Archive for 'Innovation'
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 13 Jul 2005, 4:33 PM - Leave Comment
Apple and Steve Jobs never cease to amaze me. Today Apple reported earnings and they exceeded the revenue and profit expectations by a wide margin.
Look at the attached graph that shows the iTunes song downloads chart that I made up from publicly available information.
If you observe closely, you will notice that it took about 14 months to sell the first 100 million songs. However, the last 100 million songs will be sold in less than 90 days. The key here is the fact that Apple was able to see this long ago. Steve and Apple have been innovative at a breathtaking pace.
Look at the simple counter that they put on the Apple Home Page (iTunes Music Store 500 million song countdown) and you can see that songs are being downloaded every second and the race towards 500 million songs is ON.
I saw this interesting post by Rory Blyth bashing innovation. Rory talks about innovation being useless if enough attention is not given to quality, support, stability, relevance and value. I agree with Rory there but I disagree with the approach in the article as there are companies like Apple who are innovating and are giving attention to all the other stuff that they should normally give attention to. We don’t want to send a message to organizations that Innovation is useless. Everything has a place and I think in these current times Innovation has an important place in organizations that want to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.
Hats off to Apple for providing an example for corporate resilience.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 05 Jul 2005, 11:09 PM - Leave Comment
While driving to work today, I saw a Zero Emission Bus (ZEB) by VTA
(valley transportation authority) here in Silicon Valley. The bus was
completely powered by fuel cells. It was a delight to see fuel cells in
action (one the road).
May be I had missed the announcement or busy with work but I looked
around and found that VTA had made an announcement related to this a
few weeks ago.
Hats off to VTA for taking steps to save the earth (in a small way)
I remembered reading about such innovations way back in a book titled Unlimited Wealth
by Paul Zane Pilzer. Pilzer’s alchemy theory rests on the premise that
we have unlimited resources but lack the technology innovation to take
advantage of them. With so much of noise about oil prices, may be the
answer is not worrying about the increase in oil production but
increase in innovation to avoid over-reliance on oil. Once the demand
drops, the price drops automatically. Maybe I am over-simplifying this
but read the book and may be there is something there.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 30 Jun 2005, 3:47 PM - Leave Comment
Life works in interesting ways. If you put your heart out and do the
best you can, you get a lot more help from outside than you really
want. If you slack and HOPE that things will turn out well, you are all
alone.
Take Gmail from google. When Google
introduced Gmail, there were no other web based email offerings that
could match the offer from Gmail. It was head and shoulders above the
rest of the crowd. The interesting part is this – a slew of tools and
plugins were developed by people not even employed by Google to make it
even better.
I was looking at an old post by Rob titled Gmail Tools and Plugins. There were at least 25 tools and plugins listed there almost a year ago. There must be a lot more now.
Do your best. Be at your best. Help will follow. May be you will have more help than you really want.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 27 Jun 2005, 1:03 AM - Leave Comment
DVR is an example of a game changing innovation. Just like Napster forever changed the way music industry thinks and works, DVRs are out to change the way TV industry thinks and works. TiVo and ReplayTV are the two prominent players and I am sure there are many more to come.
When I last checked, there were close to 1.9M TiVo subscribers and the
number is growing rapidly. This is a small number compared to the total
number of TV viewers but I am sure there is a point at which DVRs will
start causing a serious shift in the way the whole TV industry
operates. Here is a wild scenario (at that imaginary point)
* the number of people who don’t own a DVR does not make sense for advertisers to pay a ton of money for TV spots
* Ad rates for TV spots will drop
* Reduced revenue for TV spots means reduced spending by TV folks on quality programs
* Lack of quality programs provides lesser incentive for advertisers to advertise on TV
Add to this popularity of citizen journalism, podcasting (soon videocasting) will all put increasing pressure on TV channels.
On a positive note, whenever such a major shift happens, a ton of
opportunities open up for other innovators. Something to think about.
Posted under Business Models, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 21 Jun 2005, 2:12 PM - Leave Comment
I was at Fedex this morning and while waiting for them to complete my job, I browsed through one of their new offers “File, Print Fedex Kinkos“.
It was, in a nutshell, a very compelling offer. A few months ago, I was
shipping printed copies of my manuscript all over the place to get
endorsements. With this service, if I need to do that, I could print to
a Fedex location closest to the destination and ask them to ship it via
Ground – all with the click of a button.
