Posts tagged productivity
Learning innovation ! – Part II– Incremental & Radical Innovations
Dec 3rd
Its been a while since I posted a new topic on Learning Innovation series I started last time here. I thought I would keep on posting frequently, but not to be so. Anyways, here is my another attempt at writing one more article in the Innovation series.
Last time I wrote about one of the techniques of learning Innovation called Innovation by Subtraction. This time, I would be trying to explain one more type of Innovation viz., Incremental & Radical Innovations.
The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used across the world for innovation. They are also called Sustaining & Disruptive Innovation techniques.
Incremental innovation generally relates to enhancements or small improvements in the existing products or services, whereas the Radical innovation brings a significant improvement in the product or the service.
One of the most common examples of the Incremental innovations are the early Pentium chips developed by Intel. From Pentium I to IV, they were generally based on the similar pattern however as the new version came out they brought out newer technologies & innovations in their chipset, which could be attributed to the Incremental innovation. Moving from a single core to dual or quad cores in their latest processers could be termed as a Radical innovation though.
Another example of Incremental innovation being Microsoft’s Windows 98 operating system, which was an enhancement over the Windows 95 operating system. The Windows 95, however was a Radical innovation over the previous Windows 3.1 operating system interface.
Now you may ask me how to differentiate between the Incremental innovation from a Radical innovation or you may even ask, what should be the degree of deviation between an innovation to be considered as Incremental vs Radical?
The answer to this question was defined by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They recommend to consider an Incremental innovation as a Radical if it meets one or more of following characteristics,
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The innovation provides entirely new set of usage features and experience
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In terms of statistics, it provides about five times or better performance
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Or it provides more than 30% reduction in the costs of the product / service
Normally the Incremental & Radical innovations go hand in hand. If you see my previous examples you would see that the Radical innovation has followed after one or more Incremental innovations. So you would relate to the fact that the Radical innovation is characterized by a long period of Incremental innovations before and after it.
The diagram shows the cycle of the Radical Innovations and how they arrive after a series of the Incremental innovations.
The important benefit of the Radical change is the fact that it can potentially and significantly change the basis of competition in the favour of the innovator.
Incremental innovation is relatively easy to obtain than Radical one and I am sure by now you would have understood pretty much of it.
There are significant examples of where the Radical innovations have given great advantages to the innovators. Some of them are as follows,
IBM
Introduction of electronic typewriter, nearly wiped off the manual type writers form the market and gave IBM a significant business advantage.
Wal-Mart
Innovated a radical process change in the way the supply chain was managed throughout its stores in the US that gave a significant advantage in terms of time & cost and helped it cement its position as No. 1 in the retail market.
Incremental Vs Radical – Which one to choose ?
Radical Innovations are significantly risky, take more time to develop and are more expensive to obtain in nature, whereas, the Incremental are significantly less risky, relatively cheaper & based on a proven product or a process and are more likely to produce results in a shorter time frame.
The Incremental innovations provide the businesses with a steady stream of enhanced and improved products / processes or services, but due to relatively simpler nature of these innovations it is required to keep in mind the following,
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Ensure that the innovations are focussed around the market demands. Since the nature of innovation is such that you would eventually keep on developing new enhancements, small features, there is a danger that you might do something which the customers would not want and may not need in their product. If you continue to churn out the improvements or new features that the customer does not want, the customer eventually might look for alternative products.
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Don’t forget Radical innovation ! Incremental innovations do not necessarily envisage the future technology and attempt to provide a bridge between current and future technologies. Imagine what would have happened to iPhone if Apple would have used the traditional keyboard design of the phone !! Also, remember that its on Radical innovation that changes the business game in your favour !
- So when you look around next and do a brain storming about innovation, you might want to start with an Incremental innovation and who knows you might bring out a Radical innovation in your product / process or your service !
- Good Luck !
Learning innovation ! – Part I – Innovation by Subtraction
Nov 18th
First of all, I must apologize to myself for not being able to post anything on the blog. Its indeed been a very hectic time both at work as well as at home.
Indeed, its not easy to be a father of two !!
Anyways, back to the topic !
