Bruce MacVarish Notes

The Exploding Internet

New Scientist has a number of visualizations that illustrate the internet explosion since 2002.   Here's an example of internet users by country in 2002 and then in 2008.

versus...

Look at the growth in China and India... and still at a relatively low penetration of each country's population.   I think it would be interesting to see the same comparison based on mobile internet use. 

Just imagine what this mapping looks like in 10 years with a 90%+ penetration of the US, 50%+ penetration of China/India and an explosion of new web, voice, social and mobile innovations over that time.

Guiding Principles of Apple Innovation

If you had to summarize the guiding principles of Apple's Design and Innovation Strategy what would they be and how might you embrace them to drive new product designs and create new revenue streams from new markets?  

With the help of Chris Morrison, Bruce Nussbaum, Owen Linzmayer, Umair Haque and Daniel Turner, I've summarized a draft list of 11 guiding principles that appear to be important to Apple's innovation strategy.  

1. Don't follow your Customers; Lead them

Apple tends to place less emphasis on evidence than on intuition, under the theory that consumers can’t tell you they want a product or function if they can’t yet envision it. Instead, they need to be shown a superior alternative. Apple sees itself as being in business to create those revolutionary alternatives.

2. Temper Engineering with Art

Most companies that try to operate like Apple fail. Often that’s because of who they tap to spearhead the creative process. High-tech devices are built by engineers — and often designed by them, too. Unfortunately, engineers tend to design products that they would want to use, which explains why a typical device is jam-packed with a hopelessly confusing array of features.

3. Focus on the Few to sell to the Many

Instead of trying to satisfy every fringe taste or market niche — other companies that make laptops, for instance, often sell dozens of models at any given time — Apple focuses on just a few products in each category.

4. Be your own toughest Critic

Ultimately, Apple succeeds because it not only beats its competitors but also strives each year to beat itself. As management guru Peter Drucker noted long ago, “Your being the one who makes your products, process, or service obsolete is the only way to prevent your competitor from doing so.” In the process of trying to outdo itself, Apple often leaves its competition in the dust.

5. Clear your mind and "Think Different"

Design is a “fundamental soul,” Jobs says, "that expresses itself through an end result — the product."

What is Apple’s fundamental soul? The company’s motto, “Think Different,” provides a hint. Apple maintains an introspective, self-contained operating style that is capable of confounding competitors and shaking up entire industries.

Internally, Apple barely acknowledges competition. It’s the company’s ability to think differently about itself that keeps Apple at the head of the pack.

6. Build your Innovation infrastructure and Fortress

Apple has flattened sprawling organizational hierarchies. Companies with extended chains of authority tend to plod when it’s time to act. Most of the decisions at Apple come from Jobs and his immediate deputies.  Rank-and-file employees are often given clear-cut directives and close supervision. Proven talent gets a freer hand, regardless of job title.

7. Cultivate your "Creatives" - the Innovation Elite

Apple reliably churns out the industrial equivalents of da Vinci paintings and Hokusai woodcuts. This has little to do with how the company treats employees in general. Rather, it stems from the meticulous care and feeding provided to a specific group: the Creatives. Apple’s segmented, stratified organizational structure — which coddles its most valuable, productive employees — is one of the company’s most formidable assets

8. Institutionalize your "Creatives"

Today, Steve Jobs seems to have learned how to focus his aggressive, take-no-prisoners personality shrewdly and to great effect. While he’s still an essential part of Apple’s success, the company has also institutionalized many of Jobs’ values to such an extent that Apple is now far less dependent on him.

9. Innovation is not Invention

Innovation is creating something new of value. In the business world, that means creating something new of value that generates revenue and profits. Disruptive innovations that change the game are often business model innovations that integrate five or six or eight different types of innovation.

Apple brought together a legal/business innovation (getting the heads of music studios to agree on 99 cent downloads), a software innovation (the iTunes store) and a great industrial design--the iPod. That's what makes for powerful disruptive innovation.

