Every year I launch a start-up venture.  They often fail.  In fact, here are a couple of my favourite failures:

ArtPension would have given people a tax-efficient “cheque book” for buying things they love like fine art, wine and classic cars in their pension fund. It was great timing.  People had fallen out of love with equities generally and pensions specifically following a series of market crashes and mis-selling scandals.  I was launch-ready with regulatory approval, an operational platform and a marketing plan.  Then the UK government changed the regulations, making the business impossible.

365 Memory sold the cheapest digital memory anywhere in the UK.  We were the price leader for three reasons. Firstly, we had great supplier relationships in Taiwan.  Secondly we were ferociously tax efficient.  Being Jersey-based, the business didn’t need to charge VAT. Thirdly, we had very little money tied up in stock because of our drop-ship, factory direct model. Unfortunately we died because of failed Jersey-based logistics and dispersed management.

Failure goals and the “Dyson myth”

There’s a toxic myth about entrepreneurship.  You could call it the “Dyson mythology”.  It goes like this.

James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, gambled everything he had on his business.   In five years, he produced 5,126 failed prototypes, mortgaged everything and was on the verge of bankruptcy.  Salvation came with a chance contact from a small Japanese company.   The resulting  vacuum cleaner went on to sell more than £2 billion worldwide.

James Dyson is a hero.  He fought hard, broke the rules, never gave up, risked everything and succeeded hugely.   History is shaped by people like that.  But the great are the enemy of the good.  The problem is that people like James Dyson make it seem like all-or-nothing risk is what entrepreneurship is all about.

Learning to dream again… safely

I have a personal goal to lose 20% of what I earn every year until I fail to succeed at losing it.  Having a failure goal, takes away the fear of not succeeding.

Research on entrepreneurship says that on average one in ten start-ups succeeds.  So giving up on first failure isn’t a great way to do it.  Oddly, that’s often the mistake that corporate innovators make too.

That specific 20% is important too.  It means that I don’t bet the farm and can walk away from failures with my home, happiness and marriage intact.

Why every employee should be a spare-time entrepreneur

There are three reasons why every employee should be a spare-time entrepreneur.  What’s more, enlightened companies should encourage it.  Here’s why:

1. Learning to dream

Doing a start-up reminds you how to dream, imagine, create and invent.  There is no company in the world that doesn’t value those qualities.  But too often, process-centric corporate cultures don’t make it feel that way.  Quite simply, being an entrepreneur makes you a better employee.

2. Better than an MBA

Start-ups teach you priceless lessons about how to get things done and about how to manage risk, plan and deliver.  They give you the ultimate personal responsibility.

3. Better than a pension

Many people in employment are racing their first coronary to a subsistence retirement and a newspaper round at 80 years old.  The risk-return arithmetic on start-ups is a lot better than on pensions ; so long as you don’t bet everything on a single throw.

In the blood?

Some people say that being an entrepreneur is in the blood.  Possibly, I fall into that category since I set up my first (successful) organization when I was 19.  But actually, I think it’s more likely to be a question of choice.

So this week, I’m really excited to have set up a new company…more on that soon.

Related posts:

1. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
2. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential
3. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it

My iPad arrived two days ago turning me into a four-year old boy on Xmas eve. Yesterday, a queue of cooing colleagues snaked around my desk. Everyone wants one.

So two days into ownership, this is what I think it means.

1. It WON’T replace laptops … Not yet anyway.

iPad is a device for consuming media, not for creating it.  It’s hideous to type on.  But lovely to browse with.

It’s much nicer to swipe and tap with your finger than to point and click with a mouse.  So whether tablets get physical keyboards or laptops get natural user interfaces, this will change device design.

2. It’s ALREADY the device I want to use for casual surfing.

How did I ever manage without something that’s always on, weighs nothing and doesn’t burn my thighs?  Enough said.

3. It WILL change the way I consume newspapers and magazines.

WIRED magazine on iPad is highly readable and wow-inducing.  It pushes the boundary of what’s magazine and what’s interactive media and for the first time ever I would RATHER have a magazine in electronic than print format.

