Innov-ex Innovation blog

2011 Oct John Cleare visit to the MHT archive - Mike Parsons - Picasa Web Albums

2011-10-31T22:09:00.000Z

2011 Oct John Cleare visit to the MHT archive - Mike Parsons - Picasa Web Albums:

Had a great few days wandering the hills by day, talking, talking all evening and half the night.

John Cleare brought some mountain tools which I have been researching for a story within our new site area called Gear Timezone, all about iconic gear, in this case the story of dropped-pick axes and the revolution which made Scotland the birthplace of modern ice climbing.

http://innovation-for-extremes.net/gear-timezone/

John C was accompanied by a friend Pin Howell, oft known in the 70's and 80's as 'Mr East Africa climbing'. I recall fondlt using his bivi shelter on the summit of Mt Kenya in Dec 1989.

Maxine suddenly realised there was a letter from John in the recently acquired Bonington archive, dated 1971 and written from Everest; John read it aloud to us all and I was unsure who was the most amazed, he or us!

Al Hinkes joined us and Marian did an amazing job joining the banter but most importantly keeping us all well fed and watered. The axes, 'Terrordactyls' were from Derek Gamble, one time engineer and partner in the McInnes-Peck climbing gear business

Picture gallery below.

'via Blog this'

Emerging technologies: what are they and why?

2011-06-16T17:27:00.002+01:00

Emerging Technologies
What they are and why they matter ?
Threat or opportunity?

What is a technology?

It can be as simple as a stone axe or as complex as a nuclear power plant, but its still technology. It also includes things like eg Facebook, Twitter and new software for creating a high ranking on Google search.

What is significant about the word ‘emerging’?

New technologies are important because they can lead to new companies and even whole new industries. If, as a business you can spot one early on and grasp it by turning it into services or products your customers need, you can grow your whole business on the back of it.

Let’s look at a few historical examples within the outdoor trade.

Macintosh opened his factory in Manchester in the 1830s, having developed a revolutionary new technology for coating fabrics with rubber to make them waterproof. He not only developed a large business of his own making waterproof clothing, but the whole of the Manchester area became a centre for producing coated fabrics. By the 1890s 80% of the world’s supply of waterproof garments, called Macintoshes of course, were produced in Manchester.

Fast forward then to the late 70s and the outdoor business.

There was a retail store called LD Mountain Centre founded in 1966 in Newcastle. In 1972 the owners wished to branch out into manufacturing packs. They battled hard with Karrimor, who weren't for giving up their rucksack domain, but didn't make the progress they wished for. By the late 70s one of the directors of an American company in the aircraft industry, had the idea of using their existing and emerging technologies with PTFE to produce waterproof clothing. In this case the fabric was not coated but used a PTFE laminate. It did something different which the original Macintosh (and all its successors) did not do. It allowed the wearer to have greater comfort because it was able to let moisture vapour ie sweat, out. This was undoubtedly an emerging technology and initially imperfect partly because the unsealed seams leaked. But after a difficult period solutions were found.

Berghaus went on to build their business throughout Europe and the world on these new emerging technologies supplied by W.L. Gore. Being there at the right time when the new emerging technology is little known, can be the key to the founding of a great business.

Fast forward another 30 years and there was a small retail store in Ambleside who became the first company in the outdoor business, the first in the UK, in any business to sell products from an online website. By 1996 they were quoted by the DTI as an example of best innovative practice and the business proceeded to grow strongly without increases in their retail footage. When the business of Up and Running was eventually sold in approximately 2005 the Internet business had grown strongly without outgrown the physical and that was retained by the owner and move to a new location in Carnforth, and the retail store being sold and renamed Lakeland climber and runner.

Emerging technologies can be both great opportunities, but they can also be a threat particularly if those new technologies are taken up by your competitors sooner than you, or if perhaps your competitor has a period of exclusivity.

Examples: Karrimor built its pack business on emerging technologies in textiles and moulded plastics. Their earliest products, however, were cycle bags. These declined for many years but then Karrimor took the opportunity to transfer some new technologies from packs to cycle bags, growing its cycle bag business substantially again. After enduring a period of leadership in this cycle bag market for 15 -- 20 years there emerged a German company, Ortlieb, with new technologies which could produce a waterproof product without any need for tape seam sealing machines as used in garments. Karrimor, despite trying very hard indeed was unable to respond to the challenge in this case and was more or less eliminated from this marketplace in due course.

