In association with the The News, Mindsheet has won ‘Innovation Of The Year Award’. The team were presented with the award at The News Business Excellence Awards ceremony in Portsmouth in January 2009.
In association with the The News, Mindsheet has won ‘Innovation Of The Year Award’. The team were presented with the award at The News Business Excellence Awards ceremony in Portsmouth in January 2009.
The Awards were a chance to honour companies and organisations across the South East Hampshire region. The nine award categories reflected the merits of team work, community involvement, innovation and high achievement. Forty-eight entries made it onto the shortlist across all categories.
Innovation of the Year Tropy
Amid such an amazing range of local business talent at the Gala Awards Dinner, we were happily surprised to win the Innovation of the Year category –
“For individuals or businesses which had shown a proclivity to ‘think outside the box’, becoming the first in their field to embark on a particular course of action, or having researched and developed a particularly novel and useful system or product”.
for our Testudo robot spy buggy – a remote control reconnaissance device that combat troops can send into enemy territory to scout for hazards.
The robot was developed in response to the 2008 MOD Grand Challenge. It gave us the perfect platform to demonstrate how we work with our customers to gain a deep understanding of their operations and behaviour. We specialise in helping companies develop breakthrough products and services in highly complex environments.
Throughout the exercise we involved soldiers with recent active service experience to guide the development so that it was soldier friendly and relevant. Following our success at the Grand Challenge we are in discussions with the MoD who recently agreed to fund the next stage of development.
Does the name “Peter Drucker” mean anything to you? If it does, you’ll be keen to read about my encounter with him back in the late 90s. If you haven’t heard of him, then read on anyway as you might just pick up some useful information.
Peter Drucker, (who died in 2005 at the ripe old age of 95) is widely considered to be the “father of modern management”. He was a renowned business thinker who predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power, the decisive importance of marketing and the emergence of the information society.
He worked for and consulted for some of the top global companies, governments and non-profit organisations. After years of practicing, and refining his business thinking, Drucker developed key tools top management will benefit from, if used.
Back to my meeting with him. I was working for Lucas Industries in 1998 when I was given the task of predicting the long term future to understand the impact on the automotive industry for strategic planning purposes. Our CEO, Victor Rice, suggested that we seek Peter Drucker’s help because he was the only person he knew that consistently got it right.
My Meeting with Peter Drucker
Armed with some of his books, a team of three of us headed out to Claremont, California to meet with the man himself, for 3 days! (Not an inexpensive trip I can assure you).
It’s quite awesome talking to a man who says things like: “I remember when Harry told me to sort out the Japanese economy after the Second World War”. All matter of fact and never sounding like a boast.
In that time we covered many topics and he imparted many pearls of wisdom on the subject of scenario planning. One I want to leave you with is:
“You can’t predict the future but you can have a good guess about certain factors that affect your business such as demographics. Try and separate out what’s predictable from what’s not predictable. Unique statistical events such as the 1970s Oil Crisis or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand could never be predicted.
However, an understanding of your business reveals key factors which are important for success. They could be raw material costs, sales volume or whatever. Try and anticipate what events could happen that would affect these key business factors and then train your early warning radar for looking for these types of events. Better still, group these events into scenarios and then prepare and rehearse your response for each scenario. By using this method, Shell Oil was much better prepared for the oil crisis of 1973“.
Interestingly, the automotive industry is very dependent on sales volume. The mantra for the last 30 years has been – reduce prices and then wait for increased volumes to make production viable again. So far this has worked, and volumes have sharply leapt in response to unique events and demographics. For instance: the Second World War trained many women to drive which paved the way for two-car families afterwards.
Volumes steadily rose throughout the 20th century, but what will happen next? Priorities have changed, car adoption is widespread and now the focus is on Green Issues. The industry is geared on ever increasing volumes, if volumes no longer grow, then disaster.
With this in mind: should we be baling out the unsustainable or instead looking for a better substitute industry?
Whether you followed Peter Drucker’s wisdom or another business mentor, there’s plenty to learn from listening to others!
In a recent blog I talked about fast ways to protect your Intellectual Property. Whilst this is a key part of the innovation development process and puts you in the best position to capture the market share, unfortunately it doesn’t always stop counterfeiting going on.
Counterfeiters want to make a killing from your intellectual property and when it comes to faking drugs they often do. Criminals can make more money from illegally trading pharmaceuticals than narcotics and the penalties are much lower.
