Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University had the idea and the insight to see how a Nintendo Wii remote can be turn any surface into a multi-touch screen. It is a very cool demo. You can download the software from Johnny Chung Lee’s page.

Below is the YouTube video. It is awesome to see such out of the box thinking using off-the-shelf materials, and repurposing a game remote for more professional use.

Technorati Tags: Nintendo, Wiimote, Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote

Mongkhon BoPhit,
originally uploaded by binnur gul.

Well… I know I have been quiet, but I had a good excuse. Between visiting Thailand, recovering from jet lag, and the usual craziness of the holiday season, I haven’t been able to do anything more than just think about blogging. Honestly, I have been thinking about really cool topics to blog about, too!

Though it was work related, I was able to see some wonderful places around Bangkok. Turns out my visit coincided with the King’s 80th birthday celebration. As such, I got to experience and witness first hand the love the Thai people have for their King.

Thai people are kind and thoughtful. I was stuck in traffic for over 2 hours (mostly snoozing at the back of the car), and barely heard any loud horns. That level of patience is quite rare in the world.

I also noticed the newspapers frequently cover stories relating to global warming and impacts to the country and the economy. Perhaps this is due to the accelerated rate of globalization that is experienced in the region. Thailand seems to be divided on the topic as well. While the manufacturers in Thailand see globalization as a threat, public view reflects otherwise. However, they are concerned with the impact of globalization to the environment.

You can see the photos from my trip on Flickr.

Happy Holidays!

Technorati Tags: Thailand, globalization

The article, “Tough CEOs Often Most Successful, A Study Finds“, was published in the WSJ.com last week. The research conducted by three University of Chicago business-school professors highlights that the ‘hard’ skills count more than ’soft’ skills when it comes to success.

In this research, hard skills refers to traits that “get things done”: persistence, efficiency, analytical thinking and setting high standards. Soft skills, on the other hand, include teamwork, creativity, persuasion, listening skills, enthusiasm and treating people with respect.

I have been chewing on these findings, and frankly I find the results conflict with my experience. I have found that innovation and technology management revolves around people: whether it is about motivating your team or pushing the diffusion/adoption of your new innovation and technology. Yes, to be successful one does need the hard skills mentioned here. However, I don’t believe it is possible to be successful nor establish a sustainable success without the soft skills, which are downplayed in the study.

Here are some highlights from my other postings on innovation and the need for soft skills.

• Innovation requires both sides of your brain — You can’t just be creative, but also need to be analytical to successfully exploit the opportunity. Think out of the box, look for connections even seemingly unrelated, be open to and seek new experiences and ideas, be observative and keenly inquisitive. Know that the future is unwritten and full of opportunities. Be positive, hopeful and optimistic, regardless of the current situation. But, while dreaming big, start small, simple and with focus. Iteratively build on your previous successes, and create your future one step at a time.
• Strategy and its execution requires ownership at all levels — This means everyone, from the CEO on down. Executive leadership must embed strategy in the organization: from its people, to its processes, to its culture and values. Any strategy, however brilliant, will fail unless people are emotionally committed to its success. In order to achieve unwavering commitment, people need to be involved in the strategy process early, they need to understand and believe in the strategy, and they need to feel included. The organization’s culture, values, incentives, people, structure and processes all contribute to how the existing internal environment will support its strategy.
• Innovation is change — In this case, change applies to all aspect of innovation process, not just the final output. Innovation is ambiguous and requires failures to achieve success. Innovation is also a change in behavior of customers, in how they work and produce something. Yet, market adoption and acceptance is a complex process where one rarely has the power to control or dictate.
• Innovation starts with people — Innovations do not occur by themselves: they are generated and sustained through the efforts of individuals and people. Creativity, commitment and persistence drives the innovation process. How well an organization cultivates and nurtures the creativity, knowledge creation and invention process plays into their innovation capability. Yet, it is important to note that these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for successful innovation; but they do make up the foundation that innovations are built upon.
• Your organizational culture is linked to your firm’s success — Various studies and surveys indicate the link between organizational culture and firm’s success. Denison Consulting’s 2006 study links high performance in key areas of the organizational culture (adaptability, consistency, mission and involvement) to long-term financial performance and short-term sales growth.

