Tag Archives: economy

innovation, The Digital Age

The Lean Startup

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This event marks the publication of Eric Ries new book The Lean Startup as part of the LSE’s public lecture series.

“Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that’s being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It’s about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it’s too late. Now is the time to think Lean.”

I liveblogged the event – and here are my notes.

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries

Linda Hickman says the book has started a whole movement; there is some controversy about his thinking. Started as a software developer, founder of IMTU and on the board of startups and working with HBS.  The contentiousness of his approach is related to his reflective practice – it’s not about the ‘Great Man’.

Ground rules – don’t want anyone to be disconnected on his account. Use your mobiles.

Public policy-makers are keen on ‘entrepreneurialism’ – v exciting.

Startups are difficult and boring – and product improvement meetings don’t make good movies. The stuff that’s important is ‘too boring to be in the movies’.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainly.

“A startup is an experiment – can we build a sustainable organisation”.

  • Most startups fail
    • Some get bought – by big companies.
    1. Some enter the Land of the Living Dead

“We can build anything we can imagine”

Entrepreneurship is management. He blames Taylor – “In the past, the man was first. In the future, the system will be the first.” (1911). Fred Taylor’s scientific management gives the wrong signals – we needed more stuff; it was about building it; not thinking about whether is should be built.

We are dealing with ‘extreme uncertainty’
It’s about “The Pivot”

Pivoting is a core concept – a change in strategy; not a change it vision. Pivot sooner. Expands the runway without raising more money.

Achieving failure = successfully executing a bad plan.

Forecasting ad planning only works in a stable environment.

Which activities (from the perspective of the customer) add value and which don’t.

Pivot for him was throwing away 6 months worth of code development. But learning is the excuse to justify failure. “Learning is our most valuable asset” as entrepreneurs.

Validated learning is about how we achieve the learning with minimum effort. Need to minimise the total time through the loop. Build – measure – learn. The point of continuous deployment is implementing features very rapidly – but as experiments.  Need to make the “Minimum Viable Product”.

Innovation accounting. [Cites the Toyota Way]. Need to hold entrepreneurs accountable. Normally the metrics are ‘vanity metrics’.

“They can’t [VCs] tell whether you’re on the brink of success or whether you’ve spent the year ‘goofing off’.”

You need to:

  • Establish the baseline
  • Tune the engine
  • Pivot or persevere

“It’s better to have bad news that’s true than good news that’s made up”.

“When experiments reach diminishing returns; it’s time to Pivot”.

Questions

Q – re leadership of the business; why don’t you mention the directors?

A – masses of advice on that. It’s more about the process and the environment that they work in.

Q – re e-commerce; what does MVP look like?

A – inventory is about satisfying demand. Building up inventory in advance of a sale is not a good plan. Start with a very small number of early adopters. Apologies and take pre-orders.

Q – why should I listen to this – what have you built that’s successful?

A – argument by case study. The point of a framework is that it makes predictions – start with one concept and see what happens – make predictions and test. Do it for yourself and see what works.

Q – re scaling. How do you implement a MVP?

A – take one idea; try to get a competitor to steal it. ‘We should be so lucky!’. Big companies have plenty of ideas – but they can’t implement. If you can’t out iterate them – shame on you.

Q – stuff gets released that people don’t really want.

A – it’s about batch size. Think manufacturing. Apply it to software development. Cluster immune system.

Q – re Investors and their attitudes. How do they react?

A – Not easy to sell to investors. It’s difficult. We pivoted to a better product. A few of our investors understood what we were trying to do as a micro-scale experiment. And we knew what the inflection points were caused by. It’s a tough sell. “Don’t pitch the buzzwords – pick the results.”

‘There is zero penalty for shipping the MVP too early.”

Q – from a big company guy from an established brand. What are the challenges of getting big companies to change their ways’

A – The challenge is to get them to change the accountability. Start something that doesn’t need the corporate brand. Reverse the thinking – needs to come down from the top. Middle managers get paid to ‘make the quarter’ – and they kill innovation.

Q – What are you going to do next?

A – I have no idea. Something to do with the short term nature of public markets. Targets are part of the problem. We need a long term stock exchange. Needs full-on ecosystem reform.

Digital Britain, The Digital Age

Jeremy Hunt MP – Media and Technology

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I was invited to hear his first keynote on Media and Technology – and here is the liveblog of the event.

At the bottom of this post you can see the liveblog I made at the time; while Jeremy Hunt was speaking. Using Scribblelive, I also added in content from those making comments on Twitter. I streamed live from the event using Ustream Broadcaster on the iPhone but just some of the questions. There’s no point trying to stream the speech – Ministers rarely depart from their prepared texts and in any event the transcript is usually available immediately. Questions are different however.

