Day 3



Alright, I never did get used to taking notes online, so I now find myself trying to catch up on previous days....

Wabi Sabi - "The beauty of imperfection"...

In session 6, despite being at the end of a very long day, I do remember that we discussed the notions of joint development/innovation. I think the development of Linux provides us with the best example and use of joint development and also shows the great potential of people working together in order to innovate. The group exercise was definitely a bit of a novelty as we worked together on google docs not speaking with eachother and still managed to come up with something to present. Our group took the position of Youtube, and together we raised some interesting issues in discussing some of the pros and cons of marketing and product development using Youtube. Sebastian's P&G example (the 'Talking Stain') was particularly relevant and gave us a bit more of a framework to work with. I'll try and link in one of the videos in a bit.



Finally, I think what stood out the most for me from this session was the fact that there has been a shift of money in IT from hardware development to consulting, training, and certification. I don't think this will change in the near-term, and as such I'll keep this in mind when considering future business/investment opportunities.



Day 4



For these sessions, I remember being a little fresher and thus was able to retain a little bit more....

Here we discussed disruptive innovation and this began with a look at the machine tool industry in the early 80s - specifically, how Japan was able to use Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machine tools to increase their market share and essentially take over the market for the next few years by combining the flexibility of computers and machine tools.

Incumbents are often considerably resistant to change and here Dave brought up the example of the current shifts in TV and the way people want to interact with the products. He discusses it in detail on his blog here on the disruptive technologies post: http://omniumtechinnovation.blogspot.com/


We also discussed the Wii and how Nintendo forced the Xbox 360 and the PS3 to sell below cost. They were able to leverage low complexity in order to capture a new market of previously non-gaming type people. I was reminded of this great youtube video, which is not completely unrelated to this and joint innovation you can check it out on the sidebar...

MESH Technology etc.

I was amazed with how Skype leverages more nodes to ehance the quality of their voip technology - allowing mini hubs to form which can expand MESH technology in order to increase resilience against peak nodes...
I was also impressed with some of the trending software and tools we looked at - like google trends - basically monitoring the interests of individuals in various market trends...with the potential aim of determining market preference (Finding demand example: 3G Iphone searches over a year before the product was out on the market.)
I think if you have marketing people that can keep abreast of the rapidly changing market conditions by keeping 'an ear to the customer' these tools (OReilly Radar, Alexa, and Technorati) may be extremely useful - particularly by recognizing the warnings of capability oversupply and in identifying low end customer demand segments.
Now I can begin to understand why it would be difficult to manage both mainstream and disruptive technolgies within a single organization - the complexities would be astounding and counter to existing culture - and might only be possible with a radical shift in strategy (also maybe why reuters and bloomberg might see their demise as they will soon be disrupted by the likes of technorati etc...)