‘That’s not going to happen here’. This is one of the claims I hear a lot here in Mexico, whatever trends are happening elsewhere are not going to happen here anytime soon.

They talks as if Mexico were isolated from the rest of the trends of society. First of all if you’re in a country where there’s internet access, you’re going to be affected sooner than later. Saying ‘that’s not going to happen’ here is a clear signal that you or your organization has no point of view whatsoever about the future, you have a no-sight trap. You merely react to what happens, and by that time you’re way behind the times. Also by design, all your strategies will be copycats of others because your point of view stands for nothing more of the same. That’s why it’s important to have your own point of view instead of participating in mindless copycatting and doing what the guy next door does.

Another way to look at this is to do what the ‘it’s not going to happen here’ club won’t do, if they think it’s going to take 5 years for a trend to be adopted here then why not start exploiting it before they do?

The only thing stopping you from doing that is your own point of view, so ask yourself: what’s our point of view about this trend and how can we exploit it before others do?

Standing for nothing more than the same has no value in a world where anyone can copycat successful business models in a couple of months. And most successful business models are increasingly exploiting digital technologies to their benefit.

In countries like Mexico, new ways of doing business don’t get adopted until very late in the game (years later!) where the approach has been turned into a winning algorithm by someone else on another part of the world (See Groupon). Being the first to market doesn’t mean you’ll win the game, building a better business model does. And this depends more on a unique insight you found that feeds your point of view and not someone else’s.

Saying that a certain trend won’t affect you is really saying that you and organization don’t care if you become irrelevant. Your role in the future is simply not important. Why not increase the rate of change where you are and force your competitors to adopt to you? Why not shape the ecosystem and position yourself as the apex? Why wait?

Like I told a friend recently, all it takes for things to change is for someone somewhere to start acting differently. If someone has the ‘cojones’ to take on the culture challenge, has a vision (POV) and is committed to progress then you will see a transformation sooner than later. Then again this might not happen either, and the system will remain stuck until someone does something about it. Why wait?

Think about how you can start exploiting trends right now and not wait until someone else figures it out. Build your own point of view, don’t buy it from someone else.

• Do companies need less innovation? by @ralph_ohr
• Write Your Own Map by @timkastelle
• Why Reward Failure?
• No Strategy – No Innovation via @innovate
• Five Reasons You Don’t Have the Time to Delay Innovation by @jamestodhunter
• Innovation does not start with idea generation by @ovoinnovation
• Redefining Failure by @thisissethsblog
• The New Definition of Innovation by @ingenesist

Want more? You can find more innovation posts in my Delicious bookmarks account, all good stuff!

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Good question posted by @Stevekoss from yesterday’s post: Do companies need less innovation?

The process of innovation is full of highs and lows and requires people to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone so I think it depends on a person’s tolerance for failure. It basically comes down to mindset, Carol Dweck has written extensively about how there are people with a fixed and growth mindsets. If you look around you’ll see that we’re mostly surrounded by people with fixed mindsets, people who are afraid to be wrong and make mistakes. Where innovation requires a learning disposition, people with fixed mindsets have a hard time accepting the idea that ‘failure as learning’ is part of the process.

What we need to do is come to a collective understanding that failure will happen along the journey of any new initiative and see it as an investment, this way we can change the perception of failure from ‘failing to learning’.

Below is Professor Carol Dweck explaining the difference between a growth and fixed mindset:

P.S Be sure to click on the links (do you have a growth or fixed mindset?), it’s stuff I’ve written about before as well as ideas taken from elsewhere but they all come back to the growth vs fixed mindset.

I look forward to your thoughts

This is a guest post by Ralph Ohr in response to an article posted on Business Week titled: Why Companies Need Less Innovation.

Thanks for this valuable post.

Although, I just partly agree with the author, the post has greatly initiated an important discussion. The definition of what innovation means in a certain context as well as the resulting question who is responsible to drive the defined scope, turn out to be crucial for innovation success.

