Outside Innovation

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone: Whose App Ecosystem Will Win?

 

The recent buzz about the Verizon/Motorola/Google (An)Droid vs. Apple/AT&T/et al iPhone has revolved around two customer-critical issues and one supplier-critical one (can you guess which is which?):

• Which device+network combo meets customers' usability requirements?
• Which brand evokes the most loyalty?
• Which ecosystem will attract the most apps?

As pundits review and early adopters swarm, I've been noticing a few patterns in the dialog. It's not about the device. Sure, everyone comments about display resolution, keyboard quality (or lack thereof), industrial design, and user interface. But there are also provocative wars of words (and maps) about network availability (in the U.S.—other countries have more pervasive mobile networks than ours). These are the initial barriers to adoption. Do I like it? Can I use it?

Local Motors: Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

One of the most inspiring "stories" at the Business Innovation Factory's fifth annual summit, BIF-5, in Providence, Rhode Island was told by Jay Rogers, the founder of an innovative new American car company, Local Motors (www.local-motors.com). Jay is an ex-marine whose grandfather instilled in him a passion for cars. His grandfather owned, among other companies, Indian Motorcycles. Jay grew up in a car-mad family. His experience fighting in Iraq convinced him that the U.S. needed to shed its dependence on foreign oil. So he has invented a new kind of car company.

The cars are made out of easily assembled, lightweight composite materials to reduce fuel consumption. The car chassis is licensed from an existing mass-producer of cars (the first one uses a BMW chassis). The "proprietary open source" car designs are contributed by world-class industrial and automotive designers participating in open competitions on the Local-Motors Web site. The designs are submitted, evolved, voted on, and critiqued by car fans, designers, and prospective customers (customers' votes count more). The car designs are specific to each region of the country. The community also participates in the design-to-build phase through an open prototyping process for each new model. Each phase is photographed, commented upon and posted, with trade-offs discussed.

Once each local car model is in production in its micro-factory, each customer helps assemble his own car at this local sales/manufacturing facility/service location. (Think Build-a-Bear for cars!). As Jay Rogers explained: your car is the second most expensive investment most people make in their lives; why shouldn't you have an amazing experience and an amazing car?

The Anatomy of Innovation

I really enjoyed completing my case study about Nature Education's groundbreaking Scitable platform for science education. Many people are happy to showcase their innovative projects. But few people are as forthcoming as Vikram Savkar in taking me behind the scenes. 

 I gained a good understanding of the steps required to innovate within a large organization:

• Hire an outside renegade.
• Have him build and sell his vision.
• Let him create his own team.
• Locate the team off-site.
• Take a blank slate approach.
• Create a blueprint with an integrated cross-functional team.
• Have the team implement the technology, the content, the user interface design, the business plan, and the marketing plan in parallel.
• Leverage your corporate technology group by agreeing on design standards up front and having them conduct architectural reviews throughout.
• Engage customers as hands-on advisors throughout the process.
• Design your information architecture around customers’ activities towards their goals.
• Build in instrumentation that lets you measure what matters to your customers as well as your sponsors.
• Beta test with friendly customers and invite them to invite their friends.
• Promote via the Internet and social media.
• Make it easy for customers to tell you what role(s) they are playing.
• Let customers see what activities they’ve performed, so they can pick up where they left off; profit from your ability to track what activities customers in different roles are doing.

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How to Revolutionize Your Industry

If your business model is under siege, what should you do? That’s the question that Vikram Savkar asked himself a couple of years ago. At the time, he worked for a publisher of high-priced textbooks. He decided that among the reasons the textbook publishing market is broken are:

• Customers don’t choose what to buy -- the students who buy the books don’t get to choose which books to buy (their professors assign them).
  
• There’s no feedback mechanism for students to react to the material in the textbooks, nor to interact with the people who write them.
  
• There are no real alternatives to traditional textbooks, so publishers can’t tell what their customers would prefer.

So, when he got the opportunity to reinvent what he perceived to be a broken market, Vikram seized the opportunity. This week, we present the a case study on Scitable—the project that Vikram and his team at Nature Publishing Group’s new Nature Education division have launched. You’ll see that they are attempting to create an alternative to science textbooks and to come up with an alternative business model.

As I explored Scitable and learned how students and professors are using it, I noticed that a lot of the third-world students who are flocking to Scitable would probably not have bought $150 textbooks on genetics. So Scitable isn’t replacing something they would have bought. It’s replacing something they wouldn’t have bought. It’s providing a new value proposition to a new market.