I always thought innovation is something that can never be taught on the job and I thought it must come from within individual to break the mould and find out better ways of doing the job. I never thought that you can actually teach someone to think innovative and come up with innovative ideas, implement the innovation concepts and practice innovation techniques.
How wrong I was to think that !
I have been part of the Innovation Sessions in my organization and the experience there has been nothing short of great. Not only these sessions have given me a direction to think different on innovation, but also to learn more on various innovation techniques and processes.
With this post, I would starting a new article series Learning Innovation based on my own learning and my thoughts on the same. I hope this first post will give you few leads to help yourself learn more on innovation techniques and processes so you can also try them in your organization,
Innovation by Subtraction
Innovation by Subtraction is a bit uncommon process but might yield surprising results.
To use the IbS process for doing an innovation in a process, we are expected to make a list of components of the process. The list should contain the MUST have components of the process. Now, as a part of the IbS, you are expected to brainstorm on how the process would still function without each of the components. We are expected to innovate the potential value or benefits would be without the components.
However, the most important part of the solution must be the fact that the solution should not compromise the business value or benefits coming out the process. It should sound like a workable business idea !
The examples we discussed within our session were very interesting and the ideas that came out were even better. Have a look at the following table which might give you an idea on how radical can your thinking get when you remove the most essential part (you thought) from your process, service, product.
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Product / process
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Most essential part of your product / process |
Innovative Solutions when you remove the most essential part
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| Mobile phone | Battery charging |
Can the phone use solar energy? |
| Laptop | Keyboard | Can it use touch screen? Can it use gesture control? Can it read your brain? |
| Shopping | Shops | Shopping as a service? Can the experience be made better? Assisted shopping with experts? Better value for money? |
IbS has been a catalyst for many great innovations over the year. Most notably of them were,
Phone call with IVR (Interactive Voice Recording)
The most important thing when you deal transactions on phone, are of course the people. You need someone to listen to you and act on your instructions or help you in dealing issues. Now when you apply the IbS rule to this process of a phone call and remove the most important part of the process, the listener (person) and replace with an automated solution, what remains is an innovative solution of IVR.
Business benefits – Significant reduction of costs, reduction in errors, more customer satisfaction in general.
Client server technology
The most important part of the computer functionality was the business processing and the subsequent hardware that is consumed by desktop PCs do support the business processing. When you remove both 1. an ability to compute itself and 2. CPU unit, what remains is an innovative solution of Client server technology. The server controls the business processing and has significant CPU power while the clients are more of dumb terminals with only monitor & keyboard as significant hardware. You can still perform full tasks and can add more terminals with less costs.
Business benefits – Significant reduction of costs, space & consistent performance
Touchscreen
Did you ever think of any computing device until last few years with no keyboard to interact with? Calculators, mobile phones, notebooks, desktops were all having dedicated keyboards for users to interact with them. You now take out the most important part of the device interaction i.e. keyboard and the innovative solution is to have a touch screen interface. Touchscreen technology has been touted as one of the most popular device interaction technology now a days with more and more devices giving option of touch screens.
Business benefits – Style factor, bigger screen areas, better interaction techniques
So, think on you can use the IbS technique for finding out innovative ideas and solutions for your processes, services.
Adopting Enterprise 2.0 for managing my project teams based across continents
Jun 4th
Continuing from my earlier post on using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams and taking it one step further, I have been contemplating on actually adopting an Enterprise 2.0 software stack for real time collaboration, better communication, effective knowledge management & idea generation amongst my team.
The obvious problem at my hands is lack of budget to actually look for and adopt any proprietary software that would solve our purpose, thus a little more intelligence & effort is needed to ensure we have a good set of working processes, software & tool to enable us become an effective project team.
Being into production support and providing critical support to few prime portals of one of world’s leading telecommunications company, the need of time is for the team to have an effective collaborative tool at their hands which would allow them to exchange short messages via web based intranet portal.
So to cater to this requirement, we decided to install Laconi.ca and try that out. Hopefully we will have something to work on by end of this week.
