innovationguy.com

I have a couple of interesting links that people may be interested in.

• My friend forwarded this transcript of a pre-commencement lecture given by Narayana Murthy (chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies) at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. The theme of the lecture was the great impact that chance events played in shaping his life. Quite a good lecture. It really got me thinking as to the random events that lead to long friendships, family, professional success, and perception altering moments.

• I got a note in my email today with links to 3 new TED Talks.
  • John Doerr: Seeking salvation and profit in greentech
  • Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo on SeaDragon and PhotoSynth (AMAZING)
  • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: How to help Africa? Do business there

• Also some interesting articles in SmallTimes this month. NanoDynamics is planning an IPO.

• The rankings for the top Schools with Nano programs according to SmallTimes is out. ( or the quick view for the impatient).
• The SmallTimes mergers and acquisitions summary this month seem to have quite a few interesting tid-bits.

  • Xradia with it’s minaturized microscope offerings with some new funding.
    
  • NaturalNano Funding deal is in there (Notice the much improved website with their new money).
  • SolarDiesel with a huge buyout deal on the plans to builds the worlds largest biodiesel plant.
  • Arrowhead Research Corporation continues its end-run to gobble up all the SWNT patents it can find with the purchase of C Sixty Inc. and CNI

• This story from Seth Godin about alignment is concise and to the point.

“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.”

The team over at iinnovate.com always surprise me with the quality of their guests for their interviews. This latest interview with Carly Fiorina formerly CEO of HP is no exception.  Min Li Chan and Min Liu ask some very good questions which dig out some great answers and advise from Carly.

Carly gives some really great perspectives in this interview.  Here are a couple of my favorite questions:

When asked asked what element of being a CEO was most challenging at HP she Carly stated:

“The most challenging part about being CEO of HP was that we had to transform the company. It was a great company with a great history, but it was also a company that was lagging further and further behind when I arrived. ….. <stats on missed financials, lack of innovation , etc>… We had a great deal of change that needed to be done, and change is always very difficult.  It [change] is always resisted and particularly difficult with a large, tradition-bound company like HP was.   But that is also frankly the challenge and joy of leadership. Leadership is always about changing things. ….”

When asked how to preserve innovation and a sense of entrepreneurship in corporate America as companies  grow above 10,000 employees mark she stated:

“… So it is a challenge for every company.  The pressure for Corporate America boils down to the fact that the  focus on profitability sometimes causes people to cut costs as opposed to investing in innovation.  This is where leadership is so imporatant.  If the leadership doesn’t decide that innovation is a value worth celebrating then eventually it will whither.   If leadership doesn’t decide that instead of cutting that expense, they will make that investment in the future, then the investments won’t get made…..   I think it is about the culture of a place. Whether risk-taking is really celebrated and rewarded, and if you are going to celebrate and reward risk taking, you have to let people make mistakes.  Not every bet is goign to pay off and you have to deal with that…. There is no silver bullet, but it starts with a believe that innovation is the life-blood of a technology company….”

When asked about the trend of startup aquiring as the major source of innovation for a tech company and whether this was dangerous she replied.

“I think it is a trend which offers some advantaeges to startups…. It is dangerous when taken to extreme…. Every company gets to a place where the old answers don’t work anymore and then the only thing that works is for people to be creative and try new approaches to old problems. If you have outsources all your creativity, all your ability to take risk, all your ability to think about a new idea, then you are not going to be able to solve the problem you need to solve….”

Her talk on how medieval studies (college major) helped her and what a CEO is suppose to do she stated:

“That set of studies, more than anything, taught me how to think…. It [particular class in her major where she was required to read thousands of pages and condense them to 2 pages every week] taught me that to really undestand something you really have to go through all the detail of it, but then to be able to communicate something, to be able to prioritize action around something,  you have to get it down to the essence.   It taught me how you distringuish between the truly important and the merely interesting….”

When asked why she thought that anyone wanting to be a CEO should take on a sales role as some point in their career she stated:

” I think the human dimension of business is really important…. but beyond that, what selling is really about, if it is done well, is talking to people in a language they understand, that is meaningful to them.   If you are going to be successful in selling something to someone else, you have to speak to them in language that is familiar to them and in terms of things that are important to them….. Those are skills that any executive needs to have: How do communicate effectively. How do  speak to people in language they understand.  How tp speak to them in terms that are important to them….”

Interesting insights on some relevent topics to anyone in business. There is much, much more in the interview, well worth the listen.

