Prototypes R us

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National Instruments plays a quiet but critical role in the transformation of ideas into innovations.  Ideas and innovation are often confused–most popular and research attention goes to telling stories of how great ideas come into being.  But there's a big difference between an idea and its successful implementation somewhere.  anywhere.  And that difference is often measured in decades and millions.  Ideas are about what could be done, innovation is about getting it done.

Through the Entrepreneurship Academies, I get to see a lot of science and engineering talent developing some of the latest and greatest ideas using the, yes, latest and greatest in monitoring and controls technologies.  New ideas about real-time monitoring of carbon output in smoke stacks, mad-cow disease in slaughterhouses, mastistis in dairies, oil content in algae, tumor cells in surgery, and arsenic in drinking water, to name a very few.    The ideas are remarkable and at the academy we work with the researchers to understand how they can remain remarkable as they become businesses and enter the market: moving from what could be done to getting it done.

One of the central challenges facing researchers is transforming their benchtop ideas (usually one-offs) into alpha and beta prototypes that can be used in the field in trials–particularly as test and measurement equipment is expensive, cumbersome, and general purpose.

That's where National Instruments (NI) comes in.  I've been working and talking with them for a number of years now and the more I spend time with them the more I want to give up my day job and become one of their customers.  NI has built an incredibly strong business and even stronger community focused on making it possible for researchers to turn their ideas into reality, one step at a time.  They got started by connecting your PC (actually, it was a Mac, bless their hearts) to laboratory instruments.  Over time, they got better and better at that and, more recently, began to focus on the migration of ideas from laboratory experiments to actual production.  They've built a series of chipsets and systems that support migrating an idea from 1 unit to 10 to 100 to 1000's. 

Anyway, they've become to prototyping in hard-core science and engineering what foam core and the glue gun are to prototyping in design school.  And most recently, John Hanks, vice president of product marketing for data acquisition and industrial control, posted on their rules for prototyping (summarized here):

1 Recognize That Ideas Are Cheap.

2 Start with a Paper Design.

3 Put in Just Enough Work.

4 Anticipate for Multiple Options.

5 Design for Reuse in the Final Product.

6 Avoid Focusing on Cost Too Early.

7 Fight “Reversion to the Mean.”

8 Ensure You Can Demonstrate Your Prototype.

Thinking about networks

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A great post by my brother, Steve Hargadon, describes the challenges facing anyone trying to create, or re-create, a new business: Long-handled Spoons. The story, excerpted here, goes as follows:

A Rabbi asks to see Heaven and Hell. His wish is granted and he’s taken to a room where everyone is seated at a long dinner table with delicious food in front of them.  However, everyone there is starving and emaciated.  This is because, the Rabbi discovers, while each has a long spoon strapped to his or her wrist, the spoon is so long they cannot pick up the food and actually put it in their mouths. They are utterly frustrated and bitterly unhappy. The Rabbi is told that this is Hell.

He is then taken to another room with everyone seated at an identical long table with delicious food, and each individual also has a long spoon strapped to his or her wrist.  These people, however, are well-fed, for they have learned that their spoons are perfectly designed to allow them to feed each other, which they are doing quite naturally.  They are joyous, happy, and contented.  The Rabbi is told that this is Heaven.

Steve uses it to discuss web 2.0 and the difficulties that the traditional business mindset has in wrapping itself around true collaboration. In a more obtuse way, I posted earlier about my fear that Apple saw the need to connect our digital networks, but is falling short of enabling a truly open experience because of their insistence on being the hub of a network that will, ultimately, have no hub.  Our posts seem to be two views of the same problem (what would you expect from two brothers?).

The lack of collaboration is not new but the internet has made the problem all the more obvious and acute.  While some people hold on to their proprietary offerings, collaborators are growing like weeds around them.  This is all obvious, but what I find fascinating, and what the lesson of the long spoon is getting at, brings us down from the level of technological trends, web2.0 evangelism, and social networks and into the challenge of changing the way people think and act.

How do people conceive of new ventures that are networked at their core?  Meaning new businesses that are originally designed for, and evolve around, collaboration as the primary way in which value is created and delivered.  Forget the long-tail–this is the challenge of the long spoon.

