Why bother with Innovation?

Its costly, distracting,uncertain,fuzzy…. There are more urgent things to do.

Top and bottom line targets, investor pressures, Competitive forces — obviously these need more attention. So why bother?

It might be pertinent to look at Mckinsey ‘s 3 horizons

Enduring Ideas: The three horizons of growth

In this interactive presentation--one in a series of multimedia frameworks--Steve Coley, a director emeritus in…

www.mckinsey.com

First featured in ‘The Alchemy of Growth’, it explains the three horizons in any business . The current, adjacent and disruptive. Optimise the current, grow with adjacent and be ready for the disruptive.

Too many firms have bitten the dust focusing on / being happy with the first. ( Nokia, Blackberry, GE, Yahoo….)

With cycles of obsolescence getting shorter thanks to technology, both individuals and firms need to work on ALL the THREE horizons simultaneously.

Its not a ‘Nice to Have’. Very quickly , it is separating the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’!

Limiting Thought

A number of real world factors limit your thought, none of them worth limiting your thought. Why?

Budgets, feasibility, market readiness, customer adoption, funding, skill availability, technology …. the number of factors are quite a few. But none of them should limit your thought,even though they might limit your current execution. Lets try to understand with an example.

Apple products had keychain as a feature for number of years. Key chain is a mechanism to store passwords to accelerate authentication and logging into a Mac etc. Many years later, Apple implemented finger scanner authentication mechanism ( Touch ID). Subsequently face recognition ( Face ID). As you can see , this is a progression of the maturity of authentication mechanism to make user experience better and better. It might be pertinent to note that each of the later features use/leverage earlier features. Did Apple only think of Keychain when it developed it first? No. They certainly had a vision of improving user authentication though they wouldnt have thought out everything related to FaceID.

Not limiting your thought based on current limiting factors , helps you the following ways:

1. You can develop the first set of features/product as close as possible to the future vision to reduce re-work/non-compatibility etc.
2. Articulating the vision to the product teams/partners helps them align/enhance their skills in a timely manner.
3. The unlimited thought also helps you prioritise in terms of where the market /competition is headed and what gives you differentiation in longer term.
4. It also brings clarity to you on what is not worth pursuing, when you cannot see too far with it.
5. A consolidation of these unlimited thoughts is your product roadmap.

In more ways than one, it is a competitive differentiator.

Truth is a Lie

At the cusp of new year, I wanted to share the paradoxes of life that we eventually get to. Here we go.

1. Circle of Taste: Lets start with a simpler one. As kids everyone like the sweet taste ( toffees, sweets, ice creams etc) and as they age, they start liking the bitter ( alcohol , Smoking etc) ?
2. Circle of Maturity: Kids tend to do things that are considered ‘stupid’ by the adults. As adults age, they start doing the same ‘stupid’ things?
3. Circle of Assets : If you follow the billionaires, most of them , after accumulating assets, go on to give the most away. All the time and effort spent on earning and saving, suddenly seems to be the wrong thing to do ?
4. Circle of Rationality : All the education and science are based on logic and rationale over time fail to answer questions and then people tend to turn towards the fuzzy,obscure,abstract things such as faith, philosophy ?
5. Circle of Plurality: We keep looking at multiple things, multiple people, multiple issues and multiple lives. What if the truth is the opposite of the multiples?

Here’s wishing you as you travel towards the lies to the truth!