It’s not just drugs, but all goods from aeronautical parts to the ubiquitous CDs and DVDs. Widespread availability of sophisticated low-cost duplicating technologies make it easy to produce professional looking copies.
It is generally reported that 7% of world trade is in counterfeits. This figure can only get worse as economies shift from manufacturing to creativity and innovation. It is the intellectual property that becomes the principal source of value and criminals have been quick to exploit this 21st-century crime.
Many brand owners are now beginning to wrestle with the issues and the role of brand protection director is increasingly common. But where do you begin? There is no shortage of technologies, but it is important to thoroughly understand the problem before adopting the wrong technology.
Counterfeiters do not stand still and so expect your security measures to be undermined. However, frequent packaging changes can add to the confusion and so it is critical to adopt the right approach.
Lessons can be learnt from the banknote industry where they have successfully grappled with the problem for the last 300 years. Essentially they take a systems approach with an extensive infrastructure for managing the cash cycle. There are comprehensive accounting systems with appropriate automation for quickly spotting irregularities. Banknotes are serialised with multiple security features and layers.
What is needed is the equivalent system and management tools for managing the integrity of goods across supply chains. Such a system will not only address counterfeiting, diversion and theft but will also bring many operational benefits too.
This brings me nicely along to a real life example of a system designed to address counterfeiting. Mindsheet, in partnership with key R&D providers Plexus, Ecebs and Scientific Generics, delivered a major £5.2 million platform project for ITI Techmedia to address counterfeiting. This 21-month project developed a breakthrough platform that enabled innovative system-level solutions for brand protection and product authentication in complex multi-company global supply chains. The system features a range of machine-readable taggants, plus the readers, writers and trust management systems which provide the means of exchanging codes and information to establish a product’s provenance.
Developing new products and services is hard and most fail. What customers want (and are prepared to pay for) may have changed significantly. These discontinuities provide exciting opportunities for companies…
Steven Todd, an Associate Director of Mindsheet, recently wrote this article for the Saïd Business School, Oxford University where he is an Associate Fellow.
“What marketing opportunities have been created by the recent global financial meltdown?
Developing new products and services is hard and most fail. The cost of these failures to US companies alone is estimated to be over $100 billion per year. The recent global financial meltdown has had a profound impact on many markets. Businesses and individual consumers are reducing their budgets and becoming increasingly cautious about spending money. But more importantly, what customers want (and are prepared to pay for) may have changed significantly.
These discontinuities provide exciting opportunities for companies who are prepared to take a fresh look at what customers really want. Leading companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft, have moved beyond traditional approaches to customer-driven innovation and instead focus on outcomes – the metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done.
To exploit these opportunities, companies need to act fast and do three things. First, adopt an outcome-based approach to understand what value really means to their customers today. Second, use this insight to reposition current offerings and develop sales material and tools that focus on outcomes. Finally, review their pipeline of development projects and cancel or redirect projects that don’t deliver measurable improvements in customer outcomes.”
Thank you to Steven for allowing us to share this article with you.
To find out more about the outcome based innovation model, read our Innovation Lens report for a full insight.
How do you go about starting a project plan? Getting the myriad of information into some form of comprehensive plan can seem like a bit of mountain to climb at first. A perfect solution to jump start your project plans is the use of software tools incorporating the powerful Mind Mapping process.
A quick question …how do you go about starting a project plan?
Getting the myriad of information into some form of comprehensive plan can seem like a bit of mountain to climb at first. A perfect solution to jump start your project plans is the use of software tools incorporating the powerful Mind Mapping process. I have now used mind mapping software for the last eight years, such as MindGenius and Open Mind and cannot imagine project planning without them!
The Mind Mapping technique pioneered by Tony and Barry Buzan has becoming increasingly popular. It is particularly suitable for business because it helps you organise complex information which in turn inspires the creation of more ideas and concepts. Once any information is captured in Mind Map form then it also tends to stick in your memory because of the way that you intuitively visualise the map in your mind’s eye. These attributes have lead to the widespread adoption of Mind Mapping for ideas generation, organisation and note taking.
The Mind Mapping Book by Tony Buzan demonstrates how to create Mind Maps and gives many examples of beautiful maps that have been created for a variety of different applications. It is no surprise that the content of these maps should be strongly etched in your memory after the huge artistic effort that has been expended during the map’s creation.
However, what about Mind Maps for mere mortals with little artistic ability or for that matter time! – Cue software programs that enables you to create Mind Maps at breakneck speed and with no artistic talent. More and more executives are discovering how useful it can be.
