Outside Innovation

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. 

Disruptive Innovation: Nature’s Scitable Replaces Life Sciences Textbooks

In October 2008, Nature Publishing Group's new Education Division quietly launched the Beta of a revolutionary idea: Replace expensive textbooks with a free collaborative learning space for science. Scitable.com went live in January, 2009 and has quickly become a magnet for serious students of genetics (the first field that Nature is addressing).

Now, in the Fall of 2009, Scitable.com is alive and well. Students and faculty from all over the world are actively using Scitable's resources to teach and learn about genetics.

What can you do on Scitable?

• Explore a topic room in subjects like evolutionary genetics, gene inheritance and transmission, genes and disease, genomics, and several others.

• Follow a Learning Path on topics like the human genome project, cancer, or types of genetic diseases.

• Join or create a public or private class or study group.

• Read well-written short articles that introduce concepts in enough depth to get you oriented.

• Read the most important research on each topic.

• "Ask the Experts" at Nature Education just about any question you have about genetics or about the material you're reading.

• Design a course using any of the free materials.

  

I interviewed, Vikram Savkar, the Publishing Director at Nature Education,who led the innovation team at Nature to create and launch Scitable. I learned how he and his team approached and carried out an intrapreneurial project designed to revolutionize the textbook publishing industry. I also learned a lot about how to develop a next gen Web-based product.

I look forward to following this project and to bringing you background and updates as Nature's burgeoning Education group throws down its gauntlet at the science textbook publishing industry and introduces a new customer-friendlier business model.

Creating a Social Network for Physicists: AIP UniPHY

On September 8, 2009, one of our Visionaries, Tim Ingoldsby, the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the American Institute of Physics, launched a pioneering new Web site, AIP UniPHY (aipuniphy.org). Tim billed it as a first-of-its-kind scientific networking platform for physical scientists. 180,000 physical scientists from 100 countries can now easily see all of their colleagues as well as their competitors in any field of research. They can find the top experts in each field and see what relationships each person has with others in their fields or in other disciplines. 

The site makes explicit the previously hidden network of colleagues and competitors who are working in all of the sub-disciplines of physics. Here’s how it works: AIP “built” the social network by taking the database of all of the journal articles and papers that physicists have published in 100 leading physics journals by AIP’s member societies (and other publishers) in the past 30 years as well as approximately 100,000 papers from scientific conferences.

Each paper is typically authored by several colleagues, who may be working in different universities, research institutions, or companies. This database of authors and co-authors and papers with topics and metadata is then “munged” by Collexis Holdings’ semantic fingerprinting technology to produce a graphical network showing all the linkages among all of these scientists and the topics they research. In addition to exploring graphically, you can also find experts by topic, by geography, by institution, or using a combination of criteria. Once you locate the people you are interested in, you can add them to “your network.” UniPHY pre-populates the profiles for each of its 180,000 scientists based on the published information with their titles, institutions, and so on. As they log into the site, they can update their profiles with photos and other information.