Innovation to Products to Ventures

Unfair advantages - why technology startups need them

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:23:40 +0100

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.

It's about where you are as well as what you are selling

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:18:18 +0100

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.

Real innovation requires real customers

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 14:32:39 +0100

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....

Real innovation is more than brainstorming

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:05:55 +0100

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.

Dead project walking -why you have to kill projects to be successful

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:04:44 +0000

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.

Portfolio management - slightly trickier now

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:46:10 +0000

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).

Portfolio management - a few more models

Richard A D Jones — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:12:00 +0000

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.

Technology only rolls one way - downhill!

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:39:02 +0000

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.

How to spot a crap technology startup - 1 "We don't have any competition"

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:34:30 +0000

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.

Physical interfacing of your team

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 18:36:57 +0100

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.

How do you make better decisions? Get senior management out of the process!

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:25:54 +0100

When your project has reached a decision point, do you really want to wait until the management team can assemble? Are you sure they will have time to get to your part of the agenda? You've probably been in a project that gets bounced from at least one meeting and has to wait. The key here is to remove senior management physically from the decision making process.

How to assess projects - simple weighted averages

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 21:09:18 +0100

This approach provides a simple way to compare the 'attractiveness' of different candidate projects.

Monitoring the effectiveness of innovation

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:18:54 +0100

Innovation is like a sales funnel, you get prospects in one end and hopefully ‘sales’ out of the other end. The costs associated with generating concepts, clustering, evaluating etc. can be very significant and the business should really understand how these costs are spent throughout the process.

The informal innovation process

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 17:51:09 +0100

The difficulty with trying to create purely formal processes for innovation is that you can lose the clichéd “water cooler” effect of accidental generation of ideas through chance discussions, meetings and exchanges of information. However, relying purely on your personnel to generate enough good new ideas is near suicidal for a business.

The impact of office environments on co-operation

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 17:55:23 +0100

Creating relaxed, informal areas for people to think and co-operate can have a dramatic effect on the quality and quantity of innovation in an organisation.

The impact of physical layout of organisations

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:56:48 +0100

If you want people to talk, you have to give them a fighting chance by putting them in relative proximity....There was some work done that showed that the probability of communication between two individuals was significantly lower if they were in different groups and decayed rapidly based on physical distance

Instant messaging and strange communication effects

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 18:16:37 +0100

It is amazing to see people who work quite closely together using some form of instant messenger (IM) to talk to one another. Software developers seem to like this best – as if the fear of human contact might be too much for them. It’s got benefits.

Put your best person on key tasks

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:31:10 +0100

It’s actually a broader point but if you want to launch or support a top-priority initiative in an organisation, you have to put a top person on it. If you just dig out someone because they are ‘available’ then you immediately send a signal to the rest of the personnel – it’s not really important!

Change hurts – so make it as quick and as clear as possible.

Innovation partnerships - co-innovation

Richard A D Jones — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 17:38:27 +0000

Relationships between companies have been changing for the last 10 years plus. Suppliers in car companies have moved from ‘Just In Time’ delivery of components (or Just In Trouble occasionally) to being made responsible for complete sub-systems of the cars. They no longer just