That’s convenient and time saving. This is a classic example of
leveraging the value chain. In other words, they have extended their
service to do more things that the customer would have done separately.
In that process they bring unprecedented convenience and time saving.
For those of you who got interested in leveraging the value chain,
don’t miss another classic story of Cardinal Health. Here is the link for a shorter version.
If you want to read the longer version, you have to read one of my favorite books How to grow when markets don’t by Adrian J. Slywotsky.
You don’t need to be a very large company to apply the principles
behind Leveraging the value chain. All you have to do is look at how
your customers are using your product and/or service internally and see
where else you can extend your reach.
Good luck!
Posted under Compelling Offers, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 17 Jun 2005, 11:02 PM - 2 Comments
Tom talks about his “line intolerance”
at starbucks. I have thought about this problem at least ten times.
There are long lines especially during peak hours (morning, post lunch
and early evening) and interestingly while Starbucks has been
innovative a number of times, they don’t seem to do anything about
this. May be Starbucks thinks that lines will signify popularity. They
may not know that these lines are making people go and try out other
places and some of these folks will probably get addicted to some other
brands.
What could Starbucks do – Here is one solution
In a nutshell, the solution is to create a pre-order capability for all Starbucks Duetto card holders
Here is the solution in detail: Most lines at Starbucks are from
regular clients who come in and order almost the same drinks every time
they come in. Since they are using Duetto card, customer can be
identified. Here are the steps:
1. Client purchases a Duetto card and registers for pre-order facility at Starbucks website
2. Pre-order registration will ask the client to choose three favorite
drinks (with all the customizations) These are the preferred drinks
3. Client also chooses three of his favorite starbucks stores
4. When the client wants coffee, he can order by phone or on the web
4.1 On the web: Login – choose store – choose drink and choose time and pay by credit card
4.2 On the phone: Call in a central phone number. System prompts to
choose the store and the drink from the favorites. Client chooses store
and drink and keys in the time he wants to pick up the drink. Card is
automatically charged.
5. The store gets notified and a sticker with name of the client gets printed with the time of pick up
6. Starbucks team folks schedule this drink prepartion
7. Client walks in and picks up the drink. If you want to add some more
features, have the client swipe the starbucks card and identify himself
before picking up the drink.
Hope starbucks is listening!
Two benefits:
a. Duetto card holders get additional benefits. More Duetto customers
b. You get the preferences of all these duetto customers for analysis purposes later.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 16 Jun 2005, 9:22 PM - Leave Comment
What are Google and Microsoft upto next?
Here are two links where they provide sneak previews of their upcoming innovation initiatives
1. Google Labs
2. MSN Sandbox
Have fun!
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 15 Jun 2005, 2:21 PM - Leave Comment
What a coincidence – I wrote about this yesterday and I go over to Tom’s blog and he is providing a ringing endorsement to the same article over here.
Once again, don’t miss reading it! This may be the way organizations will get their competitive advantage.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 14 Jun 2005, 9:00 PM - Leave Comment
This week’s feature article in Business Week is titled “The Power of Us”
and talks about how companies are collaborating with users to create
more powerful offers. When users become your partners, the world is
your R&D unit.
Of the example companies that are covered in the article is Skype.
Skype lets users make use of the power of internet to talk to other
skype users or other phone users (via SkypeOut). As of today there were
121M+ downloads of Skype software. The interesting thing about Skype is
that every person that is using Skype is allowing Skype to utilize some
spare computing resources for the benefit of all. So, the more users
jump into this bandwagon, the more computing power there is. What an
amazing example of “leverage”
There are many more examples highlighting open innovation in the article. Don’t miss reading it.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 06 Jun 2005, 9:57 AM - 1 Comment
People are innovating like crazy and it’s getting exciting everyday. I saw this great piece about a SF based startup Current taking citizen journalism to TV (link: San Francisco Chronicle) this august.
Citizen journalism is the new wave where the general public participate
in creating news and also participate in selecting the news (by voting)
that they want to see.
The company Current is now seeking public to upload news videos that
they can air on their satellite channel once it goes live in August.
The company plans to pay about $250 for every video that is aired.
Former Vice President Al Gore is the chairman of Current.
It is hard to predict how successful Current will be but I am sure
other news networks (with traditional crew) are watching this closely.
This is a game changing move and will set higher standards for everyone
in this business.
All the best to Current!
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
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