As importantly, how do people living in organizations designed to profit from proprietary products and services allow aspects of their business to experiment with and evolve into more open and collaborative business models?  Can large organizations change the way they treat suppliers, competitors, and potential partners fast enough to evolve with emerging markets?  I’ve know companies that can’t get an NDA through legal in under 6 weeks–how are they going to explore and experiment with partnering in these conditions?

Reconciling design and PR in the big three…

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Bob Lutz, vice-chairman of global product development at GM, announced his retirement at the end of this year (Losing Lutz).  His stated reasons give some insight into the mindset at the top of the big three American car companies about the role of design, and public relations, in developing and selling cars (and themselves) to the American public:

…a bigger tipping point for Lutz was the government’s increasingly hands-on role in how cars will be made. Lutz said he was looking ahead at engineering and designing new cars to meet tougher government-mandated fuel economy rules rather than strictly to spark passion among car buyers—and thought it would be a good time to start moving out. “What I have proven to be best at is the psychological and emotional end of the business, designing what people want,” Lutz said in an interview. “We’re seeing an increase in regulation. This is one reason I think it will be a good time to retire. I won’t have to worry about that stuff.”

To hear the head of global product development complain about new design constraints is a bit surprising. Or not. But it is a lesson in how the mighty have fallen.  Here are five reasons why this response reveals a lot about just how broken this industry is.

1. Design is art practiced under commercial constraints. Henry Ford’s offer of “any color, so long as it’s black” was an admission that black was, at the time, the only color for fast-drying lacquer, and thus a constraint in designing for mass-production. Good design embraces constraints because doing so creates new market opportunities.  Bad design avoids constraints and, by doing so, limits opportunities.

2. The automobile industry, like any old and established industry, has been dealing with government-mandated constraints since before today’s executives were born. Unleaded gas, seat belts, and air bags were all sure to bring the auto industry to its knees, and yet miraculously did not.  Imagine what would have happened if the big three, instead of lobbying against fuel efficiency for the past 30 years, embraced it.

3. One of the strongest arguments GM and others put forward in the past few years for why they would not design in more fuel-efficiency was that their customers did not want it and would not pay for it. Six months after the bottom of the SUV market fell out, it is hubris I hear when Bob Lutz says his strength is “designing what people want.” That works when people are buying what you’re building, but doesn’t when they’re not. 

4. While Lutz is complaining about being unable to design fuel-efficient cars, Ford’s PR guys are touting their “dusting off” of fuel-efficiency technologies shelved decades ago (Ford see the future). And US cars currently average 21mpg, far below European and Japanese cars averages of 36 mpg and 31 mpg respectively. Efficient design solutions are already widely known and widely used–just not here. 

5. Finally and most critically, when it comes to designing new cars, Lutz has lost the distinction between design and public relations. Faced with new design challenges, it seems Lutz would rather reach for a microphone than a drawing board. The head of GMs product development has blamed more than the government for the challenge of designing better cars–also competitors, environmentalists, democrats, and even the Union of Concerned Scientists (saying “I’m not sure if they are concerned,” he said. “But they are certainly not scientists.” BW 11/2007).

When Alfred Sloan tapped Harley Earl in 1927 to design the new Cadillac, and later found the Art & Colour Department, GM led the world in design.  Times have changed. 

Greenbox, where IT meets energy

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Feature-2
A very nice story on Greenbox graced the cover of February’s Entrepreneur magazine.  Greenbox is a San Bruno startup pulling together and repackaging information about residential energy consumption.

“We’re calling it interactive energy management,”
says Smith, Greenbox’s vice president of marketing. “How do you get
[homeowners] more engaged with how, where and when they use energy and
give them the tools to make better decisions?”

There are only a few places where Energy Efficiency has a chance to make real gains in the traditional model of Si Vallety entrepreneurship: low capital investment, high proprietary technology, and scalability. Greenbox is aiming directly at one of these places–the intersection between households, home area networks, smart meters, and utility databases, where a few smart programmers and marketing guys can create a set of tools and relationships that can find rapid growth and, hopefully, impact.