Talking of formats, I’d much rather read the Financial Times on my little iPad than wrestle with a print broadsheet on the train.

Coincidently, my WIRED magazine subscription got delivered on the same day as my iPad.  I still haven’t opened the paper version.

4. It MIGHT change the way I buy books.

Integrated search, in-line dictionaries and the ability to carry half the British Library in my hand are nice.

But I wrestle with this.  You see, my Mother was a teacher.  My maternal grandfather was a Cambridge academic.  I’m co-author of a book (here … thank you for asking).  Books are in my blood; almost religiously.  I love the novelty and utility of eBooks.  But they don’t take me back to when I was six years old and my Mum read poems to me.  There’s almost something sacrilegious about them.

Maybe that’s just generational change-resistance.

5. It WILL make me pay more for media.

Hello iPad.  Goodbye free content?

I know several entrepreneurs whose attempts to charge for online content succeeded about as well as King Canute’s wave management.  iPad apps might possible turn the tide against free content because the experience is so good.

Pricing models for iPad media content are a little Darwinian right now.  They range from The Times £9.99 per month subscription to Men’s Health’s $2.99  per issue to Wired’s free content.  Which pricing model proves the fittest for the iPad environment remains to be seen.  But I personally think it will be disruptive of the free content model.

In summary

Is the iPad useful?  Definitely.  Is it compelling?  Hmm … kind of.  Is it a disruptive innovation?  Possibly.  Is it the end of the laptop?  No.

Now, repeat after me:

I must not blog about Apple.  I must not blog about Apple. I must not blog about Apple …

Related posts:

1. How to time product launches perfectly
2. What the home entertainment industry that never was can teach us about Google and Facebook
3. How to have disruptive ideas

But I thought this was such a great presentation about why “online” continues to be a disruptive technology.

It encompasses beautifully why putting “eLipstick” on the pig of a fragmented legacy organisation doesn’t meet customers’ service and experience expectations.

Related posts:

1. Contact evasion and how to avoid it
2. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
3. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron

“Irrational passion is the key change agent of our economy.” – Seth Godin

Right brain frameworks like this one aren’t the key to creating transformative innovation, but they help to polish and explain the idea.

Seven key innovation questions

There are the seven questions to ask about any new innovation:

1. Is the market attractive?
2. What customer needs does the innovation meet?
3. What’s the proposition?
4. How can we lock out competitors?
5. Is it do-able?
6. Can it be profitable?
7. Is it strategic?

Is the market attractive?

“I have determined that there is no market for talking pictures” – Thomas Edison, 1926.

The market is a set of external, immutable forces acting on your idea.  You need to think about:

• What’s the size and value of the market?
• What share is realistically available?
• Is the market changing, growing, shrinking or consolidating?
• Are there any unprecedented changes or discontinuities like new legislation, new entrants, disruptive technology or other tipping points that could transform the market in your favour?

What customer needs does the innovation meet?

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, – Henry Ford.

But ultimately, what Henry Ford’s customers needed was to get places faster.  The Model-T met a strong, unvoiced customer need.  Ask yourself:

• Are my customer needs clearly defined, strong and unmet?
• Are there unvoiced customer needs?
• What’s it worth to the customer to meet those needs?

What’s the proposition?

A proposition describes the sum total of benefits that a customer gets from a product or service.  For me, one of the ultimate proposition statements of all time was Apple’s “one thousand songs in your pocket” tagline for the first iPod.  To develop a great proposition, ask:

• Is the proposition clearly defined?
• Does it meet strong customer needs?
• Is it different from what competitors offer?
• Is it interesting?

Can I lock out competitors?

It’s not enough to be a first mover if you have powerful competitors that can overtake you.  To lock-out competitors, ask:

• Is the innovation patentable?  Or is there any other intellectual property that can’t be substituted?
• Can I use or build a powerful brand?
• Are there any scale economies and can I get big fast enough to benefit from them?
• Do I have an insight, knowledge or skill that’s rare and significant to the innovation?
• Can I build exclusive partnerships?

