E Management

Nesting Doll is a Triz Principle for space optimization. Space is a very precocious resource in today’s world. An entire village can get adjusted in just one multistoried building. Flats are attached and arrangeed in a well planned structure. Rooms have almirahs, tables have drawers, and beds have boxes. Things can get adjusted to these tinny structures in systematic order.

In fast growing population, we all are working to increase our world. However, space is limited. We are just cutting jungles and exploiting environmental resources to meet the exponential demand. In future, world could be multilayer with small flats comprising of all facilities and digital offices. It may be something like circuits on nano chip.
Laser of 3 D may bring excitement of tourist place at your home where you can change temperature, can change wall colors, and can feel different countries/locations/beaches based on your choice. Universality is another triz principle which can remove need of travel to distant place.

Communication with distant relative will be a click away. Your life may be like open book where each moment is recorded in some camera. Person living miles away from you may be seen as living at next door. His movements can be easily tracked. If we crack anti matter theory, world will be so tinny. We will attain wings to cross the distances.
Food may be mostly sea based. As agriculture is not able to deliver, we may be forced to change our choices. Basic needs of food, shelter, electricity, or water will be fulfilled. We will be just thinking how we can explore space. There are unlimited possibilities. We have miles to go.

Mathematics to most of us is a subject to be hated and loved at the same time. On one hand, the enmity with mathematics is because we had to learn, memories a pattern / method taught to solve a problem in anticipation of the problems we might face in our real life when we are out in the world from our safe cocoons. Although I never applied math to my real life problems as they seem to be more complex to solve with the scant knowledge of mathematics I possess. On the other hand we were forced to love mathematics because it helped us score good marks and gave us a chance to progress by choosing lucrative professions. Answers were more important than the methods with which they are derived because you can’t get an answer with a different method than the one which is already established.

In my wildest of the dreams I never thought of seeing a play on the work & life of a mathematician, but I did see a very different play “The Disappearing Number” based on the theme of passionate collaboration between mathematics genius Srinivas Ramanujan (1887-1920) and his mentor, guide a Cambridge Scholar Godfrey Harold Hardy. (G.H.Hardy)

Ramanujan had no formal training in pure mathematics and was introduced to the subject when he was 10. He had a difficult childhood and adulthood. But that did not stop him pursuing his passion & the genius went on to make the greatest contribution in mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series & continued fractions. For continuing with what he knew the best he had to take up a job at the Madras Port Trust as Class 3, Grade IV clerk, making merely 30 rupees a month. His seniors however encouraged him and gave him space to pursue his passion. At that time with guidance of some of the seniors he wrote to several famous mathematicians about his work which no one understood for lack of explanation / proof and was not considered for publication. After receiving several rejections he finally wrote to Cambridge mathematician G.H.Hardy. Initially he had also ignored his correspondence for lack of sound explanation of his work until he saw one formula that a struck a chord with him. To the uninitiated it seemed to make no sense at all. It read something like this

1+2+3+4+5+….. = -1/ 12

It was this very formula that provided Hardy with his first inkling that Ramanujan was a far from a crank. Hardy knew that there were sophisticated mathematical techniques developed in Germany that has spread widely. He realized that Ramanujan must have single-handedly reconstructed them. It is for exploration of such mysterious things has resulted in making of this play.

Ramanujan went to Cambridge to work with Hardy against his Brahmin beliefs. Hardy was fascinated by his work & kept himself busy preparing explanation for his proofs while Ramanujan kept on adding several more during the day. It was exhausting for Hardy to work like that and he wondered from where Ramanujan gets this knowledge to come up with a new theorem that frequently. Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family Goddess, Namagiri of Namakkal, and looked to her for inspiration in his work. He often said, “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God”

Unfortunately he had a tragic end at an early age of 32 with several liver infections; he spoilt his health due to his strict vegetarianism and spent many days of starvation and ate only rice & fruits occasionally. This part of story rides the audience on an emotional rollercoaster. Today Ramanujan’s mathematical discoveries are used in crystallography & string theory which explains how everything in the universe is connected with each other.

