“Expertise is the enemy of innovation” – Stephen Shapiro
To read more about innovation, check out, What Fire Teaches Us About Innovation.
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Innovation
In the States there is a class of attorneys known as “ambulance chasers.” They follow accident victims to the hospital and offer their services to get justice or payment for their injuries. I am not diminishing the role of personal injury cases and the legitimate rights of those victims, but those attorneys are looking for pain and suffering. In fact, it fuels their business.
All of us in business have a similar need to look for the pain. The most successful companies, and the products and services that they offer, address an unmet pain and solve it in a unique way.
As innovators and business strategists we should always be in the hunt for the pain.
- What costs too much?
- What takes too long?
- What ends too soon?
- What can we not get enough of?
- What do we have too much of?
These kind of questions, can lead to the insights that create new customers, new business models, new products, and fuel the enterprise into the future.
Thank you to Cindy Davis for the conversation about Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
Read the whole article, "5 Emerging AV/IT Technologies - The Revolution," in AV Technology Magazine.
As we start to plan for InfoComm 2017 in June, I was struck by how the show has become the family reunion of our industry.
Here are three reasons why
1. It is the “don’t miss” event of the summer
If you are in the AV industry, you start each year by putting InfoComm on your calendar. You schedule things like vacations and graduation celebrations around it. You make sure you book early. You show up anticipating something great!
2. You always learn something new
At your actual family reunion, you might hear a new story about your favorite aunt. You might learn that your second cousin can also wiggle his ears like you. You might get your niece’s prize potato salad recipe. At InfoComm, you can learn about the latest standards, take CTS-certified courses and get “recipes” that you can use for upcoming projects and client jobs.
3. It is the chance to reconnect
If you work in the AV industry, there are friends, colleagues and partners that you only might see once a year at this show. You learn what is new with their business and what trends they are following and, if you are lucky, those personal relationships also cross over to updates on the kids and hobbies. We love connecting with customers and hearing about their successful projects and what they have planned. And these conversations always end with the earnest promise to stay in touch and help each other out throughout the year
I am looking forward to InfoComm this year and I’ll see you there. I’ll be the one wearing the “AV Family Reunion 2017” t-shirt!
This blog was originally posted on InfoComm All Voices.
"In a walking city, shouldn't the sidewalks be on the map, instead of the streets?" - Mike Rawlinson, CityID
Amazon must be a huge consumer of kraft cardboard. We have a model in which product is shipped in cardboard and then, in most communities, is picked up at the curb for recycling. Why don’t we turn this around?
Why aren’t the deliveries made in something akin to a mailbox, but for packages. With limited packaging (ie, soft packaging, reusable totes, etc) and then we have curbside or community drop off of goods?
Today the brick and mortar retail world relies on customers picking up goods from a store and trashing the packaging at home. What if it was the opposite? The goods were delivered to the home and we dropped off the packaging (on our own schedule). As tools like Amazon become more ubiquitous, the infrastructure for curbside reusable pick-up is a natural next step.
It was great to chat with Gary Kayye on Rants and rAVes again. Tune in to Episode 582: Planar & Leyard Will Show 0.9mm LED and New Rental Solutions at DSE to hear about the innovative displays we'll be showing off at DSE 2017.
Why don’t the makers of hybrid vehicles take a playbook from the wearables and fitness apps space and gamify their cars so that you can compare your mileage to others and compete with your friends to be the most green driver? Would that create a network effect that might drive more brand loyalty in the space, as the options for hybrids and electric cars continue to grow.
Read more about companies can take inspiration from other industries to grow their businesses. Download the free eBook “The Payoff of Paying Attention”.
Why doesn’t Taco Bell, with their expansive supply chain and access to Pepsico’s resources, create an upscale Mexican food chain? Like Honda has Acura and Toyota has Lexus. They could start the first non-GMO, vegan friendly, gluten-free Mexican food chain in the country – which would be very on-trend and popular in Portland.
Read more about companies can take inspiration from other industries to grow their businesses. Download the free eBook “The Payoff of Paying Attention”.
I had a fascinating discussion the other day with someone from Jawbone about the differences between data sources. Jawbone and many others allow you to count steps using an instrument in a device. It’s a sensor. The data, within a few degrees, is accurate. It can be tallied, analyzed, and predicted.
On the other hand, food journaling is a reporting exercise. Many apps allow you to jot down what you have eaten and when. Either with manual entry or database look-up the nutritional content can be tabulated. But it’s prone with human error and ego. Not all sugary snacks get recorded. Whole days and weeks can be missed in the data stream. This is exactly a problem that faces all self-reported data that the healthcare industry has faced for years. People lie. To themselves. To their doctors. And now, to their devices.
So, is there a way that we could sensor things that were once reported? Patients who have pacemaker/defibrillators don’t have to report their heart rate or even their level of activity. Their device does it for them by monitoring their heart from the inside. An insulin pump doesn’t require a pricked finger in a blood sugar test. It notes the change and dispenses the intervention automatically. But those with chronic, life-threatening diseases like heart failure or diabetes will accept these invasive sensors. But what about the average person just wanting to improve their life and health?
Would you, as a consumer, sign up for a ring or bracelet that tracks your heart rate so you don’t have to record your exercise? I think the answer is “yes,” due to the broad adoption of FitBit, Apple iWatch, Jawbone, Polar, and other such devices.
Would you sign up for blood sugar monitoring (if it could be done without drawing blood), so you didn’t have to register your food and you could enjoy personalized recommendations and recipes that might give you what your body needed next?
