The API landscape is extremely dynamic. The following 2 diagrams taken from ProgrammableWeb describe the most common APIs which are used in order to build mash-ups. They show the dominance of major historic players (check the “see all time” diagram) but also the more recent rise of new players such as Twilio in the recent past (last 14 days), as well as the convergence of Cloud Computing and Telecom.
There is yet more evidence of the emergence of this new ecosystem; it is indeed interesting to notice the emergence of new players offering the technical support to manage API infrastructures such as the new Application Enablement Services Business Unit from Alcatel-Lucent (the one that acquired ProgrammableWeb in 2010), Mashery, Apigee, Aepona or 3Scale.
But let’s come back to the relationship between Apps and APIs.
After all, aren’t applications mere channels? To support their promotion, we can reasonably bet that Brands will also create APIs in the future, with probably a more obvious way to demonstrate Return On Investment through the number of innovative apps created by third party creative developers than through the number of downloads KPI[7] of their own app. Brands could therefore propose APIs in order to extend the reach of their products and services.
Here are some suggestions for a few popular Brands[8].
Nike could create a “Just Size It” API that gives the perfect shoe size from the photo of your feet,
Evian could create a hydration API that calculates the quantity of water a person needs to drink daily and reminds her when rehydration is needed,
Netflix has proposed an API to tap into its customers’ creative capabilities, and even organized a contest [9] so as to crowdsource ideas leading to the improvement of the algorithms of its movie recommendation engine,
French off-licence chain Nicolas could create an API that allows its customers to find and leave recommendations about the wine they buy.
How could these companies support the use of their APIs, and therefore the promotion of their Brand? This would be done by the developers who would make sure to make APIs accessible by the end users on different interfaces, and who would find ways to remunerate themselves through the proposition of new business models.
Of course Brands can still develop some specific applications themselves, but the decision to propose an Open API will offer an unparalleled way to boost exponentially the reach of their promotion.
A lot of marketing managers are sometimes the victims of the ‘gadget syndrome’: they follow the trend getting on board the last fashionable feature to include into their marketing plans. One year it is the ‘Facebook Page’, or the ‘Twitter account’, and the year after the ‘Mobile App’.
But as part of a more sustainable marketing and innovation strategy, the best solution may very well not be an application but rather an Open API.
Another trend to take into account as a booster for the number of APIs, is Open Data. The opening of public data by the administrations (After initiatives in the US with Data.gov and in the UK with Data.gov.uk, Etalab[10] is also about to launch the Data.gouv.fr portal of data sets in December 2011) and French cities such as Rennes[11], Paris[12] or Montpellier[13] have already exposed some data sets with some of them as APIs.
Open Data for businessese
The concept also appeals to businesses as shown by the Bluenove white paper (in French) entitled “Open Data: what are the issues and the opportunities for the enterprise?” with sponsors such as French railways SNCF, French Post Office Group La Poste, SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT and the French confectionary giant Poult group. The Civil Service, local governments as well as businesses will have to learn how to attract, engage and manage a community of developers but also of entrepreneurs, researchers, academics, students and companies from other industries to motivate them to use their APIs and boost their innovation.
as a conclusion: the fundamental role of developers
Martin Duval, CEO, Bluenove
One the one hand major platforms continue relentlessly to open themselves to to more and more end users thanks to more open developments. On the other hand, developers will try to invent new applications but will also have to use an increasing number of available APIs and use new skills to detect, select, integrate them but also contribute to improve them and even ask for new ones.
One sees new types of requirements, services and skills emerging which keep the collaboration and innovation momentum going between the members of these complex ecosystems among which developers have a fundamental role to play.
As I started writing this article at the beginning of October 2011 , the http://www.programmableweb.com/[1] web site indicated on its home page that it has identified 4007 APIs and 6175 mash-ups on a global footprint: At the moment you are reading this piece on the Visionary Marketing, I am certain these numbers are completely outdated. I agree that, Dear Developers, these numbers are still very far from your ‘Ocean of Apps’ but this new ecosystem nevertheless starts to look like a ‘Jungle of APIs’.
First and foremost, let’s take the time to put this notion of Open APIs back into its context. ‘Application Programming Interfaces’ do enable the connection between different IT platforms and the integration of different application and services through the creation of a ‘mash-up’. Open APIs proposed by a mobile or web player aim at helping the creation of an ecosystem around a common platform, therefore forming a dynamic community of creative developers who are given the opportunity to innovate faster and in many more directions, than if they wished to do it on their own. This is therefore a genuine Open Innovation strategy in which the various players will have to initiate and maintain a long-term bond of trust, based on elements such as stability, sustainability, ease of use of the platform and the APIs, but also based on a win-win relationship with its community of partner developers.
Beyond the major web platforms (Google, Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Amazon, etc.) that propose to the developers a big set of APIs and of course the main mobile OSes (Iphone, Android, Windows Phone, etc.) offering their SDKs[2] to support the development of mobile applications, similar open programs exist as well in the Telecom industry. Telecom operators such as Orange (with Orange API[3]), Telefonica (with their BlueVia[4] program) or Telenor (with Mobilt Bedriftsnett[5]) also allow access to third parties to some of their network assets such as SMS, click-to-call, location, storage, billing, etc. in order to facilitate the emergence of new services through the innovation potential from developers, start-ups and brands.
A signal demonstrating the need for rationalisation and standardisation in this ‘jungle of APIs’ came up with the GSMA ‘One API’[6] initiative: a success still to be confirmed.