The idea is similar to the flies engraved in urinals (see Nudges)–given something to aim for, it’s amazing how consumers can be nudged to change their behavior despite a lack of clear incentives for doing so. Given the costs of improving existing energy infrastructure, and the relatively low returns to individual homeowners (even if they are better than investing in solar), changing behavior through non-economic means may be the most economical strategy.

Greenbox is one of a number of similar efforts in this area, but also one of the leading companies and thus one to follow.

[author’s note: a special shout-out to Matt Smitt, who participated in the Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy 07]

Back to design basics

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Gizmodo's review of Amazon's new Kindle2 ran a nice design test–Dieter Rams' Ten Design Principles. It's been a while since I'd seen them and so, in the spirit of acknowledging what has already been said (while everyone tries to say it again better), I am doing my part to help re-circulate these good words of advice:

01. Good design is innovative.
02. Good design makes a product useful.

03. Good design is aesthetic.

04. Good design helps us to understand a product.

05. Good design is unobtrusive.

06. Good design is honest.

07. Good design is durable.

08. Good design is consequent to the last detail.

09. Good design is concerned with the environment.

10. Good design is as little design as possible.

Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Because at heart, and in our work, all of us engage in designing in some form or other, we should always be asking ourselves how well our work (products or services) measure up to these timeless principles. 

For those wondering who Dieter Rams is, the Design Museum has a nice page with examples of his work.

One of the great innovation challenges: Energy Efficiency

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A recent NYT editorial, Energy Inefficiency, eloquently laid out the reasons why energy efficiency is the best, cheapest, and most abundant alternative energy.  It also revealed why energy efficiency is one of the greatest innovation challenges we will face in the coming decades.

So much attention has gone to advancing the usual suspects–e.g., solar, wind, and bio-fuels–with the hopes that each will one day compete with coal-based energy costs. Current energy efficiency alternatives already do.

Yet here we are, editorializing on the benefits of a set of technologies that are, on paper at least, the more economically rational choices.  The McKinsey Global Institute study mentioned in the editorial compared available solutions to the climate crisis and found energy efficiency (which they rebrand as "energy productivity") to be the best returns for investments.  

..the economics of investing i
n energy productivity—the level of output we achieve from the energy we consume—are very attractive. With an average internal rate of return of 17 percent, such investments would generate energy savings ramping up to $900 billion annually by 2020. Energy
productivity is also the most cost-effective way to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG)… Moreover, the opportunities to boost energy productivity use existing technologies that pay for themselves and therefore free up resources for invest
ent or consumption elsewhere.

So why hasn't it caught on? Because embracing and advancing energy efficiency requires us to go against some dearly-held but false beliefs about innovation (and capitalism, for that matter).

First, that innovation is about two kids in a garage bucking the status-quo.  That's a fine story for starting new markets, where scale and performance won't truly matter for decades (imagine if our energy infrastructure had the reliability of Microsoft'
Vista). But the energy sector is one of the oldest and largest industries in the country, and has been heavily regulated since lamplighters first unionized and the gas companies first began funding politicians in the mid-1800s. Meaningful innovations in
the energy sector must coordinate with public policy, and few entrepreneurs and investors trained in Silicon Valley smash-and-grab capitalism have the savvy and willpower to engage in these long, politically sophisticated efforts.

Second and related, that the free market will, if left alone, solve major problems like the climate crisis and energy security. To suggest that federal and state governments should leave energy innovations to the "free market" is to deny that western governments have
always played central roles in shaping the energy sector, including the current political boundaries of the Middle East. The current structure is a product of past and present policies, which directly and indirectly subsidize the costs of petroleum- and
coal-based energy. Innovations of the scale and scope we hope for will require accompanying regulations and subsidies to level the playing field.

Third, that the best solutions are new ones. Most stories of innovation focus on invention, but
the real force behind breakthrough innovations lies in harnessing what's already been developed and practiced somewhere else.  The light bulb was 40 years old when Edison "invented" it; his contribution was being the first to tie that existing light
bulb to innovations in energy generation and distribution (including borrowing the business model from the gas utilities).  Spending more money to invent new technologies is not the answer. In the words of economist, Joseph Schumpeter, Innovation doe
not "consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits.
It consists in getting things done."   

The greatest challenge to energy efficiency is not to make an already economically rational decision even more so. It's overcoming the biases that give shape to policy, investment, and entrepreneurial activities favoring more expensive and less developed alternatives.

