Category: Innovation

Once in a great while, a phrase comes along that immediately sparks a thousand thoughts in your head.  It does’t matter if the thoughts are even relevant to the context in which you heard the phrase, the thoughts are there.  Clearly my written English will give this poor justice, and as my Sister is always kind enough to point out; I’ve never met a grammatical error I didn’t like.

Unfortunately the phrase ‘strategically intelligent mistakes‘ is not mine, it’s Accenture’s, but was brought to my attention in a pending article by Peter Livingstone, a Publisher at Financier Worldwide. I will be ‘advertising’ this article when it comes out so that my enormous following can enjoy it.  I’m fairly sure my 18 subscribers will make all the difference to its success.

Accenture’s context is; “Some companies have recognized that they can allow innovation teams to make strategically intelligent mistakes within a clearly understood governance framework. This, in turn, enables a culture that not only tolerates risk but also embraces failure as an integral part of the innovation process.”

Which is perfect for the purposes of this blog, (and my last one on Why Everyone Should Start a Business) because it’s very much the thought of failure that prevents so many good ideas from becoming reality, or causes thoughts to die on the vine. That, and having no idea where to start, but that’s blodder for another time.

Whether the idea is for a start-up, a new service line, or an improvement on something that already exists, fear of failure / ridicule / loss of respect, or any number of fear-based de-motivators prevent those ideas from being freely expressed. The only truly bad idea in business is one that never see’s the light of day. Sure, it might fail, fail spectacularly even, but no-one has just one idea, so the next one will have the benefit of experience for the creator, and everyone around them.

Thomas Edison, arguably the most famous inventor in recent history, failed over 3,000 times to invent the lightbulb (though he certainly didn’t phrase it that way).  My favourite quote of his; “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

You do not have to be an entrepreneur and start your own business to make a significant impact with your ideas, there are plenty of examples of an ordinary individuals’ idea making significant positive impact on an organisation. It is the CEO who ultimately holds the key to how ideas are received, and whether or not his/her people feel as though their ideas are welcomed, regardless of the possible outcome.

A recurring theme in my blogs is; “Let’s be very clear; The CEO sets the tone for the entire company: its vision, its values, its direction, and its priorities.  If the organisation fails to achieve [enter goal here], it’s the CEOs’ fault, and no-one else’s.”

In Accenture’s article, there is this wonderful paragraph; “For instance, a large advertising agency awards a quarterly Heroic Failure trophy to recognize clever, unproven ideas that may not work out in practice, but nevertheless demonstrate creative risk taking. And an online payroll provider offers $400 to the winner of its Best New Mistake award, which goes to an employee who made a mistake but learned from it—and, in doing so, helped other employees avoid similar mistakes. The idea behind both awards is to support creativity by encouraging openness about errors and rewarding those who genuinely learn from their failures.”

Can you imagine working for an organisation that rewards and encourages you  regardless of your mistakes.  No, neither can I, but it’s a very pleasant thought isn’t it?

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Update 14-Oct-13 15:09: My thanks to Jon Hawes for pointing me at this article; http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/09/how-i-got-my-team-to-fail-more/

 

 

A friend of mine sent me this article today, with the rather humorous note “Just don’t name them Skynet!”; Cyborg Cockroach Sparks Ethics Debate. Like every other issue in the world, there are those for it, and those against it. I’m only writing about it here because innovation and science fascinate me.

Their example for experimentation; “…pleased that the project will teach students about the neuroscience behind brain stimulation treatments that are being used to treat two of his friends with Parkinson’s disease.”

Their examples against; “They encourage amateurs to operate invasively on living organisms” and “encourage thinking of complex living organisms as mere machines or tools.”

And my favourite; “I’ll just be happy that I found a cleverly marketed consumer item that I am very happy not to own.”

The debate is of course over ethics. The question is; is it OK to experiment on cockroaches in order to further the cause of neuroscience? The in-favour camp say the benefits are numerous; from treatment of Parkinson’s disease, to non-surgical treatment of epilepsy, to giving back mobility to those who have lost the use of limbs or lost them altogether. The not-in-favour camp say that it’s simply not right morally/ethically/humanely etc., or that you’re teaching kids to be psychopaths.