String of thoughts sparked off as I took the train back home after the play, one of them being the genesis of the work that these great minds do. Why they only are able to do what they do & not many of us. Three other genius minds struck to me at that very moment Genrich Altshuller- Father of TRIZ (Science of Systematic Innovation), Micheal Faraday inventor of electromagnetic theory & electromagnetism one of the first forces that exist in nature & the last one is Steve Jobs inventor of devices like smart phones i-pod, i-pad. What is common in all of them? I thought Altshuller, a patent reader in the patent office of USSR was imprisoned by Stalin for political reasons when he shared his ideas of decoding innovation with fixed number of patterns. His communication with the dictator became a reason for his captivity, as dictators don’t like IDEAS they like IDIOTS. He enthused his inmates who also were intellectuals with his ideas, after setting free they together saw a dream of decoding innovation and mined nearly 200,000 patents to make common rules that lead to a science of predictable innovation. Altshuller did not make fortune in his lifetime with what he did but left all of us a treasure to innovate with. (http://innovationnukkad.blogspot.com/search?q=remembering+altshuller)

Michael Faraday was born to working class parents and eked out a meager existence as an apprentice bookbinder in the early 1800. The young Faraday was fascinated by the enormous breakthroughs in uncovering the mysterious properties of two new forces electricity & magnetism. He joined Prof. Humphrey Davy and in his absence went on to create series of stunning breakthroughs that led to the creation of generators. Empty space was not empty to Faraday at all they were forced lines. His was not trained in mathematics but his notebook was full of hand drawn force of lines. One day he found while moving a magnet over a coil that a current is generated so the lines of forces were not useless but had the power to generate electric current. What you are reading now is because of Faraday’s invention. His invention energized the world and changed the course of world’s civilization. Faraday’s DNA was imagination, experimentation and observation.

I have nothing more to say about Steve Jobs as many of us use his creations i-pod, i-phone & i-pad to conduct our daily chores. To describe more eloquently about the form of creativity that we talked about so far I use his own expression

When you ask creative people how did they do something, they feel little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while that’s because they were able to connect experiences they have had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they have had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences, so they don’t have enough dots to connect and they will end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one understands of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Why these minds were different & creative than the rest I seem to have found an answer in G.H.Hardy’s book “Mathematical Apology” (here the word apology needs to be taken as explanation and not as regret) there are two things that shape the work of great minds the first of which is intellectual curiosity and the other being the pride that they take in their own passion which has a ‘pukka’ connection with their soul. They see several patterns of things they are passionate about and connect those patterns differently to come up with some new creation each time. All these creations are against all odds. So greater is the difficulty the more beautiful their creation becomes. They follow a non-linear path of thinking.

To conclude I would say every organization has at least few of its own Ramanujans, Faradays what probably is needed is equal proportion of Hardy & Maxwells to create a new knowledge and value.

Source – innovationnukkad.blogspot.com

Blog – http://innovationnukkad.blogspot.com/

(Understanding Populations Better Than They Understand Themselves)

Introduction:

Successful Innovation requires right answer/s to the right problem/s. It is said, “What is to be done” is known, “How To” part merely follows. The biggest challenge however is recognizing the “What” part. Before going further let us remind ourselves of Einstein’s definition of a problem or an opportunity “Problem is the gap between what we want and what we have”. Many times falling prey to prevalent thinking “If ain’t broke don’t fix it” & “All is Well” JJJ we fail to recognize what might be needed. (Opportunities = Un-recognized customer desire /need/ want etc,)

The successful innovation therefore requires answering three questions

1. “What does Customer Wants or Need?”
2. “How do we recognize what he wants”
3. “How we meet that unmet need? (What product/ services we will design & create to meet the unmet need).

Absolutes of Innovation ¹

If we have to have a simple definition of what successful innovation means to most of us then we can say it is something which has all of good things ( Both for customers and business ) and less or none  of bad things again for both. Thus if we now have to define what a successful innovation must have; it leads us to state two necessary absolutes

1. Solving a trade-off or compromise
2. Adding a new function or an attribute that no competitor is offering

Recognizing Unmet Needs = F _(Trend)

Innovation requires organizations to go beyond understanding the ‘Voice of The Customers” “Slipping into their shoes” or “knowing their conscious mind” to a newer level -“Seeping into their unconscious mind observing several of their behavioral trends” to comprehend what they will appreciate in future products and services by way of its unique functional features & attributes (tangible and intangible).

