The event was held in a renovated space that is now an arts/culture center

Rehearsal

Jason and Kevin on stage

Dinner the night before, with the group Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group doing a sketch based around Michael Jackson, and with a performance of Thriller.

TEDx Day

Jason doing introductionsZoo Nutritionist demonstrating zoo feeding practices with volunteersAnother zoo feeding practice: the Pinata

A chalk wall for people to leave messages
Designer Alice Wang presenting. This is what it feels like on-stage, a blurThe BaBa Band

Taiwan tennis professional and advocate Jeff Hsu

Dancer Fang-Yi Sheu

I categorized the various things I’ve done into six buckets - industrial design, user research, interaction design, strategy, writing, and marketing. For the most part these aren’t roles in the traditional sense. I’ve never had “interaction designer” as a title, and the spike of writing in 1996 wasn’t because I suddenly became a writer, but because I was doing my Masters degree. But these activities were important parts of whatever role I was doing at the time. Over my eight plus years at frog I’ve had four titles and at least six roles.

It’s satisfying that today there is a pretty evenly distributed mix of all the things that I’ve been interested in doing over the years. When I started out as an industrial designer I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, or ever getting bored with it. But as I worked more and got more projects under my belt, other areas of expertise caught my interest and I recognized things about what I was good at and - just as importantly - not good at, which steered my career in different directions.

Where I am now is “postdictable” - not predictable by me twenty years ago, but perfectly logical in hindsight.

What would your personal map look like? And is your current mix of activities what you want to be doing? Is it a surprise or a planned progression?

Virgin America offers a superior product at a lower price, has an enthusiastic fan base, and cutting-edge marketing - all usual ingredients for market disruption. So why can’t it take a sizable bit out of entrenched competitors? Fast Company reports on how Virgin has faced barrier after barrier to expanding its service into new markets, a critical step for an airline to gain enough geographic footprint to attract a sustainable quantity of passengers.

The article quotes Hubert Horan, an aviation consultant:

“King Solomon couldn’t start a U.S. domestic airline these days. No matter how well they’re run, it’s tough for any airline that’s small to survive.

Here are these well-run efficient airlines [Virgin, JetBlue, Southwest] — people like them, they have low costs — but they can’t get the badly run inefficient airlines to go away. In a competitive market, the people with the better-run companies ought to drive the high-cost companies out of business, and that just doesn’t work in the airline industry.”

Here is a strategy canvas of the airline industry, comparing Virgin, Southwest, and an averaged “Legacy” airline. The strategy canvas evaluates several dimensions of competition (e.g. prices, convenience) on simple low-to-high scales. You draw a “value curve” crossing the points where entrenched competitors sit for each of the competitive dimensions, and then look for white-space opportunities to differentiate. (My tongue-in-cheek but not entirely incorrect one-line summary of BOSis: look at what the competition is doing, and do the opposite.)

Admittedly this diagram is a quick and dirty analysis but you can immediately see how Virgin and Southwest have very different value curves than legacy outlines. (And yes I recognize that there is variation within the legacy airlines, they aren’t all exactly the same, but like I say I’ve averaged them for the purpose here. This is is often what is advocated in BOS, which uses Southwest as a case study of creating a new value curve - see the graphic on p38.)

Strategy canvases are a nice way to quickly take the pulse of a category. But they are also easy to do poorly by leaving off important dimensions that may not be about the more obvious factors of product innovation.  This strategy canvas, for example, leaves out the political and geographic lockout that the legacy airlines have created, which - as Virgin is showing - are vital to market traction. Don’t make the mistake that some companies (and industry analysts do) of cherry-picking your competitive dimensions to make yourself look good, and leave out ones that may have a critical impact on your ultimate success.

That’s no accident. It’s the result of enormous amounts of hard work and financial investment, much more than most companies are willing to stomach. Apple’s head of design, Jonathon Ive, said in a recent rare interview with design site Core 77 about the iPhone 4:

“A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials. [At Apple] we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material—and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work.”