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[1] ProgrammableWeb has been aquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2010
Business week has a very brief story – relayed by innovation tools on their site – on why businesses should go on investing in innovation. Atkins argues that companies have to go on investing in innovation in order to dominate in the next decade. He is right, but unfortunately and despite the title doesn’t really explain why we – and our managers – do have to pursue the innovation effort.
The answer to that last question is in previous studies carried out by PIMS (see PIMS history in the following transcript) – included in my lecture on innovation at the Paris university. What this PIMS study is showing is that even in times of crisis, innovation is not an option. On the contrary, it is during these periods that innovation is the real driver for success. however, the return on investment is not immediate and therefore patience is required. Success for innovators who won’t give up during the current credit crunch will show – according to PIMS – in the years following the crisis through the acquisition of a few extra-points in terms of market dominance. Results will in no way happen in the short term though and this is why the real difficulty is to show managers that innovation budgets have to be maintained, let alone increased.
It is certain that the main inhibitor in that process is that managers are also driven by short-term issues in those difficult times, sometimes fighting for their own survival and therefore focussing not on innovation but on the bottom line. Hence Sir Stelios’ – the much reverred Easy group innovation – response to an interview I saw on the Beeb a few weeks ago. When asked about the current credit crunch, Sir Stelios responded (quoted from memory) “I’m afraid that business is bound to be boring again; one will have to be a lot more cautious; at the same time” he added “when the going was good, it was easy to confuse luck for skills, but from now on it will be a lot more difficult”. (note: similar feedback from Stelios in a Times article available online at this url).
TRANSCRIPT FROM THE NOTES OF MY SLIDE
Brief history of PIMS
The PIMS project was started by Sidney Schoeffler working at General Electric in the 1960s, then picked up by Harvard’s Management Science Institute in the early 1970s, and has been administered by the American Strategic Planning Institute since 1975.
It was initiated by senior managers at GE who wanted to know why some of their business units were more profitable than others. With the help of Sidney Schoeffler they set up a research project in which each of their strategic business units reported their performance on dozens of variables. This was then expanded to outside companies in the early 1970s.
The survey, between 1970 and 1983, involved 3,000 strategic business units (SBU), from 200 companies. Each SBU gave information on the market within which they operated, the products they had brought to market and the efficacy of the strategies they had implemented.
The PIMS project analysed the data they had gathered to identify the options, problems, resources and opportunities faced by each SBU. Based on the spread of each business across different industries, it was hoped that the data could be drawn upon to provide other business, in the same industry, with empirical evidence of which strategies lead to increased profitability. The database continues to be updated and drawn upon by academics and companies today.
What Pims have shown is that the impact of innovation is not immediate. mostly takes place 2 years after investment. This is why really successful companies never stop innovating (look at cisco) and don’t handle innovation as a 6-year cycle which only lasts for 2 years. It must be a continuous effort or it mustn’t be
ROCE: Return on Capital employed: ROCE is a measure of how productively a company manages its refining, marketing and transportation assets. ROCE is the ratio of operating profits generated to the amount of operating capital invested.
Very often, I hear people say that you have to make your end-user’s lives easier to generate a marketing success. However paved with good intentions this statement may be, I did ask myself the question whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. Here are my thoughts on this subject:
First and foremost, I wondered whether revenue could be linked to user-friendliness and ease of use of the service? Very often, it is said that what made Apple’s success was the user-friendliness of its products. This explanation, however, is very debatable. What could be simple for a certain user, mainly because he is used to a certain feature or a certain way of doing things, may seem complex to another. And this is even true of such well-designed products as the Mac Intosh, or the iPOD. For instance, it happened to me many times that I advised new Apple buyers who were complaining about the lack of the contextual click on their new Mac mouse. I had to show them that they had to press the button for approximately one second in order to display that contextual menu. This simple gesture may seem very user-friendly to most Mac users, whereas having a two button mouse may seem very unusual and quirky to them. But to most Windows users (just a little reminder, this is 97% of the population) this way of working with a mouse is very quirky too. Can we easily conclude that these design particularities (which could be considered as great by some and quirky by others) are a good selling argument, which are sufficient to explain how successful the product was? I’m not really sure, due to the fact that there are a number of users who discover these design features after buying the products and not before.
Secondly, I’m wondering whether user-friendliness is a constant with time? As a matter of fact, I think that user-friendliness can be pictured on a curve (similar to the hype cycle curve by partner), which explains the evolution of a user and the user-friendliness factor in the course of the usage of the machine or software. By the time a user gets used to the features of the new software or the new hardware, including those which are very exotic, the end-user will become more and more exacting. A feature which might be unusual, or even useless when you start using a product for instance, may eventually prove very useful and even compulsory with time. For instance, when I started using my newly purchased HTC 7500 advantage, the 3-D communication capability seemed to me superfluous; but I started using it more and more, and then I started to dive into the complexity of the menus and options. Now, the 3-G capability of my PDA has really become irreplaceable. If I were to lose it, I would struggle goes straight away to shop and buy a flat fee subscription for 3G, because I really need this feature now. As a conclusion, what seemed complex and useless at the outset (menu configurations to connect, proxy parameters, etc) very shortly became an absolute necessity for me to connect my machine to the Internet and use it to the full.
