Enough ideasPosted by Wichert van Engelen Jan 16, 2009 12:29:56An often used word on the internet to indicate that information, knowledge and wisdom are not the sole property of guru's, but that everyone can contribute:
crowd wisdom.
The best known example is of course Wikipedia, not written by a couple of editors, but maed by thousands who each contributed a small item. Another example (sorry in Dutch) is wijbouweneenwijk.nl in which the design of a entire new living-area is not done by engineers, but by a community of interested people.
This crowd-fenemenon now is spreading towards the energy-sector. Not only energy from centralised powerplants, but energy powered by small outlets: every house a solar collector on the roof, every farm its own turbine, biogas-systems in every small village.
The new streetlights of Philips (at the moment only a prototype) fit in this new trend.
The streetlights look a bit like a flower, having leafs above that can change direction/position. When the sun is shining, the leafs act like solar collectors. When the wind is blowing, the leaves turn a bit and act as wind-turbine. If every straatlight in the country generates a bit more energy than needed for giving light at nightime, it will add up to quiet some extra electrical energy.
At the moment not yet cost-effective, but one day: energy will be by the crowd.
Enough ideasPosted by Wichert van Engelen Dec 14, 2008 15:00:19It's not only Lego which is letting his customers think about new products. Asus and Intel made a website inviting customers to contribute their ideas of a perfect laptop. Being producers of fast-innovation consumergoods, this is a very clever step.
- As laptop-producer this gives you a enormous amount of new ideas on laptop-functionalities.
- You are making a statement, giving your brand a innovative appeal.
- It's good for binding your customers. The many reactions of customers on each other's ideas, nearly make it a community.
- You don't have to spend any money on trend-watchers. People willing to take the trouble to contribute a well-detailled new idea on the website are early-adaptors. They represent the latest trends.
There's a small drawback: you have to restrict yourself. The number of new ideas is many times larger then you ever will produce (assuming you only want to produce profit-making stuff). This means you have to choose:
- A laptop geared for travellers and salesmen. Powered by the cigarette-lighter on the dashboard, keyboard seperate from the screen (the laptiop can be used as a touch-screen notebook, or as full PC), swivellegs underneath the screen to put it upright (for presentations on the spot).
- Or a laptop for the surf-generation: really waterproof
- Or a laptop for all those customers not willing to replace their laptop every two or three years because it's outdated (made in modules, coming with a up-grade subscription system)
- Or a laptop for highschool kids (fitting in a locker, pop-off and replacable shell - to many scratches or personalising your laptop? simply replace the shell) and soft rubber corners for all the bumping
- Or do you get the most profits by making a real exec-laptop: leather outing, walnut inlays, double screen?
Have a look at
www.wepc.com and see all the new, nice, fancy, innovative developments our laptops will make the coming years.
InnovationPosted by Wichert van Engelen Nov 30, 2008 12:59:05At ENG’s Financial Innovation Summit in Amsterdam last week, Head of Innovation of the Spanish bank
Caja Navarra, Pablo Armendariz held a talk about the innovations this bank did the last years. These innovations makes this bank less vulnerable to the current financial crisis.
The Spanish financial market is highly fragmented: 290 banks with 45.000 branches servicing 45 million people. Most of the banks are traditional saving-banks. Locally oriented cooperations offering saving accounts and nowadays also loans.
Half of the saving deposits in Spain is managed by such non-profit saving banks. These banks are owned buy local authorities, trade unions and other local organizations. In between 15% and 30% of profit is given to (local) charity.
CAN (Caja Navarra) decided to bind its customers to the bank. Not by offering better saving- or loan- rates, but by making the customers really attached to a (internet) community. CAN wanted to create the feeling of a small local community, on a regional, even country wide scale, with help of old and modern techniques combined.
The central question: how do we make the customers really attached to this community (a problem seen in most communities on the internet)? CAN answered this question with their new slogan: You Decide. The customers are given more decision-power. Main problem with that one: the board of directors had to give up some decision-making power.
The strategy of CAN was straightforward: we ar going to introduce civic banking. Power on banking in the hands of civilians. Formed by customers rights leading to duties for the bank.
The first step of this strategy was the most difficult one. Each year 30% of the profit is given to local charities. The board used to decide which charity got what amount of money. Now the customers decide. Each customer joining the community can vote (yearly) to which charity the profit has to go.
Ultimate transparency: the customer decides what is going to happen with the profit made.
When Armendariz announced the second step in their strategy, a whisper went through the crowd. CAN sends a letter to all its customers yearly, stating the amount of profit CAN made with this customer: That’s what you call transparency!
The third step was focused on binding the community again. At the site CAN made a market for volunteerjobs at the charities getting money out of the profit. This includes workshops and training of the customers willing to do a volunteerjob.