High quality craft comes about from an interplay between a material and a person, whether they be a woodworker, metal-smith, designer, engineer, or production-line worker. Good craft comes from intimate familiarity and ongoing hands-on manipulation of the material and the forms it can make, not from abstractly visualizing the form as is often done through CAD renderings. They can be highly photorealistic, but often not usefully informative to the design process as they lack tangibility. Ive goes on to say:

“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”

Forty years ago, design philosopher and master wood craftsman David Pye argued that design is always limited by budget, not technique. The ideal form promised by superior technique, he said, will always lose out to affordability, and therefore design will always be compromised. What is remarkable about Apple is that they have navigated around this paradox to a large extent. Obviously they don’t make the cheapest computers around, but they have brought a incredibly high level of quality to everyday products at prices that many people can afford and an increasing number are happy to pay. It used to be that you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an object with this degree of precision, whether it was jewelry, a car, or a fine watch.

Apple has done it by taking techniques and materials that everyone else uses for small-batch prototyping, and scaled them up to be mass-production ready, such as how it carves out aluminum blocks to create the shells for everything from iPod Nanos to MacBook Pros to the new Mac Mini. They work closely and over the long term with a small set of suppliers to hone the techniques and get the costs out, rather than doing what everyone else does which is to shop around every year to different vendors, always hunting for the lowest price. Apple isn’t afraid to “single source” a technique, technology or material from a vendor if it gives the right affect and advantage, while other companies avoid like the plague being locked into single vendors.

And of course Apple has famously fanatical attention to every detail that starts at the very top with Steve Jobs, and percolates out to the rest of the company. Apple is certainly not unique if you look across all companies in all industries, but very few - if any - of their direct competitors have it.

So it’s not magical how Apple does what it does with the quality of its products. It’s just that most other companies don’t have the patience, budget allocations, or sheer will to pull it off.

“[E]vents, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations. These firsts-of-their-kind developments require unprecedented degrees of creativity — which has become a more important leadership quality than attributes like management discipline, rigor or operational acumen.”

Later, the report states:

For CEOs and their organizations, avoiding complexity is not an option — the choice comes in how they respond to it. Will they allow complexity to become a stifling force that slows responsiveness, overwhelms employees and customers, or threatens profits? Or do they have the creative leadership, customer relationships and operating dexterity to turn it into a true advantage?

Today’s complexity is only expected to rise, and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organizations - we call them “Standouts” - has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.

Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovation in how they lead and communicate.

Having written a lot about the new breed of complex problems businesses are facing today, this rang true with me. In fact, the study’s findings line up well with the challenges and approaches I describe in Innovation X. Here’s a small sample.

• Embody creative leadership: Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. (In Innovation X I refer to this as Divergence)
• Reinvent customer relationships: In a massively interconnected world, CEOs prioritize customer intimacy as never before. Globalization, combined with dramatic increases in the availability of information, has exponentially expanded customers’ options. (Immersion)
• Build operating dexterity: CEOs are revamping their operations to stay ready to act when opportunities or challenges arise. (Adaption)

The report is fairly lengthy but an easy read, and well worth getting. Unfortunately the site seems to be having some technical glitches and it took me several tries to actually download the PDF (registration required with opt in/out contact info). Get the report here >

Last week was The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, and it was really a terrific event. It was held in a wonderful brick factory building which, despite getting very hot inside, was a spectacular space. The screen was a gigantic 70 meters across. But despite the showy scale, the vibe inside was friendly, enthusiastic, and down to earth.About 1,000 people attended from Europe and the US and elsewhere, and I was somewhat surprised that most of the speakers were from the US. These included Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), Lisa Gansky (web entrepreneur and angel investor) and Timothy Ferriss (4 Hour Workweek author). One of the other highlights was the opening talk by Robert Cailliau, co-founder of the World Wide Web along with Tim Berners-Lee.

There were also presentations by a lot of start-ups from various European countries (but mostly Netherlands), which were a bit uneven, but showed that there is still huge vibrancy in coming up with business ideas based on social networking, Web 2.0, cloud computing, mobile web, and combinations of all of these.

Thanks to Boris, Patrick and the rest of The Next Web crew for putting on an impressive event!

I gave a keynote about the current and coming collision of the web with physical objects. This is something that has been talked about for a while (Bruce Sterling on Spimes, The Internet of Things, ambient computing, and so on), and we are now starting to see real commercial products. For example, I talked about Nike + and Zipcar, along with some of the work that frog has done for Intel and others in this area. But we are still at the “horseless carriage” stage of understanding what this collision means - it won’t simply be web+object. I coined a neologism - webjects - to describe this future total blend of web and objects, and described a couple of high level frameworks for how to think about them.