One side need only point to the numerous examples of life saving medical breakthroughs that involved the use of animal testing to make their argument, the other side need only point to WWII concentration camps to make theirs.

Forget for a moment that we spend billions globally on killing ‘roaches, and that almost every human feels an involuntary shudder of disgust when we see one. Forget also that two extremes of alternative to experimenting on ‘lower’ life forms are 1) experimenting on humans instead, or 2) letting our disorders go untreated. And finally, forget that a large percentage of our medical advances are the result of killing each other in larger numbers; i.e. war. OK, so the last one doesn’t really fit, but is does demonstrate that no issue is simple.

Instead, focus in this; in the end, the only thing that matters to you is your own opinion, and you are either for it, against it – and rather surprisingly given the subject – completely indifferent.  I can see the benefits, and could not care less about ‘roaches, but my opinion would most likely be different if this was a higher life-form, especially dogs.  But wherever you stand on this, both the benefits and the negative ethical connotations are undeniable. It’s the balance that matters, and in most industrial nations, that’s driven by the majority.

The argument I cannot accept is the one where it’s teaching kids to be psychopaths. Yeah, like THAT’S the cause. That’s up there with video games and movies causing violence. It’s not the videos/movies that are the cause, it’s the perspective in which the individual child puts what they see. That is driven mostly by the parent, and how that child is supported during emotional issues. I’d love to see a study on how many well brought up children resort to violence as opposed to those neglected by emotionally distant parents (asuming both sides are given the same stimuli).

That said, I did have an immediate thought for another benefit of this science; We have all come across a very badly behaved dog or child that we would LOVE to see under better control, right? So my idea is to strap electrodes to the owners’, or parents’ heads respectively, and stimulate their feeling of nausea every time their pet/child misbehaves. Perhaps that would get them off their lazy, inconsiderate arses to do something about it.

Of course this issue goes a lot deeper than this blog, but seeing as I’m in the indifferent camp (given my current knowledge of the facts), I’ll leave the debate up to others. I also make no apology for choosing to remain ignorant of what scientists do behind closed doors, I have chosen my battles for now.

Like privacy, this issue will take people on both sides of the fence to make sure we get the innovation we crave, at a price we can ethically afford. I wish them luck.

Even now it’s fairly easy for most technology support people to perform their function. They have either extremely deep knowledge in one sector (PC, Mac, iOS, etc.), or are something of a jack-of-all-trades/techs. Much like a handyman is great for most day-to-day repairs, but should never be used to replace your boiler, your electrical system, or your windows.

But what happens when everything is online? Well, almost everything.

When I raise the subject of Internet of Things, I usually get one of three reactions;

  1. The what of who?
  2. That’s awesome, can’t wait!
  3. No thank you.

The first answer is invariably from people who are not technology oriented (majority), the second one from people who ARE technology oriented and usually young, and the third answer from people who are either terrified of technology itself, or who realise that privacy would be a thing of the past.

It’s hard to argue with the latter when you’ve voluntarily put your entire life’s infrastructure online. Like I will.

But who’s going to support all of this? Governments will do their best to regulate this, and they’ll fail; technology providers will attempt to make it simple and safe for the average user, and they will fail; and your PC repair dude will have little idea where to start, but probably charge you for trying.

Luckily the technology behind the Internet of Things is already known to most techies, but they can no longer stay as deep into one technology as they may have done in the past, and probably prefer.  Customers will begin demanding jacks-of-all-techs over specific and individual knowledge-sets, and expect them to be able to fix their smartphone, re-program their dogs’ locator chip, and propose a tasty dinner based on the computer generated contents of their fridge.

The new generation of technology support professionals will need to keep up with innovation as never before, or lose out to those that do; your local PC repair shop will lose to home service; and  we, the consumer, will expect this to be seamless, painless, and cheap.

I even foresee both regulation and certification around providing these services. It’s one thing to support a customer who can’t flush his toilet using his iPhone, it’s quite another supporting a customer who is having issues with her pacemaker, or insulin dispenser.