At the meantime the branches of CAN are refurbished. The new branche is open and includes community-elements as a small play-corner for the kids and a second-hand-book exchange. CAN’s customers can use the branche for their own meeting. Even when it’s a meeting of the football-club, having nothing to do with financial business.
The latest step in the strategy is again: the customer decides. CAN made 6 area’s in which they are investing the saving deposits. The customers can decide for themselves which part of their saving-account is used in which area.
CAN did a really radical innovation. And it pays off. The amount of saving deposits as well as the number of clients is growing faster than average in Spain. And now faith in banks is diminishing, CAN is hardly troubled with this phenomenon.
InnovationPosted by Wichert van Engelen Nov 27, 2008 15:14:37Last Thursday I was invited to speak at the Financial Innovation Summit 2008 by ENG (European Networking Group), located in the middle of historical Amsterdam. The subject of my talk was not very unusual: radical / disruptive innovation (what else would my subject be ;-)
But the participants of the summit were a bit different. Or rather: there were less participants than expected. And on top of that: a couple of speakers cancelled their talk on short terms notice.
It looks like the financial crisis now has diminished the faith in the future in such an extend that the financial and economical crisis is creating an innovation crisis. Incremental innovation, especially cost-reductions, are still very popular, but real Research and Development, the search for radical innovations, new business models, new services and products, now is out of scope. Even innovation-powers like Nokia are decreasing their R&D department.
So is innovation going downhill for the next couple of years? Will the majority of readers of this blog be unemployed the next years?
I think it will be more a change of focus, of scope, rather than a real innovation crisis. History shows that most of the crisis-situations bring out the best innovation power in human beings. The big companies all are on the cost-reduction-track (mostly because they need some cash money right now), but to midsize and smaller companies this crisis can be a perfect chance to get a break. Innovation at the moment is not a matter of money, but of being innovative, thinking without a box and of course: having the guts to act.
And even in the financial world there is still sufficient room for innovation. Nearly all banks are telling us that the customers don’t trust banks anymore. Customers don’t like their bank to start all kinds of fancy experiments (with the customer’s money) – as if that’s not exactly what banks have been doing the last decades. Customers nowadays only want high interest-rates and no changes. This is what most banks tell us.
But customers are looking for trustworthy banks. And they are looking for transparency. Customers aren’t dumb. They know what’s been happening in the financial institutes. They simply don’t want it to happen again.
During the above-mentioned innovation summit, I saw a very good example of a bank being innovative the last couple of years, which makes it a front-runner in these days. The customers have more faith in their bank, because this bank chose to become completely transparent.
Read more in the next blog about Caja Navarra
InnovationPosted by Wichert van Engelen Sep 24, 2008 13:25:53On short term, technological innovations are overrated. But
on the long run they are mostly underestimated.
In mu last blog I wrote about innovations being successful as
competitors are joining the market or as there is a critical mass. Overrating
technological innovations on the short run has lots to do with this point:
people tend to expect miracles but the first period those miracles don’t land.
And when they do in the long run, people are used to the new technology and don’t
consider it to be a miracle anymore.
Another innovation holding the balance: RFID-chips. A couple
of years ago these chips - the content being readable without contact and on a
distance – hit the market. The expectations were very high. This would change
the world. But what happened? Years of troublesome experiments and
disappointments. The financial industry tried to incorporate the chips in their
cards. But to no avail. In the Netherlands the chip-card for public transport
had disaster after disaster.
But in the long run the RFID-chip will change the way we do a lot of things. A
nice example of the new use of these chips combined with old technology thus
enabling services thus far impossible is the Champion chip.
About a week before the Dam-to-Dam run my son not only got
his starting number, but a RFID-chip as well. He tied the chip to one of his
shoes and during the run on several spots readers were laid down on the ground.
Thus far no big deal. On the other had: 35.000 participants were able to see
their personal running-times on the internet. As well as their time after 5, 10
and 14 kilometers. As well as their average speed on each of the stretches.
At several spots along the route video-camera’s were mounted, linked to a
clock. Again: no big deal.
But by combining this relatively new technology
(RFID) with a couple of older techniques (like video-takes with time registration)
suddenly new services appear not feasible a couple of years ago. Each runner
can go to a website on the internet, enter his starting number and watch a
couple of ‘personal’ videos. The chip knows exactly when you crossed the reader,
the timing of the video registration is recorded, the film is winded back 30
seconds, and the runner sees himself (or herself) running along the
fruit-stand, the halfway mark or the finish. Impressive when you know it is
done 35.000 times.
Slowly but surely the RFID-chip will get its critical mass.
Let’s see what it will change in society the next couple of years.