I’m embedding the stream archive here. The person in shot on the immediate left is Mark Thompson DG of the BBC – check out the body language.

Digital Britain, The Digital Age, Uncategorized

The Future of Broadband event in Gateshead

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The Future of Broadband in the NE and the world

In a busy, buzzy and engaging event, over 100 of the NE’s leading business people and entrepreneurs discussed the Future of Broadband – looking at the prospects for the NE in the new wave of broadband services, often called “Next Generation Access” or “NGA” some of which are being developed here in the region.

The scale of the opportunity

The event was sponsored by  NorthernNet represented by Mercedes Clark Smith and Sunderland Software City represented by Fred Pernet of Codeworks.

In their opening remarks, Fred and Mercedes mentioned the importance to the NE’s businesses of getting to grips with the coming services as broadband develops; this is especially important given that the region is increasingly looking to create new jobs in the digital and creative sectors; such as games, animation and software.  Mercedes described how NorthenNet offers types of technology and broadband speeds to smaller companies previously only available to the very largest and on a much more flexible basis.  She argued that “It’s not about the technology; it’s about the people” and that the benefits of creative and technical people working together are beginning to be realised.

The move from Copper to Fibre

To provide a basis for the conversation, Adrian Wooster, Chief Technology Officer of the Community Broadband Network, talked about “From Copper to Fibre” and covered the types of new services based on optical fibre technology and their impact on business.  He mentioned that it’s important to remember that it’s not all about download speed.  Increasingly the speed at which you can upload files and other content is becoming more critical to businesses.  He said “New technologies are coming, some of them already being implemented in Gateshead, that offer the potential for new services.  You can get closer and closer to customers.”  He stressed the business relevance and innovation potential of new services.

G-ti – “Getting it done” in Gateshead

Liz Reed from Gateshead Council (pictured above) focused on G-ti (which stands for Gateshead Technology Innovation) a ground-breaking project bringing ultra high speed service to the Baltic Business Quarter.  “Our job is to make sure we get businesses and jobs; jobs for local people.”  That G-ti is an example of collaboration between the private and public sectors, is a very open and competitive network and that it demonstrates what Gateshead needs to be competitive.  That it’s important for local authorities to demonstrate leadership.  She spoke passionately about the “need to unite creative and technical people in using this new stuff”.   Liz said that Gateshead was “About getting things done.”  At the end of LIz’s presentation, Brian Condon a director of CBN and an independent consultant on technology and business, did a ‘straw poll’; asking the audience to vote on whether this project was a good use of public funds – admittedly an unrepresentative audience – but they voted in favour (with not a single hand raised against).

Caring for the “Not Got Anythings”

Other local projects featured highly in the session – Cybermoor Limited whose Operations Director, Kevin Wood, said that in his area of Weardale ‘NGA’ stands for “Not Got Anything”.  Cybermoor are working with local communities to install optical fibre and improve access to services and innovations such as high capacity ‘Telehealth’.  He agreed with Liz that it was about “Getting things done”.  He said he wasn’t afraid of the “Community” word.  He was open about some of the issues of small scale projects; and that a lack of depth of resources could give problems.  He concluded that “It’s about making things happen when no one else cares.”

George’s “Stories from the Coalface” from ITPS and Virgin

George Galloway, MD of ITPS brought what he called “Stories from the coalface” of real business in the region.  ITPS is a successful and growing privately owned IT services business with over £10m of turnover.  George, who was on stage with Chris Walsham from Virgin Media, provided examples of how ITPS operates.  They were the first Service Provider to offer services on the G-ti network (there are now 5 competing providers) and they partner with a range of companies including Virgin Media.  Chris stressed the importance of partnership working and the need to collaborate.  He said that their strategic relationship with ITPS was a good example as it shows that both large (and Virgin Media has a £15bn network) and smaller players can benefit.  George gave the example of a successful project where a move from Copper to Fibre (of one of the types described by Adrian earlier) had delivered operating cost savings of 30% while simultaneously provding a 10-fold performance increase.  Chris added that these new technologies can help companies reduce their carbon footprint; reducing the need to travel and saving time.

Partnership working to ‘bridge the gap’

Simon Roberson who is the NE Regional Manager for BT Group gave a different perspective from a very big player in the market.  He  talked about BT’s plans to deploy “Superfast Broadband” to 66% of the UK population by 2015.  He said it was a very big project and that it would be difficult to reach those people described as being in the “Final Third”.  He said “We have to remember that the ‘Final Third’ is one third of the population; not 1/3 of the country.” and that there are still very big distances to cover outside the dense urban areas.

