BusinessQuests - tailored advice and facilitation for business progress

US Innovation Status

I just read this excellent report on the status of innovation in the US (link kindly provided by the excellent Leeander) and I find it just amazing that the authors show a great deal of analytical rigor both in assessing the past and suggesting ways for the future in the form of a public private partnership. The article is long but very well worth your time.
With this kind of approach I see the US going back to the very top of innovation performance. It's time we did a similar assessment in Europe instead of just celebrating innovation and creativity in a very institutional manner.

Philippe Stark on design

What inspiration and fun Philippe Stark can be! There's more than meets the eye in what he says in this presentation...

Seemingly dissimilar items composing a coherent picture

Today is one of these days when I can express better than on most other days why I carefully remain on a spot that is common frontier to several seemingly different worlds: business, marketing, technology, psychology, software development, complex adaptive systems, social media... At the end of the day this is also what defines BusinessQuests: the often treacherous area defined by 'business + innovation + technology', where starting from what drives people is a fundamental starting point. BusinessQuests is where people's quests drive business value and where people's values resonate with quests in business.

Beta Group in Brussels

Back to the Beta Group this evening at my Alma Mater, home of the B-school that has given me much useful knowledge at a time that feels like centuries ago for anyone who's been heavily involved with innovation in the past decade or so. There were more than 200 people in the room, which I find particularly positive for innovative ventures.

Again a couple of very interesting initiatives and very refreshingly most of them had credible business models. As I've said before on this blog I completely disagree with people downplaying the importance of a business model as they develop extreme positions to support the (correct IMHO) position that innovation needs to be supported regardless of the existence of a business model.

Let me give you my top 3 and some notes I took during the presentations...

Inspiration of the day

Impossible is sometimes an excuse for not trying enough different ways for reaching a goal. Many thanks to Anne (Institut Ressources), Sylviane and JH (Media4) for letting me have this gift today.

Are You Going To Finish Strong? Awesome video! If you watch only one video today make sure it is this one! Nick Vujicic has no limbs but he leads an incredible life!

Roubini confirms deep crisis: how will you shield your business?

Nouriel Roubini’s (RGE – Wikipedia –  Page at NYU Stern) interview on Bloomberg is something you ought to listen carefully (podcast at the end of this post) if you’re a business founder, a manager or an asset owner. It’s not exactly the sort of content that will boost your morale, but I don’t believe the Coué method is the right way to go because it’s much more than a mere crisis of confidence. On the other hand neither denial, nor pessimism are going to take us anywhere.

Rather a pragmatic take on the situation is an essential first step if you’re serious about adapting and being in a position to fully benefit from an eventually recovering economy. This is only one of the reasons why it’s worth getting down to some of the implications of this analysis for business. Today helping business people deal with anxiety and make sense of this chaos is part of my work in different industries, from commodities to tech-innovative sectors, in different areas of Europe. So what does a pragmatic analysis of the situation mean for business? Read on and listen to the podcast.

Beta Group evening in Brussels

This evening I attended the meeting of Beta Group in Brussels. The event took place in one of the classrooms of the University of Brussels, home of my business school… It felt like a big return to the past since it’s been at least 14 years since I last visited that part of the world and in fact it hasn’t changed on bit… There were five presentations of startups that I found refreshing, not particularly because of the quality of the demos (sometimes too technical, low energy and not that assertive), but because I saw people creating fun stuff and prusuing visions and dreams of their own. Here’s a couple of companies I think are before good market opportunities:

1. Oxynade, because aggregating the information about events in a way that is clever, usable and relevant irrespective of the user’s device is a growing need, especially if they decide to make the whole thing transactionnal and allow tickets to be purchased and sold over their platform.
2. Plot Point Prod, because there is a big opportunity in product placement in videos online and VOD, especially during a period of economic downturn when consumers are likelier to stay at home and therefore need to be reached through channels they will use for entertainment. To make their case they very cleverly opened their “Stratagémistes” channel on YouTube and I think the entire audience enjoyed watching their stuff.
3. Proxyclick aka Click ‘n Lunch, because it simply makes sense for a lunch ordering platform to act as an intermediairy to allow caterers to deliver food to people at work and beyond. Their idea to offer a “virtual canteen” is interesting even though the operational challenges must be quite daunting.

During the event I heard someone ask the presenters of the last presenting startup (Seetiz) about Seetiz’s scalability. An interesting question, even though growth is not an objective per se. I think companies are better off making sure they’re great, solid, disciplined, high-quality and fun places to work before they attempt to grow. Growth is a by-product, a consequence of something fundamental: the enthusiastic urge to profitably serve customers in a consistent manner such that they become eager to stick with a company as a supplier. So, the list of this post is not meant to identify potential “high-growth” companies, but merely to say why these three stand out in my opinion.

Definitely refreshing to be spending some time with people who innovate by pursuing their own quests in the wonderful and often mesmerizing world of business.

Widenoise just released by WideTag

Even the longest journey starts with the first step… As WideTag releases WideNoise I feel this is the best way to describe the event because WideTag’s stated destination is to be a leading player when the Internet of Things becomes reality.

As WideTag’s CTO often says, there is a still a hell of a lot of stuff missing from the real world for the Internet of Things to happen, but one ought to start with what we’ve got, include new stuff that is coming up and build whatever is missing.

