Blyck is live, September 2007

This is the Blyk go live ! A great idea and defining moment for mobile services.
Services :
Blyk starts with a messaging-focus. It offers f r e e 217 SMS and 43 min voice / month to 4.5 million invited 16-24 years old members in UK. This resulted from market research covering 3,000 16-24 year olds across Europe. They will charge additional 10p/SMS, 15p/min top-up rates with mobile data 99p/ Mbyte (except from adds clicks).

Blyck invites advertisers to go beyond adds and create dialogues not demographics stats and click-thru. Advertisers get unprecendented feedback from members, who get relevant information. 45 brands were announced at the launch including Boots, Coke, Flirtomatik, L'Oreal, McDonalds, MasterCard, Natwest, Sky Broadcasting, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft's Xbox.
Infrastructure :
Nokia Siemens Networks provides a full mobile virtual network operator (MVNO)hosting connected to Orange UK radio network. First Hop provides the messaging software. TietoEnator, manages the BSS, web portals and services.Blyck has an elaborate customer care, in particular for subscriber authentication and ad campaign management. Xtract supplies consumer analytics (See my notes on Xtract founder Jouko Ahvenainen) . Mermit develops advertising and CRM systems. Plans are for for a pan-European deployment. Blyk is conisdering 12 deployments including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands.


The press conference with Blyk’s co-founders, Pekka Ala-Pietilä (former president of Nokia) and Antti Öhrling courtesy of VPOD TV.



text WHISPER to 82595 to get your code to join Blyk in UK if you qualify

Virtuoso project teams, MIT Sloan , September 20, 2007

Notes edited from IMD/MIT Sloan DSI program

Bill Fischer is professor of technology management at IMD. Bill Fishers studied management of the creative processes. His case studies shows that all-stars teams are required for great changes and great successes. And he brings a combination of academic research with his own real world experience from activities in healthcare, in telecommunications and in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

If you believe the future of telecommunication is that of a new media they you should like the examples from the book Virtuoso teams co-authored by Bill Fischer and Andy Boynton
because they offer examples ranging from entertainment (West side story and Miles Davis) and to telecoms technology (in the days of Edison).

Available vs. obtainable talent
Virtuoso teams are elite teams put together for one-time-only efforts to create big change. Such change is difficult to develop and execute. It needs the best talent a company has to offer to have the best chance of success. In other words, an elite group with a license to really deliver big change, staffed with the very best performers that the company can place in each position, including going outside of the organization to get them. These teams are intense and intimate, and they work best when members are forced together in cramped spaces under strict time constraints. They assume that their customers are every bit as smart and sophisticated as they are, so they don’t cater to a stereotypical “average.” Leaders of virtuoso teams put a premium on great collaboration and they’re not afraid to encourage creative confrontation to get it.

How does this approach differ from the conventional team approach? Larger organizations are reluctant to acknowledge elites, because it is easier to manage human resources through egalitarianism and harmony. In addition, in most companies, talent is the property of groups, functions, regions, etc, and not visible or movable within the broader corporation. Therefore traditional teams are typically made up of whoever’s available and achieve average results.

Directive leadership
The example closest to telecoms technology is that of Thomas Edison whose virtuoso team leader skills included :

• Committed systemic vision (end to end services)
• Team diversity and skills (he assembled engineers, mathematicians, technicians, business people)
• Open business organization : flat hierarchy meritocracy and rewards and communications
  Fast prototyping
• Communications and marketing (he pre-announced products to create demand and also innovated in business models)

Individual talent within a team context
Another virtuso team example made a breakthrough in the entertainment industry. West Side Story went against all of Broadway musical traditions of the 1950s. Blood on stage, racial violence, dissonant music changed the face of American shows and the subsequent movie got 10 Oscars. The team of virtuosos included classic composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Do you remember the Maria song ?


Another musical example comes from Miles Davis musical re-invention during his career. He surrounded himself with great musicians like Bill Evans and ensured that even rehersals would add surprise and drama. This has been documented in Kind of blue: the making of the Miles Davis masterpiece, Ashley Kahn and the video below from Ken Burn's Jazz.

Innovation teams at IDEO
We looked at a video on IDEO, a design industry leader and promoter of the concept of ‘design thinking’, a term given to the introduction of design methods and culture into fields beyond traditional design, such as business innovation. In telecoms they are known as having worked on the Helio device design. We also had a teleconference with a lead designer.

Teamwork ; The key soft skill is teamwork not creativity. Innovation is a team sport. They stress importance of human empathy : we help client to innovate up to the CEO agenda. If you want to innovate you need inspiration requires contact with human beings. Thru interviews with customers and observations you get ideas. You need to get out into people’s houses, offices and conduct dialogs with a view to identify problems and headaches. Make sure everybody knows what the customer experience is.

Analysis : Then comes the ability to synthesize for decision making. It’s the art of making meaning and finding directions from a mass of ambiguous information. Some points are important, some other not. Start by aggregation of information. Innovation can be big or small; breakthrough innovation, looking for large revenue. Walk out the room with one or three messages for executives, package the idea in such a way that it can be communicated to all stake holders.

Prototyping : IDEO value proposal is 'think to build', having researchers in the same building where implementation occurs provides a high degree of immediacy. The approach is to get a prototype to the market as soon as possible. What is a prototype : right things but not the overall service and using available tools like photography, Flash animations. People are scared to show an innovation to upper managers unless its ready. Foster a culture of prototyping : failures become variations, options, choices. Prototype reduces the costs of failures that can be corrected before people are emotionally connected to features.