InnovationPosted by Wichert van Engelen Sep 23, 2008 17:47:11
I’m a proud father of
a boy running the 10 mile long Dam-to-Dam race last Sunday. We did look at his
results on the internet and I had to think of the Segway and its competitors
(one does have strange associations ;-)
Let me start with the
Segway and I’ll get back to the two Dams (Amsterdam and Zaandam, both towns in
Holland) later on.
People who are reading
my blogs frequently know that one thing I always keep repeating is that an
innovation is no innovation unless it’s implemented. There are more than enough
good ideas around. The major hurdle in innovation is to get this ideas out of
the drawing rooms and into the hands of customers.
You could say that a successful
innovation is an innovation that is doing well on the market. In the profit
sector: making profit. In the non-profit sector: the customers like the new
service and are using it.
It’s a shame for most
innovators that in most cases the successors of an innovation will earn the big
bucks. The inventors of the MP3 did see Apple iTunes take all the money. Most of
the search-engines are broke while Google (starting much later) is doing rather
well. Philips did not get rich by the CD (though they did make quite some royalty
money with their patents). The first makers of personal computers like Sinclair
and Commodore are gone. The first real PC-builder – IBM – did see a lot of
money going to Dell.
You might say that an
innovation is successful when there is some kind of competition. Partly just because
of publicity reasons (the more competitors, the more – free – publicity for any
product or service).
But mostly because of
penetration. Some services simple need sufficient customers to attract more
customers. E-mail didn’t work very well when only a small portion of the public
had access to a computer: there simple weren’t enough people to send an e-mail
to.
Sellaband and Segway
are examples of innovations holding the balance. Sellaband (consumers buy a CD
before it’s even produced, thus financing the musicians) already did win a lot
of innovation prizes. It is doing very well. Yet so far I don’t see a lot of
these types of business-models on the internet. Thus making the penetration
rather slow.
Segway is doing years
now to get official permission to use this two-wheeled machine in public. You
hardly see any of them. But the breakthrough of the Segway may be triggered by
a new competitor. Toyota introduces the Winglet: smaller, slower and geared on
airports and shopping malls.
A new competitor is
not that nice to Segway. Yet it might trigger this innovation to become a successful
innovation.
And what has all this
to do with running 10 miles? More on that in my next blog.
Above: the Segway.
Below: the Winglet
InspirationPosted by Wichert van Engelen Sep 17, 2008 13:32:36The ice-skating season is starting shortly. Finally I can go
on Monday-mornings and ride my laps on the Jaap Eden Icerink in Amsterdam.
But the shoes of my skates have become a bit to small (of my
feet has grown a tiny little bit). So I’m looking around for a new pair of
skates (or at least the shoes).
Nice stuff they have nowadays. Your foot neatly fits in the
shoe. There shouldn’t be any movement of the foot inside the shoe possible
anymore. To make it even better fitting, some of the inner side is made of
thermo-plastics. This plastic isn’t only moldable when it is produced, but
later on, when you buy the shoes, you can make it moldable yourself. Just heat
up the shoes, put them one, make sure your feet are in the right position, and
let the plastic cool down (and become hard again).
A couple of smart guys uses these thermo-plastics in welding
all type of materials together. They made nails of thermo-plastics. After putting pieces
of wood together, of after driving a nail into a wall, extra energy (by means
of electrowaves) is brought into the nail. The nail will melt a little bit,
this making the fix very tight.
This is another example of how smart inventions mostly have
some spin-off. While I think this idea of thermo-plastic nails is very good for
attaching your pictures tightly to even very bad walls, so far it hasn’t been a
real hit.
But in medics it is a hit. The nails are used to fix broken
bones. The human body doesn’t mind plastics to much, and bones have a very open
structure. By radio-waving the nails afterwards, they melt a little bit and
glue the bones together. Lightweight and very strong!
But after all: I prefer the original appliance. I hope I
will find good skating-shoes and won’t need the nails for broken legs.
Wichert van Engelen
Enough ideasPosted by Wichert van Engelen Sep 15, 2008 09:19:19Hardly)
anything worse than your bike being stolen. Or it should be your bike being
vandalized. The trade in bicycle locks probably is larger than the trade in
bikes themselves.
At home you can safely lock your bike in the garden house, unless you are
living in a town.
Townspeople are used to look out of the window first thing in the morning. Just
to see whether their bike is still there and both wheels are still in working
order.
To those people the invention of Joe Wentworth is really good: simple,
effective and it doesn’t look very expensive. The folding handlebars.
With such a steer you can park your bike in the hallway. Leaving enough
space to get out of the house easily when there’s a fire.
Hurray to Joe Wentworth. Even more hurray to the producer bringing this
product to the shops.
