Aptus Collaborative Innovation

Offshoring disruptive? The proof is in.

2007-10-09T19:58:43Z

A year ago I asked the question: Is Offshoring a Disruptive Technology, in Clay Christensen's definition?

Well, it appears the answer is Yes. TPI's latest quarterly report on outsourcing shows a collapse in global market share of over 25% for the big players - Accenture, IBM, EDS, CSC - in favor of the Asian outsourcers. The number and value of US outsourcing deals has plummeted 70%, and shifted towards Europe and Asia.

Innovation Esperanto

2007-10-09T03:48:37Z

Last week I presented our Business Innovation Factory work on the Primary Care Practice of the Future to the Art and Science of Services conference. A diverse group of folks gathered to swim in the emerging body of knowledge around Services Design - academics and practitioners from around the world, spanning design, marketing, IT, and operations research. What unified them was the understanding that the design, management and innovation of services is not well understood, not like we understand the product world.

Balancing Innovation and Six Sigma

2007-07-24T13:23:07Z

John Parkinson, a guest columnist at CIO Insight, writes an interesting article on the conflict between organizations that have internalized Six Sigma, and the new imperative for innovation. We consistently see this in clients that have spent a few years getting Six Sigma built into their culture, and then reject the idea of experimentation or "fast failure" prototypes to try new concepts.

Where conflict occurs, it's often about the definition of unnecessary sources of variability. Many Six Sigma black belts (certified experts in the application of Six Sigma principles) tend to apply the principles as doctrine without regard to context or situational need. People should think outside the box and try different approaches to routine tasks, but the black belts see this as perverting their carefully optimized process by introducing unnecessary sources of variability. And it doesn't help to point out that repeating the process unchanged and expecting a different outcome is a good proxy definition for insanity.

Its completely understandable how corporate teams, who feel like they've just gotten on top of the last business transformation tool,would have trouble reconciling it with an approach that seems to fly in the face of everything that six sigma holds dear. But Parkinson has it right that the tools of innovation are complimentary to the tools of six sigma, and that we must learn to both optimize the core and create divergent experiments at the edge.

Indifference Kills

2007-06-06T04:08:59Z

Scott Williams, Chief Creative Officer for Starwood, has a television-trained eye for a story. But what he has learned at Starwood, a collection of well-known hotel brands including Westin, W and Aloft, is that the customer tells the best and most authentic story. Last week at the Art and Science of Services Conference, Scott showed showed how Starwood leverages customer observation to learn what customers want (or don't want), and then gives it to them.

Surgery with a warranty?

2007-05-18T14:08:14Z

Geisinger, a hospital system in central Pennsylvania, has been running a unique experiment for a year, and just presented their first results to the larger medical community. Borrowing a lesson from other consumer products and services, they have begun offering a 90 day warranty on heart bypass surgeries. The warranty, called ProvenCare, charges more upfront for the surgery, but covers any followup visits or care for complication for the critical 3 months after a heart bypass.

Slingbox + Wireless + Camera = Disruption

2007-05-09T14:14:56Z

A local TV station in San Francisco that has replaced their expensive remote cameras - the ones that monitor highway traffic and beam it back to the station using old-style microwave technology - with an innovative DIY solution. The news director wired together a Slingbox, a high speed EVDO wireless card, and a cheap digital video camera in a hard case. The result ? The TV station took their costs from $25,000 to $1000, and opened up a whole new world of possibilities for live TV broadcast in the field without bulky expensive trucks or signal feeds.

The Vanguard of Global Work

2006-10-27T03:36:00Z

Continuing on the theme of outsourcing being a sign of a deeper shift towards a global distributed talent force, Mike Corbett from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals recently wrote a newsletter piece on How Outsourcing is Changing Where and How People Work. This brave new world represents such a fundamental shift, its actually a good thing that most companies don't realize what they are actually unleashing when they take their first steps into outsourcing !

Harnessing the energy of youth !

2006-10-06T18:35:33Z

Frans Johansson has a brief blog entry about PlayPumps, which harnesses the energy of kids at play to create and store potable water:

Clean water. It is the key for public health and for fighting infectious disease. The question for some parts of the world with few resources is how to get it out of the ground. PlayPumps is a non-profit that has connected the sounds of playground laughter with groundwater to change villages in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Johansson makes a nice point about this being an "intersectional innovation" - numerous times I've watched my daughter with a bunch of other kids at a playground and said "if there was only some way I could bottle all that energy"?

What Lies at the Bottom of the Pyramid?

2006-10-06T18:17:14Z

At BIF-2 this week, I was giving a lot of thought to how innovation gets really exciting for me at the bottom of the pyramid, when applied to create useful change for the 80% of the worlds population that can't access or use the global panoply of goods and services as its configured today.

Most of the stories at BIF-2 inspired me or sparked some thought, but the ones that really stuck with me - Michael Singer, Dean Kamen, Frans Johansson - touched in some way on how we move the locus of innovation to the rest of the globe, rather than continuing to spiral through continuous refinement of goods, services, and experiences for ourselves.

So I'll use this space to develop that thought and start to pull the threads together on innovation at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Please jump in, there's some amazing stuff happening out there.

Missing the Point...

2006-10-06T16:56:26Z

At a mind-expanding two day conference on innovation, I had a long and spirited conversation with Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, about how "outsourcing" is really the first wave of reconfiguring the organization to tap the potential of global talent. I've been noodling this in the past 24 hours, and it really casts a different light on many of the current outsourcing discussions in the media.