Innovation and top line growth is a concern for today’s CEOs. Yet at the same time, many will admit that only a small percentage of their innovative ideas, products and technologies are getting commercialized. Maybe this should not come as such a surprise, given that these CEOs are focusing on hard skills. Maybe even the successful CEOs are missing the crucial aspect of what it takes to innovate and drive innovation in their firms, limiting their true potential. Perhaps a follow on study should be made which compares/contrasts the successful and innovative CEOs in areas of character traits and skills. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Tough CEOs Often Most Successful, innovation, soft and hard skills

“We cannot direct the wind,
but we can adjust the sails”
— Contemporary Western Proverb

Your firm is a living organism, a complex system. As with all living systems, it self-maintains, self-renews and evolves. The firms that recognize themselves as a living organism, a learning organization are aware of their environment, their place in the ecosystem and the shifts that are occurring. This awareness and sensitivity to internal and external changes gives them the flexibility to adjust and adapt.

“Adapt or die” is a common phrase that highlights the importance of survival for firms. As firms adapt and evolve, the organization determines and selects the traits necessary for the survival and through its culture continuously reinforces it. This continuous process of adaptation and evolution further ensures the success and survival of the successive generation.

The life-cycle refers to our knowledge and generalization of living systems, the principles and laws that govern life from birth till death. As businesses, we also go through our life-cycle stages. As always, these are guidelines and not definite steps. As with my son that skipped the crawling stage and went to straight to walking, firms can also skip stages. Here are the common stages of a business life-cycle:

• Seed: Similar to a plant life-cycle, the seed stage represents the germination of a compelling concept and the push for finding the first set of customers to validate the idea. The firm’s main challenge is market acceptance, and managing resources and time effectively.
• Startup: This stage is characterized as customer acceptance, where the focus shifts to obtaining new customers and delivering on the product’s promise. Usually at this stage, the firm has enough customers, are able to keep them satisfied and the focus is shifting from survival to managing revenues and expenses. The firms’ main challenge is to have checks and balances to ensure they are on track, and managing the burn rate. This is where you don’t want to run out of money…
• Growth: Congratulations, you have proven the idea, showed the market validity and are now acquiring many more new customers. The growth stage is a milestone that marks the validation of the idea, which also means increased competition. If the firm is focused on growth, it will strive for operational excellence, proper scaling of the product and the business, and will look at ways to expand into new businesses, markets and customers.
• Decline: This stage is usually marked by the reduced revenue and profitability. At this stage, there may be a crisis that calls for action and renewal. Or, the organization might be the frog in a pot of cold water, slowly being boiled, not realizing the situation they are in. All focus is now on managing negative cash flow and costs.
• Exit: The exit stage is all about closing the doors whether due to bankruptcy, selling the business, acquisition by someone, … This process mainly includes proper valuation of the company. There maybe psychological and financial impact that should be managed.

Just like a child growing up, each stage is a change, requiring different nurturing and focus areas for its survival. Yet, basics are needed for survival at every stage: basic management skills, basic financial knowhow, basic marketing competencies. In addition, there are also other factors to consider:

• Clarity on what you are and what you are not. This is important for your internal decision making, for your customers and your brand image. This continuous adjustment, explicit commitment and mutual adjustment from everyone is needed to achieve results.
• Know how you compete. Many new firms excel because they stress customer service and flexibility over what established firms can offer. This coupled with focus on high-quality products, flexibility in responding to customer needs and product customization gives them a boost in the market over competition.
• Innovate while managing your core business. It is too easy to put all your eggs in one basket or over commit yourself. Innovation and technology strategies correlated with growth, but need to be managed.
• Understand other life-cycles in motion, such as those of your customers. Where they are in their adoption curve drives their purchasing behavior and risk profile.

Technorati Tags: business life-cycle, business survival skills

Strategic planning is all about the future: where you are going over the next 3+ years, how you plan to get there and how you know when you arrive to your destination. However, your success at your strategic planning all depends on how well you know yourself, and your starting point.

Here are few key areas where you should build a good foundation and understanding in order to achieve success at your strategic plans. It is a good starting point, but not all inclusive. Please add to this list with your experience and insights.

Know yourself
This is all about self-examination and being introspective. It is about recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, understanding your distinctive competencies and realizing your competitive advantage. This process requires you to be true to yourself about who you are, so you can chart a course for who you want to become.

Know your customer
You want to understand your customer better than your customer understands herself. What keeps them up at night; what they don’t foresee today, but will need tomorrow; what motivates them to buy and turns them off; what makes them successful; why their customers prefer them to others; how are they profitable … This is where you are wishing for a mind-meld approach to getting to know your customer. In the end, you want to become a specialist in your customer’s businesses. It will help you understand their articulated needs, but also help you innovate for the unarticulated opportunities.

