Hong Kong Institute talk

Media X hosted two multi-day workshops this month, one with the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Tech, and the other with an industry group touring re Innovation and Entrepreneurism in Silicon Valley.

I got a chance to give a morning workshop for each, which in turn gave me a chance to practice my "new view" about the missing links in larger corporations.

I have been positively impressed by both Geoffrey Moore's "Dealing with Darwin" and Kevin Kennedy's "Going the Distance" -- especially by the process flow diagram that Kennedy uses to distinguish Entrepreneurs from Product Managers from Process Managers.   This chart does a great job of defining the jobs inside a company that pertain to Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" from a customer standpoint, as well as the company-inside dynamics around Everett Rogers' S-curve of adoption (The Diffusion of Innovation).

The first Missing Link is at the bottom of the chart, when resources are freed up by selling off "old successes".  How do they get re-applied to the right "new ideas"?   Steve Jobs could do this; Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard could do this; most CEOs are by contrast apparently incapable of this.  And it takes a C-level decision maker to connect the two -- the resource "seller" is a financial type, but not a product strategist or researcher; the latter has NO connection to the resource pool without a C-level sponsor.

The second Missing Link is between the Entrepreneurs who invent something new, and their colleagues who are busy with the Mission Critical products and services of the current company.  The new stuff is disruptive of their busy daily routine.  Thus the company is able to rebuff the new ideas long before the erstwhile customer gets a chance to vote.  This stops innovation in larger corporations much more than anything else.

The third Missing Link is for the Entrepreneurs themselves -- how do you decide to "think outside the box" when you are really good at what you do, but what you do (and know) is not the set of rules for the 'new world'.

I had two sets of examples, one around Apple's transformation from a computer vendor to the iPod music, then the iPhone communications company, and then the iPad tablet vendor, as compared to Motorola, Nokia, and RIM on the one hand, and HP and Dell on the other.    The second was re HP in the days of being a voltmeter company and 'going into computing' in a way that defied logic (if you were a proper computer company, or for that matter, a proper voltmeter company).

These are topics worth outlining in more detail.

Stay tuned