Is it do-able?

Imagination often exceeds capability.  See my post on premature genius.  To avoid premature genius, think about:

• Who needs to be asked what to understand if it can be done?
• Are there precedents that suggest it’s feasible?
• Can it be done at reasonable cost?

Can it be profitable?

As Gary Hamel observed, “growth is the scoreboard, not the game”.  Profitability is the outcome of innovation.  But, when it comes to drawing up forecasts and valuations ask:

• What businesses are comparable?  How much do they make and what are they worth?
• How risky are the cost and revenue streams?
• How many revenue streams does the innovation generate?  Generally, the more revenue streams, the less risky is the idea.

Is it strategic?

If you’re working in a big company, you’ll need to answer this too.  Strategy is either brutally simple (if it makes money, it’s a fit) or inscrutably complex.   Many strategy academics, take a resource based view, which means answering:

• What core competency would the venture deploy?
• How does it fit or leverage brand or distribution strengths?
• Does it use proprietary processes, skills and know-how?

Be a storyteller, not an analyst

“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure” -Einstein

Use this framework to shape and develop your thinking but not to constrain it.  When you communicate the idea, use the facts and analysis.  But don’t be limited by them.

Be a storyteller, not an analyst.

Related posts:

1. How service teams can inspire product innovation
2. How to have disruptive ideas
3. How to time product launches perfectly

As gadgets get smaller, Britain has the largest plug in the world.  A problem, brought to life in this video:

The traditional British plug was invented in 1946.  Why did it take 64 years to invent a better one?  More importantly, why didn’t any of the rest of us have that idea?

Listen to what nobody says

I think the reason is that it’s so hard to find unvoiced customer needs.  No British customer has ever said to a product designer “I’d like a more portable electric plug.”  Not even to the inventor.  Instead the designer, Min Kyu-Choi, had an experience; he scratched his new laptop on its plug.

Their are so many ways to trigger the inductive leaps that create innovative new products.  But for me, the best one is to have direct experiences.  The easy part of that is that we all of us have experiences continuously.  When my alarm goes off, that’s a customer experience.  When I get on the train, it’s a customer experience.  Buying my morning coffee – an experience.  They all come bundled up with  satisfaction and frustration.

The hard part is noticing the response rather than accepting the “how things are-ness” of it.  One of the best ways is to keep a record of what happens – mark up every experience on a timeline and plot your emotional response.

Not taking problems for granted is the first step towards great product design.

Related posts:

1. Is iPad the end of free content?
2. How service teams can inspire product innovation
3. Design for experience, not features

“By means of this remarkable instrument, a man can have the Italian opera, the Federal Congress, and his favorite preacher laid on his own house.” (New York Times, 22nd March 1876, see here)

Facebook overtakes Google, the social web wins

Almost exactly 134 years later (13th March 2010 to be precise) Facebook became the most visited website in the USA, pulling in more visitors than Google.  Last week’s data from Hitwise (an online competitive intelligence agency) shows a quiet, creeping discontinuity:

The graph says  that once we used the web mostly for information; now we’re primarily social users.  So what does that have to do with the New York Times and its prediction of telephone-based home entertainment?

What disruptive technology is really for

It takes twenty years to work out what any disruptive new technology is for.  Disruptive technology has a lifecycle. It’s invented.  A thousand flowers bloom as entrepreneurs and visionaries vie to make their fortunes.  Some businesses fail.  Others succeed.  After twenty years or so the dust clears on a new consensus about what that particular technology was for.

The year 1881 was a good one for French inventor Clément Ader.  At the Paris International Electrical Exhibition, he demonstrated how his théâtrophone system would open up the vast opportunity of a French home entertainment system based on a stereo telephone line.