Until everyone involved–researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, corporations, and policy makers–acknowledge these challenges, the best, cheapest, and most abundant alternative energy available will go untapped.

Apple and the great confusion

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As we approach the beginning of the new year–measured by Apple fanatics with the January MacWorld–it’s worth reflecting on Apple’s recent past and rapidly-approaching future because it offers a glimpse into deep changes underway.
DSCN0716_01

For the past decade, Apple has served as our visionary guide to the future of personal computing coal.  Apple’s vision took shape in 2001, when Steve Jobs introduced the concept of Apple as the digital hub of our computing experience.  It was a good insight then, made brilliant by the actual products and services Apple created to seamlessly connect us with our new digital cameras, DVDs, and music.  We were at the dawn of a new digital world, and Apple made sense of (and money off) it better than anyone else.

Now, 10,000 photos and 3,500 songs later, we’re at a similarly significant inflection point. This MacWorld, Apple shows they either get the next new world or they don’t.

It all began, as Tim Bajarin wrote in Personal Computer World (Home on the digital range),

At Macworld in early 2001, Apple chief executive, Steve Jobs, used his keynote address to introduce what has become a most important concept in the world of personal computers. He unveiled a diverse set of multimedia applications such as Itunes, Imovie, Idvd and Iphoto and told thousands of the Apple faithful that the Mac would become the digital server of their homes – their creative nerve centre.

People with digital tools such as cameras, MP3 players, digital movie cameras and PDAs would use the new software to manage their digital photos, music, movies and data. Later that year, Apple even launched its Ipod MP3 player and later tied it to the Itunes online music store. This made Apple a leader in innovative use of ‘digital lifestyle’ technology.

I remember where I was that day–do you?  No matter, because everyone felt the impact of Apple’s vision and products.  The iPod was released later that year and Macintosh computer sales grew along with its success.  The digital world changed completely and the Mac (and, begrudgingly, the PC) did indeed become our hub.  But some very deep but subtle shifts have taken place since then.

The Great Confusion

While Macintosh (more accurately OS X) has served faithfully as our digital hub over the past decade, we as digital consumers have changed.  We’re the hub now.  Our digital and analog lives have continued to confuse–a term Neal Stephenson reminds wonderfully in his Baroque Cycle trilogy means also the process of mingling two previously distinct alloys.  It may be confusing for those experiencing the mingling in the moment but, ultimately, it results in a single and coherent reality.

In other words, I’m no longer outside the digital world, occasionally choosing to look in on it.  That distinction is gone. Confused.

My experience of news is confused: I read the morning papers scanning for the items I have not already seen online; when I find interesting articles, I go online to send them to someone (or myself); maybe I blog about them; and I learn as much by what others send me.

Music?  Confused again.  iTunes carries my own music collection, but Pandora’s gentle introduction of artists I like but had never heard of before has become as much a part of my Sunday morning ritual as bagels and the New York Times.  And Shazam (thank you, iPhone) allows me to engage with the music streaming around me wherever I go.

Even traditional computing activities–if you’re willing to concede that email and word-processing are now old school–are confused.  I get email on my desktop at the office and at home, on my iPhone and Blackberry, and in an emergency, on any other internet device I need thanks to googlemail and (more clumsily) mobileme. If anything, I miss old days when email was a different world.

The experience of word processing–what others once called writing–is equally confused. I abandoned MS Word for its complexity and insularity, moving to googledocs for its simplicity, availability (whether home, office, or hotel) and, increasingly, collaborative capabilities. This last distinction speaks volumes on the difference between digital and connected. MS Office documents requires constant vigilance to keep versions and edits distinct and separate. But writing is no longer solitary.  Drafts move between authors instantaneously, and between iterations via twitters, blog posts, and essays before becoming published pieces (if at all).

So many other digital and analog experiences have confused as well. Photos moved from digital archives to online and shared instantly with distant cousins. Family calendars are online and updated at the dinner table. Not to mention casual conversation, which email, texting, and social networking has confused completely with real contact–just look at any corporate meeting. You get the point.