The presentation (without embedded movies) is up on Slideshare (clicking on this link will let you also see the notes about each slide):

I was also interviewed after my talk:

AtMost.TV: The Next Web 2010 Danielle Schouten interviewt Adam Richardson(Frogdesign) from AtMostTVchannel4-PP on Vimeo.

So what could the Postal Service do to innovate itself out of its budget gap and re-imagine itself for the 21st century? I posed the question to my clever colleagues at frog design and received an overwhelming number of ideas, much more than I can include here. Here are a few starter provocations…

Read more >

Microsoft is a bit like Tiger Woods at the moment - industry darling that became too dominant, then had a fall accompanied by a thick layer of schadenfreude, and now is trying a come-back. Microsoft is being replaced in the big-bad-wolf department by Google and Apple and finds itself in the odd position of being an underdog, and people love to root for underdogs. In fact I’d say that Microsoft is further ahead on the come-back trail than Tiger is if you look at some of its recent announcements: Bing,Windows Phone 7, the Courier journal concept, and the just-announced IE9. Something interesting is brewing in Redmond.

(And for context, I’ll say that I’m a Mac user for 20 years and in the past have been quite critical of Microsoft’s approach to innovation. But I also like to recognize credit where credit is due, and that’s the case here.)

There are two things going on with their recent announcements that are really interesting, and which hint at better things to come still.

Finding its Innovation Voice
There is a clear editorial voice to what they are doing. In the past Microsoft was often criticized for producing warmed-over versions of other people’s products (the perrennial Windows vs. OS X war), or for taking a “kitchen sink” approach that just stuck every feature imaginable into a product without thinking about how they gelled as a whole. Now they are creating products with distinct points of view that do not try to simply ape other successful ones, or out-do them on feature lists. You may or may not like exactly what each product does, but at least there is differentiation and an emerging personality to what they are doing, something Microsoft has long been lacking.

Systematizing Innovation
They have been able, to an extent, to systemetize an approach to innovation that began (it seems) with the Xbox team. The Xbox, especially the 360, established a fresh, distinctive approach to development that had been lacking at Microsoft. Innovating on behalf of customers rather than by linearly extrapolating what they say, consideration of a whole ecosystem, and then taking responsibility for the whole user experience in that ecosystem.

We see threads of this Xbox approach showing up in most of the new generation of products - Bing, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and Courier. (These are all products more or less at the edges of Microsoft’s business, Office and Windows have not yet been affected so heavily. In fact the Windows advertising campaign flaunts the notion of just doing what customers asked, which these other products are definitely not doing.)

It was looking for a while that the Xbox might just be a one-off innovation high-point for Microsoft. Motorola experienced this with the Razr - a game-changing product that they weren’t then able to convert into a broader portfolio and leadership of the industry. They could not systemetize the innovation process. After a couple of years, other phone manufacturers caught up to Motorola and today they are way back down in the rankings again.

Succeeding once at innovation is one thing, and can just be a matter of luck sometimes. Succeeding at it over and over again the way that Apple and Google do is a whole other ballgame. If current trends continue, this is what we are seeing going on at Microsoft. Given their size, resources, reach and clout, this could lead to some impressive stuff.

The Proof is in the Pudding
Windows Phone 7, Courier and IE9 all have one other thing in common - none of them have been released yet. They look at the end of the day there can be a lot of slip-ups between nice demo and game-changing shipping product. Microsoft has stumbled here before - look at what happened to Vista and Zune. But they’ve taken their lumps and perhaps now are ready. If so, we could be seeing a huge resurgence from the company which, after all, still has huge resources, dollars and reach. If they really can get their innovation groove back, from conception to implementation, then they will be a massive force to be reckoned with once again.

Read this book: Thinking Like Your Editor. There are loads of books out there about writing, and about crafting proposals. This is by far the best one I have seen. It is geared toward serious non-fiction and understands what editors, publishers and audiences alike seek out in these types of books. I completely rethought and rewrote my proposal after reading this.

