by Charles Plant | Apr 26, 2012 | Innovation
The press seems littered these days with articles bemoaning Canada’s poor record at Innovation. Unfortunately, I think much of what is written and said misses the point. Let’s go back to what Innovation actually is: It is successfully taking a new idea, product, process or something to the market. As such, this process involves two distinct parts. The first part involves coming up with the idea, developing it into a product etc., and this is what everyone looks at. They use patents and such to measure new idea creation. However the second part of innovation is actually the most important part. That is taking the idea to the market. This is marketing, sales, business development, whatever you want to call it. In formulaic terms:
Innovation = Idea + Marketing
People who comment on innovation continually forget the importance of marketing so they don’t measure it in looking at innovation. Statistics show that rapid growth of new software companies is more of a function of marketing that it is of R&D. The more successful startups spend much more on sales and marketing than they do on R&D and the ratio is 2:1. If marketing is twice as important in successful startups as R&D then this same sort of ratio must hold true for larger companies. This if you want to find innovators, you must look for marketing as a much more important factor than R&D in the success of innovators.
Marketing is the more important part of the innovation formula.
When people talk about innovation, when governments fund it, when companies do it, they forget the second part of innovation, that of marketing and this in fact is the most important factor in success of innovation.
by Charles Plant | Jan 23, 2012 | Innovation
Well it’s always sad to see a founder, or even two end up leaving an active management role at their company. It could be a natural evolution but it got me thinking about my love/hate relationship with my Blackberry. I remember the first time I got a Blackberry. It was about 2000/2001 and I thought this was a great new device. It was amazing how quickly I became addicted to it, checking messages regularly and answering them at all hours of the day. The first time I noticed that there was a problem with their use was in a meeting at Arch Venture Partners in Chicago. One of the rites of passage in getting venture capital funding is presenting your pitch to all of the partners. We sat in a windowed boardroom and due to cellular reception, the partners had to place their Blackberries on a window ledge. On a regular basis during the meeting the partners would get up from their seats, go over to the window, retrieve their Blackberry and check and perhaps answer messages. Perhaps I was boring or they just were not interested but that was a defining moment for me. I started to look at how I used the Blackberry and discovered that I was becoming involved in a lot of things that my employees should be handling themselves. It was too easy to get me and to get me to deal with things they should be dealing with. It was also too easy to check email at all hours of the day and mentally to never leave work. RIM has managed to change human behaviour by the introduction of an innovative device and whether history will see this as positive or negative change, here’s a thank-you to Balsillie and Lazaridis for creating a world changing company.
by Charles Plant | Oct 12, 2011 | Innovation, Management
Today’s service outages from RIM did not cause me any issues as I’ve been sitting at my computer all day trying to write. It did bring to mind though, similar issues that customers of ours had at Synamics. We built mass calling platforms for telcos and the expected level of service from us was referred to as 5 nines reliability. 5 nines meant that our systems (along with every other in-network telecom system) had to be available 99.999% of the time. Clearly RIM is not achieving those levels of reliability as 5 nines reliability means that you are allowed to be out of service something like 5 minutes per year. It will be interesting in the days ahead to see if this service outage is material to RIM’s customers. If they start leaving in droves it will be because this was a material problem. If such is the case then RIM has forsaken what is material in their business for something that is immaterial such as creating new tablets. Apple has been great at figuring out what is material. Now let’s see if Rim can be just as great.
by Charles Plant | Aug 30, 2011 | Innovation
I gave myself a birthday present of a new Kobo as I have gotten tired of carrying all sorts of books around. My first reaction was quite negative as I turned it on and found that the page was only showing around 50 words. If you read 500 words a minute, a device that only shows 50 words means that your reading will be slowed down to a crawl as you flip the page every 6 seconds. Now I have been accused of being rigid in my thinking so reminding myself of that, I vowed to give it a further try.
Once I found it was possible to change fonts and layout, things began to improve and once I had finished my first book I was hooked. Not so much on the layout, form factor, techno mumble jumble or anything else but by the ease of getting the next book. Finishing a normal book means that you likely won’t start another for a while until you replenish your stock at a store some time later. The great thing about Kobo is that it takes only a couple of minutes to get another book. At 11 at night when you are looking for something to read, you can easily download something and be reading within 5 minutes. Not so of regular book shopping. In fact I hazard to guess that I’ll read more with a Kobo than I did with real books and if many of us do so, this will be a boon for the publishing industry but alas, not so much of one for the retail bookstore.
by Charles Plant | Jul 23, 2011 | Innovation
I was amazed to find out recently, the volume of texting going on. What Instant messaging is to the computer, text messaging or texting is to the phone or mobile device. According to Nielson Co. in 2009, “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008—almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.”
Originally sent using SMS, (Short message Service) text messaging, refers to the exchange of brief written messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network. Text Messaging now refers to messages that may contain image, video and sound content. Texting has been a boon for the telephone companies as it gives them something more to charge for whereas much of IM is not paid for. Statistics about the use of Text Messaging say:
- The ITU (October 2010) estimates that 6.1 trillion messages will be sent worldwide in 2010, that is triple the number sent in 2007 (1.8 trillion). That means 200 000 text messages are sent every second, earning operators US$14,000 every second (if the average text costs US$0.07)
- The most number of texts are sent in The Philippines and the United States.
- Portio Research (February 2010) estimates that SMS is used by four billion consumers worldwide and that worldwide SMS traffic will exceed 10 trillion in 2013.
- The global mobile messaging business is worth over US$150 billion, and will hit US$233 billion by 2014.
by Charles Plant | May 23, 2011 | Innovation
If computers, voice mail and cell phones weren’t enough to overwhelm the typical corporate user and blur the boundaries between work and home then email was the next nail in the coffin. In case you have forgotten, Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. These systems were primitive and only allowed communication between users who logged into the same host. This came to be useful in large corporations as a means of communicating internally as all employees with a terminal on a mainframe could become an email user. In the 1980s, networked personal computers on Local Area Networks became very useful. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were then developed. Unfortunately, these systems allowed communication only between users logged into the same server just as early systems were limited to users of the same mainframe. Over time, these systems came to be linked together as long as companies were using the same protocol. Eventaually the adoption of ARPANET and later Internet protocols allowed email messages to be sent over the internet efficiently.
Some statistics about email usage in 2010 show that the numbers for email are:
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 480 million – New email users since the year before.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
- 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
