I love the phrase "unfair advantage." Peter Crouch is a striker at Liverpool who towers over defenders and so gets more than his fair share of headers. I always look for the same thing in startups (and I don't mean tall people). Read on for more about the different types of advantages and how you can develop some for your technology company.   more »

I was in a strange conversation today. Someone was asking about UK broadband opportunities and I told them it's a blood bath. It really is horrific with free broadband offers appearing (if anything is ever truly free). So why are my business partners and I are so keen on broadband in Eastern Europe. Broadband is broadband right?

Well, the difference is the adoption curve. You probably know this already but there is a profile of sales over time that starts to build slowly, then accelerates before flattening out again. This s-curve is seen in many industries. Sometimes your product or service can re-juvenate itself by finding a new niche or set of users and a second s-curve builds on your original one. Tricky but good if you can do it.

In broadband, we can see in the UK that we have achieved near saturation and companies are being forced to givie it away 'free'. However, countries in Eastern Europe have very low penetration and so are only at the start of the s-curve explosion.

This doesn't make it easy but it does mean that you can learn from what has happened in other countries and use strategies that have worked.    more »

I get to work with a lot of new companies and corporate ventures and, you know what, they frequently have no clue about what a real customer wants. Cambridge (the UK one) is a great place for technology innovation but even the smartest people don't always understand about having a real market. They have the “Field of Dreams” view about customers - 'if I build it, they will come." However, this mistake isn't limited to startups - I worked with a European electronics multinational and I couldn’t believe their approach to innovation.

The division I worked with produced equipment for automating factories - essentially like computers with input and output connections to make machines work. Here were two classic conversations with them.

"Good news Richard - we have done a deal with M****** (identity masked to protect the innocent) and will be distributing their single board computer series. Our arrangement means we will have the same market price as them."

"Okay. What do you mean by market price?"

"Our list price is identical to their’s."

"Hang on," say I, "our normal customer gets a discount of 10% whereas M****** give a discount of 30% as standard. Our real market price to users or distributors is going to be significantly higher than their’s. In what way do you think that is market pricing?"

....silence....   more »

The most tired management story on the planet is how 3M came to make the Post-It pad. Remember - man uses not very sticky glue to put bits of paper in his hymm book and eventually has to ..... oh I can't even bear to repeat it.

For every great idea that someone 'games' through the barbed wire and trenches of internal barriers, there are thousands that die a slow death in cupboards and desks.   more »

Companies can be outstanding at generating new ideas – I mean really world-class and yet they struggle. The simple reason is they don’t have the resources to exploit them. I’m not talking about the resources not existing in the company, I am talking about them just not being available. If the resources are being used for something useful then is that okay? Well only if it is more valuable to the business than the project it is delaying. If not, then your resource prioritisation across the portfolio of projects better be good. However, the more frustrating problem for companies relates to when their resources are ‘lost’ to the business either still working on bad projects or doing ‘after sales’ on previous projects.    more »

In another post, I put up the graphic above as an approach to assessing different projects within a porfolio and understanding the overall ‘balance’.  The projects here represent a company that is sticking pretty close to home in terms of what it does but is expending significant money in trying to develop technology led approaches to their market (the diameter of the circle represents the money committed to the project).

   more »

People often forget that the reason you try to understand what you are currently doing in R&D is so you can make better decisions in future. Representing projects graphically allows you to understand the portfolio at a higher level and is ideal for the senior management team when they are contemplating where they are compared to where they are trying to get to. There are a couple of other blogs about this but I was too tired to put in these final diagrams. Again, there’s no right or wrong – just different ways of viewing what you have. I think they’re pretty self-explanatory. I’d write more but there’s a guy playing his i-Pod so loud I could sing along and I’m just off to garrott him with his own headphone cable. If there are no more posts – please come visit me in prison.    more »

Something is a specialist skill that only a few people can do and gradually it becomes more widely available, cheaper and easier to use (no punchcards in computers now - only blue screens of death and sanctimonious Mac users to deal with). This article talks about the inexorable march of technologies and produsts from high cost, scarcities to being cheap and on your desktop etc.
   more »

Here are the signs of how to spot if you are talking to a startup company that is doomed. Might be a bit harsh and an exageration but I bet I'm right almost all the time on this. Here is the first thing they say that should make you run out of the door screaming.   more »

This is really simple but works.  Think about the processes involved in going from innovation to product/feature delivery.  If they are supposed to work closely together then put them close together.  Is that it?  Okay not quite.

To maximise the interactions between different groups, try to increase the size of the physical interface between them.  I'd say that in English if I could. 

Maybe an example will help - doubt it but worth a try. 

If you have a development team and an industrialisation team say - then don't design the office so they are separated.  See if you can set it up so that as many people as possible are next to someone from the other department.  I don't mean mixing them up completely as you want each group to still function well on their own.  I just mean think about how you can create long borders between groups where colleagues from the different groups can talk.

© Copyright Richard A D Jones 2005