Thirdly, it may happen that a feature, which seemed user-friendly, and convenient in the beginning, becomes useless and irritating with time. For instance, we could describe the T9 (so-called ‘predictive text’) feature on mobile phones as very useful when we discover it for the first time. When you don’t have a keyboard on your mobile phone or your smartphone and you want to type a text (short message, note, calendar entrey, etc) this feature may seem really great and useful. You start typing the beginning of the words, and then the system will fetch into the dictionary and will complete the entry. However, with time, this feature appears quirky, and even generates unwanted effects. As a result, the feature which was meant to simplify usage becomes cumbersome, superfluous, and it even gets on your nerves to a point where you actually de-activate it (as long as you are able to work your way through the menus to re-instate manual entry). Eventually, users and mostly youngsters prefer to use abbreviations, and even this weird phonetic SMS lingo to communicate. This is a good example of a feature which seemed useful in the beginning, and was meant to make users’ lives easier, but which at the end of the day is so complex that the users want to get rid of it.
Other pertinent examples can certainly come to your mind, but as a conclusion of these brief article, I can add that user-friendliness is probably what is the most difficult thing to achieve in this world, because it is both subjective and personal (what seems easy for one may seem difficult to others) and because it evolves with time, with the usage of the system in one way or another. At the end of the day design can be a hell paved with good intentions, where user-friendliness and simplicity is aimed at but where one generates a lot of irritation and frustration. Most importantly, because this criterion is very subjective, it would probably generate a halo effect if we were to try and measure its impact on sales and revenues, or even worse if we were to predict future revenues based on user-friendliness. Conversely, we can certainly find a very good number of products or services, which went through huge commercial success despite the fact their usability was really bad or even downright awful (one will remember. Siemens’ Gigaset telephones, which were tremendously successful from a commercial point of view a few years ago whereas their menus were absolutely useless; for instance turning on your speaker phone required that you pressed the ‘INT’ key and then press eight for what it means!?). I hope that this article however is not going to entice manufacturers to make lives even more difficult for users, because I think this is hard enough as it is.
However, and however much we regret it, we think it would be wrong to believe that user-friendliness and the quality of a user manuals is a recipe for success.
Virtualisation of customer services interaction was quoted by Time (March 2008) as being one of the ‘10 ideas which are changing the world‘. Pascal Levy-Garboua, Director, Business Development of Virtuoz.com, a leading-edge provider of IVA (intelligent virtual agents) technology, is giving us more insight into the future of customer relationship management in this post written on behalf of Visionary Marketing.
Intelligent virtual agents are changing the face of online customer service and are fast becoming the main channel of customer support communication for generation Y. However, the domain of artificial intelligence and its presence on the Internet today is still relatively unfamiliar to many. “Intelligent virtual agent” has yet to become a widespread buzz word in the field of CRM, but it is full of potential.
So what exactly are virtual agents about, and what can they be used for?
IVAs are artificial intelligence programs which translate to autonomous, graphically embodied agents which appear in an online environment. Graphic design for each individual virtual agent may vary from video animation to a photo or an avatar, in an interactive 2D or 3D environment, in order to fit with a company’s brand image.
Intelligent virtual agents can be designed and built with the capacity to fulfill a multitude of functions on the Internet. They offer a large variety of online functional abilities which allows their missions to be accurately defined according to their role in the customer cycle. Be it for marketing purposes, help and advice with website navigation, sales functions, customer support or sales follow up, intelligent virtual agents are increasingly being sourced by companies to bring more personalized interaction to their CRM.
IVAs in the CRM cycle
IVA strategies for improving online CRM
Immediate and ubiquitous real time access to answers. IVAs offer customers immediate and ubiquitous real time access to answers using a variety of functionalities. Customers are thus saved from frustrating time on hold with a customer service center or, as is the case with traditional search engines and FAQ explorers, from trawling through mountains of web content in order to find their answer.
A personalized, tailored service. IVAs can mirror the in store experience from a customer standpoint. The ability to connect to company back office databases allows agents to retrieve personal information to provide the most tailored answer.
Encouraging online self help and increasing web content ease of access. Online virtual agents encourage online self service and increase web content accessibility to even the Internet beginner. Helping e-customers efficiently zero in on the information they are looking for is consequential to CRM, helping to alleviate customer frustration when they cannot find a certain page, or certain information. Through facilitating online services discovery, virtual agents are becoming an invaluable tool in cross and up-selling as well as in the maintenance and reinforcing of a company’s brand strength and recognition.
Proactive approach to customer issues. By simulating a text chat session with a live agent, encouraging customers to visit certain pages, and offering co-browsing, the Virtual Interactive agent is an efficient and low cost method of internet guidance, helping people perform tasks such as locating information, placing orders, or making reservations. Virtual agents are proactive in their approach to customers’ issues, identifying the customer problem and providing a personal, pertinent answer. Occupying sales and marketing roles, agents can be an effective viral marketing tool, acting to increase a customer contact base using proactive questions and features which push the customer to action. Market studies have shown an actual increase in customer satisfaction after IVA implementation, owing to the virtual agents’ ease of use and the pleasant customer experience they provide.
Personalized human-like interaction. The humanized nature of virtual agents makes them easier for customers to approach. IVAs have a personality defined to compliment their professional mission, which allows them to convey a more bespoke service and add a human touch to online customer care. It has been observed that this humanized approach is reciprocated from the human end, where a reported 70% of visitors greet and say farewell to virtual agents. Indeed in a world where e-commerce is becoming a driving force, increasing competition will require e-businesses to humanize online interactions, mirroring the in-store experience with more tailored, engaging conversations.