As already indicated in former comments, the author tends in his understanding of innovation to focus on the more radical part of the continuum. This part is primarily driven top-down, requires dedicated processes in place and depends on the allocation of selected resources. Leadership needs to assure these pre-conditions, together with a proper link between company’s strategy and innovation. Otherwise, aligned activities and targeted resource management is likely to fail. Arie Goldshlager has well pointed out that an innovation chain is likely to be just as strong as its weakest link.

But there is also innovation at the opposite part of the continuum. I would like to refer to a great post by James Todhunter (@jamestodhunter): In defense of improvement

He pinpoints the importance of improvements for incremental innovation. Improvements typically emerge from daily business and are driven bottom-up by employees in their respective field besides doing their day-to-day job. This is particularly important as incremental innovation usually accounts for the majority of activities to the overall innovation portfolio.

In this sense, everybody in a company is basically in charge to contribute to the development of the company in order to stay competitive – closeness to daily business and time horizon might be different. If we consider innovation to cover a continuum, ranging from incremental to radical purpose, it’s essential that leaders understand that both end of this continuum require different approaches, incl. objectives, mindset, resources and processes.

I don’t think companies need less innovation – I rather think, companies should focus on contributing to innovation at the right point of the continuum.

Feel free to share your thoughts.

Regards, Ralph-Christian Ohr

• Why Companies Need Less Innovation – BusinessWeek via @ralph_ohr 
• If You’re the Boss, Start Killing More Good Ideas by @work_matters 
• The Art of Momentum: Why Your Ideas Need Speed by @the99percent
• You’re Smart Doesn’t Mean You’re A Good Problem Solver. Putting More Smart People On A Problem Might Not Be The Answer by @ideacouture 
• Innovation and commercialization, 2010: Global Survey – McKinsey Quarterly
• Why Great Ideas Can Fail via @core77
• In Defense of Improvement by @jamestodhunter
• The Creativity Crisis? What Creativity Crisis? – HBR
• The Evolution of the Business Model Concept by @sundelin
• How Group Dynamics May Be Killing Innovation via @ralph_ohr  
• The Peculiar Way We Reward Innovation – HBR

Want more? You can find more innovation posts in my Delicious bookmarks account, all good stuff!

Competition in industries is essentially competition between business models. A recent tweet by @TimKastelle which led to a post about the evolution of the business model concept reminded me of a great creative exercise to help you look at your and other industries dominant business model as a lego kit, which when broken apart can be reconnected like building blocks to create new types of business concepts.

Here’s how it would go:

First you start by thinking about the trends that are happening in the world and how they affect your industry, your business and your customers. You then look at different industries where incumbents are being disrupted (at least trying to!) by startups who are already taking advantage of these trends. Let’s take two trends that are making an impact in several business arenas right now: Crowdsourcing and game mechanics.

Here’s an example how this might look like:

Game Mechanics are being talked about tirelessly right now from a technological and marketing perspective for their ability to create customer engagement, as illustrated by Foursquare and Groupon. As for crowdsourcing, it has become Threadless’s core business strategy by letting their community create t-shirts with their own designs that if become popular, can be sold and they get to make money.

Now that we have to two examples we can start by asking questions:

What if we made game mechanics part of how our business is run instead of treating it like a marketing tactic? What if we made it core to our business strategy? How would we create value? What if our customers had a say at the boardroom table about how our business in run? What if we co-created our business with them? How would value be created and what would it mean for them and for us?

Equipped with curious thoughts it’s now time to go into discovery mode and look for businesses who have designed their business strategy around both trends and are playing by a different set of rules. Take for example 4Food, a NY based restaurant that turns lunch into a social networking game with the use of both game mechanics and crowdsourcing. Here’s how the NY Times explains it:

Customers start by going to 4food.com, where they can build a burger. There’s a list of options to choose from, including the type of burger bun,  a beef, turkey, veggie or salmon patty, condiments and more.