He wasn’t the only person thinking that way.   In 1893 Telefon Hírmondó was launched by a colleague of Alexander Bell to 60 subscribers.  It’s opening message declared:

“We greet the inhabitants of Budapest. We greet them in an unusual way from which telephone broadcasting all over the world will start its victorious journey.”

By 1907, its subscriber base was 15,000 and it only stopped broadcasting with the Second World War.

Just as we eventually found out what the telephone is really for, last week’s Hitwise data shows that we’re discovering what the web is mostly for.  If the web really is primarily social, that  has big implications for online proposition development.

Things we may need to do more of include:

1. Design based on the needs of communities, not just individuals.
2. Emphasising social functionality as much as content and transactions.
3. Building content that can travel on social networks, rather than driving traffic to your own site.

Related posts:

1. New utility customer service challenges
2. Is iPad the end of free content?
3. 10 management truths for the web age

The SEO money pit

Here’s a personal example.  Yesterday, I paid $299 dollars to Yahoo for a little, insignificant Directory listing for Opine Consulting (which is here, in case you’re curious).

Submitting to the big directories is part of basic belt and braces Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  However, $299 is a lot of money for an obscure little raindrop of a link in the big, wide ocean of the internet.  For the keyword “innovation” my site is competing against 112 million other pages on Google.  For ‘marketing’, I’m up against half-a-billion alternatives.  For ‘service’ there are just a shade under 10 billion pages.

SEO is at the sharp-end of the global attention famine.  In the SEO arms race, only the biggest juggernauts (and of course the channel owners) can be long-run winners.    The internet is moving towards a globally perfect market and back-links, directory submissions, paid search, and article marketing are money-pits.

Innovation is worth more than cash

Thinking about the SEO arms race, is making me get very clear about these principles:

1. Imagination is worth more than cash.  A resonant idea that people pick up on, creates more exposure than £££s of traditional marketing expenditure.
2. Innovation has no monopolies.  If anything, it’s inverse to size as many large organisations are bound by conservatism and process.  That’s an incendiary thought because of what it means for competition.
3. Innovation can’t be faked.  It comes out of fun, interest and obsession.  Like any right-brain process it’s unpredictable and isn’t confined to 9-5 thinking.  People doing what they love will win in this particular game.

I can guarantee that I won’t be spending much more on SEO.  Watch this space…

Related posts:

1. How service teams can inspire product innovation
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential

Customer insight arms race

For £10,000 a report, anybody can buy as much customer surveying, benchmarking, customer ethnography, usability, psychodemographic segmentation, social network monitoring and integrated listening capability as they want.  There are two problems with driving innovation from this kind of insight:

1. Lots of organisations have deep pockets, so the pursuit of a commercial edge through third party solutions becomes an arms race rather than a competitive advantage.
2. These approaches are a step removed from reality.  They’re constructs.   They are to real customer experience what television is to reality or what air conditioning is to climate.

Contact centre Cassandras

By contrast, service teams are the most under-exploited resource for driving product and service innovation out of customer insight.  If this isn’t self-evident, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who spends the day in constant contact with customers?
• Who has most emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst?

Contact centre staff know exactly what customers love and hate.  They experience it viscerally every day.  But, Cassandra-like, their voice is often overlooked in strategic marketing and new product innovation.  Why?  The reasons boil down to a)  narrow service management focus on cost and operations, b) silo’s between service management and marketing c) service staff without the skills, systems or incentives to make a strategic difference and d) physical and cultural remoteness from the Board.  Visually, the problem looks like this:

Service management barriers to product innovation

The most powerful customer insight you’ll ever have?

All of these barriers can be broken down fairly easily, and for far less cost than many customer insight approaches.  Here are four key ways of doing it:

1. Get service agents to listen and probe for what customers are saying about competitors, products and features.  Make sure that this kind of insight can be captured and reported in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
2. Track service performance against brand values, and not just operational targets.
3. Conduct regular reviews of raw customer service feedback, searching for strategic product and service insight.
4. Give the Board regular, visceral, experience of the customer.  Board members should sit in on the call centre at least every month and should regularly listen to representative recordings of customer contact.

