainment.

The LEGO Group created a culture around its products that enables their followers to design, to build and at times to destroy, almost anything that their imagination desires. As my son said, “a world without LEGOs would be a very boring place”. LEGO’s contribution to creativity is frequently acknowledged through numerous product excellence awards.

Here are the key innovative elements that contribute to LEGO’s enduring success:

- Strong sense of purpose: LEGO’s strong sense of purpose carries itself into everything they do, and clearly demonstrates itself in their brand. LEGO is an abbreviation of two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning “play well”. For them their brand is a guarantee of quality and originality; it is their promise to parents for providing a creative, imaginative, safe and fun environment for our children. These values and strong purpose drives LEGO Group to continuously look for the next innovative product line.

- Leading with their strength and partnering everywhere else: Based on their 2006 annual report and their vision for the future directions, LEGO Group is refocusing on their core business: toy production. With this decision, in 2005 they sold LEGOLAND Parks to Merlin Entertainments, while maintaining 30% of the shares. This has enabled the LEGO brand to continue while directing all management resources to focus on the stability and profitability of the company. LEGO Group is currently the world’s sixth-largest toy manufacturer.

- Strong community presence: LEGO has recognized the importance of close connection with their users. LEGO Club and LEGO BrickMaster are all part of the LEGO community for children. They also established a LEGO Ambassadors community program for the adult LEGO hobbyists to share their LEGO product knowledge and expertise with the world-wide LEGO community. We also cannot forget the LUGNET (LEGO Users Group Network), or the various activities that they pull together, such as BrickCon.

- Collaborative innovation: LEGO recognizes the need to be close to their users, and company is utilizing many venues to strengthen its ties between its customers and the company. LEGO Factory and LEGO Digital Designer provide their users with the ability to create their own designs for manufacturing, or just simply sharing with the world using the digital gallery. LEGO Inside Tour is a way for the designers, product developers and the users to get together.

- Extensive set of products and services for ages 0-99+ build on their core products and purpose: Here is some of the sampling of their products: LEGO Magazine, LEGO Factory, LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, LEGO Education, LEGO Parents, various licensed products to add their creativity boost to role playing (StarWars, Harry Potter), … The list goes on.

- Ecosystem of partners and supporting products/services: LEGO products has enabled other products and services to exists within its ecosystem. These include partnership with various institutions/companies that are experts in relevant topics. Some examples include LEGO engineering (legoengineering.com), First LEGO league International, and LEGO Serious Play. We can’t forget the various LEGO brick storage and organization products that exists specifically for LEGO blocks storage as well, such as the BOX4BLOX.

At the end, for my son what matters most is that his purpose of having a fun play time, where he can showcase and share his latest creations and ideas with others, is well met with LEGO products. In summary, LEGO Group through their innovative products have enabled my son to create and be innovative himself.

There is no doubt that the toy industry is competitive. However, if LEGO Group continues to play to its strengths and extend its collaboration with their users and their partners, they will continue to deliver some of the most innovative and well regarded products for many generations to come.

Agile development methodologies tend to generate quite a buzz. This blog was inspired from Steve Yegge’s blog, or rather his rants, regarding the Agile Methodology. You can check out his blogs at his blog site: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
    - original post: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html
    - follow on post: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/10/egomania-itself.html

For me, it is never about the tool, or the methodology, but rather how one uses, or adopts, the tool to get to the results effectively and efficiently. Though I don’t quite get Steve’s analogy in regards to the chili making, it is worth visiting the agile development methodologies and their support of the innovation cycle. In this blog, agile development methodologies refers to all existing agile and light-weight software development processes, such as extreme programming, feature driven development, etc.