And that means my experience of the digital world no longer comes through a single screen–whether a desktop, laptop, or phone.  It comes through more screens than I can count and, in the next few years, than I could imagine. It’s nothing new to say we’re immersed now in the digital world.

Doors in a meadow

What’s new is that there is a titanic struggle underway for control of the hub of that digital world. We’ve come so far since Apple declared themselves the hub that the idea of them as the hub–and us as a spoke connecting, through the PC, to all things digital–no longer fits.

Eight years ago Apple showed us how computer companies could embrace and enrich our digital experiences. We listened. We bought digital cameras, iPods, laptops, smart phones, Chumbies, Sonos, eeePCs, and everything else under the sun.  And, in the process of engaging with them, we evolved.

Anyone who wants to control my access to the digital world today is building a door in the middle of a meadow and telling me I need to use it. Apple’s iPhone has brought me some wonderful apps (including Pandora, Sonos, and Shazam) but it has yet to allow me access to google calendar or googledocs–despite Apple’s insistence that insular iCal and .mac are enough. That’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.  It’s too easy to see the rest of the meadow, to see where I want to go, and to want to use the shortest path to get there.

For years before Apple anointed themselves hub in 2001, we saw the digital revolution coming.  The same is true today with the great confusion.  It’s anyone’s guess how Apple, or Google, or anyone else will make money when we want access to everything through everything. But that future’s already here, and companies that don’t recognize it are going to keep building doors we’d rather not use.

So Apple now sits with us, on the verge of the next major transition.  Are they going to announce a radical change in strategy?  I hope so, since we did well by them the last time. But that may be asking too much of a company where lightning has already struck twice.  Stay tuned.

Food & Health Entrepreneurship Academy

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The Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Davis will be hosting the Food & Health Entrepreneurship Academy (FHEA), on February 23-27, 2009 at the University of California, Davis campus. This new program, run in conjunction with the UC Davis Foods for Health Institute and sponsored by Unilever, Pepsico, is focused on the fields of nutrition, viticulture & enology, plant science, biochemistry, nutritional genomics and fields relevant to food and health.

These Entrepreneurship Academies are designed to train university and industry researchers on how to identify, evaluate, develop, and advance the commercial opportunities created by their scientific research. It’s a one-week “bootcamp” where participants learn the basics of the business side of innovation and evaluation by working on the potential of their own research. We’ve developed an effective curriculum focused on the migrating technology from laboratory science to broader application which is then taught by a faculty comprised of academics, entrepreneurs, angel and venture capitalists, and IP lawyers. In this way, participants gain both a solid educational experience as well as a valuable networking experience.

FHEA follows on the success of our Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy (GTEA), which brings researchers from across the world to UC Davis’s Tahoe facilities, where they learn and advance their technologies under the guidance of leading early-stage “green technology” entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and related professionals. And, like GTEA, the Food & Health Entrepreneurship Academy builds on one of the campus’s core research strengths.

For researchers, it’s an opportunity to (1) analyze, enhance, and communicate the value of your research, (2)
explore the business opportunities their research creates, (3) build the skill sets for a career in industry research, and (4)design future research programs that address and align with practical applications.

Prototyping a great leap forward

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A relatively recent but great leap forward in prototyping received some deserved attention in a NYT article today, “If No One See It, Is It an Invention.” The article, by Leslie Berlin, describes Johnny Lee Chung (a Carnegie Mellon graduate student) and self-produced short youtube videos of his inventions.  A great example is his low-cost Wii-hacked interactive white board.  And these videos have been a big hit–viewed by millions, used by school kids, and landing him a nice job at Microsoft. 

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote

While not addressing it directly, this article captures a slowly emerging but immensely powerful tool in the innovation toolkit: the short video as prototype. Prototyping usually involves designing, building, and testing aspects of the technology or product features in order to learn what works and what needs improvement. The mantra: express, test, cycle.

Perhaps not surprisingly, effective technology development teams embrace prototyping to design products and services.  Yet those same engineers and scientists turn around and try to describe and sell their ideas without designing the communication process.

The short video, done well, not only communicates more information in 3 minutes than a powerpoint presentation can get across in 15 minutes, but allows for prototyping.  Express, test, cycle.

