Bill Hewlett's and mobile innovation.
Collaborative approaches to service innovation.
Blue ocean ideas for our next step developments
Bill Hewlett's and mobile innovation.
I stepped into Bill Hewlett's preserved office where in 1970 he supported the company's 1st mobile product, the iconic HP 35 calculator designed to fit his shirt pocket. The story was published in HP Journal, in 1972 : project idea in fall 1970, manufacturing in November 1971, 100'000 units sold in 1972 and HP had to print the following statement : "orders for the HP-35 have exceeded expectations to such extent that a waiting list has been established". I met Bill twice in the 80's to discuss medical technology advances and I remember him as a very strong engineer, curious about many different things. His guiding principle was the famous HP Way stated "a deep respect for the individual, a dedication to affordable quality and reliability, a commitment to community responsibility, and a view that the company exists to make technical contributions for the advancement and welfare of humanity." and the operational implementations was called "management by wandering around". 
Thedesign of the HP 35 included many aspects : mechanics, electronics, and the original "reverse polish notation" that got adepts addicted. The team included France Rode, Thomas Whitney, Chung Tung, Ed Lijenwall, Dave Cochran and I wonder what they would say about today's smart phones. Collaborative approaches to service innovation.
HP's current approaches include the innovation program office (IPO), modeled after business plan and start-ups competitions. One of the great program sponsors is Phil McKinney, the CTO of HP's personal systems group and the author of the killer innovations podcast .
Some of Phil's views :
"a perfect storm is coming due to fundamental shifts in impact of technology and user experiences. What are the user experiences ? "Always connected " but not today's hotspot, but something insanely simple" and much more smarter devices. About virtual collaboration, the challenge is that the world is flat : China's top 1% student exceed the number of students in the US so the ability to collaborate worldwide becomes critical."Another great sponsor is Susie Wee, leading a team of immersive user experience designers who produced HP Halo collaboration room that make it cool to to work from our home town with teams in Tokyo, Bristol, Singapore, Grenoble without burning tons of CO2 nor bearing the pain of lengthy audio conferences.
Blue ocean ideas for communications in the coming yearsI repurposed selected ideas from Andrea Constantinou's mobile mega trends to stimulate our discussions :
1. Telecom industry must choose between 2 options : global cloud service delivery (new) or efficient traffic infrastructure (old)
2. Communication services have 2 levels : personalization (new) or commodity mass-market foundation (old) ; a side effect of this is the impact on monetization which now includes advertising (mobile ~ 5B$ in 2008, on-line ~ 24B$ in 2006) in addition to communications.
3. Content services are transformed by social communications : remixing and sharing experiences, across people, services and devices are the new media.
4. Device software and the value is bubbling up : of course the advanced devices are fueling this, IDC says 170 million units will be shipped in 2008, a growth of 40% so you need advanced OS and application environments. The OS level is also flattened despite fragmentation (Nokia's push will keep Symbian 60% market share but Mac OS X, BlackBerry OS, and Windows Mobile will grow faster). So the value "bubbles up : on-device-portals, idle screen applications, active screen applications, user interface frameworks, - web, widget and AJAX runtimes, trans-coding proxies.
5. User experiences rule the business : we all know this - but in a tech-driven industry we did not practice the process transition towards lead -user driven design processes.
6. OpenSource and cloud computing are destroying network enablers : new web service APIs will mean more wholesale access, Open SER, Open IMS , Asterix will make network elements cheaper and more accessible. The opportunity is that as the football field gets flattened, people who run faster on applications will win a share of the new business. HP is got on the way to become #1 IT company worldwide when it dropped it's operating system (for Unix) and processor technology (for a co-development with Intel) assets into the open space.
The blue ocean strategy of Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is another way to look at this I have used for several years. Communication industry is in a red ocean, boundaries are defined by spectrum licenses and market share and pricing influenced by regulators. With up to 6 mobile licenses per country, core communication services and network technology become commodity, leading to cutthroat competition turning the red ocean bloody. A blue ocean communication industry, in contrast, would be a yet unknown market space, untainted by competition where demand would be created rather than fought over. Is there such a way to make the competition irrelevant , executing fast at low cost ? So we ran an idea competiton on the topic, generating hundred ideas on the following themes :Create and capture new demand : play on social networks and user generated content innovations, embedding communication into devices and services where it has not been possible before. My colleague Agnieszka Thonet suggested cool ideas for my fridge. And other colleagues at HP Labs think about networking the dumbest devices in our homes.
Create uncontested market space : help lead users create new user experiences, new devices, vertical applications, allow market entry with speed and surprise. That's what Apple or Facebook did but there's many more markets to be created. My friend Peter Vesterbacka has focused his ConnectedDay social network services on 4-year old children.
Make the competition irrelevant : perhaps using the freemium business model where communications is a way to merchandize brick and mortar goods. That's the old #800 idea and perhaps Ebay's rationale for acquiring Skype.
Align the whole system of a company in the pursuit of differentiation and low cost : use cloud services delivering all services to consumers and for enterprise communications. Google's has done a lot to start this but there's plenty more. Can we get beyond OpenID and Opensocial for personal/virtual identity management including open access to presence/cell ID from HLRs within secured levels of privacy ? Could we good beyond Paypal with mobile macro, micro and nanopayment communication tools ? Can we have ubiquitous storage, access and sharing of user content across social networks and devices ?
Asking such questions around us got us plenty of new ideas during these hot summer days. After all these are good times for audacity.