WideNoise, designed by a beautiful team released yesterday as an iPhone application that allows you to socially share data about the noise level at a specific location, is very much the result of this very pragmatic approach: use an existing networked device that has at least one sensor embedded to offer a first application of a “spime”. What’s a spime? It’s a device capable of recording and transmitting location coordinates as well as information about its immediate surrounding, e.g. temperature, carbon dioxide concentration… Now, spimes are likely to play a prominent role in the Internet of Things. Although it’s quite geeky as a concept (if you’re interested read this), there are three reasons why it’s noteworthy:

1. spimes will be (already are) all over the place in a matter of a few years using technologies (RFID, GSM, GPRS, GPS, GoogleMaps…) that only need assembling
2. with the environmental crisis we need to measure our “physical” world in order to make smarter (micro-)decisions from whether to use a car to how to manage the powergrid dynamically
3. the flow of data that will be captured will in part BELONG TO YOU so you don’t want it taken from you without your consent or in a way that is so proprietary you can’t control it, which is one of the reasons why WideTag seeks to make things open, something it started doing with OpenSpime, an initiative aimed at offering open protocols and technologies to the world for building and operating the spimes of the future

In fact, Widenoise is also a bridge between the “pure vision” of the Internet of Things (where objects are supposed to exchange information and form self-configuring networks for relaying the data) and today’s reality of applied technology becoming increasingly “social” and hybrid in that it mixes hardware, software and people to create value for participants. So has WideTag managed to make noise social as a very nice post of this morning claims?

Awesome innovation at WideTag and sr labs

One thing is certain: my current trip to Milan is most interesting. That's mainly because I had working sessions and discussions with three exceptional persons, the founders of WideTag, Leandro Agrò (blog - profile - a conference he co-founded - idearium and leading designed at sr labs until a couple of years back), Roberto Ostinelli (profile - a multi-talented individual who's a beautiful artist as well as an accomplished technologist and business person) and David Orban (blog - profile). The achievements of that little bunch of determined persons have been very significant indeed over the course of the past 10 months and they create a foundation on which to create more.
As a coincidence of sorts I also got a great opportunity to learn about a fascinating Italian company called sr labs and to actually try their amazing i-able product which makes it possible to control and command a computer solely with one's eyes. It's quite an extraordinary experience because of the incredible precision of the device, its ease of use and the speed at which one gets acquainted with the way the product works. Aside from obvious applications to help disabled people access and control a computer, there is a range of other fields in which the eye tracking technology could be applied. Definitely worth a closer look...   

Inspiration from The Last Lecture

Today's inspiration from me. Dr Pausch's presentation contains a message for those of my customers who complain when I tell them what they need to know instead of what they'd like to hear: "your critics are the ones telling you they love you and care... when you're doing a bad job and nobody points it out to you, that's when they've given up on you". Enjoy.

The full lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University is below. Be sure to take the hour and a quarter needed to watch it because it's worth it. Every slice of it.

Lego Mindstorms at Ad:Tech

Just attended a splendid presentation of the way Lego has been actively seeking to and succeeding in involving passionate users in the life of the Mindstorms product line. Lego's people noticed that Mindstorms was generating a lot of passionate contributions and involvement by the community of users, many of whom were absolutely not kids but male adults. The product seems to have been outrageously successful in the Silicon Valley, where the local tech enthusiasts seem to be the typical customers. The product was being hacked and transformed in all sorts of ways... So Lego's people decided to really engage in a very intense interaction with their customers and to let them influence the life of the product to a very large degree. They set a few very simple rules to manage the community of carefully screened engaged users: respect, positive contribution and giving Lego a veto right on how the product would evolve... Today, it's one of the best known examples of how powerful a genuine engagement with customers can be to drive buzz, word of mouth and basically to make it possible for a lovemark to emerge. There's even the case of famous author Chris Anderson who went on to build a drone using a Mindstorms NXT control module...
Here's a nice little video about Mindstorms:

Carbon emissions: facts to make a difference

Nowadays a day seldom goes by without some piece of news regarding the sorry state and dismal prospects of the Earth's environment. These are the days of inconvenient truths. Opinions are numerous, conceptual ideas abound,  more or less scientific and rigorous conclusions widely distributed and each person responds in their own way. Some will feel anxious, others don't know or pretend not to know (so they can drive an over-sized car with an engine that makes a noise that is music to their ears), others still feel a century is too long a time to worry and a few do what they can to help.
The point however is that we all seem to be like drivers or airplane pilots deprived of instruments, flying or driving blindly in the worrying knowledge that the wall we will hit is getting dangerously close. That's the key issue: we lack data about the impact of our daily micro-decisions on the environment even though there are all sorts of calculators of environmental impact out there. What we do not have is a means to measure what is going on as it's happening, which is really a pity in a world so connected. That's precisely one of the challenges OpenSpime, the self proclaimed "infrastructure company for an open internet of things", seems to be addressing with a pretty cool infrastructure that combines sensors, software, the Internet and mashups to deliver actual maps of carbon dioxide emissions. A good friend of mine is their CTO and I am impressed with what these guys are presenting in this video:

Great User Generated Content in the US Primaries

Here's a piece I think is a shining example of user generated content and a strong indication that open online platforms give real power and influence to the people. Now sure whether that validates Gladwell's tipping point, but it does show that the people can wield some influence. Now the question is whether this influence will be stronger than that of insiders of a system, in this case the US political establishment. Something interesting to watch for marketeers and communication pros.