By the way, after my earlier post, few of my team members came back to me disputing my claim of unawareness of ‘twitter’ within them. So it was good to know as well !
Another important bit was to have a knowledge management portal and for that we installed Mediawiki solution on the LAMP server I had on the Intranet. Obviously it worked as a treat so far and hopefully it would continue to serve as a KMS solution for us.
But the problem we are having is about carrying out the backup of the Mediawiki. Obviously one simple way is to back up the database tables & then back up the file system separately. However, I was just wondering if there are any ready tools available that would execute the backups on the Mediawiki installation and give me an installation kit to restore, if eventually we need !
Few things I have installed on the server are Open Office (OpenGoo) to manage the documents online for the team. However, so far never used it for a real project purpose though. I would like to see how I could use it in my project in future though.
I have also had an installation of b2evolution lying on my server which I intended to use for the team blog for spreading the news on updates and progress on various changes / issues, but as of now it looks a long shot for the team to actually start using it. Obviously it would support the RSS / Atom feeds as well. So I would have to hold on for a while.
As a part of my objective of increasing the collaboration within the team, I have created something called Ideas wall and Questions basket that would give the team an opportunity to interact with the management & post ideas for new innovations, opportunities as well as ask questions on the processes around the project. Just for the sake of mentioning, these two are plain wiki pages in a team section for me and that worked well so far.
So far I have not felt a need of having a Social networking intranet portal for the team as the size of the team is not really big and although we have resources spread across various locations in the world, its easy to connect with each other with the existing tools. So may be I can keep that idea in reserve as of now.
As usual, if you have any comments or any ideas for me to take a look, I would welcome them. So please leave a comment on my blog or ‘twit’ me on Twitter.
Using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams ..
Jun 3rd
Today, during one of my team review meetings, one of my colleagues raised an idea of having a chat server hosted on intranet to allow the team members collaborate with each other for issuing and requesting updates on various incidents, problems and their progresses. A good idea to have one chat server, but few team members were probably not pro to the idea due to the ‘push’ nature of the chat and they did not want to be disturbed with many messages broadcasted to the team if they were not of any interest to them.
Then the obvious solution to this idea was to install ‘twitter’ like microblogging software on one of my intranet server and allow teams to follow rest of the team to ‘pull’ the updates as and when they need it.
To my surprise, when I explained the concept of microblogging to the team and gave an example of ‘twitter’ to the team, none of my team members seem to know ‘twitter’. This was a shock to me, especially when my team was supposed to be pro in Information Technology !!
Nevertheless, explained them the concept of microblogging to the team and asked them to explore ‘twitter’ concepts and find out how it works.
Upon doing the search myself, I found Laconi.ca best suited to our needs of having an online microblogging and collaboration tool for the team.
I would still need to get the team explore this product and get a pilot installation tested on our intranet Linux server but by the looks of the product, it looks to be exactly what I needed for my team to enable better collaboration.
Anyways, few main expectations I am having from this kind of collaboration tool being used in the support project is to enable the disparately located team put up updates on a simple question @What are you doing?@. Obviously my team is located at various locations across India & UK so having a centralized tool would certainly help us in better collaboration.
Another important usage I envisage of this tool is to give updates to customers about any major release updates or change implementation. It is obvious that while the teams are busy doing the installation of a software on the production servers, they would not like customers or any other teams asking the questions on status updates and disturb them. So if we have this kind of tool, it would definitely enable us ‘post’ proactive updates on intranet which could be followed by various customers / teams to find out the updates themselves.
Thus, a job for me tomorrow is to find out someone in my team who could take on the job of doing the R&D and install the Laconi.ca software on my intranet server and take it from there ..
A job hopper’s interview & an interesting perspective !
May 29th
This story was forwarded to me by one of my friends and I am unaware of the source of this story / article .. whatever !
However, its interesting one and here is how it goes ..
