Let there be [more] light...

Innovation is not just a fancy term for entrepreneurs to make more money with new ideas and products. Innovation has real value in helping improve the lives of people and our society as a whole. This is an area that I focused on in my book, Living in the Innovation Age (TekNirvana, 2011). One fascinating example of this was how students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the solar bottle bulb – a simple, yet effective innovation that costs less than $3 and only requires a one-liter soda bottle filled with a mixture of purified water and bleach to provide approximately 55 watts of daylight. This innovation solves a challenge faced in numerous poorer communities with cramped settlements of small metal roofed houses that do not get any sunlight in their homes.

Businessweek recently covered the story of an innovator who has created one more way that the poor can get clean and cheap light. Better yet, this one doesn't require daylight, which means it can provide light even after sunset. Kerosene lamps used in many developing countries in addition to posing fire hazards and injurious to health are also a major expense for many of the world’s estimated 1.5 billion families without electricity. Poor households typically spend at least 10 percent of their income on kerosene, as much as $36 billion a year worldwide, according to the World Bank. British industrial designer, Martin Riddiford, has figured out a way to use gravity instead of kerosene. He has created GravityLight - a pineapple-size lamp powered by a 25-pound weight that falls about six feet in a half-hour and shines slightly brighter than most kerosene lamps. The catch - once the weight reaches bottom, it must be manually lifted to repeat the process since GravityLight ingeniously uses human power stored as potential energy. GravityLight is slated to have its first field tests this summer in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Once Riddiford’s team works out the final kinks, the basic model is expected to retail for about $5. Not bad at all.

The Bottom Line
Innovation can help proactively improve the quality of life for those less fortunate. Even simple innovations such as enabling members of poorer communities to get daylight in their homes or providing a safer, cleaner, and cheaper alternative to kerosene lamps can substantially improve the lives of those who live in under developed parts of the world.

Steve Jobs' Biggest Mistakes Exemplify the "Innovation Journey"

Principle #2 in my recent book, Living in the Innovation Age, states that innovation is a journey rather than a destination. I provide numerous examples of how successful innovators battled through a series of failures to ultimately succeed. The list includes individuals such as James Dyson (vacuum cleaners) and companies such as Google (social media). A recent HBR blog titled "Five of Steve Jobs's Biggest Mistakes" by Peter Sims provides yet another example of a highly successful innovator, Steve Jobs, who too battled epic failures of his own along his long and illustrious innovation journey.

Check out the complete blog posting here.

Now this is a "Reverse Innovation" that makes sense!

I bet this short story will bring a smile to your face. If not, I owe you another story :). There was a Japanese soap manufacturing company in which the soap blocks were made, then wrapped in wrapping paper automatically on the assembly conveyor belt, and finally packed in cartons. Typical Japanese automation at its best. Unfortunately, there were times when the wrapping machine created an empty packet without a soap inside. To rectify this problem the Japanese company bought an x-ray scanner from the US for $60,000 to check each packet on the assembly line and find the empty ones.

Not surprisingly, the empty packet challenge was not unique to the Japanese company. Nirma, a premier Indian soap manufacturer, faced a similar problem. Their solution was just a bit different and way cheaper. They simply bought a big fan (about $60) and placed it at the end of the assembly line. Problem solved: the empty wrappers without soap just blew away!

Now that's what I call a "Reverse Innovation" that makes sense to adopt worldwide! :)

HBR - Nine Rules for Stifling Innovation

We all talk about how to create a fertile culture to spur and encourage innovation.  In her recent blog posting, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has done a nice job of identifying nine ways to completely derail any innovation efforts whatsoever. They're actually quite funny, although if you are facing any of these where you work then you have my full sympathy...

The nine rules she identifies are summarized (and slightly paraphrased) below:

1. Be suspicious of any new idea from below. After all, if the idea were any good, we at the top would have thought of it already.
2. Invoke history. Find a precedent in a an earlier idea that didn't work, so it won't work this time either.
3. Keep people really busy. If they don't have free time, they won't try to think as much.
4. In the name of excellence, encourage cut-throat competition. Get groups to critique and challenge each other's proposals, preferably in public forums, and then declare winters and losers.
5. Stress predictability above all. Count everything that can be counted, and do it as often as possible.
6. Confine discussion of strategies and plans to a small circle of trusted advisors and make sudden, big announcements. 
7. Act as though punishing failure motivates success. That'll stop people from trying new things.
8. Blame all problems on the incompetent people below.
9. Keep reminding everyone that the top people already know everything there is to know about this business.

You can read the complete blog posting here.