Supplementing outsourcing with virtual sourcing. IVAs allow companies with large customer service flows to supplement service center outsourcing with Virtual Sourcing. An agents’ ability to handle unlimited requests at any one time helps to take a dramatic load off traditional call centers, reducing the need to invest more time and money as businesses’ CRM needs grow.
The most advanced technologies offer a predictive dimension that allows real time adaptation to customer behaviour. Contrary to previous generation “keyword-based” chatter bots, recently developed IVAs, such as those produced by VirtuOz, can evaluate a customer’s previous behaviour and trends to predict the course of an interaction. This allows the agent to adapt its strategy in real time to meet the clients’ needs and fulfilling a variety of missions simultaneously.
Existing call center productivity optimized. IVAs all have well calculated exit strategies to ensure the customer is never left with their issue unsolved and has not wasted their time. Agents can be interfaced with other CRM tools such as webforms, callback systems and live chat, to render the customer service process more efficient. Agents automatically categorize customer issues, enabling them not only to transfer to the most relevant customer channel, but also to only transmit information pertinent to the customer’s problem. This allows for quicker resolution, therefore increasing existing customer service centres productivity levels. Comprehensive reporting tools, where all conversations are registered for monitoring, allow stringent quality control and ensure that agents are performing to the required standard, a quality which of course is near impossible with human customer care.
Integration with other web based services. IVAs, such as the recent French development Skaaz, (www.skaaz.com) can be integrated with Instant Messaging services, blogs and social networking sites; such artificial intelligence technology may also soon appear in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where AI software will be able to profit from interactions with humans and increase its knowledge base according to its experiences.
Several major players in the business world have already jumped onto the band-waggon of excitement surrounding IVAs and their ability to revolutionize online CRM. The French arm of eBay, www.ebay.fr, integrated Louise, an IVA made by European leaders VirtuOz, onto their site in 2007 in a bid to reduce the high volume of emails and calls received by their call centers. After only 2 months the volume of emails received by eBay.fr’s customer service department diminished significantly, while email qualification was increased, allowing the existing CS systems to experience a sharp increase in productivity. Communications giant Neuf-AOL, also in France, economizes 1 phone call per customer per year with their IVA, named Chloé.
IVAs and the future
Contrary to public belief, the roots of the technology were planted several years ago. Simple keyword based agents such as Colloquis’ Encarta on MSN Messenger and Ikea’s agent by Artificial Solutions provided a broad technological base from which more flexible and powerful agents have stemmed. Having already developed the predictive dimension now associated with agents, European leaders in artificial intelligence, VirtuOz, are currently in the process of developing voice recognition for their IVAs, which will add yet another dimension to online customer support. The popularity of agents is ever growing amongst brand companies who are looking to revolutionize their online approach to CRM and profit from rapid ROI. Customers can already access agents across a wide range of channels, and when IVAs become even more accessible over mobile media channels (PDAs, cell phones), agents will surely be commonplace not only for business CRM strategies across the web, but for personal use also. IVAs will give users even greater and easier access to information than currently is the case.
(innovation presentation at Thales University on March 13, 2008)
This morning I delivered my speech on innovation at Thales University in the southwest of Paris for the second time since 2007. On top of the usual presentation describing what is meant by innovation, how one defines it, and what are the expectations of the clients (mainly in outsourcing), as well as the methodology for joint innovation programmes I have introduced new parts in this presentation regarding ideagoras and open innovation. An ideagora is literally a marketplace of ideas. The term was coined by Don Tapscott in his latest book, entitled wikinomics (www.wikinomics.com). This presentation of ideagoras was particularly apt; for the audience was made of a mixture of English and French r&d representatives of the Thales organisation. Thales is the result of the merger of a number of companies including Racal (payment systems) and Thomson CSF, the major defence systems provider. Thales, beyond these two sectors, is also present in the field of consulting services. The reason why ideagoras such as innocentive, or yet2.com was so important is that, in the light of my presentation, this is a revelator that the landscape for research and innovation in general, is being reshaped by the Internet, and collaboration in such an open environment. The audience was really interested in seeing how we organised ourselves at Orange, to create ideagoras internally and how much positive feedback we were getting from this. Orange’s system, entitled IDclic (literally translated, click4ideas) has received awards and praises, and is claiming 150 solved challenges and net savings worth €450,000,000 for 2007.
Obviously, innocentive is taking this concept one step higher by making innovation players penetrate into the world of open innovation. With systems like in innocentive and the like, innovation is no longer carried out by the sole representatives of research and development departments, but is actually open to external players. In the course of this presentation I gave examples of solved challenges at Solvay (a Belgian chemical manufacturer) and the BOGO (buy one get one) light bulb mentioned in Time magazine this month. As I said in my presentation, I do not think that ideagoras will take the jobs of people such as those who were listening to the conference. More importantly, I think this will change the way that they work. They are increasingly challenged by their management be it at Thales or anywhere else, in order to produce better results and make innovation more directly profitable to the entire company. Ideagoras are a step forward in the right direction. Internal ideagoras to start with are there to ensure that people are talking to one another and that they have exploited internal competencies to the full. But external ideagoras are taking thingsfurther and they come as a complement to internal r&d. I do not believe in full innovation and product development outsourcing. It would be silly as it would deprive a company from its competitive advantage and its ability to improve and evolve its product and service lines. I believe in ideagoras coming on top of internal processes. It may even be grabbing something in the regions of 10 to 15% of current r&d budgets if all goes well. Actually, it is possible that these 10-15% will not go to one particular ideagora, but to several of them as companies will want to spread risk across different services and different communities, and they will want to use their different business models and processes.