Related posts:

1. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
2. How to have disruptive ideas
3. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential

Wise companies will develop product and service innovation that meet the physical, social and identity needs of overweight consumers.  They’ll do so not only for profit, but also because it’s the right thing to do.

Bigger, faster, more

In the UK breast reduction surgery for men was the fastest growing procedure in 2009, up 80%, see here.   Ninety-three million Americans are obese, a number that will climb to 120 million within five years.  In England, nearly a quarter of adults is obese (see NHS statistics here).

To really understand the trend, watch the obesity map below:

The unstoppable momentum of size

Obesity is hardwired into society, socially reinforced and maintained by the physical infrastructure of our cities.  Consider the following:

• Society is “obesogenic” in the sense that people are addicted to fast food and sedentary lifestyles promoted by television and cars.
• Our physical infrastructure locks in these patterns. Urban sprawl and zoned planning force people into more car use and less walking.
• Obesity is social.  Having an obese spouse raises the risk of becoming obese by 37%. Having an obese friend increases the risk by 137% (See  here for data).
• 95% to 98% of diets fail over five years (see here).

A few billion spent on government health promotion is not going to reverse all this.  Instead, obesity will become simply a part of “normal”.

Size acceptance

Lisa Marie Garbo (a descendent of Greta) is the queen of size acceptance in California.  Her nightclub, Club Bounce (see here) invites patrons to petition President Obama for overweight rights and anti-hate legislation.   Last year, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) celebrated its fortieth birthday.   NAAFA says “our thin obsessed society believes that fat people are at fault for their size and it is politically correct to stigmatize and ridicule them.”

Embrace customer need, don’t punish it

Obesity will change the financial arithmetic of annuities, life assurance and medical cover.  Transport services will bear extra costs of carriage space and fuel.  Other products and services will innovate to adapt to society’s changing weight and shape.

CasualMale is a good example of niche innovation.  With over 500 clothing and fashion retail outlets worldwide, its brand is focussed on “big and tall men” and its clothes feature comfort innovations like neck, waist and jacket “relaxers”.

In contrast, moves to “tax” overweight customers are very likely to meet with public backlash.  We think history will judge these measures to be punitive and discriminatory.

Instead, the size acceptance movement and the huge growth of obesity will drive demand for  products and service innovations that are attuned to the physical, social and psychological needs of big customers.

In financial services, this could mean new, innovative underwriting models and annuity benefits written for the specific needs and risks of obese customers.  Or it could mean niche branding that empathises with and celebrates obese customers.

Above all, remember that in the UK, this “niche” is a quarter of adults and growing fast.

Related posts:

1. How service teams can inspire product innovation
2. What the home entertainment industry that never was can teach us about Google and Facebook
3. Bad customer service is dead

The problem with product development

The iPhone is one of the least usable phones for sending text and email but gets the highest consumer satisfaction of any smartphone. Why?  It’s product design that’s based around experience not features.

Small usability, big love

An average iPhone user makes almost three times more errors per text message than someone using a hard-key QWERTY phone (see
usercentric.com).  But googling the terms “iPhone love” gets about 336 million results and the iPhone has higher customer satisfaction than any other smartphone (see JDPower consumer research, here
).

Experience not features

It’s not just less usable.  If anything, the iPhone has less features than many competitors.  Mobile email, voicemail and mobile web browsing are hardly new, you can’t forward a text or voicemail and the camera is positively primitive.

But it does have Apple’s trademark obsession about experience.  This isn’t just in the fluidity of the interface or the resolved simplicity of the case.  If you buy one in an Apple store it will be “served” to you with a flourish like Michelin-starred food.

Product developers spend lots of time benchmarking product features and prioritising them using techniques like conjoint analysis.  What we need to do more of is design, customer ethnography and journey mapping to build experiences out of our products.

Related posts:

1. How to time product launches perfectly
2. How to have disruptive ideas
3. How service teams can inspire product innovation