Today, the topic is Business Model Innovation – White Space and You.

In this episode, I am interviewing Mark Johnson, the author of a new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal.

Mark is chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India, which he cofounded with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. He has consulted to Global 1000 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries—including health care, aerospace/defense, enterprise IT, energy, automotive, and consumer packaged goods—and has advised Singapore’s government on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mark’s most recent work has focused on helping companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business model innovation.

Find copies of his new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, at your favorite online or brick and mortar book store. The official website for the book is www.seizingthewhitespace.com.

Key Concepts Covered on White Space Innovation

We cover several of the key concepts, including a deep dive into the Customer Value Proposition (CVP) and the “job to be done” mindset that Innosight typically uses in their work, which is part of an overall trend in innovation management that focuses on the outcomes that customers are searching for, rather than the products, services, or solutions-based approach, which is rapidly becoming a dated and dangerous approach.

We also discuss several aspects of innovation maturity – both from the standpoint of innovation practices, product innovation vs. process innovation vs. white space or business model innovation, as well as maturity in skillsets and personnel to execute on a variety of innovation initiatives.

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Mark Johnson – Business Model Innovation – White Space and You

Reference Materials for White Space Innovation

For reference, two of the figures or graphics referenced from the book, can be found below.

The Four-Box Business Innovation Model

And the Stages of Business Model Implementation

Closing Review

Whether you are just getting started with innovation management, or are already a seasoned innovator, I would readily recommend Seizing the White Space as a worthy addition to your innovation toolkit. Business Model Innovation may be the latest flavor of innovation to get air time, but not without good reason. By re-thinking the fundamentals of at least SOME aspect of your innovation portfolio, to make way for White Space Innovation opportunities, you will be in far better shape than your “head in the sand” competitors.

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for White Space discovery?

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617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within your organization

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Quick – what is Henry Ford known for? Most of you are likely thinking the automobile and/or the moving assembly line. But, how many of you thought “charcoal briquettes”.  That’s right, Henry Ford invented charcoal briquettes. When Ford noticed the amount of scrap wood and saw dust that came at the end of his car assembly line, his creative mind and business acumen could not tolerate the waste. He wondered if there wasn’t a market for the waste. Voila – he created the charcoal briquette, which he eventually sold off to a man by the name of Kingsford (name ring any BBQ bells?)

Today, I read an article that made me recall this part of Ford’s life. Artist Matthew Mazzotta is turning waste into both art and fuel. In this case the waste is the ultimate form of waste – animal waste – known to many as “poop.” Apparently Mazzotta is not the first one to think this way – tough he is the most artistically creative. There are farms, and entire communities in the Netherlands that are powered from the waste of herds of cows, horses and chickens, and projects underway in several countries to turn many forms of farm waste into energy. Brilliant.

While the article made me think about Ford’s briquettes, it also made me think about innovation management as a process, and how far too many companies fail to use it. Eureka moments  like those experienced by Ford and Mazzotta can be instigated in your organization. You just need to discipline yourself and your co-workers to think outside the box systematically, to look at something like waste as an opportunity, not a cost of doing business. Its not serendipity. It is disciplilne, a way of thinking about and viewing different situations. Tools such as SCAMPER and Morph Matrix, for example help to expose these opportunities. These tools, among others, as well, as related team building and process disciplines are the focus of IAI’s innovation workshops.

So again, I ask you, look around, what waste do you have? Is it crap – or an untapped resource? Let us show you how to change the way you look at that. Will have you saying – holy crap that’s innovation.

Last Saturday Dan Keldsen and I attended the New Hampshire State Tournament for Destination ImagiNation (DI).  I love and am inspired by this organization, but I have to say I do not like their name. There is far more than “imagination” going on. This is not just dreaming and imagining – its real problem solving and engineering. (Note the picture to the right – taken at the event.) What is most amazing is that the people behind all this “imagination,” problem solving and engineering are children, affectionately known as “DI kids”, in grades K – 5 (and beyond in some cases).

