Harold Jarche

Theory & Practice for Innovation

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In reading Christensen, Anthony & Roth (2004) Seeing What’s Next, I found patterns linking three strategic innovation approaches.

First, in McLuhan for Managers, the authors synthesize much of Marshall McLuhan’s work, and provide a lens for managers and owners to make business decisions. The important piece of this book is how to use McLuhan’s laws of media to understand the changes that are possible with a medium. The authors suggest that it is in the retrieves quadrant of the
probes ” … we may be able to glean valuable clues as to the effects of the new medium from more easily observed effects of the old.” Understanding retrieval can give a clearer vision of signal versus noise.

Johansson, in The Medici Effect says that new businesses should look for reversals in order to find possibilities, especially at the intersection of fields or disciplines. These can result in order of magnitude business opportunities.

Christensen, also the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, gives new business entrants and incumbents a theory-based set of tools to understand and use disruptive innovations. One of the strategies for new businesses is to target non-core customers of the incumbents. These come in three categories (overshot, undershot and non-customers) and by targeting these customers entrants can avoid direct confrontation, while developing skills and expertise (swords) in areas outside the core business of the incumbents. Once the entrants have grown “under the radar”, they can grow to directly confront the incumbents.

This is an over-simplification of these three excellent books, but my intent is to grab your interest, as I see patterns in each book that reinforce each other, and I believe can be beneficial to your business, existing or new. Finally, Seeing What’s Next includes chapters on the healthcare and education industries, two fields of my own practice. The chapter on education was worth the price of the book for me.

Here is my first attempt at summarizing some of these concepts in a graphical form.

International Partnering

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My town, Sackville, is looking to create a long-term partnership with a a tsunami-stricken Indian town of the same size. This seems to be a better strategy than just raising money (though that is important), and I’ll keep an eye on this. Maybe even get involved if it makes sense.

Here is the full CBC post, as they tend to take them down after a while:

NB town to adopt tsunami-stricken community

WebPosted Jan 13 2005 01:16 PM AST
CBC NewsSACKVILLE



The town of Sackville, New Brunswick wants to adopt a town in India that’s been affected by the tsunami disaster.

Sackville town counsellor Virgil Hammock suggested the idea of partnering up with an Asian community. He says other aid efforts are helpful, but he’s worried that the campaigns won’t last .

“You know, six months to a year from now, people will have forgotten about this. They’ll have some other catastrophe to deal with,” said Hammock.

Hammock says the town hasn’t decided which Indian community they’ll support, but he says it’s likely that it will be a town in one the Indian islands that were hit worst by tsunamis.

“I looked at a town called Malacca, and that’s a town about the size of Sackville. But I haven’t been able to contact anyone there yet because this town was utterly destroyed.”

Hammock says the town will work with the local Rotary Club over the next few months to make a connection with an Indian community that needs aid.

Once the groundwork is laid out, Hammock says the people of Sackville will decide what kinds of projects they want to work on in the adopted Indian community. Hammock says the idea behind the partnership is to provide long-term support for people in Asia.

“We want to give them something they actually need, that we can buy or install, instead of just sending money. Then we can have sort of a longterm relationship with them.”

I’ll suggest to our town council that we all take a look at the SEA-EAT Blog, which includes a “Help Needed” section for the region hit by the tsunami.

Public Service Announcement – Missing Children

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A local mother here in New Brunswick, Canada has appealed to the general public to help her find her two boys, who were abducted by their father on December 31st. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have the basic information on this site.

The mother, Nicole Gallant, has also sent this link to additional photos of Sage & Ovila. Here is the press release.

Update: 19 January, and both boys are still missing.

Update 10 February: "Police in Louisiana have found two New Brunswick children who have been the subject of an international search for more than a month." :-)

CopyLeft Commies

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I guess that I’m a Copyleft commie, if you believe Bill Gates. Here’s Bill’s comment that launched a thousand blogs:

"No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist."

Follow this with Michelle Delio’s overview of some of the issues around patents and open source:


  • Recently     – IBM just gave a few hundred of them [patents] away while other companies are greedily gobbling them up.
  • The issue – "The real story here is that we are in the midst of a huge revolution because the patent system hasn’t kept up with technology and changes in society," says Sunstein [an attorney specializing in intellectual property law].

On the other hand, Creative Commons offers creators an option to control their own copyright – With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here.

There is also a Canadian petition circulating on user’s rights, which gives a different perspective from what one hears from the established media companies. If you want a good (US) historical perspective, then read or listen to Lessig’s book, Free Culture.