Mind mapping is about getting information into your head in a way that makes it stick. It allows you to work smarter, quicker and cheaper. You can get stuff out of your head on demand. It’s a way ofextracting information and then recognising it and using it in a way which allows you to understand and communicate better.
The majority of mind mapping packages integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Office and are a boon for project managers. The picture above shows the results of a quick fire workpackage brainstorm with members of the project team. The project’s central theme is represented in the middle of the map and then ideas radiate outwards by association. Don’t worry about mistakes or ideas going to the wrong place, it’s easy to sort out afterwards with the drag and drop interface.
Next you can view your Project Mind Map as a work breakdown chart by a single click. Now consider project risk and augment the chart with additional activities to properly manage the risk.
When you are satisfied with the work breakdown, then start adding resources and timing to the activities straight from your MS Outlook address book or your company directory or send activities to Outlook as To-do items. Another button click and the entire map is transferred to MS Project where it can be viewed as a network diagram or a gantt chart.
Likewise the map can be transferred to MS Word or Powerpoint for documentation and presentation.
So if you haven’t already tried out the many benefits of Mind Mapping software especially in relation to project planning, go online today and try one of the many trial Mind Mapping software packages out there and let me know what you think!
I don’t know if outsourcing is something you have undertaken recently or are contemplating for your business? Or, on the flipside, are you or have you been a specialist contractor or part of an outsourcing team offering your skills to companies?
I don’t know if outsourcing is something you have undertaken recently or are contemplating for your business? Or, on the flipside, are you or have you been a specialist contractor or part of an outsourcing team offering your skills to companies?
I’m guessing you’ve probably answered yes to one of those questions but, I wonder, have you ever been involved in R&D outsourcing?
Outsourcing has been on the increase over the last 30 years, driven by the difficulty of maintaining world-class standards across all aspects of business activity and a desire to reduce costs. It started with the outsourcing of support activities and then moved on to mainstream activities such as manufacturing, distribution and customer service. Non-technology companies have often outsourced product development, but for technology companies this activity has remained largely in-house.
Increasingly though, technology companies are experimenting with development outsourcing strategies. The need for R&D teams to develop differentiated products and services to meet the market needs coupled with the need to stay abreast of all technology developments and new competitive threats has meant R&D outsourcing has become more and more attractive.
If R&D outsourcing is something that is, or has, affected you, I hope you may be interested in my joint paper
(I presented the paper along with my colleague David Allen at the IEEE Engineering Management Conference in Washington).
In the paper, we examine the issues surrounding R&D outsourcing and, most importantly, how to mitigate them through the introduction of the right strategic and tactical management processes.
To learn more about R&D outsourcing and read the paper click here.
Have you managed to come up with a good idea recently that addresses a strong need in an attractive market? Right from idea inception you should be taking measures to create barriers that prevent competitors from exploiting your efforts. Some form of IP protection and search should be conducted as soon as possible.
Find out how.
Have you managed to come up with a good idea recently that addresses a strong need in an attractive market? Hopefully you’re on to a winner, you just need to get your resources in place ready to develop and launch your product successfully. Sounds good doesn’t it but expect other people to copy your idea as soon as the potential is proven. Equally, it could be that you have unwittingly copied someone else’s idea. Downstream lawsuits, after you have developed and launched your product could be very costly indeed.
Right from idea inception you should be taking measures to create barriers that prevent competitors from exploiting your efforts. Whilst secrecy can serve as the main tool for protecting your idea during the early stages of development, some form of IP protection and search should still be conducted as soon as possible.
The right blend of IP protection, whether patents, trade marks, copyright and / or designs will very much depend on the nature of your invention. However it can be a long and costly process and can impede the success of your idea if you don’t approach it in the right manner.
Here’s a brief guide to some fast ways to protect your IP and keep down your costs without compromising your market position.
Before we get onto this, first a few disclaimers:
1)We are not patent attorneys.
2)You should always seek legal advice.
Now we have got that out of the way, I have got 15 patents and do know what I’m talking about.
Initially, undertake online research to establish whether any prior art (existing work in the public domain) exists. Useful references include:
Again, the article indexes many more useful internet resources.