Its inspiring to watch the kids solve complex problems, building any number of contraptions and solutions using amazing levels of perseverance, ingenuity and problem solving. My favorite part was watching teams set up their “solutions” only to find something had gone wrong. The agility with which they came up with “fixes” was inspiring to say the least.

But, while inspiring, it is also frustrating.

Why? Because you cannot help but wonder why this level of creative problem solving, ingenuity, and innovation (right – not imagination) is lacking in many business settings.

I have to admit that I attended the NH tournament for a selfish reason.

The DI program is the foundation and genesis of the DICor corporate innovation training that I took, and that IAI is certified to provide.

I was there to promote the corporate innovation workshop to the parents of these brilliant innovators. I am always amazed how adults, business people, even those that are raising brilliant innovators, are often hesitant to embrace innovation – especially being trained to be a better innovator.

Before I took the DiCOR worshop, I too was a skeptic.

Innovation – that is a skill set you are either born with or not. Right?

You cannot really practice it and fine tune the talents you have – the way you would a musical instrument, a sport, or a foreign language.

Boy was I wrong.

We have had some great successes in training other adults on how to be as “smart as a 5th grader.”

The workshop includes many hands-on challenges. I have yet to see an adult team beat the records held by the DI crowd (of kids), but they come close.  More importantly, the “adult challenges” set in business issues always clearly illustrate that the application of some simple tools and a mental discipline can radically improve practical creative problem solving.

So come on – I challenge you and your co-workers. It’s the year 2010… Are you smarter than a 5th grader?  The innovation workshop is guaranteed to improve your problem solving skills and meeting productivity by a minimum of 25% – what have you got to lose except maybe a bit of pride?

(BTW – an average of 20% of the cost of the Innovation Workshop is given to DI to support the kids program of the non-profit organization – any way you look at it, it’s win-win for the current generation *and* the next generation)

Take the Innovation Workshop Challenge…
and Join Over 200 Companies and 5,000 Business Professionals that Have Radically Increased Their Innovation Capabilities.

As computing power increases, “mashable” and findable data/content grows, GPS shrinks, partnerships and individual innovation explore, and it all comes together in the form of a handheld device like the iPhone, Blackberry, and myriad Androids being rolled out on a weekly basis, we continue to see the rise of applications that only a few years ago seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Ladies and Gentleman, it’s the mobile content economy – and it’s going to impact your business one way or another. Isn’t it time get prepared?

The latest indication of this is Siri – Your Mobile Virtual Assistant.

Smartphones are not new, speech recognition is not new, but the concentration of power/content/data and location with contextual, “geographically smart” speech recognition, opens up interesting possibilities.

View the demo below (or download the app to your iPhone or Blackberry), before going on…

Just as with the business models of travel sites such as Orbitz, or Kayak, and similar meta-aggregators or “meta businesses” – new business model innovation is afoot!

It turns out that being *the* aggregation point for information, even given away for “free” (as far as the user is concerned at least), is quite the healthy business model.

The trick is to:

• Do it well = user experience and usability
• Do it with completeness = solid data/content partners
• Make it idiot proof = semantically smart speech recognition
• And not to presume that as the, in this case, mobile app provider, you have to create and own it all yourself.

Siri uses licensed data from allmenus.com, Google Maps, City Search, Taxi Magic, MovieTickets.com, OpenTable, eventful, Gayot, livekick, WeatherBug, BooRah, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo! Local, yelp, FlightStats, Vlingo and TrueKnowledge, and licenses the speech recognition engine of Nuance, and combines it into a self-contained application that is, as they say, a “person-centric app.”

It’s essentially the mobile generation of the “Single Point of Access” or Portal that had been all the rage in the 90s – it’s the “Personal Portal” – hyper-localized, and personalized, as it always should have been.

Of course in testing the application, there seem to be some data gaps, and some taxonomy work that needs to be done (hint: a wrap = burrito here in Boston, and vice-versa), but all told, it’s a sign of the mobile times to come.

Where to from here?

How are YOU approaching digital content strategies for a mobile world?