This is also why the burgers are shaped like doughnuts: customers are asked to pick a “scoop,” which goes into the middle of the burger, from options like avocado and chili mango, baked beans or mac and cheese.

Once you place your order, you can give it a name and off you go to pick it up. And this is where the game aspect comes in. 4Food has a leaderboard that shows the most-ordered burger. That turns it into a social networking food game.

Here’s how it works: I create a burger, call it “The Bits Burger” and broadcast it to Twitter or Facebook. Each time someone orders my special creation, I get 25 cents credit in the restaurant and my burger rises up the leaderboard. The more customers order my burger, the higher it goes and the more credits I get, until I’m eating free.

If we were to look at the business model for 4Food it might look something like this:

• Who are our customers?
  Digitally connected individuals who are between 18-35 years old that use Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare on a daily basis.
• What products or services do we sell?
  DIY hamburgers.
• What distribution channels do we use?
  Internet website and any device connected to the internet that has a internet browser.
• What do we charge our customers for?
  Small cost of burger, plus fries and drinks.
• How are we different from competitors?
  A customer can potentially eat for free if his creation gets ordered enough times.

As you can see, 4Food’s business model is entirely different from traditional restaurants. Incumbents will have a hard time trying to replicate it themselves as it requires them to abandon the status quo. This is what happens when different trends converge and an opportunistic entrepreneur sees a connection between them for an interesting new business concept. And that is what this exercise is all about, seeing connections from a holistic point of view.

The above example is fairly simplistic for practical purposes, there’s much more to it than just cherry picking but the basic ideas are:

Look outside your industry

If you look around the web, startups are designing their business models around not just one trend but many that when combined can alter the rules of the game or create a new industry as is the case with Foursquare. When looking to innovate it’s useful to look outside your industry for ideas, that’s why I chose 4Food. Because restaurants are a traditional business and haven’t changed much in decades, 4Food presents an extreme look at what the future might hold for that industry.

Create a new Lego Kit

Now you may be asking but what about me? It’s time to play make believe and take parts of the exemplary businesses business model and apply it to your own. Treat every component of the business model as as separate (for a holistic look use the Business Model Canvas), and create scenarios about how that might look. It’s like looking at other businesses like part of a Lego Set and then taking them apart and combining them in different ways.

Insights, insights, insights

The point of this exercise is to look for insights by asking ‘what works?’ ‘who’s done it?’ and ‘how can we do it?’ and then imagining how it might look.

What do you think? I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

These pictures are from the border crossing between San Ysidro and Tijuana. This is Tijuana a few steps after you cross the border and this building is full of auto import agencies. There’s 18 of them and they all sell the same stuff, advertise the same way, operate the same way and talk the same way. The only recognizable difference between them is the name of their business, the font they use and the colors. Is that all there is?

I imagine anybody who comes through here must think the same thing: Which one do I…what?! To prove my point I sat at a table across the street for a couple of hours and went to work to see how many people ‘cared’ to come in. Afterwards I went in and acted as if I were looking to import my own car, I only visited 6 of them but that was enough: My conclusion is: how are these people in business?

This is a textbook example of having no distinct point of view. When you have the same point of view as everybody else, everything you do and say is going to be like the guy next to you. Sure any of these businesses can try a handful of marketing tactics to get people to walk through their doors but any smart customer will look around and see that the only noticeable difference between the ‘offers’ is price. Hence these businesses are locked-in a lowest bidder businesses. Where’s the real value?

An authentic way to stand out is to have a point of view since most folks stand for nothing more than the same. So if the guy next to you has a ‘boring point of view’ that’s you cue!

Great collection of reads this week which I encourage you to read while also following these smart people on Twitter.

