Author: Raglan Tribe

The Innovation Launch Machine

Britain has an outstanding record of invention but often misses out on exploitation. It’s hard to get risk capital to turn technology ideas into market winners.  However, it’s not just the absence of capital that causes problems:

  • Entrepreneurs often don’t understand how to create investable propositions
  • They focus on the wrong activities that alienate time-pressured investors

Furthermore, investors often don’t understand technology preferring a clearer path to profits through mature enterprises.

It’s a shame, because well executed projects that resolve technology risk in the context of strong market pull leads to the greatest value for both investors and the UK. It worked for us in the industrial revolution and today we simply can’t afford to miss the boat.

So what do I propose?

  • An investment internet portal that makes donating funds as easy as using the “Just Giving” charity site
  • Simpler financial compliance by limiting donations to small sums of money – micro-investments
  • The hosting of educational materials to help entrepreneurs create a perfect “dragon’s den” pitch

The commercialisation of this innovation launch machine will be through modest membership fees and a percentage of funds raised.

Imagine a UK that boasted more than just pioneering research and development, but that can claim to be the “first stop” for all the world’s entrepreneurs who wish to get their innovations off the ground. This would lead to a huge influx of ideas that would power our prosperity for the next century as well as solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

I’m Raglan Tribe and I’m looking for the Technology Strategy Board prize to get my idea of the ground. Specifically,

  • The development of a legally compliant micro-investment portal with tracking and audit to ensure that investors get a great deal
  • The inclusion of e-learning to ensure that participants know how to deliver solid investment plans
  • The inclusion of sociable viral technologies for promoting entrepreneur pitches and rounding up a large audience of micro-investors
  • And lastly of course, the exposure and credibility that comes from winning this competition

Market Inspired Innovation Event

Mindsheet is delighted to host this exciting conference at Langstone Technology Park on May the 20th.

Market Inspired Innovation is a structured approach for creating new products and services by putting customer insight into the earliest stages of the innovation process, transforming a hit and miss craft into a systematic process that generates new value.

Mindsheet is delighted to host this exciting conference at Langstone Technology Park on May the 20th.

Market Inspired Innovation is a structured approach for creating new products and services by putting customer insight into the earliest stages of the innovation process, transforming a hit and miss craft into a systematic process that generates new value.
Market Inspired Innovation

This conference is organised by SCI and Mindsheet and is aimed at business people looking to exploit the next cycle of growth through innovation.

scilogo

Click on the video to find out more.

What’s the single greatest advantage you can have over your competitors?

Here’s a question that was often posed by Gary Halbert, the late legendary copywriter, to his students:

“If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to see who could sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side to help you win?”

After hearing all the wonderful ideas back from his students, Gary’s response was always the same:

Here’s a question that was often posed by Gary Halbert, the late legendary copywriter, to his students:

“If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to see who could sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side to help you win?”

After hearing all the wonderful ideas back from his students, Gary’s response was always the same:

“The only advantage I want …

is…

A Starving Crowd!”


It’s a simple message really and one that extends far beyond the direct marketing discipline where Gary made his name. As a product innovator or entrepreneur it’s your job to find that hungry market and feed them what they are already hungry for rather than blindly developing solutions for a market with no desire.

It makes absolutely no sense to design a product if you first do not know what your customers want or what their problems are.

Seek out the starving crowd in your chosen market and you’ll have the greatest advantage over your competitors.

To get more pearls of wisdom from Gary Halbert visit: http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/

Tell me the future Mr. Drucker?

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
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!

Declaring War on Counterfeit Crime

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.

Mind Mapping to Project Plans in 30 mins

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.

Mind Map

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!

Implementing Business Strategy with Virtual R&D teams

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

“Implementing business strategy with virtual R&D teams“.

(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.

Technology Push – Should we dictate to our market?

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!