Is  your business found in the content/data aggregators for your market?

Is your business “socially connected” to applications like FourSquare and Gowalla

In short, are you leaving money on the table for your competitors to run off with? It’s early days, but disruptive innovation wins go to those who start the trend first, unless you’re an extremely fast follower.

Weigh in with your thoughts and concerns – and while we don’t do app development, at Information Architected, “there’s a consulting service for that!” (Need digital content strategy for your enterprise? Get in touch.)

What struck me first about these two lists was the degree of difference. Only 15 companies made each list; meaning each list had 35 different named companies. How could that be? Well its perspective, and I call this out because it is analogous to what we teach as the importance of corporate culture to an innovation practice. How does your company view innovation? What is considered innovative? What “gets the bosses attention?” These issues  dramatically effect the way innovation is executed and valued.  In the case of Fast there seems to be greater emphasis (though not exclusively) on disruptive innovation. There is a bit more focus on entrepreneurial start-ups, smaller companies doing new and different things in a market. This list uniquely includes companies such as First Solar, Spotify, Alidi Sud, Glam Media and Quantcast.

BusinessWeek appears to be (again not exclusively) more focused on established larger corporations that are doing incremental innovation to strengthen market dominance.  This list uniquely includes companies such as Toyota, Nintendo, Sony, Nokia, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase and Ford.

What struck me second were the 15 companies that made both lists  (i.e., Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Walmart, Amazon, GE, BMW, Disney, Cisco, Intel, Facebook and Nike). Of these, all but 2 are US-based firms. Even amongst the companies that did not make both lists, there is a respectable percentage of US-based firms. Despite much press of late to the contrary, the US, at least short-term,  based on these two lists, is not lagging in innovation.

The third thing that struck me was the degree to which many of these companies appear year after year. There were several other articles in each of these magazines that I encourage you to read, as well as others, including this one that discusses a study conducted by Bringham Young University on why innovation happens.  These articles point out that while most companies readily state that innovation is critical to success, few, in reality, do anything proactive about it. Few companies have a specific focus on innovation: a team, do training,  and practices etc.  IAI’s survey on innovation in 180+ companies supports this observation. Our study found that While 68% stated their organization believed that innovation should be managed as a corporate asset and process, only 49% have put in place any formal process to manage innovation. Similarly, only 49% have any form of executive management presiding over innovation.  More shockingly, perhaps is the fact that 46% of the organizations do not specifically reward innovation.

Too many business leaders believe that creative problem solving and innovation skills are inherent, either you have it or you don’t, but research seems to suggest otherwise. Jeff Dyer the conductor of the research at Bringham Young University stated “”I always thought creativity was genetic — that some people have it, some people don’t, and there’s not much you can do to get better at it,” But after conducting the study, Dyer thinks differently.  We at Information Architected agree.  In fact we dedicate a major part of our practice to dispelling that idea, and dare you to prove us wrong. We can show you how to change your corporate culture (and how to determine if it needs to be)  and how to instill a proactive innovation practice, complete with tools that hone each individual’s innovation skills and establish innovation as a corporate competency. We will take on any organization’s challenge and guarantee results. Come on – I dare ya. Learn more .

And here is a link to that chart I referred to:  InnovationTop50

1. The event was being produced by Kavin Moody of CIMS, who I had worked with a few weeks back on a similar symposium at Olin Innovation Lab (Olin College of Engineering), and was impressed with the group and his work.

2.  The speaker, Karen Sobel Loeski was highly recommended by my colleague Joe Wehr, whose opinion I respect and value greatly.

3. The topic was just a bit left of center – Leading the Virtual Workforce.

So I decided to go. WOW – OMG am I glad I did.

Karen Sobel Loeski was not only a dynamic, engaging and entertaining speaker, but her message was fascinating.  As those of you who follow my work know, when I address collaboration and knowledge management audits I utilize an 8-dimension model. Using a variety of techniques I measure the effectiveness of (and obstacles caused by) these 9 facets.