Book Review - The Wide Lens

Why do many innovations fail? It is a question that baffles the best of us and keeps many a corporate executive awake at night. This anxiety is not unwarranted. Despite having a brilliant idea based on true customer insight and needs implemented with flawless execution, many innovations simply fail to meet the expectations set of them by their creators and by the market for which they were created. The Wide Lens by Ron Adner is a must read to gain insight into why that might be the case. In his thought provoking book, Adner explains how most innovation initiatives focus solely on managing the "execution" risk i.e. ensuring that a valid customer need exists, vetting the idea, and ensuring appropriate leadership and implementation. Adner explains that this "narrow lens" view is a root cause of why these innovators are blind sighted by failure. A "wide lens" view reveals two other major risks that need to be mitigated for success:

1. Co-innovation Risk - This risk represents the extent to which the successful commercialization of an innovation depends on the successful commercialization of other innovations. 
2. Adoption Chain Risk - This risk represents the extent to which partners and others will need to adopt the innovation before the end customer can reap the full benefit of the value proposition.

Adner illustrates these risks very clearly in explaining how Michelin’s big innovation in tires - the PAX System, which was designed to run for 125 miles after a blowout - failed to take off, despite the backing of major automakers, because the company failed to foresee the need for a robust network of service centers to repair these run-flat tires before going to market. The inability to service PAX tires and the resulting additional expenses incurred by consumers who had to buy new tires led to mass consumer backlash and even lawsuits that ultimately turned automakers off of these truly innovative tires. The PAX system falied because Michelin had failed to mitigate the adoption chain risk.

As Adner explains, co-innovation and adoption chain risks lurk in the blind spots of traditional strategy. They remain dormant as long as an innovation follows established lines (such as Michelin's successful introduction of Radial tires in the 1946). However, as soon as an innovation goes beyond being incremental in nature (such as the PAX tires), ecosystem challenges arise, which can only be addressed with a wide angle lens.

History is replete with examples of innovation failures that occurred despite brilliant execution. Nokia spent millions to be first to market with a 3G handset, but failed to profit because critical partners in its ecosystem did not complete their innovations in time. By the time customized video streaming, location based services, and automated payment systems were finally ready, so was the competition. Phillips suffered a similar fate as it tried to introduce HDTVs in the 1980s. And we are observing a similar dynamic with 3D TVs today. All of these are examples of failures stemming from the lack of "co-innovations" that need to happen for consumers to be able to realize the full benefits of an innovation's value proposition.

The Michelin story above illustrated an innovation's failure due to non adoption by a critical player in the ecosystem. Pfizer’s suffered a similar disastrous fate with its miraculous inhalable insulin, Exubera, which was approved by the FDA, hailed by Wall Street analysts, and launched with huge fanfare. The $2.8 billion write-off, widely acknowledged as one of the biggest failures in the history of the pharmaceutical industry, can be traced directly to endocrinologists not embracing the requirement of lung function testing imposed by the FDA.

Contrast the above examples of failure with two innovations that have been successful. Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) is an example of a consortium of movie studios coming together in a unique way to overcome the cost of adopting digital film within the theater value chain. In essence, they subsidized and shared the cost of capital investment in smaller theater chains to ensure that digital film would enjoy the broad distribution and availability critical to its growth. It was a direct result of this innovation that director James Cameron was able to regale us with his 2009 blockbuster movie "Avatar". Amazon's success in the e-reader market with its Kindle product is also an example where Amazon overcame publisher reluctance by subsidizing their participation in addition to  robust digital rights management both of which Sony was unable to accomplish and therefore failed despite having a technically superior e-reader.

Finally, Adner provides insight into a topic that is near and dear to my heart - "The First Mover Advantage." In my recent book, Living in the Innovation Age, I talk about the fallacy of thinking that "only the first to market" reaps the benefits of innovation. Rather, there are many cases of second, third, and subsequent movers being successful where the first mover failed. Adner sheds further light on this matter by presenting a framework that one can use to determine whether they should even try to be the "first mover". Per this framework, it only pays to be the first mover if your innovation has very little dependency on the ecosystem. The more complex your innovation becomes and the more it depends on co-innovations and adoption, the less beneficial it is to be a first mover (i.e. the risk of moving first goes up significantly). In such cases, it is much more prudent to be a smart mover as Amazon was with its Kindle and Apple was with its iPod.

The Bottom Line

I highly recommend The Wide Lens to anyone involved in innovation strategies, commercialization and new business development. Its unique approach to analyzing that factors that contribute to the success and failure of complex innovations and the supporting tools (value blueprints, leadership prism, first mover matrix, supply chain reconfiguration levers, and minimum value footprint) are sure to, as Adner summarizes in his last chapter, "multiply your odds of success."