TREND ² is all about understanding people, the populations they form part of, and most important of all for a business, understanding what motivates them to spend their money. The basic idea behind recognizing trend is that the most powerful forces in our society are the emerging, counterintuitive trends that are shaping tomorrow right before us. For e.g. need to stay fitter, Yeh DIL MANGE MORE attitude, a smaller car but a bigger house first, few years later both get bigger & bigger, getting attached to one “sect” & creating more diversity of sects are all forming part of trends. “Jain food” is one such trend which does not meant food for “Jains” but food that is devoid of onion or garlic which is even preferred by the rest of the population. While people are eating healthier food than ever, number of chat shops shows an increasing trend as they are frequented by a sizeable population.

I-pod, I-phone are not the result of customer surveys but a deeper understanding of behavioral pattern observed in few individuals which soon was embraced by the rest. The power of extreme individual choices has never been greater and the reasons and patterns for those choices never harder to understand and analyze. Identifying small, intense subgroups and communicating with them about their individual needs and wants has never more critical in marketing than now. Small groups, drawn together by shared needs, habits and preferences are on the rise.

Late Sh.C.K.Prahalada & M. S. Krishnan in their book “The New Age of Innovation” ³ has put forth a concept of N=1, R=G which means product / services that are truly innovative can cater to the individual need (N=1) by leveraging global networks resources (R= G). I-pods are popular not because we can carry music around- we could do that with the walkman, they are popular because it gives us the ability to choose our own songs thus personal technology has become personalized technology. (N=1, R=G)

Thus a trend is a behavioral aspect by an intense identity group that grows a need and influence behavior of a larger population not met by the existing businesses.

TREND and Its Relevance to Business ⁴

Most managers can articulate the major trends of the day. But in the course of conducting field and market research in a number of industries and working directly with the companies, they often fail to recognize the less obvious but profound ways these trends are influencing customer aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors. This is especially true of trends that managers view as peripheral to their core markets. Consequently, they ignore trends in their innovation strategies, include product features that only superficially address a trend’s impact on consumers, or they adopt a wait-and-see approach and let competitors take the lead. At a minimum, such responses result in missed profit opportunities or wasteful investments in R & D. At the extreme, they can jeopardize a company by ceding to rivals the opportunity to transform the industry.

Why Firms Fail To Leverage Trends ⁴

Ignoring trends that originate outside their markets

Most firms naturally think of themselves as offering products within defined categories. (“we make cosmetics” We make Automobiles” “We are apparel company” “We are bank” etc This often directs innovation efforts toward customer needs that have been considered relevant to the category and need of the population as a whole is ignored.

Responding to a trend in a superficial way

Siemens launched Xelibri 6, (http://www.canadiancontent.net/mobile/phone_pictures/siemens-xelibri-6.jpg), a Smartphone for women that contained two mirrors and was designed like a makeup compact but could not actually hold make up. The rise of digital media has prompted consumers to seek products that allow them to multitask, but Siemens didn’t appreciate that people expect such products to deliver this benefit in substance, not just in form.

Ill-conceived offerings that don’t speak to consumers new needs or desires often dilute, rather than enhance, the brand’s equity, thus responding to a trend in a superficial way doesn’t help.

Waiting Too Long to Respond

Sometimes waiting to watch the competitor to make the first move can often lock valuable assets. Nike was able to secure a partnership with Apple to co create Nike +, a sports kit and web service that allows runners to track their performance with their i-pods and share information with others. (http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/) Given the i-pod’s popularity among joggers, a firm that now seeks to enter the new space has lost an opportunity to launch their services with a capable partner

What is trenDNA?

The approach I am going to discuss hereon is summary of my understanding of “trenDNA” a six years of research by Systematic Innovation GURU Darrell Mann and his Turkish counterpart Yekta Ozozer. The main theme of the book is “Understanding Populations Better than They Understand themselves” by understanding trends and their connections with each other

trenDNA is about observing patterns of behaviors that form a trend & re-focusing the way we look at world. It is a tool for firmer predictions about the future not just by looking at the trends but looking at the conflicts and synergies between trends.

The book contains 160 + trend cards each describing a unique behavioral pattern (trend) which is distinct from the other. Authors claim that during their research they have come across more than 1000 trends & were considered for a detailed assessment, after intense deliberations they rationalized them based on their resemblance finally sizing them up to 160+ unique trends.