Some, rather most organizations reject his CV today because he has changed jobs frequently (10 in 14 years). My friend, the ‘job hopper’
(referred here as Mr. JH), does not mind it…. well he does not need to mind it at all. Having worked full-time with 10 employer companies in just 14 years gives Mr. JH the relaxing edge that most of the ‘company loyal’ employees are struggling for today. Today, Mr. JH too is laid off like some other 14-15 year experienced guys – the difference being the latter have just worked in 2-3 organizations in the same number of years. Here are the excerpts of an interview with Mr. JH:
Q: Why have you changed 10 jobs in 14 years?
A: To get financially sound and stable before getting laid off the second time.
Q: So you knew you would be laid off in the year 2009?
A: Well I was laid off first in the year 2002 due to the first global economic slowdown. I had not got a full-time job before January 2003 when the economy started looking up; so I had struggled for almost a year without job and with compromises.
Q: Which number of job was that?
A: That was my third job.
Q: So from Jan 2003 to Jan 2009, in 6 years, you have changed 8 jobs to make the count as 10 jobs in 14 years?
A: I had no other option. In my first 8 years of professional life, I had worked only for 2 organizations thinking that jobs are deserved after lot of hard work and one should stay with an employer company to justify the saying ‘employer loyalty’. But I was an idiot.
Q: Why do you say so?
A: My salary in the first 8 years went up only marginally. I could not save enough and also, I had thought that I had a ‘permanent’ job, so I need not worry about ‘what will I do if I lose my job’. I could never imagine losing a job because of economic slowdown and not because of my performance. That was January 2002.
Q: Can you brief on what happened between January 2003 and 2009.
A: Well, I had learnt my lessons of being ‘company loyal’ and not ‘money earning and saving loyal’. But then you can save enough only when you earn enough. So I shifted my loyalty towards money making and saving – I changed 8 jobs in 6 years assuring all my interviewers about my stability.
Q: So you lied to your interviewers; you had already planned to change the job for which you were being interviewed on a particular day?
A: Yes, you can change jobs only when the market is up and companies are hiring. You tell me – can I get a job now because of the slowdown? No.
So one should change jobs for higher salaries only when the market is up because that is the only time when companies hire and can afford the expected salaries.
Q: What have you gained by doing such things?
A: That’s the question I was waiting for. In Jan 2003, I had a fixed salary (without variables) of say Rs. X p.a. In January 2009, my salary was 8X. So assuming my salary was Rs.3 lakh p.a. in Jan 2003, my last drawn salary in Jan 2009 was Rs.24 lakh p.a. (without variable). I never bothered about variable as I had no intention to stay for 1 year and go through the appraisal process to wait for the company to give me a hike.
Q: So you decided on your own hike?
A: Yes, in 2003, I could see the slowdown coming again in future like it had happened in 2001-02. Though I was not sure by when the next slowdown would come, I was pretty sure I wanted a ‘debt-free’ life before being laid off again. So I planned my hike targets on a yearly basis without waiting for the year to complete.
Q: So are you debt-free now?
A: Yes, I earned so much by virtue of job changes for money and spent so little that today I have a loan free 2 BR flat (1200 sq. feet) plus a loan free big car without bothering about any EMIs. I am laid off too but I do not complain at all. If I have laid off companies for money, it is OK if a company lays me off because of lack of money.
Q: Who is complaining?
A: All those guys who are not getting a job to pay their EMIs off are complaining. They had made fun of me saying I am a job hopper and do not have any company loyalty. Now I ask them what they gained by their company loyalty; they too are laid off like me and pass comments to me – why will you bother about us, you are already debt-free. They were still in the bracket of 12-14 lakh p.a. when they were laid off.
Q: What is your advice to professionals?
A: Like Narayan Murthy had said – love your job and not your company because you never know when your company will stop loving you. In the same lines, love yourself and your family needs more than the company’s needs. Companies can keep coming and going; family will always remain the same. Make money for yourself first and simultaneously make money for the company, not the other way around.
Q: What is your biggest pain point with companies?
A: When a company does well, its CEO etc will address the entire company saying, ‘well done guys, it is YOUR company, keep up the hard work, I am with you.” But when the slowdown happens and the company does not do so well, the same CEO etc will say, “It is MY company and to save the company, I have to take tough decisions including asking people to go.”
So think about your financial stability first; when you get laid off, your kids will complain to you and not your boss.