Innovation on Tap
Blog: Form Follows Function
Two articles from the same site (CIO.com), both dealing with planned innovations, but with dramatically different results:
- “Report: Twitter’s algorithmic timeline may arrive next week” reports that rumors (or “rumors”) of Twitter switching from a chronological timeline to one curated algorithmically has led to an uprising under the hashtag #RIPTwitter. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has been busily engaged in damage control, denying (sort of) that the timeline will change.
- “This is why Amazon will open physical bookstores” reports that Amazon’s plan to open retail outlets was leaked last week at an earnings call.
While the article about the Amazon leak doesn’t report on customer reactions, that response is unlikely to be negative for a variety of reasons, all of which involve benefit to the customer. The most important one, the big innovation (in my opinion), is that opening physical stores allows it to take advantage of a phenomenon that other retailers find problematic:
Another way Amazon eviscerates traditional retailers is via the practice of showrooming. That’s where you go to a brick-and-mortar store and find the product you want but then buy it on Amazon — sometimes standing right there in the store, using Amazon’s mobile app.
Physical Amazon stores can encourage and facilitate showrooming, because they will have friendly salespeople to help you find, install and use the app. Once they teach you how to showroom in an Amazon retail store, you can continue showrooming in other stores.
While large retailers have been able to “combat” showrooming by embracing it, selling items at online prices in physical stores digs deeply into profit margins. When your business model is predominantly brick and mortar, the hit is greater than when your model is predominantly online. In short, if they play their cards right, Amazon will be able to better serve their customers without hurting their own bottom line.
Awareness of your customers’ wants and needs is key to making decisions that are more like Amazon’s and less Twitter’s. An intentional, collaborative approach, such as that described by Greger Wikstrand in his post “Developing the ‘innovation habit’”, is one way to promote that awareness:
When I worked at Ericsson Research, I instigated a weekly one-hour innovation meeting for my team. ‘Can you really be innovative every Thursday at 9am?’ you may cynically ask. Well, actually, yes, you can.
What we did in that hour was commit to innovation, dedicating a place and a time to our individual and collective innovative mindsets. Sometimes this resulted in little ideas that helped us do things incrementally better. And sometimes—just sometimes—those innovation hours were the birthplace of big ideas.
Collaboration is important because “Architect knows best” is as much a design folly at the enterprise level as it is at the application level. A better model is that described by Tom Graves in “Auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl”, where both information and guidance flow both up and down the hierarchy to inform decisions both strategic and tactical. These flows provides the context so necessary to making effective decisions.
You can’t pull a tap and draw a glass of innovation, but you can affect whether your system makes innovative ideas more or less likely to be recognized and acted on.
This is part eleven of a conversation Greger Wikstrand and I have been having about architecture, innovation, and organizations as systems. Previous posts in the series:
- “We Deliver Decisions (Who Needs Architects?)” – I discussed how the practice of software architecture involved decision-making. It combines analysis with the need for situational awareness to deal with the emergent factors and avoiding cognitive biases.
- “Serendipity with Woody Zuill” – Greger pointed me to a short video of him and Woody Zuill discussing serendipity in software development.
- “Fixing IT – Too Big to Succeed?” – Woody’s comments in the video re: the stifling effects of bureaucracy in IT inspired me to discuss the need for embedded IT to address those effects and to promote better customer-centricity than what’s normal for project-oriented IT shops.
- “Serendipity and successful innovation” – Greger’s post pointed out that structure is insufficient to promote innovation, organizations must be prepared to recognize and respond to opportunities and that innovation must be able to scale.
- “Inflection Points and the Ingredients of Innovation” – I expanded on Greger’s post, using WWI as an example of a time where innovation yielded uneven results because effective innovation requires technology, understanding of how to employ it, and an organizational structure that allows it to be used well.
- “Social innovation and tech go hand-in-hand” – Greger continued with the same theme, the social and technological aspects of innovation.
- “Organizations and Innovation – Swim or Die!” – I discussed the ongoing need of organizations to adapt to their changing contexts or risk “death”.
- “Innovation – Resistance is Futile” – Continuing on in the same vein, Greger points out that resistance to change is futile (though probably inevitable). He quotes a professor of his that asserted that you can’t change people or groups, thus you have to change the organization.
- “Changing Organizations Without Changing People” – I followed up on Greger’s post, agreeing that enterprise architectures must work “with the grain” of human nature and that culture is “walking the walk”, not just “talking the talk”.
- “Developing the ‘innovation habit’” – Greger talks about creating an intentional, collaborative innovation program.
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