In the race to profit from this technology explosion, standardisation, interoperability, and ease of maintenance will be ignored, meaning that every new technology you deploy will be stand-alone.  Maintenance complexity does not go up linearly with the number of individual technologies, it goes up exponentially.  Support contracts will be how most of these businesses make their money.

However, to the rescue comes the jack-of-all-techs who will not only help you fix what’s broken, but will be able to help you choose what technology you can go for next given their knowledge of what you have now, and what goal(s) you are trying to active.  Every good support person, consultant, or friend, gives you what you need, and not necessarily what you ask for. Even if they use sentences which end in prepositions.

The only thing holding back total technology adoption are people born before 1990. Most people born after that take the Internet, smartphones, and loss of privacy for granted. Every year that goes by our numbers fall, so the checks and balances between the Internet of Things and an individual’s rights for independence from technology are weakened.

Once again, here comes the jack-of-all-techs! The right tech support professional inherently understands that customer service is the only thing that matters, and you can never provide world class customer service if you don’t have your client’s best interests at heart.

Let the learning begin.

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Who doubts that the future of 3-D printing is that you will soon be able to print with almost any substance that can be turned into a spray?  Or better yet, the drive for new compounds and materials will harbour an explosion in stronger-than-metal fibres that will negate the need for high temperature processing?

Obviously this is many years off, but you can already produce some of the crappy little plastic nick-knacks that tourists pay squillions for every year in a 3-D printer you can buy for less than £1,000 and put on your office desk. The price of these printers goes down as the quality goes up (very similar to Moore’s Law on transistors), so it’s fair to say that, like computers, they will become just as mainstream and widespread as any other home computing device.

So why this blog?  I was just sitting here, on a gorgeous Autumn day, in the house in front of my computer (like you do), when I  took a look at everything within my reach to see where it was made.  I’m sure you can guess; anything small plastic and disposable was made in China.  My next though was; what happens to all of those people whose livelihood revolves around making cheap, plastic, disposable, and in no way useful crap, when I can print equally useless crap at home?

Then I thought of a scenario; I see a guy in a far away airport rushing for a plane to get home to his family.  It suddenly occurs to him that he has not bought anything for his for his 2 little children – that’s why it’s a ‘him’ in my story BTW, women are far less stupid – and he has no time to buy something. So, he takes out his smartphone and takes a picture of a generic toy for the country he’s in, processes it through a scanning app, and sends the results to his printer sitting at home in his office.

By the time he gets home, there’s two, identical but for the colour, cheap, plastic, disposable, and in no way useful, pieces of crap sitting on his desk. Great for Daddy, bad for shopkeeper in far away airport, and VERY bad for family scraping by on the income the receive from making the cheap …you get the point.

I have no solution for this, in case you’re wondering, I LOVE the thought of what we’ll be able to do 5 – 10 years from now, nor do I have it in me to do anything more than write a stream-of-consciousness blog on something I read while browsing Wired articles.

I understand that technology, innovation, and the sheer inventiveness of the human race means that things change, and they change quicker every year, and that if you’re not ahead of the wave you will get left behind and potentially suffer.  But I can’t help wonder if this is not a perfect time for concepts such as corporate social responsibility to make their way off the marketing fluff, and into a demonstrable service provided by the leaders in the future trends.

Maybe I just ate a bad bagel…

 

I have posited several times that compliance with the PCI DSS, with all of its idiosyncrasies and expense, has driven innovation in the payments space to a degree never before seen.  I even wrote a blog on the subject; How PCI Has Driven Innovation in Payments

However, over recent months, I have had the honour of working with several organisations who are throwing their hats in the ring, and trying to come up with ways to increase both the effectiveness of non-cash payments, but also the security.  Admittedly, these are still piggy-backing off credit cards, but the technologies are precursors to the demise of the card number itself. Basically;

If you don’t need a card number at the beginning of a transaction, why have a card OR a number in the first place?

Continue reading “How PCI Is Stifling Payments Innovation” →