Having satisfied yourself that your idea is unique the next step is to capture the embodiment of your invention. Useful headings for writing up a patent invention are:
Invention Title
Inventors (also identify lead inventor)
Summary of invention
Previous solutions – known prior art
Novelty and uniqueness
Detailed description of the invention
Key advantages of the invention
Remember to take an outcome approach for identifying key advantages – concentrate on innovation hotspots
Commercial advantages
Technical advantages
Now you’re ready to see a patent agent. If this is your first time with a patent firm and you have prepared the above information, then you can expect a consultation for nothing prior to appointing the firm as they make their pitch. Before the fee clock starts ticking carry out as much of the groundwork as you can.
Under their direction, I tend to prepare the write-up of the patent and any drawings, but I always leave the development of the claims to the patent attorney. This is the most critical part of the patent, it is what creates the broadest monopoly for your invention and it is what the lawyers will fight over in court if there are any disputes. Therefore, use the patent attorney and take advantage of their legal indemnity cover if things go wrong.
Figure 1: Doing your own drawings and drafting the main body of the patent can save £3000 in fees, but leave the claims to the experts
Typically, dividing the work up in this way saves about £3000 in fees and takes 1-2 months off the patent drafting time, (providing that you are prompt with your side of the preparation).
What happens next? Well the patent agent will file your patent which then creates the priority date (the date from when the patent counts). In the UK system you then have 12 months before publication to get the claims right and to request a search before publication. There will be further fees involved for the examination and also for any extra work that the patent attorney has to undertake depending on the results of the search and examination, see UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO). www.ipo.gov.uk for useful advice and a full description of the process.
The MOD Grand Challenge presented us with the perfect opportunity to collaborate with customers and stakeholders to achieve winning results. Read more…
“You are a Company or Platoon commander about to undertake an urban operation, which might culminate in contact with enemy forces. As you enter the urban terrain your views along main streets are relatively good, but are figures in the distance hostile or not?
Elsewhere, your line-of-sight is blocked by walls, buildings, shrubbery and all the usual urban clutter, such as power and telephone poles and cables. What waits at the next intersection?
What lies round the corner of the next building or concealed in houses or behind rooftop parapets? Answering those questions will enable you to make sound tactical decisions. But what information can you get that is immediately useful to you and your troops? What can help you determine the threats you face and what your course of action needs to be?
You are aware of a number of potential danger points where the enemy could lay an ambush. Alleyways lie to the side of main road which could conceal your opponents and allow them to move swiftly out of sight. Snipers could wait, concealed on rooftops, behind walls or parapets, or at windows or doorways. A Rocket Propelled Grenade team could be lurking under cover in a shaded suburban garden, ready to strike at a moments notice. Or perhaps an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) lies concealed across your route, waiting to be triggered as you approach”.
Raglan & Vicki Butler-Henderson at the Grand Challenge
Being able to automatically find out these answers was the crux of the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge, the aim of which was to:
“Create a system with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, locate and report a comprehensive range of military threats in a hostile urban environment”.
In response to this Mindsheet put blood, sweat and tears into developing a cooperative fleet of miniature autonomous surveillance vehicles. Named Testudo, each vehicle can follow a pre-assigned mission plan, avoid obstacles and then wirelessly report back detected threats from the hazard zone to a base station.
The MOD Grand Challenge was a great experience and whilst there was fun to be had alongside the hard work and tension of the final, there are very real consequences to the safety of our troops by delivering solutions that work. So it was a perfect platform for us to apply the Mindsheet market driven approach to the development of our solution.
In our report, “The Innovation Lens“, we examined the need to collaborate with customers and stakeholders to understand their requirements and generate winning concepts. This early customer collaboration has a further purpose in mitigating the risks associated with market acceptance. Early customer feedback means “show stoppers” and “blind alleys” are avoided before large development and launch expenditure is incurred. Also critical, is the importance of gaining customer buy-in during the early stages of development when key trade-off decisions are made.
The MOD Grand Challenge presented us with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this. We involved soldiers in the Mindsheet team with active service experience from Afghanistan; and then we partnered with a traditional military supplier MBDA (who provided the vehicle planning system for Testudo). Furthermore, the MOD, the military and scientists provided valuable guidance throughout each stage of the challenge.
But exposing your solution to the market early on comes with caveats:
– Do protect your intellectual property early on to prevent your ideas being copied. (See our article Fast ways to protect your IP).
– Do present your concepts in a realistic way through prototypes and market materials so that accurate validation can be performed by the customers.