Know your competitor
You need to understand your competitors and your industry in order to play the game. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors? Why are your customers choosing your competitors’ products? What is the layout of the industry structure; how is the ecosystem playing out; what are the trends; … These will help you to identify new opportunities and potential threats.

Know your data
What do you need to insure a sound decision making process? What key performance indicators do you need to benchmark and watch for? Always remember the saying: garbage in - garbage out.

Apply differentiation
There is a subtle yet important difference between being different and differentiating yourself. You don’t just want to be different. In everything you do, you want to offer significant value over your competitors. You want that value to shine through your brand image where your customers, current and future, can clearly recognize it.

Create your safe haven
We are living in a global world where competition is everywhere and customer loyalty is in demand more than ever. Recognize the challenge, and figure out how to create high entry barriers to protect yourself using your strengths. Aside from patents, look to build exceptional customer relationships, alliances and partnerships.

Know your resources
There are always more things we want to do than would fit into the time and resources available. But, that is no excuse to spread your resources too thin. Multi-tasking, frequent context switching will kill the productivity of your team. Instead, prioritize and stay flexible.

Be agile and adapt
In a way, everything is in a constant flux and all things change. So, be alert, stay in control and watch for shifts in the marketplace and in your customers. Recognize the changes, be agile and adapt accordingly.

Minimize your dependence
No doubt we can’t do it all ourselves and we need help. At the same time, recognize your dependencies and work to minimize them. This could be anything from your one customer, a product, partnerships or alliances.

Technorati Tags: strategic planning process, strategic plans, know yourself

“Good and bad ways to go wrong” is David Weinberger’s article in KMWorld, and it is a definite good read.

David advises us not to be wrong in two or more ways, as that can be disastrous: “you can be arrogant or you can be ignorant, but you better not be both.”

In his article, he talks about the good and bad ways of generalizing, the need for making and learning from mistakes (though he indicates not every mistake is a learning experience), and the importance of good mistakes.

I hope you enjoy the article.

Technorati Tags: KMWorld, David Weinberger, good and bad ways to go wrong

Stop, don’t dismiss or shrug away that little nagging, semi-irritating feeling you get after an interaction with someone in your organization. Ask yourself, “is this a common occurrence?” If the answer is yes, it is time to look at your organization and its culture.

What, how and why your organization does the things it does and how it behaves is a reflection of your organization’s culture. It is all about how you as a collective see the world, interact with the world and what rules you instinctively follow.

Take a step back and think about your organization’s culture. You might use one or more of the following characteristics to define it. Note some are more positive than others.

• innovative and high risk tolerance
• good attention to details
• focuses on results
• values people and team work
• aggressive with take no prisoners attitude
• creative and out-of-the-box thinking
• tolerance for ambiguity
• entrepreneurship focused
• customer centric
• collaborative, open and values trust
• empowered, self-managed, adaptive and agile
• quality work is a given and not an after thought
• need to know basis only; i.e. limited knowledge sharing
• does enough, but reluctant to go further
• ownership and accountability
• not invented here
• penny wise, pound foolish or otherwise known as frugal
• do first, think later or otherwise known as just do it
• …

Yes, the list can go on and on and on… And here is why should you care.

• Your organizational culture is linked to your firms success: Various studies and surveys indicating the link between organizational culture and firm’s success. Denison Consulting’ 2006 study links high performance in key areas of the organizational culture (adaptability, consistency, mission and involvement) to long-term financial performance and short-term sales growth.

  What do you think? Can you establish cause-and-effect links between your culture and other performance indicators such as your current customer satisfaction or employee motivation scores?

• Your culture can attract and retain talent: Individuals differ in what motivates them, what degree of social and community connections they need at work, amount of pay and benefits, as well as level of innovation, entrepreneurship, empowerment and risk taking in the company. Great companies not only create excitement and camaraderie for their purpose, but also build a culture that attracts the type of individuals that they need.

  Think about it… Are you attracting the type of talent you need to be successful in your business? What is preventing you from creating a company culture where you attract best of the best?

• Your strategy and culture are joined at the hip: Lets face it, your culture has a big influence on how your company does things. This influence certainly extends to your strategy. Just think about different generic strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, fast follower, … Each of these require a different set of cultural characteristics to be successful. Along the same lines, for any change in your strategy, you will need to identify the cultural behaviors that need to be changed and managed.
• Your culture can deliver 1+1=3: When you have a high performing organization, you can truly achieve 1+1=3! By focusing on ownership, accountability, action and results you improve your product and services using the same or fewer resources. By relying on their values and leaders, successful companies can decentralize authority to succeed in times where there is a high degree of ambiguity.