Over the last two days I was pointed to two interesting on-line moneymakers. They were interesting in how they make money. One sells something that is ubiquitous and in most caes considered a nuisance, while the other harnesses the power of a distributed crowd to provide a service at a very low cost.

The first example is http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/ where Linda Katz of Garden City, Kansas sells, you guessed it, tumbleweeds on the internet. The original post I ran across is over at Unusual Business Ideas That Work. This excerpt from the linked article pretty much explains the origin of the business.

“It all started as a joke,”says Katz, 49. She asked her son to build her a family Web page so she could communicate with friends and give it the tongue-in-cheek name Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Never mind that she didn’t even live on a farm, but in a subdivision. Nevermind that you can’t cultivate tumbleweed, which spreads its seed as it tumbles in the wind. For authenticity’s sake, Katz added a price list ($35 for a big weed, $25 for a midsize one, $20 for the small economy model)

So tongue-in-cheek or not, Katz created a business when she wasn’t looking for one. It turns out that her buyers range from people looking to decorate their houses, to movie studios, to academic researchers, to people in love with Westerns, and even for tumbleweed Christmas trees (picture at right by erissiva). Seth Godin has a comment on this site on how this site emerged totally from organic search engine traffic.

The second site is www.pickydomains.com where they have an original take on making money off the domain name trade. Most people make money (some say a lot) by speculating on domain names. Some companies can hire consultants for thousands of dollars to come up with a catchy and traffic-driving domain name. Pickydomains takes the “power of the crowds” approach. As a person/entity wanting to use their service, you pay $50 and a list of requirements for your domainname. For example you would provide the basic site type, hyphens/no-hyphens, .com or other, mandatory keywords, etc. Pickydomains would post this to their list of users, a large list. The users would submit possible solutions. If the users’s submission is chosen, pickydomains shares half the $50 fee. PickyDomains also can buy any ones the customers don’t want, but they think are worth something. If they don’t provide something you are interested in, they refund your fee. This is a great example of having a crowd solve a problem that it is difficult to solve as an individual or a small group. Interesting business idea. If you do to the site you can see some exmples of successful wins. The one comment I have is that this service is too inexpensive. Just like the previous post Here, people expectation are linked to evironment and pre-text.

I have been doing quite  a bit of driving lately and have been using the opportunity to go back and listen to some of the older killer innovations podcasts that were put out before I discovered Phil McKinney.   If you are interested in creativity, innovation, or how to bring new ideas life and are not a listener, you should be.    He is not a consultant, or guru, or professor,  or someone trying to sell a book.  He is the real deal and does this in a business setting for a well known and large corporation.   Listen and you will see.

If you are new and really want to dig in quickly to, then a recent post on his site lists the 5 most downloaded podcasts.   One of my personal favorites is the Sept 11th 2006 podcast that is a recording of a talk given at Reuters.  It really captures very succinctly some of what he has developed over many years as an innovation champion.

As someone who has lead an “innovation team”  in a corporate setting,  I wish I had known about him before undertaking that endevor.    Give him a listen,  If you don’t find it useful, write me an email.

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on an experiment by the Washington Post. (original article) It seems that they took a world class violin prodigy playing a $3.5 million dollar violin and plunked him down in a subway station acting like a street musician. Dressed in regular clothes and a baseball cap with the open violin case at his feet he played some of the worlds most challenging violin pieces. So what was the result? So how much did he earn? Keep in mind that he usually sells out concert halls for $100 bucks a seat for the good ones? He made a staggering $32… (chech out the video on the Washington Post site)

Besides being a pretty good experiment on how context affects people’s perception, it is a good learning experience for marketers. You can have a world class service of product, but if you are selling it in the wrong place to the wrong crowd, you will be sorely dissapointed. How many times have we heard “Why isn’t this selling, it is the best performance product on the market?” Maybe you are trying to sell it to the wrong crowd or in the wrong context. Maybe your prospective customers are like the subway patrons that have no use for entertainment as their sole objective when they encounter the service  is getting to work.

A second take on this is to consider the fact that there was probably a subway musician in the same subway system that morning that cleared more than $32. Why was he more sucessfully financially while our virtuoso would be hard pressed to pay for a day of parking  in the downtown area?  Was it the tailoring of his music and “act” to the audience at hand? Did he play music that was recognizable to his audience? Did he “ham it up” for the audience to provide a laugh on the usually stressful trip to work?

• Where in your business or industry does context and experience affect the profitability or sucess of your product or service?
• Are you unsuccessfully trying to sell a product or service designed for one geography or context into one that isn’t as receptive?
• How do you use context or experience to increase your profit on a product or service?