• Innovation Economics by @elldir
• Why Big Companies Almost Never Notice Disruptive Innovation | Techdirt
• Why Waiting Until A New Business Model Is Proven Doesn’t Work | Techdirt
• How to become a better innovator by @ovoinnovation 
• Six Characteristics of Highly Effective Change Leaders via @innovate 
• Learning from nature’s design via @philmccreight 
• Great Reads on Failure: Help Build a Collection of Insights by @lindegaard 
• To Create the Future, See Hidden Patterns (and Challenge Them) via @ralph_ohr by @mitchditkoff 
• With Innovation, You Don’t Get Points for Difficulty – HBR
• Oslo Innovation Clinic Offers Treatment for Ideas – HBR
• How to Be an Ideas Factory: Loosen Your Grip on Your Creations – BNET
• Innovating When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: The View from PARC via @ariegoldshlager 
• Ten “worst practices” for gaining benefits from Innovation by @rgmcgrath

Want more? You can find more innovation posts in my Delicious bookmarks account, all good stuff!

To change things up a little bit I decided to take a taxi after I crossed the border to Mexico today. After you cross the border and walked over to the cab station you’ll notice there are two types of cabs, the yellow ones which are the least cheap and the ‘taxi libre’ which takes you anywhere you want for less money than the yellow taxi. But surprise-surprise, I got on a taxi libre and soon found out that there’s a third type of cab and that I was in it.

‘Taxi libre no economico’. As in a Taxi that’s non-economical. As I sat there and listened to the driver I asked him:

Me: So what’s the damn difference between this taxi and all the other ones that look just like it?

Driver: That’s it’s non-economical.

Me: And how are people supposed to know which one is which?

Driver: After we’ve taken them where they want to go.

Are you kidding me?! Seriously that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Nowhere on the cabs is it mentioned that there are two ‘taxi libre’ types of cabs, you really don’t know only after you get on a cab and ask for a price. It’s safe to say that if you’re a foreigner you’re paying a lot of money for a cab and I have no doubt that is why this exists. I’ve taken a lot of cabs down here but this is the first time I’ve encountered this, I mean I was surprised at this nonsense!

I ended up telling the driver to drop me off immediately and went back to where the taxis are stationed. Once there I started asking around which ones were the non-economical taxis, that got some of the drivers really angry because it was as if I’ve just crashed their party. They had no other option than to offer me the normal rate.

So why am I writing this?

Because it just goes to show what happens when you change your routines. If you always stick to the same path, the same way of doing things, you’re missing out on other possible paths. If I hadn’t changed my routine today I wouldn’t been able to tell my foreign friends and readers to watch out for those ‘taxi libre’ cabs the next time they come visit Tijuana!

Give it a try. Instead of driving to work like usual, take the bus. There’s nothing like seeing things up close and personal.

Thanks to all the people who share links there was lots of content this week so the list ended up being longer than usual, all worth reading.

1. Smartfailing – a new concept for learning through failure by @lindegaard
2. Innovate, Yes, but Make It Practical – NY Times
3. Sometimes Success Begins at Failure — HBS Working Knowledge via @ariegoldshlager
4. Survey Reveals Corporations With Centralized Innovation Departments More Likely to Have Focused Efforts via @ralph_ohr 
5. Ideas are far more glamorous compared to the actual execution: Vijay Govindarajan via @ralph_ohr   
6. The efficient use of ideas by @ovoinnovation
7. Managers who understand how artists work will have a distinct advantage via @philmccreight 
8. Idea Deficit Disorder – Stopping the Epidemic by @wallybock
9. Innovation ‘ s Biggest Paradox
10. Try Something New: Experiments Can Lead to Success by @neilpatel
11. Innovators field guide to finding unmet customer needs
12. Quarterly Earnings Kill People-Based Innovation… – Fast Company
13. The Idea or The Execution? Here’s What The Greatest Minds in Tech Say
14. Beyond Stage-Gate: A new approach for innovation by @Brioneja
15. Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation – HBR
16. Innovation & the Status Quo: The perils of groupthink, stereotyping and system justification by @DrewCM
17. Getting Down to the Business of Creativity — HBS Working Knowledge
18. Creativity Matters by @johnmaeda
19. True Leaders Are Also Managers by @work_matters
20. ‘Ideacide’ (or 14 Ways to Kill Creativity) – OPEN Forum