  As leaders, our every action sends a message to our people: dusty action item lists, reoccurring discussions with no specific decisions or owners, late start to meetings, runaway meetings, … Just a reminder, the buck stops with us.

• Your culture defines your ethical behavior: The world is transparent and becoming more transparent everyday. Honesty, integrity and ethical behavior is no longer a nice to have, but a must to demonstrate. Sure, you can put in place as many controls, checkpoints and policies as you want to ensure ethical behavior. But, to be successful, this ethics DNA must be embedded into your culture.

  The real test comes when doing the right thing is extremely hard: schedule slippage, customers’ personal data is compromised, lower than expected revenue results, … When that happens, and they will, how do you work as an organization: conduct open, yet difficult communications, take ownership for the responsibility, ensure joint accountability, …?

Finally, here are some of the signs that hints your culture needs work:

• second guessing/revising of decisions;
• execution issues and problems achieving results;
• inability to deal with or tolerate ambiguity;
• excessive workforce turnover;
• living in the past rather than facing to the present;
• loss of confidence in the leadership, direction and purpose;
• excessive politics and bureaucracy;
• firefighting mentality that rewards heroics;
• inability to innovate and risk adverse behavior;
• difficulty attracting and retaining talent;
• lack of respect;

Technorati Tags: organizational culture, why organizational culture important

The McKinsey Quarterly recently had a good discussion on the topic of innovation management (might require free membership to access the content). As Gary Hamel summarizes, the discussion is about the changes that are occurring with management practices and organizational designs.

How do you build organizations that are as nimble as change itself? How do you mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee, every day? How do you create organizations that are highly engaging places to work in? And these challenges simply can’t be met without reinventing our 100-year-old management model.

Managing creatives, knowledge workers, freelancers, …, is not an easy process. It requires a careful balancing of freedom to explore and directing energies in a productive way that ultimately profits the firm and society. From Lowell Bryan:

These thinking-intensive people are increasingly self-directed. In fact, they’re directed as much by their peers as they are by supervisors. The management challenge is akin to urban planning. The art of it is that you must enable people to make thousands and thousands of individual decisions about how to live and work, but you have to create the infrastructure to make it easy for them to do so.

Insight from Gary Hamel:

The outlines of the 21st-century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. In terms of the future of management, we’re at the beginning of what will be a fairly long journey. You can see some of the pieces starting to come together, but we’re not there yet.

And finally, Gary Hamel’s questions to the CEOs that are serious about innovation, which should be asked and compared at all levels of the organization:

• “How have you been trained as a business innovator? What investment has the company made in teaching you how to innovate?”
• “If you have a new idea, how much bureaucracy do you have to go through to get a small increment of experimental capital? How long is it going to take you to get 20 percent of your time and $5,000 to test your idea? Is that a matter of months or is it very easy for that to happen?”
• “Are you actually being measured on your innovation performance or your team’s innovation? Does it influence your compensation?”
• “As you look at the management processes in your company, do they tend to help you work as an innovator or get in the way?”

Enjoy the article.

Technorati Tags: innovative management, Gary Hamel, Lowell Bryan, McKinsey

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker

Innovation and risk goes hand in hand. Many initial attempts at trying something new fails. However, through those failures we learn, adopt and improve. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Part of establishing an innovation culture is about emphasizing importance of taking risks, trying new things and learning from each failure that comes with the territory. However, to be agile and be successful, you need to be quick at evaluating new ideas, and either moving them through the innovation funnel or killing them.

Tools and methods for performing quick validation of your ideas are the focus of this blog. Here, quick means anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, and at most a couple of weeks.

One page project summary and/or press release

Start with refining and focusing your idea. A one page project summary and/or an imaginary press release are a great way to highlight your idea’s benefits and value. Your product pitch should include:

• Description of the product and service;
• Description of what customer problem it solves;
• Key customer benefits and features;
• Identification of key performance vectors;
• Positioning statement and value proposition;
• Indication of the logical customers and markets;
• Estimates of market potential, profitability and price;
• Fanciful customer comments and raves;

Your goal is to generate interest and excitement with your sponsors and potential customers. Any reaction less than an interest is a good indication of either needing to rework your product pitch or your idea.

Build your idea pre-screening criteria

Evaluate each of your ideas against your pre-screening criteria. The goal is to identify and ditch poor ideas early in the innovation life cycle process. You should evaluate all ideas based on business and technical criteria, such as below.