In performing these assessments leadership style is assessed – as part of team structure, communication and structure. But, Karen’s work focuses deeply  on leadership.

While I  pontificate on the value of leadership and best practices in leading collaborative teams – and the need for a different approaches when teams are virtual – Karen actually has come up with something called the virtual distance, an approach by which one can measure the reach or gap that exists amongst a virtual team.

I will not go into her talk and work in detail here. I recommend that you buy her 2 books – really.

I will summarize my favorite points.

1. The need to address the issue of virtual distance is critical in this era of Enterprise 2.0.  One of the biggest value propositions of E2.0 is the ability to support and facilitate effective team-based collaboration regardless of time and distance between team members. This is empowering, but as we migrate to a virtual workforce, we need to realize that the approach and role of team management needs to be adapted. All too often we hear that E2.0 is about collaboration without leadership, anarchy, and the destruction of business management. Karen (and I) averts that this simply is not so. Teams – virtually any team (no pun intended) – begs for leadership – of some sort. The leader of a virtual team faces different challenges and requires different sensitivities and skills but is as critical as a “traditional” team leader.

2. Although typically associated with geographically dispersed teams, virtual distance can occur between 2 people sitting in the same car (you had to be there to appreciate this comment). Virtual distance is a cognitive and psychological distance as well as a physical distance. Karen provides a 10-dimension model to assess the virtual distance of a team.

The Virtual Distance Index^TM

3.  Glocalization of our workforces has changed many issues for business – not just leadership style. We need to reexamine how we evaluate the value of our workers and the work they perform. ROI models steeped in “cost/time of widgets produced” models simply do not work any longer.  Karen offered many great examples; one:  Adobe Reader makes no money directly for Adobe, so it has no value right? – We all know the answer is “wrong” – it is “new value”.  Although “its not about the technology” – technology is changing the economic models of the past.

Interestingly enough, I was speaking with Michael Idinopulos of SocialText the other day. SocialText  provides a host of services (including assessments) along with their E2.0 technology, because (as a virtual company themselves) they appreciate that the value derived from technologies that enable virtual collaboration and teaming is only maximized if the culture AND LEADERSHIP associated with the technology usage are specifically adapted to leverage the technologies and the environments they create. Michael addresses the issue of “leaderless collaboration” very well in his post Transparency, not Anarchy.

I think part of the reason we are having such a difficult time getting through this transition is partially based in our lexicon. Perhaps we need to think of another term for technology-enabled teams and collaboration  that transcend time and distance.  We call them virtual – but there is NOTHING virtual about them.  They are very real, and they are very powerful.  I’ll wrap this somewhat lengthy post up by stealing a quote from Karen’s presentation – she quoted Albert Einstein “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

Thanks to the generosity of Randy Corke of Chaordix, this Wednesday I had the opportunity to go to a meeting of the Ad Club.

The event was most interesting, mainly because it allowed me to see Enterprise 2.0 from a different perspective – that of the advertising professional (e.g. copy writer, illustrator, designer, layout artists, creative director, etc.).

I was a bit surprised by the tone. Crowd sourcing, as well as bogs and wikis were positioned as threatening. Without bothering to really understand the technology, multiple case studies were referenced that showed how copy could be written, creative ideas developed – through”crowd sourcing” – thus putting many “creative people” out of work.  “Threatening, scary, but powerful and a reality – deal with it.”

Of course there is some truth to what was being said. But in the lack of technology appreciation, there was far too much credit being given to technology and its ability to be the total demise of the marketing profession. I wanted so badly to remind this “crowd” that sometimes the crowd is wrong. Sometimes it leads to mob rule – remember the LA riots and lynch mobs. Heck the “crowd” elected George W Bush – twice.

Too many in this crowd – as do some Enterprise 2.0 purists – believed that Enterprise 2.0 must be implemented as a far reaching, open and transparent. Wrong. As some pointed out there could be great value in specifically developing and managing a “crowd” and containing sourcing within its boundaries.  Sure two heads are better than one, but if you had a tumor growing on your brain would you rather have one qualified oncologist diagnose it, or crowd source it to the general masses?

