Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected.

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?

Contact us at 
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

The Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat for Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 highlights a disruptive innovation in, of all things, census-taking.

It’s the battle against paper and electronic, and guess who leads the race?

According to the HBR Daily Stat (and the original source, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística):

It’s a national census of hundreds of millions of people across 8 million square kilometers, using a workforce of 230,000 and a budget of $1.4 billion. The 2010 U.S. Census? No, it’s Brazil’s 2010 census. The current U.S. headcount, by contrast, requires 3.8 million workers and $14 billion. Census takers in Brazil use PDAs and laptops; those in the U.S. still rely mainly on paper (originally reported by CNN in the 2009 run-tup/testing for the 2010 census). – Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatístic

This Daily Stat, coming the week just after Apple’s big iPad launch (reported to have sold 300,000 in the first day of sales, April 3rd, 2010), is a bit shocking to me, as someone who has been involved in digital content for over 15 years.

And it’s not because paper is the devil (although it frequently is, that’s another story for another day) – but because the cost savings and flexibility that could have easily been had, were dropped on the floor. What happened?

One Giant Step for Consumers, A Faceplant for Government

Sometimes government lags, and sometimes it leads – but maintaining parity with the commercial world, or for that matter a far less technologically developed country, would seem to be, well, obvious.

The US, being one of the largest commercial markets for smartphones, one would think would be a natural place to use what would seem to be a completely natural fit for the Census mission. GPS-enabled, off-the-shelf, 3G-powered, mobile devices, with local storage for data collection (or problematic coverage areas), and web-enabled connections to the back office – well,  just about any mobile device available on any network conceivable in the US would fit the bill.

Seeking Good Enough vs. Purpose-built

What happened? Nearly every teenager, let alone adult seems to have a smartphone that would fit the needs of Census taking. So how hard could it be to extend this to a once in 10 year project?

It seems the US Census Bureau made the classic Innovator’s Dilemma mistake, of aiming for a “perfect” single purpose-built device, which, as anyone familiar with classic (and misunderstood) “Waterfall Development” vs. “Agile Development” or for that matter “Custom Built” vs. “Configure and Integrate” could have seen coming.

While there is more to the end-to-end system of Census data collection than the upfront collection process (whether electronic or by paper), the fast-moving mobile industry appears to have caught Harris Corp. on the slow lane.

The bureau’s GPS saga began in 2006, the bureau hired Harris Corp. (HRS, Fortune 500), based in Melbourne, Fla., to develop 151,000 handheld computers equipped with GPS software, as well as the technical infrastructure to support the count. – Source: CNN

In 4 years, a lot has changed in the mobile/smartphone world – and it’s safe to say that the consumer world has led the charge here, hence the rise of the iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre, and more.

Watch Brazil

In contrast to having custom devices built, Brazil partnered with LG, one of the rising stars in the mobile world:

Brazil will start taking its population census in the second half of this year and to ensure a smooth and efficient counting, the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) has roped in LG to supply 150,000 GM750 phones.

The phones will facilitate surveyors to take a population count on the Windows Mobile 6.5 powered phone along with the support of MS Office, web browsing etc. The phone unlike the retail version will sport MS’ honeycomb UI.

It is ruggedized (see photo), with it’s own app (not hardware), but otherwise, the core phone itself, is a phone anyone with $100 could buy at the corner mobile store.

The question is not paper or not paper – it’s what gets the job done, better, faster, cheaper (and yes, you can have all three)

By not doing this step electronically, the bureau is missing the opportunity to streamline its operations, said Hermann Habermann, a former deputy director of the Census Bureau. If workers had handhelds, they could more quickly receive updates on which residences have mailed back forms and more easily send back the completed online forms. – Source: CNN

Smartphones and real-time make the loop from the field to the back office far more efficient, and can allow the Census Bureau to target much more precisely. The end impact on local US Citizens?

The technology (would also help) better identify which Census tract a home is in, a crucial fact in determining an area’s representation in Congress and the distribution of more than $435 billion in federal funds every year.

Until now, the Census Bureau usually puts about 5% of residences in the wrong tract. With the GPS, it is aiming to reduce that error rate to 0.5%, said Daniel Weinberg, assistant director for the decennial census. – Source: CNN

Unfortunately, with the fall back to paper, the error rate is likely to remain, as is the (inadvertent) mis-distribution of funds.

Incidentally, Carl Frappaolo wrote about similar issues in paper vs. electronic filing with the IRS in his frequently referenced post “ECM – From Here to Eternity.” e-Filing rates (as percentage of total submissions) has since gone up, but continues to remain the anomaly rather than the norm.

Watch your peers, watch the technology trends – and be prepared to be disrupted.

If you have any other disruptive innovation tales (of success or woe), weigh in here – these waves can come fast, and it’s all hands on deck!

Team-based Innovation

Let me suggest you Take a Day to Innovate (with our 1 to 2 Day Innovation Workshop) – and you stand a much greater chance of avoiding issues like those that the US Census Bureau faced.

Do you have the right people on your innovation team? Do they have best innovation skills to create and deliver on the innovations they need?

The Content Convergence Continues!

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.)

Recently both BusinessWeek and Fast Company published their respective 50 most innovative companies list.  I have “mashedup” both lists in the chart below and edited the lists a bit. (Where there is overlap I indicate the difference in ranking order between lists.)  There was much to garner from these lists, beyond the corporate rankings individually.

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

Last Friday’s cover of the Boston Metro proclaimed “ How recession is forcing creativity in entertainment.”
It’s an interesting article on how the current economy mixed with the advent of Web 2.0 is affecting the entertainment industry, but the title held a different appeal for me.

Serendipitously, I am working on IAI’s soon to be released whitepaper on Innovation Management. The whitepaper includes the results of a 180 respondent survey on how innovation is managed in the enterprise.

In line with today’s headline, it came as no surprise that 70% of those surveyed felt that the current economic conditions increased the perceived need for innovation in their organization. As is the case with much of the market research work we do however, the interesting findings came from cross-correlation and analysis across questions and responses. Despite “heightened need”, most organizations aren’t doing anything proactive about accelerating and nurturing innovation. 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.

Innovation is not serendipity or discovery. You cannot wait for it to happen to you.  It is a process that you have to nurture and manage as a major asset.

Innovation Architected will publish a whitepaper that details all the findings of the study later this month, and hold a webinar to discuss the findings on October 29 at 2pm ET (-5 GMT). To pre-order a copy of the whitepaper and/or register for the webinar go to the registration page.

There is no charge for the whitepaper, as it was partially underwritten by DiCOR, Imaginatik, Brightidea and Spigit.

You can also learn more about how we train organizations to proactively manage their innovation.

Those that know me, as well as loyal readers of this blog, know that I am an ECM zealot – some say a nerd. So perhaps this post is just another ranting – but I felt compelled to reiterate myself because of certain current events.

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.

Listen now!

Download

Download the MP3 of this podcast

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