Each trend-card describes the trend in brief, the other side of it lists other trends that the trend in review leads to or contradicts with. The greatest opportunity for innovation is realized by solving a conflict between the trends. It also relates trend with the thinking style (based on the work of “Spiral Dynamics” by late Dr. Clare Graves) and the generation archetype (Hero, Nomad, Prophet and Artist) theory put forth by Strauss & Howe through their work on “Generation Cycle”

One chapter is exclusively devoted to trend mapping strategies suggesting use of these trends for getting customer insight & into their probable needs. At the back of the book a list of winning solution strategies have been summarized. The strategies may appear abstract for people who do not have basic orientation to systematic innovation methods, for others it can help pointing towards possible innovation directions based on the clues provided by trend mapping strategies.

trenDNA Map

This first part being an introductory part, I will touch upon briefly the key concepts of trenDNA and its overall map.

At the core of the map, is ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ the two key elements of any innovation project. ‘As-is “part is where the things are as they are as on date and ‘to-be’ part is the future state which might be an ideal state as foreseen by the team or sponsor of the project. It might happen that there is no ‘as-is’ part and the canvas is completely blank, these are typical situations where a CEO asks his team a need to create new growth engines & business verticals.

The next in the map is “absolutes’ where we identify the function delivered by a product & services few may term this as ‘jobs to be done’ or ‘likely benefit’. The reason to think more deeply about the function is to unravel the functions beyond tangibles and finding the likely areas to innovate or finding out an alternate way of delivering the same function as is done by some of the other industries who may not be your direct competitors.

The ‘inevitable’, next in the map is all about data driven predictions may be a simple example of this could be if a shaving products company wants to predict the demand for their products in next few years then they can have the data of the number of students passing out of the college and starting their carrier as a professional. They may or have to shave regularly in their new life,  (They may not be shaving daily in their earlier “student life”) So such a prediction if not accurate can provide a reasonable estimate of the product sales growth.

The next in the map is ‘inherent’ which will make us understand the higher order effects. Taking the shaving example further we might realize that “shaving is not considered as a “cool thing” and it’s best to have some trimmed beard on one’s chin to attract & retain attention of “interested parties”JJ. This may make you think about the investments that you might make in augmenting the production facilities of your existing products. Instead you might think of something else for making your top line grow or at least stay even.

The two key themes have been introduced here may be we can call them vehicles of trenDNA. The first one is based on the different thinking styles (thinking gears) that an individual, group or society at large have. This is based on pioneering work by Dr. Clare Graves on “Spiral Dynamics”⁵ which is about how thinking style changes depending on the change in the external situations and affect the behavior of an individual, group or society at large. These thinking styles are used as a dimension in comprehending the trend thereby understand customer & plan out future things (e.g. transformations in the organization, predicting buying behaviors etc).

The other concept is based on “William Strauss & Neil Howe’s” pioneering work on generation cycles (The Forth Turning⁶) the basic premise of the work is; generation cycle repeats itself after certain years so one can have a better understanding of the current generations based on the attributes possessed by its equivalent generation of the past. Each generation cycle is known to repeat after every 80 years, so if you want to understand the GEN Y or HERO generation (born during 1980-2001) then it is best to correlate them with people born previously between 1900-1925. This provide good basis for understanding different generations & their key attributes as a consumer/ customer. Each trend is further classified based on the thinking style it represents and generation with which it finds the closest match.

The next stage is “Probables” where all the market and consumer trends that marketers spend so much of their time talking about are found. The job is describing this forth level is to make sense out of what is going to turn out to be close to two hundred individual trends. The section also help us arrange the trend database in a meaningful manner so that if we know what age group our customers are and what is probably their thinking style is then we can consider only those trends to work with that fits the selection. This can give us some early lead in innovating in products and services that will satisfy this segment.

The last one is “Possible” the authors here are quite open to accepting any such event which may have a distant correlation with the purchases made by the consumers. Now in India we already have such correlation where certain days are considered auspicious for purchases as the planetary position favors to do so. As we know smart Marketers in India are already exploiting and cashing out on such events.

We will see in some detail each area of the map in the next section.

Why we need trenDNA

Why should I consider trenDNA approach for scouting new business opportunities or understanding the missing ones in the existing one? Once motive is clear commitment follows let us see some of these motives.