I wondered why the use of crowd sourcing technology was viewed as radically different from opinion polls and focus groups. Do not get me wrong, I understand and appreciate the difference (speed of execution and scope/reach), but believe it is still a tool most valuable when managed in the hands of a creative team. More time could have been spent looking at how the technology enhances the role of many in marketing and advertising. Roles such as “directors of community” were mentioned but not examined or clearly defined. Terms like ” benevolent dictator” were introduced but not fully explored.

More shockingly, the protection of intellectual property was merely glossed over.  One speaker even suggested that authors and artists might crowd source the authoring of an agreement/contract to protect their own intellectual property. At this point, I thought to myself, “I sure hope you have some folks with legal expertise in that crowd.”  I also found it ironic that John Winsor was talking about using crowd sourcing to a small degree in the development of his soon to be published book. I got the impression that he was not paying many of those that contributed in this manner, and certainly he did not develop it in a wiki – with transparent availability to the community/crowd. Oh no, this book will be published the old fashioned way, with its copyright protected and made available for a fee at the online or brick-and-mortar bookstore of your choice – rendering royalties to it author.  (Do as I say, not as I do.)

Ironically, the voice of reason came from Randy Corke who, although peddling technology, often explained how there was more to the “solution” than just technology, and that a great deal of creativity in implementation and execution (i.e.management and design) are necessary.

I am not sure everyone came away with a clear understanding of Enterprise 2.0 technology and crowd sourcing, and how best to leverage and manage them. For too many in this crowd, teh focus seemed to be on  too many seemed to focus on replacing personnel, rather than the introduction of new tools and models.  Heck some of the features in technology from products, such as those from Choradix, are the answers to some of the concerns/questions the crowd raised. There is such a dire need for education and learning among many crowds in order for Enterprise 2.0 to by effectively leveraged.

As I walked away I was humming the Joni Mitchel Song, “Both Sides Now“, taking liberty with the lyrics as they ran through my head, “I’ve looked at crowds from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow, its crowds illusions I recall – I really dont know crowds at all.”

Amazon has long been held up as the best of E-commerce 1.0, and has powered the growth of Amazon from the laughing stock of bookstores (“Who can sell books without REAL bookstores?”) to an extended platform for e-commerce – selling nearly everything except houses, cars and people, to the infrastructure of many web 2.0 startups, and even into becoming the infrastructure of corporate america via Amazon’s Elastic Computing offering (EC2), or the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) (and related offerings) that make up Amazon Web Services.

One of the interesting ironies of Amazon, however, is the near non-existence of traditional “customer service.” Frankly, that’s because for the most part, there is no need to interact with the people behind the scenes at Amazon. When you’re buying through Amazon, you are buying the customer experience, streamlined order processing, and ability to find darn near anything that can be bought online, along with all the recommended items that “others like you” have bought.

So why buy Zappos?

Zappos has been selling through Amazon for some time now, and many of the brands that Zappos sold could also be bought through Amazon.

Perhaps this ~8 minute clip from Jeff Bezos (CEO/Founder of Amazon) to the employees of Zappos, will help.

Next Gen Customer Service

As some have put it already, the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon really brings to Amazon a “next generation customer service capability.” While Bezos claims to be “customer obsessed” (and as a long-time customer, and purchaser of quite a bit of products and services from or through Amazon, I do agree), Zappos really does embody going well above and beyond customer service, as anyone who has purchased from Zappos already knows.

Will the combined innovations of Amazon and Zappos work? Is 1 + 1 = 3++?

Amazon clearly has the technology and logistics capabilities that most companies would kill for, and Zappos provides the “over the top” human-side of the customer experience, together with a deep understanding and use of social media (primarily Twitter).

No doubt there will be hurdles to overcome, although some of the traditional issues of acquisitions are being sidestepped as Zappos will remain it’s own “wholly-owned” brand.