Examples of companies which have grown mainly on the back of emerging technologies are
Patagonia, ( fleece) Arcterix, Thermarest and Platypus, Garmin, Helly Hansen ( first base layer) Salewa ( first adjustable crampon) but this just a few of many.

Summary.

Even if you are not able technically or financially to respond to new technologies, you really do need to be aware of how to defend yourself against these emerging technologies. This is because your principal competitors will be using them against you.

The same is true whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor or wholesaler the Innov_ex conference at Lancaster University, is one of the best places to take time out to find out about emerging technologies. Here are some examples from the 2011 Innov_ex conference :

Social Media ,Search Engine Optimisation, Smart Retail,SMART Fabrics,Biosynthetics for textiles, Bioceramic membranes, FabLab

These are all available on Slideshare and there is a link from our website http://innovation-for-extremes.net/conference/agenda-and-downloads/
For more see you at Innov_ex in April 2012!

What teaching innovation teaches us

2010-11-01T19:04:00.000Z

Last week was the first week for Mary and I’s seventh year teaching a 10 week courses to undergraduate, post graduate and some PhD students.

Each workshop ( we don't give lectures to the shock of some students) consists of a theory track and an analytical session around articles on innovations that student teams (yes that's another shock to them) have posted onto the VLE ( virtual learning environment) .

If you are a business person reading this don’t misunderstand the word theory as I once did and assume it was something theoretical and therefore impractical. All the theory is researched from the leading academic and industrial literature. It enables us to analyze the innovations ‘posted ‘ by students (and we call it iSEARCH) and consider how, why and if it will take off and with what implications. Each Autumn term we review and analyse with students around 120 innovations; everything from cars, consumer electronics to alternative energy sources and eco- packaging and medical devices, no limits no boundaries are given.

What we are finding within the first week is some remarkable continuity from our teaching sessions of a year ago, but some amazing and potentially serious discontinuities coming up for industry and consumer electronics products at large.

ew Internet TV system, complete with mobile qLast year Google Android was well established and on the cards to be launching new devices, larger of course than Google mobiles and based on Linux forming a new OS ( operating system) for net books to PCs. This is still happening although Google appears to be running late in linking their G docs system with all their other applications. This of course goes unreported because Google never ever say where is is going or when it will do it by. Google ‘wave’ came up and was reviewed as a failed innovation, but is it? More later on Google watch blog.
Two big surprises have come up. Two big surprises have come up. SONY launched a new Internet TV system, complete with mobile qwerty keyboard ( embracing Blu-Ray as std of course) and using a Google TV interface which we don’t yet know if its G android or G chrome based. They are offering online content as one of the 3 largest film studio owners and obviously trying very hard not to be left standing this time by another happening like Apple iTunes / iPOD. The system even interrelates further if you find a URL on your Google Android phone, you can throw it to the larger screen. The interrelated benefits for Google’s advertising business model is a further matter.
We believe what we are now seeing is the beginning of the end of the total dominance of the WINTEL platform as the dominant design for the architecture personal computers and devices.Or not so much an ending but the beginning of real and exciting choices and probably lower cost options for Open Source operating systems.
So will all this undermine Microsoft ? Not a bit of it, A year ago our students on iSEARCH found that MS had devised a response to the Nintendo Wii, but it sounded to have even wider usage.
Details are now emerging that this interactive screen device is not merely for gamers but is a new method of viewing on a screen. The screen also has it own camera which recognises you the owner and you can even use an avatar ( of you and your size) to show yourself in clothes being sold online. No MS are not getting behind they are coming in fast from the right wings. Their Windows 7 mobile is getting good ratings, for consumers the choice is already amazing.

TRICOUNI - climbing nails as tech equipment #1

2010-09-06T09:56:00.054+01:00

Whilst I was away over the summer, climbing in Val Bregaglia, Switzerland, Mary relayed me a message from someone, then unknown, asking if we knew if Mallory used Tricouni nails on his boots.

From Mallory Boot

I picked up the email conversation saying we had replicated the Mallory 1924 clothing but not the boots so didn't know that detail. But I doubted it it as they were a pattern I hadn't seen before. Well to cut a long story short this Geneva mountaineer came to see me in Patterdale, I didn't give him lunch but took him up Pinnacle ridge, an aperitif as one might say to English mountains and he seemed to like them.