Simon gave an example of partnership working in Northern Ireland as a way for the public and private sectors to work together.  He argued that, despite what some other speakers had said, what will pay for the investments will be premium services such as HD and 3D TV which need more bandwidth than existing services.  He said to businesses in the meeting “For you guys it’s a tremendous opportunity.”

Stand by me . .

In a charismatic multimedia keynote presentation, Houston Spencer (above, left)  Vice President of Alcatel Europe (the private sector partner in G-ti) used the Ben E. King song “Stand by me” coupled with images from the 50s and 60s to show how much the world has changed and how much more change there is to go still.  He showed a video called “Stand by me; playing for change” which was made in multiple locations by multiple players and brought together to form a single performance.  He told us that the original record had been played over 7 million times on the radio since its original release 50 years ago but that this video, released only 2 years ago had already been watched over 12 million times on YouTube.

Houston talked about the changes that are coming; and that big organisations came about because of the ‘need to aggregate capital’ because everything was expensive.  The IP/Broadband world changes all that – and that it’s now much easier to create and distribute new forms of content and products using the internet.  Houston asserted that many people mistake the intent of new forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter; they are not about “broadcast mode”; “It’s not about self promotion, it’s about making connections with people, building relationships and forming an ‘ecosystem’ of people connected together”.  Houston concluded that there was a risk that the big players might destroy the ecosystems they are creating by too many rules or changing the conditions that brought them about.  He finished with an optimistic picture of how relationships sustained by the internet can result in an explosion of global collaboration and connectivity.

Photo credit: Simon Williams, Crest Photography

Digital Britain, innovation, The Digital Age

Metaphor and Strategy in Digital Britain

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metaphorsThe use of metaphor in strategy and business and in the media is widespread and often annoying.  Narrative is used to illustrate choices and “It’s been a long journey” is regularly heard from both reality TV participants and news media people who ought to know better.  But there are many more forms of narrative than the journey story – and richer archetypes we could think about.

But maybe we could recast or re-interpret some of these metaphors to help see problems in a ‘new light’.  There, you see; I’m doing it now.  What if we could ‘think our way off the Pendulum’ of boom and bust?  How about ‘painting ourselves Out of the Box’?  And how about making the ‘Playing Field’ more mountainous for players with too much market power?  What if we could harness our knowledge of systems dynamics so that things spiral into control.

And then we come to the Patchwork Quilt analogy I came up with as one of the scenarios for Digital Britain.  The industry seems to want to interpret the Patchwork Quilt as a ‘bad thing’.  Actually it’s a good thing because it’s a manifestation of the coming wave of localism.  Design your own patch of Digital Britain to respond to local conditions and make sure, though, at the edges it joins up with the other patches.

So, the next time you hear a metaphor being used to describe strategy or choices; generate the anti-metaphor in your mind and see where it takes you.

Social Media, The Digital Age

Dystopia, myopia, fatalism?

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Can we ‘hack’ our way to Environment 2.0 or are we too Human 1.0 to cope?

Adam Greenfield’s talk at Futuresonic last week was insightful; how cities will look and how we will use them once networked sensors are embedded in pretty much everything, pretty much everywhere.   I liveblogged it using scribblelive here.  You can see the way he developed the argument and the way some of the tweeters to #futr09 reacted.

Photo credit: Aeioux
Photo credit: Aeioux

But what really galvanised the audience and set the tweets flying was an apparently casual remark right at the end of his session in response to questions.  What most of us thought he said was along the lines that sustainability wasn’t possible and we should all just do our best to make whatever time we have left valuable.

bombshell5

This rather punctured the somewhat gung-ho ‘tech can solve it’ bubble blown by Jamais Cascio in his heckled-by-a-drunk-person and subsequently much-blogged opening keynote.  You can see a liveblog by Martin Bryant here which gives you a ‘feel’ for the gala event.  The idea that we can ‘Hack the Earth’ in some massive geo-engineering intervention is a big, scary idea and was presented in a deliberately provocative  way.  It seems to me that we’ve already hacked the poor old Earth about rather a lot.   Tech-driven re-hacking of what is a deeply non-linear system where we’re not too certain we can model next week’s weather carries perhaps a few additional risks.  But rather than get dragged into that, what I really want to focus on was both the reaction to Cascio’s thinking and the much more stunned interpretation of Greenfield’s remarks as being ‘we’re all doomed and there’s no point trying’.