Given the speed with which Zappos has tended to react and improve, versus the longer-cycle of testing/innovation/improvement that Amazon has typically shown, it will be interesting to see how the combined operations work together.

What are your predictions for this acquisition? And what can you learn from the strengths of the respective companies, applied to your own?

I entitle this post with a familiar quote from Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, in which he describes the state-of-the-world at the time of the French Revolution: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Turbulent, but ripe with opportunity. That is exactly where we are today in the world of ECM.

Over the last few weeks I was struck by the degree to which ECM is being talked discussed within the context of the best of times/worst of times.

Consider content publishing. It continues to undergo major, some might say revolutionary redefinition. The future of newspapers is a primary example. In the past week, The Boston Globe, my own hometown newspaper, was threatened with extinction. Are we in danger of losing high quality press coverage and editorial?

Modes of communication are rapidly morphing. In an earlier post I referenced a New York Times article that reported paper consumption in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Canada and Finland actually went down (between 2000 and 2005), for the first time in history. In a more recent article, Ruport Murdoch and Arianna Huffington debated the future of online news and whether readers of the electronic news will be willing to pay for access. Are we redefining the meaning of the word “free’ in the phrase “the free press”?

Recently, a group of architects have started a project collecting “unwanted” wrist watches, in an effort to preserve them in the Smithsonian Museum. Apparently, the advent of cellular communication devices is also changing the way we tell time.

But these same cellular devices and new approaches to communication, networking and publishing are fueling and facilitating innovation and entrepreneurship. It is truly the best of times as well. Another recent article reported that the effort and cost associated with starting a new company has never been lower. The entrepreneurial and innovative spirit is fueled by ECM. Apparently over 100 million companies have signed up for free web-based tools, such as Google Apps to serve as their technical foundation. Networking and collaborating have never been easier, or more accessible. (I will confess that my company, Information Architected, is a subscriber to several Google apps.)

In yet another recent article the question, “Is working from home the next gold rush?” is asked. New business models made possible through online content may be eliminating some jobs and industries, but also serve as the genesis of countless others.

I have to say that, I for one am most happy and excited to be part of this revolutionary time. It is the worst of times; layoffs and the possible demise of entire industries is scary and unfortunate. But on the other hand, the amazingly fertile potential for new businesses, new industries and new business models seems virtually infinite. I stare at the future with wide-open eyes, amazed at the possibilities.

If you do not agree, or simply want to further fuel you own enthusiasm, then view this presentation and demonstration at this year’s TED.

This glimpse into what ECM can/will be is nothing short of amazing. I dare anyone to view this and tell me that we are not experiencing “the best of times.” Indeed, to further quote Dickens, “we had everything before us…”

Is the legal industry ready to change their standard practices in billing, particularly given the economic climate of 2008-2009 and at least the short-term future?

If they do change that model, will it least, or go back to “business as usual” when the economic smoke has cleared?

Knowledge = precedent = expertise. Why not efficiency and effectiveness as well?

Is the industry that should have been the poster child for Knowledge Management finally going to see more reasons to be time and cost efficient, just as most other industries have had to do so to remain competitive and retain clients?

Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Christopher Marston, Esquire, CEO and Founder at Exemplar Companies, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of the traditional law firm model, and how that model is evolving and even being flipped upside-down in a disruptive innovation sense.

If you are currently a client of a traditional law firm – have they adjusted their model in recent months? Do you feel they should?

If are a knowledge management practitioner within a law firm, how do you handle cost justification and Return on Investment (ROI) for knowledge management practices within the firm? Only in certain pockets? Firm-wide?

What are the pros and cons that you have seen?

War stories you’d like to share from any side of the fence?

Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can all be that much wiser as the market overall, and awareness of Knowledge Management itself matures. It’s not dead yet – and we haven’t even gotten started yet, particularly in the legal industry.

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Is your Information Architected for Innovation Management and Knowledge Management?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture that will enable you to maximize the value of your content, information and knowledge without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

More details on our practices in these areas can be found at:

• Information Architected for Innovation Management
• Information Architected for Knowledge Management