Capturing lead user innovation, MIT Sloan, September 20, 2007

Notes edited from IMD/DSI program
Eric Von Hippel, Professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, evhippel@mit.edu

Eric von Hippel's research demonstrates that communities of users are now driving product development. As the telecom networks open-up to web mashup services, virtual network operators, we can leverage lead-user developments that have happened in many industries. Eric von Hippel provides numerous quantitative analysis of the processes that generate breakthrough innovation. Here is a summary of his papers and and video tutorials.

Users generate different innovations than manufacturers
Examples demonstrate that communities of users are powerful innovation "engines" . 20 to 40% of users engage in developing/modifying products (20% of mountain biking users, 37% of extreme sport participants) . Those with the strongest lead user characteristics develop innovations having high appeal to the general market place.

Von Hippel argues that 80% of innovations come from DIY lead-users because manufacturers don't see emerging business potential, nor can deliver in time. 'Necessity is the mother of invention '. Some examples : Apache web servers users improved security functions. HP Voodoo PCs were developed by users over-clocking standard processors and installing water coolers

Generating breakthrough value on top of incremental improvement

Users and manufacturers tend to have different knowledge leading to different kind of innovations. Unfortunately there is information asymmetry between users and manufacturers and the two sources of innovations are hard to combine. This is sticky information, because it is very difficult to transfer from one group to another or between application domains.

User need and context of use knowledge is generated by lead-users. Often the richest source of information can be found on user web sites. Users tend to develop innovations that are functionally novel. Note that users tend to share their innovation freely inside communities such as Open Source”. As a result user innovation is often cheaper and faster. And user communities are driving manufacturers out of product development.

Generic solution knowledge is, on the other hand, mastered by enterprises closer to manufacturing and supply chain activities within a particular industry. Manufacturers tend to lead in solution process improvement innovation. But the need to protect innovation with IPR often slows down innovation by preventing collaboration with 3rd parties for example.

Democratization with toolkits for user innovation

One way of democratization of innovation is to combine both types of knowledge. 'Toolkits for user innovation and design are integrated sets of product design , prototyping and design testing tools intended for use by end users. One good example is the semiconductor industry with custom ASICs toolkits. Another is Lego mind storms craze for adult techies. Lego executives simply did not know what to do. Toolkits substitute market research by collaborative innovation with communities of users.

Defining technology strategy, MIT Sloan, September 20, 2007

Notes from a week at IMD/MIT Sloan DSI program

Rebecca Henderson, Professor of Management, MIT Sloan
Rebecca Henderson focuses on strategy formulation, competition, research, and product development in high-technology industries. Her course slides are here. As telecommunication industry boundaries start to blurr with those of media entertainment , consumer electronics and on-line web 2.0, Rebecca Henderson’s rational approach help answer three questions : how to create, capture, and deliver value?

1. How will we create value?
A picture of S-Curve
How will the technology evolve, how will the market change? The S Curve is a tool for triggering discussion on industry life cycle and the evolution (especially disruptive transition) of markets. For telecoms, the difficulty is to choose the focus of analysis :
Industry : media/entertainment (content) or network access and transmission or both ?
Technology : fixed or mobile broadband and broadcasting?
Product : handset devices, internet services, network equipment and software ?
And which dimension of performance : market adoption, market sizes, social value ?

As we aim at creating value for customers, we should be desperate to listen to them but be very careful about which ones we select (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards). Too often the innovation is influenced by current customers (CTO councils) and not the leading edge customers that will survive after the discontinuity.

2. How will we deliver value?
One company innovation illustration:
For sure in telecoms, there are too many options to choose from and strategy is required to drive real resource allocation? Rebecca jokes about why in the real world it is so hard to kill project #26. Low priority projects still meet ROI goals, please some customers, and have CEO support. Absence of innovation strategy leads to un-innovative project approval. There are a range of decision tools : Risk adjusted NPV, decision trees, simulations e.g. Monte Carlo, closed formulas e.g. Black-Scholes and differential equations. Accuracy of information is key for scenario analysis.

HP Labs moves to an open innovation process so that there are few boundaries for exporting or importing innovation at various stage of the process.
How do we manage the core business and growth simultaneously? It is about combining entrepreneurial vs. operational excellence. In betweens are joint-ventures, project teams, separate teams [an organization challenges is to avoid A vs. B team conflicts] .
The best approach is not in the organization structure but rather in establishing incentives so employees share the innovation values "do you want to save lives?' ''Manage from the heart'', build on core values, practice thinking in new ways. It requires ability to manage divergent incentives and career paths plus a process to monitor metrics and resource allocation.

3. How will we Capture value?

How should we design the business model? Money is in the business model innovation. Now web 2.0, energyu and nano are hype. But 100% growth in mobile adoption or consumer riots for DuPont Nylon are no more there. It may sounds immoral but fast followers can capture more value.

Uniqueness : controlling the knowledge generated by an innovation.
Complementary assets : controlling the assets that maximize the profits from innovating, even if not unique. These are competencies=things you can do : manufacturing, sales, service . It also includes resources=things you can own : brand, channels, global.
A summary of wireless technology value chain

Where should we compete in the value chain? Should we buy our suppliers? Distributors? Should we outsource our manufacturing… distribution… sales… capability?