A spin-off of Eli Lilly, innocentive is a system of crowdsourcing, where “problems are waiting for a solution”. With innocentive, seekers are asking questions and they are waiting for solvers to post their answers to their challenges. Other business models exist such as yet2.com, which is devoted to bringing “solutions in need of a problem”. I can’t think that the two models are mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, I think they have a lot in common, and that they could be combined for greater benefit. It seems that it is the route chosen by Procter & Gamble which seem to be clients of many an ideagora.
At the end of the day, the distinction between technologically-driven innovation (solutions in need of a problem), and business-driven innovation (problems in search of a solution) is the real gist of the problem, and one which we addressed through the joint innovation programme methodology described in our White Paper. It all hinges on the need to describe innovation and what it means, and the absolute necessity to define objectives, which need to be smart (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) objectives.
I enjoyed this presentation thoroughly, and I am looking forward to the next iteration of the technical leadership programme at Thales University.
Yesterday, 12th of December 2007 was a great day in my recent career as a lecturer in marketing and innovation which started last April with the 360° analysis of the marketing of ICT products and services (click here to access the files). Indeed, I was invited by Pr Manuel Sosa to pitch on the subject of joint innovation at Orange business services, in order to present our activities in front of the students of the executive MBA of INSEAD. This is one of the world’s leading eMBAs, number 9 to be precise according to the FT eMBA 2007 ranking (click here to display the eMba FT 2007 World ranking). I was most impressed with the school. What I saw there was really amazing in terms of facilities, campus, quality of teaching, and above all interaction with the students. The good thing with executive MBAs is that you’re not really teaching to students, but rather exchanging ideas with your peers. All the students are professionals and executives in some of the world’s most prestigious firms, and they come from all four corners of the world.
My pitch started with a little quiz, asking participants to name a few innovative companies in their eyes. Naming them was not enough, they also had to tell me why they were deemed innovative, and also whether this ‘innovativeness’ was sustainable. This little exercise was far less innocuous than it seemed. By asking this simple question, we very quickly, in less than one hour, put our fingers on all the questions surrounding the difficulty to define, nurture, and deploy sustainable innovation in and outside the enterprise.
This exchange was extremely fruitful, because all of the participants had already thought about these problems, and they could easily relate to most of them. The rest of the presentation was more standard, and consisted of a capability statement of what Orange business services is able to do in terms of joint innovation with its clients, mainly in the large projects business unit, to which I belong. I gave examples of what in my eyes, and in the eyes of our clients, innovation means when it comes to large projects and outsourcing. I was also able to show the audience my innovation wiki repository, and interesting and passionate discussions were Triggered around the genesis and definition of wiki webs, the perspectives that collaboration is making possible in the enterprise, and the expected results. I was able to reuse some of my examples and materials which are developed either at Paris University (click here) or the Paris graduate school of management (click here).
The presentation lasted four hours, and we were also able to exchange quite a few business cards in the process. In the evening, I was invited at a special cocktail party, where INSEAD alumni and current students were present, and were welcoming prospective students who had come to the school in order to investigate with regard to the executive MBA. This exchange was very exciting, very open and very pleasant, and it gave us an opportunity to exchange on business, on the course, on our lives and experience. To sum it up in a few words, I really liked everything about the school. The people and the recruitment process is just outstanding. People from all over the world were there, and the quality of our exchanges was absolutely dazzling. I am looking forward to another session at INSEAD soon, probably next year.
A short while ago I went to visit one of my customers in order to have a discussion about innovation. One of the ideas that was mentioned during this meeting was about the need to have a repository in which ideas could be stored and in which one could also exchange and debate about them. Immediately, the idea of a wiki sprang to my mind. It’s only natural because this is what I’m using in the office; at Orange business services we have a Confluence(*) wiki platform, set up on top of an Oracle files database (a popular CMS platform used for building repositories) and the wiki enables us to store as many documents as we wish and start discussions with our colleagues and actually to organise ourselves around projects. This is very convenient and I thought it was worth mentioning in a discussion with my client.
And indeed the client in question was interested. However, this client also mentioned to me the name of a project by IBM that I have never heard of before: Thinkplace. At first I thought it was some sort of piece of software that you would put on the Intranet and then use to share material with your colleagues. But then I realised, by searching the Web with the ‘thinkplace’ keyword, that thinkplace was actually a fully fledged open Internet website whereby anybody, repeat anybody, can post ideas in order to be debated with others. I don’t know if that’s web 2.0 for you, but I think that’s a great idea. So I entered my idea. The only way to test the system, is to do it hands-on, and actually if it is about proposing new ideas and getting people to start discussions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to submit an idea I had thought of and get the opinion of others. So here’s my idea, in writing and in a short video which I recorded for the purpose and posted on Facebook too.
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies, on the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises to avoid unnecessary commuting, + provide outstanding infrastructure & tools for knowledge workers
Reduce the impact of commuting on the environment, improve work efficiency, develop open innovation, improve well-being of employees
How would it work? How might it be implemented?