10. Organize Something

What happens when we think of using new approaches to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? You get the iPod, the iPhone, the iTablet(?).  One of the deepest secrets hidden at the heart of 21st century economics: markets, networks, and communities can organize economic activities and drive disruptive innovations.  As an extension of the principle "Innovation is not Invention", using markets, networks and communities to re-organize inefficient industry models while empowering end users has resulted in a number of Apple innovative business models and designs. 

11. MRD + ERD + URD

At Apple there are three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document, and a user-experience requirements document. 

Marketing is what people want; Engineering is what we can do; User Experience is how people like to do things.

These three documents are reviewed by a committee of executives, and if approved, the design group would get a budget, and a team leader would be assigned.  At that point, the team works on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hope to meet the marketing, engineering, and user-experience needs--figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details, and the like.   

Thoughts?  What else would you add or what would you change?

Sources / Links:

Four Principles of Apple's Success (and Failure) - Chris Morrison

How to Innovate Like Apple - Chris Morrison

Is Apple Innovative or Just Adaptive? - Bruce Nussbaum

BusinessWeek Inside Innovation

Apple Confidential 2.0 - Owen Linzmayer

MRD + ERD + URD = Secret of Apple Design

The Secret of Apple Design - Daniel Turner

The Live Web of Interaction Signals for Business Users

Over the next 3 years, the ability to interact, analyze and filter our stream of interaction activities based on a live or real-time model will redefine our personal, work and mobile experiences with the web.  

Let's look at these two categories (i) the Live Web of real-time streams and (ii) Interaction Signals separately:

The Live Web of Real-time Streams for Business Users

The real-time theme continues to grow and it will increasingly define a new class of web.   While it has taken some time to get established, it is not a new idea.   With a hat tip to Stuart Henshall, I've found it very helpful to read the early insights and writings of David Gelernter  .    

 

Professor Gelernter is a Computer Science Professor at Yale and his research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence.  As early as the 80's, Professor Gelernter envisioned managing information based on a time paradigm and through a decentralized data storage system.  He is credited with setting the foundation for today's time based activity stream and cloud computing models so prevalent in Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Google apps and a number of start ups.

In this 2001 interview, I like how Professor Gelernter describes the impact of moving from a space ( or file) based computing model to a time ( or activity stream) based model:

When I look at where software is heading and what it is really doing, ... what's happening and what will happen with the emergence of a new generation of information-management systems, and as we discard Windows and NT ... these systems that are 1960s, 1970s systems on which we rely today, we'll see a transition similar to what happened during the 19th century, when people's sense of space suddenly changed.

 

If you compare the world of 1800 to the world of 1900, people's sense of space was tremendously limited and local and restricted in 1800. If you look at a New England village of the time, you can see this dramatically, everything is on site, a small cluster of houses, in which everything that needs to be done is done, and fields beyond, and beyond the fields a forest.

People traveled to some extent, but they didn't travel often, most people rarely traveled at all. The picture of space outside people's own local space was exceptionally fuzzy. Today, our picture of time is equally fuzzy; we have an idea of our local time and what happened today and yesterday, and what's going to happen next week, what happened the last few weeks, but outside of this, our view of time is as restricted and local as people's view of space was around 1800. If you look at what happened in the 19th century as transportation became available, cheap and ubiquitous, all of a sudden people developed a sense of space beyond their own local spaces, and the world changed dramatically.

What's going to happen, what software will do over the next few years has already started to happen and will accelerate... our software will be time-based, rather than space-based.

 

We'll deal with streams of information rather than chaotic file systems that are based on 1940s idea of desks and file cabinets. The transition to a software world where we have a stream with a past, present and future is a transition to a world in which people have a much more acute sense of time outside their own local week, or month in which they now have a clear idea of what was different, why February of 1997 was different from February of 1994, which most people today don't have a clear picture of.

With the introduction of activity streams, a business user, a department, an enterprise will have a more acute sense of time and how things have changed over time.  They will have a clearer idea of what is happening now... live... in real-time... with the people, topics and activities most important to them... and what is different between this week vs. last,  this month vs. last, this year vs. last ... across people, projects, customers, product lines, businesses and markets.   This is an incredibly powerful shift.  