Motive 1: Any innovation project or for that matter any improvement project starts with documenting “As-Is” & “To-Be” state of improvement parameters e.g. “Increase Revenue By X % or by X folds in next Y years” or “Cut Cost By Z %” “Improve Customer Satisfaction Score by “S” units or “Develop New Business with Product & Services that will add R % to the top line” etc”.  If you are leading the project which has goals like this then you are completely lost at the start. Where & How to start is the next question on top of your mind. You may just start doing it to know later that what was started was not the best of the approach. You might then feel that I should have got enough time for thinking before doing. But most of the time need of the moment is action rather than thinking and unfortunately time spend on thinking is considered as procrastination. This happens because there is no methodical approach available to our thinking According to me trenDNA coupled with Systematic Innovation can best aid our efforts.

Motive 2: If your company is undertaking a market survey trying to talk to customers & understand what they want better from your products & services, then advice by the author is to think again. Sometimes people are asked to find out what customer wants within few days before a product development cycle is undertaken. The result of such quick survey often leads to a product that either overshoots or undershoots existing customer requirements & looks like a sibling or at best a cousin of what is already available in the market. They however recommend with their experience that the resources otherwise spent on surveys can be better utilized in testing the product before launch. In author’s own words more you practice (with concepts) with trend mapping the luckier you will get. J One of the companies they work with, depend significantly on trend mapping & build its understanding of customer’s unrealized needs to come up with a differentiated product / service.

Motive 3: I am not a market analyst or a strategist but when I see everyone spending around me ( except me, my frugal up-bringing does not allow me to spend unnecessarily J ) I believe there is a growth happening. Numbers are helpful and bring seriousness to the discussion. The US GDP is $ 14 trillion and the contribution of personal consumption expenditure accounts for nearly @ 65%. The further break up amongst products & services include 35 % by products and 65 % by services. (Annexure I)

Some of the growth indicators in the Indian context are summarized in Annexure II. Every organization would like to have maximum share of those growth numbers and hence would like to innovate and introduce products and services that creates differentiation. The organization that understands the need of the customer who is at the core of these numbers will stay ahead in the race.

Motive 4: Consumer Expectation Trend follows a following path

Commodity- Product- Service- Transformation- Experience

The trend shows that customers are more and more interested in ultimate NIRVANA J(The experience) and at that stage they are ready to shell out more from their wallet t that they would at all the previous stages. The forward trend is “customization” & the backward is “commoditization”, to stay well ahead of the competition organizations needs to create more experiences through their product & services else they will have to fiercely fight in the “RED” sea instead of creating a “BLUE”. ¹⁰ The figure below depicts the point. For moving upward in the graph in order to have more pie of the customer’s wallet the organizations need to observe, recognize and capture trends & create experiences.

Motive 5

The Halo Effect ⁹ Observes that those organizations that correctly determine “What” part, stays ahead of competition because from start their resource productivity and efficiency is far better that their competitors. For competitors it becomes difficult to catch up and eventually even if they do, they exhaust themselves by then, losing stamina in the process for their possible next run.

Mind Map of trenDNA

The Way Forward

The next parts will describe in sequence the trenDNA concept in some more detail, the innovation challenge identification process and finally integration with Systematic Innovation to unfold a structure of an “end to end” innovation process which any organization would like to implement.

Prashant Y. Joglekar

joglekarprashant@gmail.com

References

1. Mann Darrell, Yekta Ozozer trenDNA – “Understanding Populations Better than They Understand Themselves”, IFR Press, UK, 2009
2. Penn Mark “Micro trends”, Penguin Allen Lane
3. Prahalada C.K., M.S.Krishnan, “ The New Age of Innovation” Mc-Grawhill 2008
4. Elie Ofek, Wathieu Luc; A” Are You Ignoring Trends That Could Shake Up Your Business? Harvard Business Review July-August 2010
5. Cowan , Beck “Spiral Dynamics”, Blackwell Business 1996
6. Strauss & Howe “The Fourth Turning”, Broadway Books,1997
7. Business World “ The marketing Handbook” 2011
8. Pine B.J. Gary Gilmore “ The Experience Economy” Harvard Business School Press, 1999
9. Rosenzweig Phil “The Halo Effect” Free Press, 2007

10.  Kim & Mauborgne “ The Blue Ocean Strategy”, Harvard Business School Press

Annexure I: The US GDP breakdown figures (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f6/GDP_Categories_-_United_States.png)

Annexure II: The Growth Forecast (India) ⁷