Several high-tech companies could partner together to provide such shared spaces, in partnership with professional real-estate companies. Shared spaces could then be rented out to companies (large or medium) who would rent a number of cubicles for their employees: salespeople, knowledge workers, clerks etc
What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies. On the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises so as to avoid unnecessary commuting, as well as provide a work dedicated area for knowledge workers, and also entice knowledge sharing across different organisations. The project is not technologycal per se, but technology is of the essence when it comes to making people collaborate. These shared office spaces could also be the opportunity for high technology companies (IT infrastructure, application software, telecommunications etc) to demonstrate new technologies in the collaboration area, and even develop new tools, more pervasive, more user-friendly. The impact on the environment as well as the well-being of employees would be dramatic.
Despite the availability of cheap and almost unlimited bandwidth, pervasive and outstanding collaboration tools, which enable people to share documents and even design new ones over the Internet without leaving their offices, I have noticed that working habits by and large haven’t changed much in the past 15 years. Despite all the talk about remote working, mobility, pervasive computing etc, most of the knowledge workers from our big cities around the globe are still doing the same stupid thing everyday: spend hours commuting from their leafy suburbs to the centre of town, or even the other way round. However, should we ask these people sitting at their desk why they have to be in the office, I think we would be very surprised to discover that, for a vast majority of them, the people they work with most of the time are not sitting next to them in the cubicle next door, but faraway. And even when they are located in a nearby building, chances are they will talk to eachother over the phone.
The benefit would be manyfold. High-tech companies would not only make revenue on this, but that would also provide them some sort of showcase for their new technologies, and they would also be able to benefit from this initiative to show that their ideas can have a positive impact on the environment. This would be a compelling living proof that technology can actually do something about the environment. Participating companies would also benefit from this idea because they will have to invest less in real estate, they would have more flexible workforces, and it has also been proven by IBM in a similar experiment in Paris, France (1995 and beyond) that on average employees were gaining 1 1/2 hours every day on travel time and that one of our out of this one hour and a half was reinvested in work and productivity (employees been keen to show that they don’t benefit from the system but are more productive.
(*) Confluence is one of the platforms made available to enterprises in order to set up internal wikis
You might believe that I’m getting obsessed with The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig’s latest book (see previous article on the Ideo shopping-cart and the halo effect on his blog). To an extent I am ready to admit to it, but once again, I think this is an important book, one that everyone should read, because some of the things that are said in this book are really fundamental.
The Internet, once dubbed the land of the swift, and the now famous (or infamous depending on the point of view) web 2.0, can lead certain people to think that things are changing so fast, nothing is as it was before. I think this is the case for another halo effect. It is true that the Internet is making things happen at light speed. It is not true that the Internet supersedes normal business rules (we saw that during the bubble period a few years back), and it is not true either that absolutely dazzling new ideas come cropping up all the time.
More than often, older ideas are being recycled, and this is not a criticism. This is one of the paradoxes of innovation (from Latin innovare i.e. to make something new). It would be wrong to think that we can invent new things all the time. Besides, there are many examples where really good ideas can be recycled productively and effectively. As we have seen in previous articles, second life is the result of some sort of recycling of what Vivendi did – only clumsily – in the year 2000 and yesterday I was browsing the latest web 2.0 applications on facebook, and I came across a new website publicising the fact that they were launching a new ‘human’ search engine, a service with which actual people carry out Internet research or your behalf. Well, that’s a new idea isn’t it? Sorry guys, it’s not. Webhelp came up with something similar at the end of the 1990s, although a few years later they turned themselves into a normal contact centre operation company. Similarly, I wrote an article about Internet research way back 1999, which I updated slightly in 2003 (information tracking in the information age revisited, by Yann Gourvennec, 2003). Chances are you think that because Google is ubiquitous (their Mobile version is really astonishing too) and everybody uses it and it’s so easy to use and God knows it is easy to use, you do not need to know how to research things on the Internet. But I think that this article which I wrote 10 years ago is still mostly valid. Okay, some of the links there are obsolete now. But the way that we should organise an Internet search, the way that you select, graft and prune new Internet keywords in your search engine research entry box , should more or less remain the same, if you want to carry out a profitable Internet research campaign. It strikes me that because the Internet has become so pervasive, that everybody uses it and thinks they are so wise (in fact they’re not. Google’s engineers are!), it is really amazing to see how few people know how to actually research information properly. Finally the human search engine idea which was launched by Webhelp some 10 years ago and now is being recycled is a very apt and timely idea.
Indeed, novelty is something very relative, at the end of the day, what really matters is efficiency and it makes perfect sense that ideas, novel ideas which are not mature at the time of invention find a second life (no pun intended) a few years later. It is entirely natural, and entirely desirable.
So that’s the innovation paradox: that way of making new things out of old ideas. Real success, most of the time, does not always arise from absolutely dazzling new ideas, but from those that are really and effectively being implemented.
(almost) anybody interested in innovation knows about the IDEO process and the well-famed Ideo shopping cart video shot for ABC. It is indeed a staple for innovation seminars and a renowned example of faultless creativity methodology. In the ABC video (you can purchase it from ABC see link per below) you will see the IDEO team challenged about the re-design of a simple everyday object, the shopping cart. And the demonstration is compelling. Here’s an object we use on an everyday basis, that is almost universally used from one end of the planet to the other, and we hadn’t even thought about making it more user-friendly. Obvious isn’t it? And the Ideo team therefore redesign the aforementioned trolley in less than 2 days. Impressive, all the seminar attendees stand up and cheer, here’s an impressive process that leads to compelling results (see the finished trolley on the lefthand-side)!