Would you sign up for a virtual assistant that would block your calendar and tell you to get up and walk in the middle of the day?
What would you be willing to sensor to avoid reporting and to gain the benefits of the data?
To learn more about how Google is addressing the two seemingly conflicting problems of bots scanning forms and OCR technology reaching the computer’s limitations. Download the free eBook “The Payoff of Paying Attention”.
Jennifer Davis' preview of what to expect at InfoComm 2016 from the June issue of Systems Contractor News.
#CreatorsRule
There is the new thing. And the new, new thing. The previously new thing is now not so new (borderline old). There is the new that makes the news. There is the new that is so new it’s stealthily secret. We are obsessed with the new. New is piling up everywhere.
Have you ever thought that each day you regularly do more than is humanly possible? You can do a load of laundry, bring in water, cook dinner, commute, and talk all at the same time, thanks to modern convenient appliances, innovations, infrastructure, and automated processes. You measure modern engines by how many equivalent horses they could replace. I wonder how many humans our modern lives could replicate on a day to day basis. No wonder the world seems to be speeding up. We are all living multiple lives in parallel.
“Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you.” These were the words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, when he made his first call on March 10, 1876.
If Mr. Bell had available to him all the various communications technologies available today, what would he have used?
Perhaps he would have buzzed off a text, Snapchat, or WhatsApp with the phrase “W - come here. I want 2 C U.” It might have included a pin on a map to his exact location. He would have thrown in an emoticon or Emoji that expressed his current mood.
Or if he wanted to replicate the effect of multiple people listening in on the call (see photo above), then he might have posted it on social media. “Come here, @MyDearMrWatson. Your ninja assistant skillz are needed” he would have tweeted. Perhaps a selfie and the caption “See what you are missing? #ComeOnOver” would have posted to Instagram or Facebook.
Or perhaps we would have just said “Siri, find Watson.”
There are five main factors that have impacted my use of the phone the last few years, causing me to use the phone less:
1. Asynchronous communication: In our 24x7 bustle of business today, it is impossible to assume that people will be available for a conversation at the same time. This is further complicated if you want to get more than two parties in conference. Emails will wait until people are available. Even the more immediate text messages will hold until people can read and respond.
2. Mobility: The rise of the text is in direct proportion to the rise of mobility. People aren’t looking at emails on their desktop, they aren’t talking on the phones (which are increasingly awkward for phone conversations without a Bluetooth headset), but rather they are looking at small screens and wanting to respond efficiently, often while doing something else. These factors combine to make text (or the close equivalent of audio or video text) the best option.
3. Record Keeping: Unless recorded, phone conversations are poor for record keeping. Emails, and even texts, can provide a “paper trail” as things need to be referenced (i.e., What day did I say I would come back with a proposal?) or researched (i.e., What pricing did Bill commit to?). And what is better for documentation than a photograph, which have forever changed the kind of communications we are doing.
4. Beyond Audio: Photos on Instagram or Super, videos on YouTube, Vine, Meerkat, FaceTime, or the use of hashtags in multiple formats to allow for searching and categorization – all of these new technologies go beyond simple audio to give a richer experience. In our experience, a growing number of Planar desktop monitors come with integrated web cameras for precisely this reason. If a pictures is worth a 1,000 words, then a picture is work a 7.7 minute voice mail (at a typical reading cadence).
5. Voice Mails (from Hell): I am not a fan of the audio message or voice mail. It is slow and no one is very good at it (leaving messages, listening to messages, the whole process). We include too many details, rambling on and boring our recipient. Or we leave our critical information (like a return phone number that can be clearly heard). As a marketing executive, I am convinced I am on every mailing list in the hemisphere and get dozens of voice mails each day, so perhaps I am particularly jaded, but there is no denying that it is faster to read a text or an email than it is to listen to the same recorded in voice mail.
All of these speak to an over-arching trend and that is the pace of business life. Mr. Bell’s message was surprisingly urgent for its day. In 1876, nearly everything could wait. It had to. But today we can’t tolerate a delay and we want instant answers to our questions, so that we can provide instant answers to our customers.
By 1915, Bell had finished the first transcontinental phone line. He picked up the line in New York and told Watson to come there, repeating his line from 30 years earlier. Watson, who was sitting in San Francisco, joked that he would come in a week before they’d be face-to-face. I guess even these pioneers of telephony would have preferred Skype.
Seems to me there are two kinds of businesses: the first relies on reducing complexity and costs and delivering a simple proposition to customers and the second relies on charging a premium for delivering something unique, special, or otherwise differentiated. The role of the business leader is to pick one.
And maybe Gretchen Rubin was right when she suggested there were two types of people. The type that group people into two types and those who don't.
It is a frequent request from sales teams: create products that are more competitively priced or competitively featured. It sounds good and this kind of request has send product marketing and engineering teams off to create me-too products for centuries. The trouble is that is hardly ever works out as well as one would hope.
See, when you set out to make a competitive product, you have actually given up the one thing that might just be the key to your success: the ability to set the criteria for which products are judged and buying decisions are made. You have let your competition decide what is important and make you play catch up.
If you have the creativity and capability, it is much more fun (and probably more successful) to do something your competition isn't doing. Create a new product category. Solve a new problem in a new way. Sell to new customers in a new way. Go after a Blue Ocean or a Purple Cow, as the authors' suggest. Do something to set the pace and decide the rules of the game and then get your competition chasing you (or better yet, dismissing you as an outlier and you can be successful without them even noticing).