 

Interaction Signals for Business Users

The shift to the live web is underway in our personal (consumer) lives and will ... as with other consumer web innovations ... be adopted and integrated within our work (enterprise) lives.    If we describe the enterprise live web as a flow or activity stream of information tied to our live transactions, conversations and relationships ... then a number of new, live, time-based signals or metrics will be needed to help us optimize how we allocate time and attention in our daily interactions.

I think there are 4 classes of signals or metrics that are emerging to help business users understand how their interactions - and by interactions, I mean their transactions, conversations and relationships inside and outside the enterprise - are changing over time and will improve their productivity by embracing the Live Web. They include:

Interaction Activity Signals track the number, rate of change and scale of interaction activities for a business user over time.  Examples include:

• number of posts, emails, meetings, conversations, orders, tweets, cold calls over time
• count of views, votes, comment, responses, feedback, re-tweets over time
• active, inactive subscribers / followers over time
• total inbound/outbound connections, interactions, links over time
• number of unique interactions over time

Interaction Role Signals track the involvement, collaboration, leadership and consistency of roles that business users play through interactions over time.  Examples include:

• pattern and pace of interactions over time
• degree of replication and emulation during interactions over time
• variability in emphasis, rhythm and timing of interactions over time
• degree of openness to new ideas and influence over time
• inbound-to-outbound interaction ratio over time
• positive-to-negative interaction ratio over time

Interaction Influence Signals track the diversity, reach and influence of interaction activities for a business user over time.  Examples include:

• diversity of business user social graph in the enterprise over time
• conversation to broadcast ratio over time
• conversation reach across the enterprise over time
• degree of reference / Link over time
• diversity of reference / Link over time
• influence of your followers over time
• influence of your referencers over time
• new conversation generation over time

Interaction Results Signals track individual business user, team or enterprise deliverables resulting from interaction activity over time.  Examples include:

• new transactions (orders, contracts, demos, investment, etc. ) over time
• conversation-to-conversion ratio over time
• relationship-to-conversion ratio over time
• correlation ratios between interaction activity, role, influence and results metrics over time

As the Live Web of activity streams and interaction signals emerge in the enterprise, one could say we're about to step out of the quaint New England village of the 1800's as described by Professor Gelernter.   

The enterprise is shifting from a space/file software model to a time/stream based software model where the real-time interactions of business users have a past, a present and a future.   

New value for business users - and revenue for enterprises - will come from aggregating, analyzing and filtering these interaction signals enabled by the Live Web.

Collaborative Capacity

Tammy Erickson on the Wikinomics blog highlights research on best performing collaborative teams and identifies 10 key attributes:

"... more and more of the work that differentiates our businesses today depends on divergent or creative activities. Our challenge is one of creating environments that encourage people to become engaged, to take initiative, invest discretionary effort in a wide variety of collaborative activities, and, as a result, develop new approaches and ideas, provide extraordinary customer service, or ramp productivity. Think of this challenge as one of setting the stage, creating an environment that engages players from multiple constituencies. It is a “pull” rather than “push” approach to achieving business results.

Does your organization have the processes and practices, the leadership skills and the relationships among participants that you’ll need? Do you have the capacity to collaborate?

Over the last several years, our research has identified the characteristics of organizations that are successful at collaborative activity. With extensive data from teams from around the world, we identified ten factors that are highly correlated with successful collaboration:

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
   
2. Trust-based relationships
   
3. Prevalence of networking opportunities
   
4. Collaborative hiring, development, and promotion practices
   
5. Organizational philosophy supporting “community of adults”
   
6. Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
   
7. Executive role models for collaboration
   
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
   
9. Well-defined individual roles and responsibilities
   
10. Important, challenging tasks 

An interesting list, and one that most would agree offers important guidance.  The question that remains for me relates to measuring and analyzing collaborative capacity of an individual or team.   

How would you change these attributes into a set of metrics to track and improve someone's collaborative capacity?