At least that’s what I had thought too, maybe a bit naively, until I read the following critical articles for which I am providing links hereafter. Afterthoughts include questions such as “why wasn’t this shopping cart deployed after the show and why can’t we find it in shops?” and also “is the exercise real or is it artificial, namely at the beginning of the process when they start investigating the problem with cameras, are they doing it for real?”.
I was also pondering – whereas I have just started reading Rosenzweig’s latest opus – whether this wasn’t a case for a halo effect, i.e. “a tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression” (The Halo Effect, p50). Yes, the video looks nice, and the people look brilliant and the process really seems to work fine. In just two days a new (supposedly) superior shopping cart was created but the real question is: what is really good design? Is it design that looks nice, or is it also about practicality for instance? (what about all these boxes on the cart, are they really so convenient? where do you store them? how do you pile the trolleys on one another etc.). Is it design (only) aimed at the end user or is it also aimed at shop-owners too? that’s an important part. In the video the onus is on the team to develop a shopping-cart that would be more convenient. But more convenient to whom? Can we assume that shop-owners aren’t worried about the cost of their trolleys, the way that they are stored, their lifespan? Besides, is the trolley issue the main issue, even for end-users? For instance, would clients rather pay more for food stored conveniently in a designer trolley or pay less for food piled up in a chicken-wire box on wheels?
These are open questions, but chances are that the answer lies in the fact that one cannot find these trolleys in our shops.
But mind you, don’t jump to the conclusion that the Ideo process doesn’t work either. Judging on just one example would simply be not enough. It would just be another halo effect.
Newsatseven is a new service which compiles and delivers news to you, direct from the Web and automatically generates a youtube news show with an Avatar (named Alyx Vance) . Below is the newscast from Newsatseven for June 19th, 2007 and it’s about the latest Harry Potter film. News archives are available here with more films to view. Newsatseven is entirely automatically generated and it claims that it is the future of the future; nothing less. The project is led by Nate Nichols and Sara Owsley, two computer Science graduate students at Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab), under the supervision of Kristian Hammond, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the InfoLab. The blog is not really updated and I noticed too that the videos aren’t generated on week-ends. Maybe the future of the future is that machines will take a break on Saturdays and Sundays. Now, the result – if it is really automatic – is indeed flabbergasting but the only problem with artificial intelligence is that it really looks and sounds artificial. Still work on our plates to make machines look and talk like humans, but should we bother?
A brand new version of the Orange innovation whitepaper for business services – which I have co-authored with Jean-François Fava Verde – has just been made available (click here to download). This latest version of the whitepaper was distributed at Connect 2007, the worldwide event for Orange Business Services clients which took place in Lisbon on June 4-6, 2007. The event was extremely successful. Many break-out sessions (see photo on the left-hand side) took place on location, at the Corinthia Hotel Lisbon, and Innovation was on the agenda of many a presentation by our top Execs. The whitepaper was widely distributed (many thanks to Mark Wigington, our VP for IT services, for his renewed support) and our break-out session was also extremely successful and triggered interesting discussions with clients about how to handle and foster innovation jointly. The break out that Jean François and I had organised with the help of Orange Labs and our partner 123interview was also a success.
The climax of that presentation was an interactive session where we asked attendees to show us their vision of innovation through a survey which contained 4 main sets of questions: 1) about our clients’ views on the lifespan of innovation (from short to long term, what I have also called the ‘innometer’) 2) about our clients’ 3 most important business issues where innovation could play a role 3) about the 3 main technologies which were on our clients’ radar screen in order to solve their business issues (hence question 2) 4) about how favourable or unfavourable our clients were with regard to working jointly with one of their vendor. But it was no ordinary old fashioned paper-based survey, nor even was it a plain-vanilla online Internet survey.
Ubiquitous computing has been on the agenda for a while now. This concept was in fact created by the much regretted Mark Weiser from Xerox PARC in the 1970′s (see a reprint of the founding article, the computer of the 21st century here). It was really visionary. Many would sneer at the concept but look at it: Tablet PC’s have already been on the market for at least 4 or 5 years. They haven’t been hugely successful but the concept is still evolving. Pda’s are now in their prime and evolving to become a) smartphones and b) ultramobile PCs such as the amazing HTC advantage which was released in April 2007 with a brand new flash-memory disk and a windows mobile OS which enables to turn the machine on and off instantly (still too expensive though at €1000 per unit) or even c) the astounding ‘cellular book‘ by Polymer Vision. I will also recommend an article found on Time magazine describing Paul Allen’s latest UMPC initiative called Flipstart: A Billionaire’s Bet, the mini computers war.
All these initiatives are in a way derived from Weiser’s vision of the ubiquitous computer, some thirty years ago. unfortunaltely, none of them has really clinched it yet for us to throw away our clunky laptops and be able to connectly and work and entertain ourselves freely, on the move, at a reasonable price. But there is that sense though that we are getting there soon and that we will soon get a computer of the 22nd century at a reasonable price.