I have seen short videos, developed and shared, that were the deciding factor in internally selling new product platforms. And as a result, we now require our students to present their ideas for new businesses or compelling markets in this format. This turns the usual (and painful) 15 minute presentation that inevitably goes long and off-script into 3 minutes, leaving 12 for questions and answers. Further, it forces the students to triage: focus on the most important information and get rid of the chatter.

Johnny Chung Lee’s videos are nicely humble and low-tech–and had held camera and headshot of him describing the technology.  But we’ve found slideshows that combine images, text, and brief clips of user testimonials to be a far better means of describing customer problems, compelling solutions, and potential business models. 

Few compare in quality and emotional impact to the Girl Effect, so right now this serves as the best to strive for.

The Girl Effect

99 Nights

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In the movie Cinema Paradiso, there is an allegory told which underpins
the movie.  It also applies, too well, to the process of innovation and
entrepreneurship:

Once upon a time a king gave a feast and there were all the most beautiful princesses of the realm. Basta, one of the guards, saw the king's daughter: she was the loveliest of all! And he immediately fell in love with her. But what could a poor soldier do compared with a king's daughter?!…One day he managed to meet her and told her he couldn't live without her. The princess was so struck by the depth of his feeling that she said to the soldier 'If you will wait a hundred days and a hundred nights beneath my balcony, then in the end I'll be yours.' Christ, the soldier ran off there and waited! One day, two days, ten, twenty…Every night she looked out of her window, but he never budged. Come rain, wind, snow, never budged! The birds shat on him and the bees ate him alive! After ninety nights he was gaunt and pale and tears streamed from his eyes but he couldn't hold them back. He didn't even have the strength to sleep any more. The princess kept watch…And on the ninety-ninth night, the soldier got up, picked up his chair and left!

and towards the end of the film…

Now I understand why the soldier went away just before the end. That's right, just one more night and the princess would have been his. But she, also, could not have kept her promise. And…that would have been terrible, he would have died from it. So instead, for ninety-nine nights at least he had lived with the illusion that she was there waiting for him…

This story resonated with our experiences working
with innovators and entrepreneurs. Particularly following the recent
activities of our students, noted in this blog.

It's all too tempting for innovators and entrepreneurs to labor away on their
dream, all the while ignoring life's (or at least the market's)
realities. Students can imagine, in the safety of case studies and
management readings, that they are preparing themselves to become the
stuff of business legends. Garage tinkerers can sweat over their
lathes, or computers, and imagine how they will spend their
riches and write their memoirs. For these folks, however, there is no
99th night. They are the dreamers without a plan, the tinkerers who've
been at it for 10 years or
more, never taking the steps to turn their ideas into action. It's
safer to believe in the idea of the idea than to take the actions
necessary to find out if it can be turned into a reality.
I'm
not arguing against sacrifice–just against unnecessary sacrifice. For
the folks who want more than the dream, waiting until the 99th night to
ask the questions wastes precious time that could have been spent
finding the answers to move the idea forward or move on. If
you want to build a better mousetrap, what can you do on the
first night to make sure the world needs one? If the big uncertainty
lies in the
technology, what can you do, on the first night, to make sure it will
work? In our programs, we ask our students to
test their idea and its validity in the market by talking to customers
and trying to sell them their product. Asking the questions and finding
out early in the process whether a customer sees value in your
technology or product gives you the answers you need to move
forward–whether it means revamping your product to fit the customers'
pain or scrapping it altogether.
I've
written recently about the need to take the right action in
launching new ideas and new companies–because actions ground entrepreneurs
in reality. Action grounds ideas in reality–by testing and improving
them. If you're right, great. If you're wrong, better to embrace that
reality on the 1st night, or even the 30th night, than the 99th.

It's
tempting to sit on a bench and dream of a better world, but better
worlds don't come to those who are unwilling or afraid to put their dreams to the test. They come
to those who are willing to ask the questions and do the work.

*The story is one taken, with liberties, from the Noh play Kayoi
Komachi, which tells how Ono no Komachi finds herself the object of a
Guard Captain's ardent love. To prove his love, she
requested, he was to visit her house one hundred
successive nights before being admitted. For 99 nights, he faithfully
visited her, only to die of exposure from a
snowstorm the last night.  In both cases, the tragedy remains.

–with Nicole Starsinic