Create tension: One piece of advice I used a lot from Thinking Like Your Editor was to think about narrative arc. You may not think of a business book as having a narrative arc, but ideally there is a thread which keeps the reader moving along and motivates them to keep going.

I tried to do this with my book in a couple of ways: 

• On a macro level, the flow of the book is fairly straightforward, but is broken into the four major chunks of topic, with implications chapters at the end. This provides a clear story line, and a carrot at the end (implications for strategy and organization) to keep pulling the reader along.
• On a micro level, I tried to create mini narrative arcs, particularly for the case studies. Each one sets up with a little mystery that needs to be resolved by the end of it. 

I also tried to incorporate lessons from Made to Stick, one of my favorite books of recent years.

Set aside dedicated time. I was very fortunate that frog gave me three months away from project duties to focus 100% on Innovation X. Having said that, there were 2-3 years worth of steady thinking about the topic, along with several articles, conference talks, numerous client presentations and blog posts, that all filled out pieces of the puzzle. I wrote a detailed chapter outline as part of my proposal to the publisher, and wrote several chapters almost full-length to make sure I had enough “there” there to be able to actually write a book.

By the time I sat down to write I had a pretty good idea of what the book would be about, how the ideas fit together, and what the case studies would be. Without that lengthy preparation I never would have been able to crank out 60,000 words in three months. Obviously not a luxury everyone can have, but very beneficial if at all possible. Working on a book over a long period in 2-3 hour bites makes it very inefficient, and you have a hard time keeping the conceptual thread (well, for me anyway).

Take a break from it. Get some distance, come back with naive eyes. I re-wrote quite a bit after coming back to the book after a month not thinking about it.

Print it out. At least for me, nothing beats reading on paper. I catch so many things on paper that I gloss over on screen, from grammar to structural problems.

Read it out loud. I caught an embarassingly large amount of poor phrasing and unwieldy sentences that I missed reading it in my head on screen or paper.

Buy a good chair. I was getting back pain from my old Ikea chair. I sprung for a Herman Miller Mirra chair like the one I have at work, picking one up on Craig’s List for half retail.

Have a routine. I once heard an interview with author Jane Yolen in which she was asked what her writing process is, as every author has one. She said she is a big believer in the BIC method. No, not the pen. It stands for Butt In Chair! That is exactly what I practiced. 8-9 hours a day, typically starting at 9:30. Five days a week. It was just like a job, but with no-one to talk to over the coffee machine.

Make it scannable. What do people do when standing in a book store considering whether to purchase a particular book? Obviously they look at the jacket and the table of contents, but they also flip through very quickly. I tried to have titles, subtitles, graphics and other high level elements every 2-3 pages. These give someone a sense of the flow of the topics as they are quickly paging through it. 

Start at the end. Come up with the title, subtitle, and one-liner blurb description almost before writing the actual book. An exaggeration, but not by much. Once you get into the weeds of actual writing, it’s very difficult to pull back enough to come up with a snappy title that captures the essence without being mechanical.

Rethink your software assumptions. Don’t use a word processor. I wrote using Scrivener, a Mac-only application that is brilliant for book writing. Instead of having one gigantic document for the whole book (unwieldy) or one document for each chapter (means a lot of switching back and forth), Scrivener allows you to work on the book in small chunks and seamlessly string them together. It provides tools that actively help you think about the narrative from top-down, as well as for managing all your pieces of writing from the bottom-up. In addition to efficiently managing all your writing and research, Scrivener helps avoid Blank Page Syndrome where you feel too intimidated to get started. You can just pile in anywhere and get started. Bored or stalled? Switch to another section and work on that for a while. Can’t recommend this highly enough.

I also used Sente to manage all the research documents, reference, footnotes and bibliography. I looked at a number of similar applications and felt Sente was the easiest to use. Its ability to search Google Books and a number of other databases and automatically import bibliographic data was handy. Having said that, Sente is still a bit quirky to use, and the documentation is not very friendly for the first time user.

So there you have my secrets. Now go off and write a book of your own!

I gave a brief presentation to talk about the book and set up some themes for the topic of the panel, “The pitfalls of customer-led innovation”. Here’s a Slideshare version of it with some extra annotation to make it easier to follow without the voiceover.

Thanks to frog design for putting the event on, and to Autodesk for the use of the wonderful Autodesk Gallery.