• How well the idea fits within the firm: vision, mission, objectives, core competencies, resources, …
• How well is the idea protected: IP, any barriers to entry to discourage competition, …
• What is the competitor landscape and do they have an alternative solution;
• What is the impact of the idea on existing technology and resources;
• What are the profit goals and metrics, what is the ROI;
• What is the market size and growth;

As a note of caution, you should monitor your pass/fail idea metrics here. Too many passes, i.e. ideas moving forward in the innovation funnel, could highlight a poor pre-screening criteria. Along the same lines, too many fails, ideas dismissed, could indicate you are dismissing potentially good ideas and being too conservative.

Prototyping and Fast Prototyping

Prototyping is a great way to explore the idea on hands-on way.

• Provides quick validation of the concept, and identification of risks and uncertainties;
• Gives insights into new competencies to be developed and cultural changes that need to occur;
• Enables a tangible way to explore the problem space with others;
• Becomes a vehicle for demonstrating your idea, possible product design and feature set with your customers;

Killer Innovations’ Phil McKinney takes this a step further and introduces the concept of fast prototypes: hours and at most days (vs. weeks). Please remember, these fast prototypes are not functional, as the goal is to get early feedback on the idea.

Tom Kelley in the The Art of Innovation has a great section on the value of prototyping and its application in real-life stories. He summarizes prototyping clearly:

“Prototyping is problem solving. It’s a culture and a language. You can prototype just about anything – a new product or service, or a special promotion. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal.

Not wasting time.”

Get in the head of your customer

Focus on what problems you are solving with your product and how it benefits your customers. Does it save time or money, enable new revenue stream or improve the quality of their existing solution? Describe your ideal customer, and where possible engage in exploration and validation activities with them. You can explore through in-depth reviews and open-ended questions, or just observe them in their own environment doing day-to-day activities. These observations can help understand in what ways your idea would benefit the customer, as well as identify any unarticulated needs and problems.

If real-life exploration is not possible, create a storyboard of your typical customer through brainstorming, associations and role-playing. As crazy as this sounds, it will give you a sense of whom you are targeting: what they are worried about, what they care about and what they would pay for. In return, this becomes a platform for you to test your ideas: Would Susie pay extra for that feature?.

Co-Design with your customers

Involve your customers in your innovation process. Simple UI mock-ups, web-conference discussions on their impressions and insights can clarify any potential issues in advance. You can also rely on your customers to help make the needed tradeoffs in product functionality.

Connect with the experts: inside & outside the company

In identifying and understanding possibilities, risks and uncertainties, tap into the experts. Just like opinion polls, these experts could provide insights and observations based on their experiences and knowledge. They can also help craft scenarios and perform scenario analysis.

Note of caution, the inputs from the experts are their best guestimation and judgment based on what is known. To reduce the bias and improve the results you can utilize tools such as the Delphi method.

Final thoughts…

• Teams tagged for validation need to have the time to focus on this activity. If full time availability is not an option, enable the employees to spend 15-30% of their working time on innovative projects and research.
• Establish a cross-functional team. Technology is an enabler, and sole focus on technology will not ensure product success in the market.
• Nothing is certain in life, except death. So, if after all the validation a failure occurs (and it will occur) in another stage, that is part of life and the learning process.

Technorati Tags: idea pre-screening, quick idea validation

Today is the Blog Action Day and this year’s topic is the environment. As technology managers, we are in a position of influence to reduce our impact on the environment. How we develop our innovations and technologies have just as much impact on the environment as the type of innovation and technologies we are working on. Here are few ideas on how we can incorporate more environmentally friendly decisions into our day-to-day technology management activities.

• Design decisions: environmentally friendly material selections, architectures that specifically focus on less power usage, equipment selection that is energy efficient;
• Project management methodologies: reduce paper usage for reports, etc., invest in collaborative technologies to reduce travel as well as enable individuals to work from home;
• Development and testing tools: virtualization tools to help reduce the number of needed servers for development and testing;
• Programs and promotions: recycle older products and parts, reduce packaging waste, use greener materials for sales brochures;

Yes, going green and the environment requires a shift in our thinking. However, it is not an either/or type of question. Going green will improve your customer relationships, and ultimately save money for your firm and your customers.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle is the familiar 3Rs focused on producing less waste by the environmentally aware consumers. As a family, we include a 4th R: Refuse: refuse to clutter the environment with unnecessary waste.

Apply the 4R philosophy (Reduce, Reuse, Refuse, Recycle) into your projects. Remember, every little step counts.

Technorati Tags: blog action day, blogactionday