Firstly, important to note that I do not believe in silver bullets, nor a one size fits all approach. It is important to take these prescribed methodologies and adapt them to fit with your culture, your organization, your market and your customers. Forcing any development methodology on your organization can potentially backfire as it will touch and stress every part of your organization’s value-chain activities. As such, the implementation should be taken seriously, address ways to incorporate everyone that will be impacted, and recognize that this can be ultimately be a trial and error process: aim-fire, aim-fire, aim-fire, …

With that said, I have adopted these agile development methodologies with my team on mid-to-large scale projects, and have experienced positive returns. I believe that the agile development methodologies support the needs of innovation efforts and innovation cycle and as such are invaluable tools IF utilized correctly. Here is a quick review of the agile development tools/processes I find most valuable:

• Customer involvement: Innovation is by nature creating something new that didn’t exist before, and commercializing it. Understanding the market and the customer is a crucial step in the innovation cycle, and agile development methodologies put the customer front-and-center.
• Incremental/iterative development: This philosophy enables a continuous feedback cycle with customers by ensuring that the team incrementally adds to the product. Again, the customer is front-and-center, and the project team is continuously enhancing its market and customer knowledge through these feedback cycles.
• Test-driven development/acceptance test: The goal is to achieve high quality product or service from the perspective of the customer. Test-driven development and acceptance testing requires the team to better understand the customer, how they would use the product, and design the system accordingly.
• Pair programming/pair design/collective code ownership: Although I personally believe pair programming is a cultural choice, pair design and collective code ownership practices are an absolute must. Innovation is a collaborative process and highly benefits from diverse opinions, experiences and backgrounds.
• Continuous integration: Although it is a common fact that there is an increased overhead of team communication and management as the team size increases (over 7-9 people) and/or more remote sites are added to the project, it is not always possible for corporations to maintain small teams that are all located within the same site. However, agile development methodologies provides tools, such as continuous integration, to enable small teams to operate semi-independently within the larger project.
• Scrum planning: At its core, Scrum assumes that the software development process is complicated and unpredictable, and provides an environment for the project team as well as the customer to work together to adjust the the project activities and priorities based on the current environment, constraints and newly available information. At its core, innovation is also unpredictable and requires a flexible and collaborative management process for its success.

In summary, agile development processes are agile and light-weight. If utilized properly, they will effectively and efficiently support your innovation efforts.

Here are the 10 major causes of leadership that was listed by Napoleon Hill in 1937.

1. Inability to organize details: the successful leader must be able to organize and manage all details, but also be able to delegate and assign as needed;
2. Unwillingness to render humble service: the successful leader must be willing to perform any sort of labor/task that she would ask another to do;
3. Expectation of pay for what they know: the world pays for the results and the leaders ability to influence and lead others;
4. Fear of competition from others: successful leader’s job is to get others to perform and deliver better results than otherwise was possible without her coaching and mentoring;
5. Lack of imagination: ability to solve problems and overcome difficulties is a key requirement for a leader;
6. Selfishness: succesful leaders give the credit to their group, for recognition of their hardwork as well as for motivation;
7. Intemperance: everything must be in moderation;
8. Disloyalty: one must be loyal to her group, her superiors and associates;
9. Emphasis of the “authority” of leadership: successful leader influences, encourages and motivates her group;
10. Emphasis of title: successful leader does not need a title, as she has her group’s respect and support;

Napoleon Hill outlined the following key factors of leadership in his 1937 book. It is the most complete list I have seen to date. Here they are:

1. Unwavering courage that results from ones knowledge of self, her skills/experiences/capabilities, and her group;
   
2. Self-control as one that can’t control herself can’t control others;
3. Keen sense of justice and fairness to retain the respect of her group;
4. Definiteness of decision as without it providing focus and leadership to others is not possible;
5. Definiteness of plans as a successful leader must plan her work and work her plan;
6. Habit of doing more than what is required and willing to do more than what she requires of her followers;
7. Pleasing personality;
8. Sympathy and understanding and the ability to relate to her group;
9. Mastery of detail and ability to operate at whatever the level the situation requires;
10. Willingness to assume full responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of her followers;
11. Cooperation as cooperative effort is required to achieve results;