Although this is a world premiere, I am not quite sure that this new attempt at reviving the defunct epaper initiative is extremely compelling. Earlier versions of such contraptions had already been launched at the heart of the 2000 bubble and already, we could perceive that there was a glitch somewhere in this great marketing scheme: for a start, specific devices were required, and they were costly. Once you had invested in such contraptions they could not be turned into anything else. Secondly, the content was poor and rare. Thirdly, these devices were ugly, bulky and heavy. Fourth, the targeted segment for such widgets is already fully equipped with pda’s, smartphones, lightweight laptops, Tablet pc’s, UMPC’s and the like. I remember a lady from the national institute for reseach and agronomics (INRA) showing me that device at the time and she spent all the time trying to tell me it was a great thing that one was able to read stuff on a screen (in fact, brightness and battery life was also an issue on those device). Um! I showed her my pda and she was gobsmacked and couldn’t even understand what it was. Now I am under the impression that this attempt is another desperate kiss of life for the little desired bulky e-reader. The device is pricy (€600-€700+ depending on the model you chose), it’s huge and non versatile and the yearly subscription for content ssems quite overpriced (€365 ie €1 a day, ie no incentive to bypass the practical paper version worth €1.20 which I buy from the kiosk every now and then). I find it very disappointing, and expectations raised at 3GSM by Cellular reader and Telecom Italia are this time again falling flat. Will we ever get rid of all this waste of paper? Isn’t it frustrating?
It’s not jut BT who has a vision of what the future has in store for us (see our previous article on BT’s freaky innovation scale here). Vodafone R&D have a vision of the future too. Despite drastic changes in their strategy and although they have started to pull out of their foreign ventures (the latest rumour is their likely decision to withdraw from Swisscom and sell their 25% stake) Vodafone has a vision of the future which is interesting and somewhat less spooky than BT’s too. It is also more visual. One may argue that it looks a bit far-fetched but at least it may trigger a few thoughts. May as well warn you though, the background noise and music can be pretty harrowing after a while.
In the following video presentation, you will discover the so-called MIT digital drawing board complete with geometrical recognition and simulation of movements. Everybody on the Internet or so seems to have seen this video, and a lot of bloggers have liked it and commented on it. Taken at face value, I must admit that this video is quite impressive and I even started to imagine what this could do to the world of design and Marketing. I suspected that there would still be a fair amount of development to do if one wanted to design a fully-fledged vehicle for instance with a tool like this, but if it existed, it sounded pretty clear to me that this kind of intelligent recognition technology is offering a lot of new possibilities to designers and engineers alike. Marketeers could have also been interested in order to test new ideas in front of potential clients. But is this video so impressive and besides, what did it have to do with the MIT altogether?
French-speaking blogger Pierre Vandeginste on his site “aïetech” thinks he has the answer to that question and his opinion is quite straightforward. Here is a rough translation of some of Vandeginste’s points:
First of all, Vandeginste is amazed by the fact that most commenters think that this video shows state-of-the-art interactive boading technology whereas in fact it looks very old. Weird,
If this video is 10-15 years old, then the simulation of the chariot that slides down the hill – Vandeginste goes on commenting – is rather impressive. However, it looks like it’s a well-prepared, maybe too well prepared demo. Vandeginste believes that some up-to-date games are performing better than that. Weirder and weirder,
What commenters seem to be most amazed at in this ‘digital drawing board’ is the screen, but Vandeginste argues that this kind of tools has been available for donkeys’ years and he could even trace its usage in remoter country grammar schools in the Auvergne where the proACTIVboard by Promethean is used at the Lycée Blaise Pascal at Ambert (a rural area in the Auvergne) or at the vocational Lycée Professionnel Marie Curie in Nogent sur Oise (in Picardy, an other rural area). Vandeginste could even quote French TV Channels 1 and 2 in the following 2005 link: TF1 & France 2. Even weirder,
Vandeginste is a freelance journalist who specialises in High Tech and has been working on such subjects for the past 30 years. He saw that kind of contraptions for the first time in 1993 at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Mark Weiser (late PARC researcher who died in 1999, and much regretted ever since, inventor of the Ubiquitous Computing concept. A researcher I have admired for decades) and his team had been working on the LiveBoard concept. The marketing of Liveboard had been spun off into the LiveWorks subsidiary since 1992.
Last but not least, Vandeginste quotes better andmore uptodate examples such as the Mitsubishi DiamondTouch which is available for purchase now. (see MERL video here)
So what is this video telling us on innovation?
First, it’s telling us that Vandeginste is a very knowledgeable journalist. Yet, many of us weren’t in business in 1993 and are not aware that previous attempts at creating interactive drawing-boards had existed. On the contrary, most commenters on the Internet – many of them very technology savvy by the way – were impressed when they saw that video. I suppose that what this story tells us about innovation is that innovation – like beauty – is in the eyes of the beholder. Even though Vandeginste must be right, many of our Internet friends would like to know more about that product/concept. The fact is that – like it or not – if you are not working in that obsure little school in rural France you are most likely to find such a concept different and interesting anyway. What this story tells us too is that people never check the source of the documents they pick up from the Internet, but that we knew already …
The API landscape is extremely dynamic. The following 2 diagrams taken from ProgrammableWeb describe the most common APIs which are used in order to build mash-ups. They show the dominance of major historic players (check the “see all time” diagram) but also the more recent rise of new players such as Twilio in the recent past (last 14 days), as well as the convergence of Cloud Computing and Telecom.
the emergence of this new ecosystem; it is indeed interesting to notice the emergence of new players offering the technical support to manage API infrastructures such as the new Application Enablement Services Business Unit from Alcatel-Lucent (the one that acquired ProgrammableWeb in 2010), Mashery, Apigee, Aepona or 3Scale.
Very often, I hear people say that you have to make your end-user’s lives easier to generate a marketing success. However paved with good intentions this statement may be, I did ask myself the question whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. Here are my thoughts on this subject:
A brand new version of the Orange innovation whitepaper for business services – which I have co-authored with Jean-François Fava Verde – 