The false poles of optimism and pessimism

We got back to Greenfield’s remarks at the end of Roland Harwood’s session on Deciphering Trust in Networked Innovation where there was some discussion and I raised the issue of ‘the guy from Nokia’ when Adam’s name went right out of my head at the crucial moment (sorry Adam!).  The following extract from the indefatigable Martin Bryant’s liveblog illustrates the point:

harwood1

And from then on, we ended up labelling those who believe that we can ‘fix it’ with the support of wizzy technology, like Cascio, ‘the optimists’ and anyone holding a negative view, like Greenfield, ‘the pessimists’.  It wasn’t really possible to develop the arguments from then on – the labels stuck and the polarity increased.  Which was inevitable, I suppose, but a shame.

Deal with it ‘in the now’

Greenfield was trying, I think, to make a much more subtle and nuanced point – that feeling we ‘might not make it’ shouldn’t stop us doing the right thing.  That the future vision of the City with its open sensor-based networks and connected people could flip into dystopia.  That ‘optimisim’ could actually be myopia and unwillingness to confront the reality of our situation.  There is much more to this than ‘hacking’ our way into the Earth’s geocode; Cascio points out the risk of hubris in that.  The idea that we have enough control of ourselves, let alone sufficient understanding of the potential system impacts of what we do, to be effective may be an illusion.  So perhaps, the best we can do, is deal with what we can deal with and make sure we keep our values in mind.

innovation

The Connected University – Driving Recovery and Growth

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“Lord Sainsbury and NESTA are launching a report exploring the vital economic contribution of the UK’s universities today, 30 April 2009.

Lord Sainsbury, Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners and Michael Kitson, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge will debate the role of Universities in regional economic growth. Jonathan Kestenbaum, NESTA’s Chief Executive will moderate.”

I blogged the event live and my notes are here.

As a summary here is a wordle of my notes:

connected-university-wordle

Three key areas for action

Lord Sainsbury highlighted three important things:

  • Increasing the scope for technical or business Universities to interact and link with SMEs – but not all Universities should have same mission.  Sainsbury argues that there will be a ‘Top 30’ of Universities who do ‘world-class’ research.  Other Universities  should not compete but differentiate themselves. It’s not necessary to ‘create new research’ – but we do need to improve the implementation of existing research.
  • The importance of science and innovation campuses – such as RAL, Daresbury, NIMH in St Pancras. Clusters of real expertise and these places can provide tremendous opportunities but it needs government drive to succeed.
  • FE colleges are important but neglected.  Government and RDAs need to focus on this.  We need a Further Education Innovation fund (like HEIF).

Sainsbury concluded by noting “We can’t predict which sectors new businesses will come from but we can predict that they will come from the high-tech clusters surrounding our Universities.”

Who was there and who wasn’t?

Consideration of the attendees (from the printed guest list) is instructive; representatives from the case studies were there; Cambridge, Southampton, Bristol, Bath, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield Hallam, Dundee, Daresbury. And I suppose it would be a bit odd if they weren’t there.  Others: Nottingham, Oxford Brookes, Queen’s Belfast, Wales, Bangor, Imperial, Liverpool Management School, Northumbria, Greenwich, Sussex, Ravensbourne, UCL.  Oxford present through Oxford Innovations.

Various representatives of the societies (Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal…), RCUK, quangos and consulting odds and sods (like me).  A few venture capitalists.

Interesting to note the Universities not present and also the pattern of other attendees.  I assume (and it seems likely) that the Nesta invitation went out pretty widely.   Nesta has a good approach to openly promoting their events and in my experience, their events are very well run and the quality of speakers and debate is high.  For events of this type, the Nesta CEO, Jonathan Kestenbaum, is very active and visible.

Better Connections between the Universities and the economy is a UK strategic issue

Nesta is right to identify the importance of the connections between the Universities and the economy.  It’s a big issue for the UK and no matter how good we feel we are at it (and I’d say at best it’s patchy) we need to be better.  While there were representatives from HEFCE and DIUS, only 2 RDAs turned up (SEEDA and Advantage West Midlands) and no one from BERR.  No Government Ministers.

There was also much talk of the ‘Top 30’ universities. This seemed to raise a few hackles!  Eric Thomas from Bristol sounded a negative note by indicating that Universities are not ‘recession proof’ – look at what’s happening in the US.  And I think he was right in sounding a cautionary note as I felt that there was too much complacency in the room and too much of an ‘even keel’.

As far as Nesta’s report is concerned – it’s a very valuable contribution and a good source of ‘food for thought’.  But I feel Nesta ‘pulled its punches’.  I think that the evidence in the report could support a much firmer line from Nesta in pushing harder to define what the role of Universities will be in future as part of our economy, as Lord Sainsbury hinted in his remarks.  We are in the NBAU world – there is No Business As Usual and this needs to be true for our Universities just as much as it is for the rest of us.