Finally, if you think that the movement for copyright and patent reform is just a bunch of radical commies, then you should read Will Shetterly’s Biblical parable to see what happens when an idea/technology, ?ɬ† la McLuhan, "flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits".

For the Toolbox

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As a new Training Development Officer (TDO) in the Canadian military, I was told by the more experienced officers to build my own “TDO Toolkit”. This was to be a selection of templates and job aids to help me with my future employment. TDO’s were mostly responsible for ensuring quality control of training programs, and many of us worked as the lone training specialist in an organisation.

Much of my work involved the development of new job specifications, followed by the creation of training standards for personnel who worked on some aspect of our newly purchased helicopter.

One of the tools that we used was DIF (difficulty, importance, frequency) analysis in determining if we needed to develop training on a specific task. In my first year on the helicopter project, I had to examine several hundred tasks for training suitability. The diagram below shows you a quick & dirty way that this can be done. This is the simple diagram, and there is also a more detailed version that we used.

DIF.jpg

Why Moodle?

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From Global Literacy is an overview of comparisons of the Moodle learning system with several others. Moodle is multilingual, SCORM compliant, based on a constructivist pedagogical model and is free (as in free beer and free source code). We (Mancomm) have been using Moodle rather successfully with a group of Montreal area nurses, who are co-developing their knowledge base on a new nursing care methodology.

Via incsub

Thinking longer

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Via Jay Cross, are these comments from some of the most interesting and thought-provoking people in the world, through Edge: the World Question Center. The comments of Esther Dyson really struck a chord:

We’re living longer, and thinking shorter.
Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now.

As a consultant, you are often called in as a last resort, and asked to come up with a quick and pragmatic solution. Don’t bother us with details and an analysis, just get the job done. However, getting down to the root causes of a messy problem may take some time. Fixing systemic problems takes even more time and effort.

We have to learn how to slow down. This can be through regular time for spirituality, exercise, reading or socialising. Organisations should incorporate slow time into their workflow. I once read that in Japan it was OK to sit at your desk and read, whereas in North America we take that as a sign of having nothing better to do. As Socrates said, “The unreflected life is not worth living”. I will take “thinking longer” as a new year’s resolution.

Firefox problems

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I’m having some problems with Firefox today. I can’t see my images that I have on my site, such as the one here. I have also lost the DHTML editor toolbar in Drupal. I know that it’s not a Drupal problem, because I have lost all of my Bloglines feeds too. On the other hand, everything works just fine in IE and even Opera. I have uninstalled and re-installed Firefox, but the problem continues. Any suggestions? I have already run a complete virus scan.

Update: Well it seems to be a Firefox problem and I can’t fix it. I’ve reloaded Firefox twice, even used the UK version instead of the US version. I can’t see any of my subscriptions in Bloglines and I’ve lost functions in Drupal, so it’s back to the dark side I go … Any other recommendations out there? This is weird.

Update 2: I’m now using Mozilla Navigator, and it seems to be working just fine. We’ll see.

Update 3: Have reloaded Firefox 1.0 on my XP SP2 system , but keeping Mozilla as a backup. Using shift-reload, I was able to see the functions in Drupal this time around. Didn’t work last time. Maybe it was just a chair-keyboard interface problem. Anyway, thanks for everyone’s help. Also, you may have noticed that I had allowed direct posting of anonymous comments for the last 24 hours. The online casino spammer caught on to this at 11:00 AM this morning, so they’re now turned off again.

The Medici Effect

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In reading Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect, I was able to take away a lot of practical ways of increasing innovation especially by looking for the intersections between fields of practice. Kind of like my tag line ;-)

Johansson tells you to look for reversals which may give you insights into new ways of doing things. He uses a restaurant as an example, saying that the assumption is that restaurants have menus, but the reversal would be a restaurant without a menu. This would be one where, “The chef informs each customer what he bought that day … the diner selects the desired food items and the chef creates a dish from them, specifically for each customer.”

Looking for reversals is the same strategy that Federmann & deKerkhove advise in McLuhan for Managers; based on McLuhan’s Laws of Media. You might want to read these two books in tandem.

Johansson states that those with lots of good ideas are also those with lots of bad ideas. The important thing is to generate many ideas, and follow through on those that show promise. Innovation is the following through part. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”

Johansson suggests that the way to be creative is to start early and let the idea develop over time. Don’t wait till the last minute:

… we should start by working hard and in a focused manner on a problem or idea and develop it as far as possible. Then we should wait, move on to something else, and forget about the problem for a while. [and repeat]

The Medici Effect is a quick read and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend this book as a window on some new possibilities.