Isn’t it time we became more innovative about how we innovate?
Sunday morning. Sun’s out and the beach is calling but before I head off here’s a quick response to a comment left by Jamie Flinchbaugh on the The Ying Yang of Innovation.
What I am going to try and prove is the idea that the problem is not always the starting point to the solution and how a pool of solutions can be pieced together to create a new solution that solves a new and unique problem.
Idea 1. Montage and the principle of moments (Historical)
Let’s begin with some old media. 80 year old media to be precise. Back in the earlier days of there was a Soviet Union a theatrical director turned film maker by the name of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein. He is best known for a film called The Battleship Potemkin (1925). It contains the famous ”The Odessa Staircase” scene that Brian De Palma paid homage to in the 1987 film The Untouchables starring Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro and Sean Connery.
Eisenstein first tested his theories of “montage“ in Potemkin and that it is why it is one of the, if not the most important, motion pictures ever made. Film Montage is the very simple idea that if you cut to pieces of film together then you end up with a third element. A new idea that is a unique expression that is distinct from the individual piece of film that have been spliced together to create it. For example juxtaposition a woman’s face with that of a man, another woman, a letter, a horse, a dog… etc and the woman appears to be looking at something different with each new Montage.
Montage can be expressed mathematically as 1 + 1 = 3. Sounds familiar? Of course it does. It expresses exactly how we think about innovation today. ie It needs to be managed and therefore it must be measured after all you are what you measure.
Today, in a post-MTV era montage is not a revolutionary idea but back then? Wow this was something special. Before montage people watched films in pretty much the same way they watch a theatrical performance. The Camera was just another seat in the audience. Montage opened up a new way of seeing and thinking. It was one of those days the universe changed.
So how did Montage come about? Simple really. Thanks to the revolution Eisenstein and the other Soviet filmmakers had very little money to purchase new film. What they did have was reels and reels of old pre-revolution feature films that they could play with and cut up into something new. So when new film sticks finally did become available what type of film did Eisenstein and his fellow Soviet filmmakers make? You guessed it.
So this is how Montage emerged out of film “poverty” if you like to become the dominant language and syntax of the film media. Necessity being the mother of invention…
Idea 2. A recent ongoing conversation about economics off shore outsourcing.
Off shore outsourcing has become the defacto way of reducing the costs of delivering IT services here in Australia, the US and UK so how do the economics stack up?
This probably needs a book to allow me to expand and explore all the ins and outs of this trend but let’s try and express it as a Twitter flow.
- I think we need a new CRM ASAP(could be BI, ERP, Billing systems…)
- Just punched the numbers and it’ll help us grow by 150% over the next 5 yrs.
- I’ll put out an RFI. We’ll see what the experts say.
- Prices are in. Wow this stuff’s expensive. Most are coming in at $5 Mil.
- Just discovered we can get it done offshore for a $1Mil. Plus it’s a fixed price deal. How cool is that?
- We’ll get an ROI in 3 months at that price. Brilliant!
- Look it’s been months and we’re not getting anywhere.
- Did you see our competitor’s figures for the last month? Incredible numbers if we could only get this CRM in then we’d be able to give them a run for their money.
- Let’s call in some project delivery experts to manage the vendor for us.
- Hey it’s taken 2 years longer than we planned and the project delivery team made more out of it than the vendor but it’s finally here.
- Still it was fixed price and it worked out cheaper than spending $5 Mil right? Bargain!
- Hopefully we’ll be able to claw back some of that lost market share now we have the CRM up and running.
At the end of the day you are what you measure. Sure you are measuring the $4 Mil saving in IT delivery costs and yes you are measuring your market share relative to your competitors but what is missing is the executive level metric.
With out the metric that brings these disparate metrics together then you will never be able to gauge the true cost of outsourcing to your organisation.
Who knows, that million dollars saving in CAPEX could be costing you a billion dollars in lost opportunities and/or market share.
At the end of the day you discover what you choose to go looking for.
Idea 3. How the web leads you to discover new insights.
Take for example Vivek Wadhwa post The Startup Visa And Why The Xenophobes Need To Go Back Into Their Caves on TechCrunch this morning. The hook at the end of the article led me to this earlier and more detailed piece in Business Week Open Doors Wider for Skilled Immigrants. This led me to this piece India’s Next Global Export: Innovation which was embedded alongside the article in the list of most popular posts.
Called jugaad, India’s improvisational style of invention focuses on being fast and cheap—attributes just right for these times
The original article was about why the US needs to open its doors to immigrants who want to create innovative new high-tech start-ups. This of course follows up on the theme I explored inIsn’t it time for the Europeans to work smarter? Not just harder?
The secret to cities, regions and states seeking to profiting from innovation is to be the light bulb which attracts the moths who have the ideas and the skills to change the world.
The hook that led me to the next article was the statement “Immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s tech companies in recent times”.
Skilled immigrants provide one of the U.S.’s greatest strengths. They contribute to the economy, create jobs, and lead innovation.
The hook that led me to the final article by Reena Jana was simply the idea of exporting innovation.
A Hindi slang word, jugaad (pronounced “joo-gaardh”) translates to an improvisational style of innovation that’s driven by scarce resources and attention to a customer’s immediate needs, not their lifestyle wants.
Here is a uniquely Asian idea that to be successful tomorrow you don’t need to be the Light Bulb or Candle that attracts the moth. To be the innovation leader tomorrow you will send your best and your brightest overseas to work off shore with the client.
Idea 4. How the MobCon changes the way we see everything.
I have had this diagram in my bag of tricks since I started blogging 2 months ago and I have been waiting for the opportunity to bring it out of hiding.
So here it is revealed today. The idea that the MobCon changes everything we believe we know and understand about how corporations work and more importantly can be configured to make profits.
How the MobCon changes everything
A decade ago at the height of the eBusiness Revolution the focus was on using technology to do more with less. (See Today the world has rediscovered that the only ‘e’ in business that counts is expenditure ) It was also all about employing smart people, smart processes and smart technology to win and retain market share. (See eBusiness? It is just Business Process Re-Engineering on steroids)
Today we have moved well beyond the idea that making a smarter corporation is the answer to improving productivity, performance and profitability. Today we see outsourcing as the answer to the 3 management P’s. Thanks to the MobCon tomorrow the corporation will fragment into a hundred, if not a thousand or a million entities that will be gathered together on an ad-hoc as needs basis. But much more on that later at a later date.
So how do we bring all this threads and ideas together to create a new solution? We’ll it’s time for me to go down the beach and think about it while I watch the surfers catch the next big wave.
Short answer? Come back for the next post and I’ll provide you with the answer 
… and here it is: Why agility and efficiency are the new benchmarks of Innovation.