Mindsheet's Testudo Robot
On the latter point, we brought the Grand Challenge concept alive through rapid build of our prototype model using off the shelf materials where possible. The chassis came from a rugged remote control toy platform with a top speed of 35MPH, (yes we did have lots of fun testing them). The same off the shelf approach applied to the sensors and communications. Rather than wasting time or resources re-engineering the chassis, we put our effort into threat detection algorithms and vehicle control behaviours, where the true opportunity for innovation lay. Check out videos of our robots here.
Our demo and feedback sessions to the stakeholders were further enhanced by the preparation of marketing materials and video footage of the vehicle being used by soldiers to seek out IEDs and bomb threats.
However, nothing could have prepared us for the extremes of weather thrown at us during the final in August 2008. Whilst our vehicles coped admirably with the realities of the environment, others were less fortunate and in some cases had to pull out of the competition due to the wind and rain.
But as Professor Phil Sutton, Director General Science Technology Strategy said: “In reality, in operations you can’t choose the weather so this has been a good test”.
So did our early customer collaboration pay off? Whilst we weren’t crowned ultimate winner of the event, we did qualify as one of only seven finalists, we successfully detected and located 5 threats within the urban zone, we successfully rejected the civilian decoys and we came up with a solution that perhaps represented the most portable, practical and reliable solution of all the finalists on display. Hence, we are now in discussions with the MOD and our partners to take the concept forward.
As a business leader, it is all too easy to get pushed into investing in technologies prior to understanding the market. Or perhaps you’re trying to find a market for a technology that already exists in your organisation but has yet to be exploited. This may seem an obvious and cost effective approach. But beware!
As a business leader, it is all too easy to get pushed into investing in technologies prior to understanding the market. Or perhaps you’re trying to find a market for a technology that already exists in your organisation but has yet to be exploited. This may seem an obvious and cost effective approach. But beware!
Remember the story of NASA developing the elaborate pump action space pen that could write in zero gravity; whereas the Russians used pencils! Well it’s not actually true, but it does illustrate the point. When you find a market for your blockbuster technology – do double check that there isn’t a simpler solution already out there.
In my first job, we made a similar mistake. We had an exotic Optical Correlator technology that could find simple patterns in video feeds. I’ll spare you the gobbly-gook but the implementation was anything but simple.
First the system of lasers, lenses and spatial light modulators had to be mounted on a slab of granite to remove any vibration. Next there was a large box of electronics to drive the system and finally the whole configuration had to be cooled to prevent overheating and to keep the system stable. Although cumbersome, it did work and was very fast at finding edges in video or even patterns such as military tanks which was the intended application.
However, there was a simpler way that used computers to directly perform the same task. In fact nowadays; the same operation can even be performed in Paint Shop Pro on your home computer. Of course, in my R&D lab this is not what we wanted to hear. It was just so much more fun to experiment with the exotic rather than use plain old pencils!
And yet, technology push can work. Just think of the Television, iTunes or the Word Processor. So what made the difference? Well for starters the technology was compelling, in other words:
1. Customers valued the improved performance as a result of the technology
2. There wasn’t a simple alternative way to achieve these same benefits
However, there is more to technology push than just improved performance. Clayton Christensen observed in his book “The Innovators Dilemma”, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers’next-generation needs.
But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons–they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers’ next-generation needs.
It is not enough to just improve performance along the already known “vectors of differentiation”. Just because a customer valued an improvement in the past, doesn’t mean that they will value further improvement in that direction. In fact, customers rarely state when things are “good enough”.
Instead, a blockbuster technology should also bring new benefits that the customer never even thought about before. They should irreversibly change the rules of the game. It’s called disruption of the market place.
Often disruptive technologies are not even hard to develop, they maybe just a new configuration of existing proven technologies. For instance, Apple didn’t invent the Internet, compressed music files, MP3 players or download systems. Instead they just put those technologies together in a unique way that has seriously challenged the Music Industries previous distribution business model.
Which leads me to my last point, usually the market disrupter is not one of the existing incumbents in a marketplace. Instead, they are invariably a newcomer with nothing to lose by the destruction of the old order!
Counterfeiters want to make a killing from your intellectual property and when it comes to faking drugs they often do. Criminals can make more money from illegally trading pharmaceuticals than narcotics and the penalties are much lower.
Lessons can be learnt from the banknote industry where they have successfully grappled with the problem for the last 300 years. Essentially they take a systems approach with an extensive infrastructure for managing the cash cycle. There are comprehensive accounting systems with appropriate automation for quickly spotting irregularities. Banknotes are serialised with multiple security features and layers.