But the conversation with the scramble was fascinating, revealing to my surprise that Tricouni was still operating as a company and much else and also that having viewed the boots at the Royal Geographical Society in London he was delighted to say that they were Tricouni nails. Sadly the English press always refers to nails with the derogatory expression 'hob nailed' boots - meaning old fashioned and useless. But climbing nails were highly technical, selected and customised by the user to different types of rock and the style of user and often obviated the use of crampons ( as was the case with Mallory whose footwear was 40% lighter than modern day climbers ).

Before launching into the full story here is an extract from our book

Invisible on Everest

'Invisible on Everest' and we will carry through this fascinating story in #2 of this Tricouni blog and also tell you how the 1924 expedition managed the insulation problems which nails cause.
Extract from Invisible on Everest

Félix Genecand, a jeweller by profession and passionate climber based in Geneva, Switzerland, designed a new type of boot nail and nailing system in 1912 which was a performance breakthrough. This was because he was able to harden nails for the first time by making them in 2 pieces. The hard gripping part was brazed to the softer malleable part which was attached to the boot by a transverse double nail. The hardened steel nails were aligned with the periphery of the toe of the boot. so giving the boot and the climber the ability to grip a much smaller hold, even to a small pebble. Additionally the nails could be fitted without the specialist help of a cobbler and ensured greater length of life. The name he gave to these nails was the affectionate nickname given to him personally by his climbing friends, "Tricouni" after the climb of the same name in the Salève near Geneva. Nailed boots were not only very effective on wet, lichenous or ice covered rock, but were better than today's moulded rubber soles. For many alpine climbs of the day, crampons were unnecessary because nailed boots were perfect on nevée slopes and good in ice steps. This very effectiveness arguably slowed down the progression of crampon development and usage.

The critical issue with this type of footwear was insulation, because nails were perfect for conducting heat away from the feet. It was customary practice for alpine climbers to select boots large enough to be used with two pairs of socks. For Himalayan climbing the sizing was increased to allow three pairs of socks. However, simply adding more pairs of socks could not solve the problem and there were many attempts to improve boot design.

Kindle sparks thoughts on work practice

2010-08-31T21:08:00.001+01:00

Kindle sparks thoughts on work practice

At the end of July my Amazon Kindle arrived. I had been thinking about an e-reader for sometime –delaying partly on price, on book choice and wondering what would emerge as the standard. Well price had come down, book choice improving and the jury is still out on which – Kindle, Nook, iPad or Sony- will emerge as the dominant design. But certainly looks to be a trend towards the tipping point for ebooks. Other changes are going on alongside as iPod sales begin to give way to apps.

So what pushed my choice over the edge? Well several things really. There is a Kindle app on my phone and, in curiosity I downloaded an out of copyright version of Pride and Prejudice, just to see what happened. No real desire to read a long book on my phone but was impressed with ease and speed. Also I was off on holiday shortly after and part of the treat is having time to read, but we travel light –or try to, and I thought a Kindle might help solve that-especially as so often I read books on holiday that I will not re-read. A couple of friends had described how they were more and more attached to their Kindles, especially for this reason.

But the real persuader for me was partly linked to work. I also picked up a blog on Inside Higher Ed by Alex Golub describing how Kindle had begun to change his way of working – showing there is more to Kindle than leisure reading. It really fired me up.

For me, as a historian, there were additional attractions. I am doing some work on attitudes to business in universities and was searching online for some fairly obscure out of copyright books on American universities. This took me to Internet Archive – the site drawing together digitised materials of all kinds and involving a network of universities worldwide. I found what I was looking for, could read it on my PC, but noticed an option to free download onto Kindle. It was this option that grabbed my imagination and almost made the decision for me.

Ten years ago Mike and I were beginning to research Invisible on Everest. In 2000 it was possible to access some- though not all- library and archive catalogues online but their contents involved travelling. Weeks were spent in the British Library and the libraries of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society reading published and archived accounts of experiences of climbers and explorers in the past, a marvellous sense of feeling part of another world. But all that travelling was costly and time consuming. This year on my trip to the Alps I downloaded copyright free material onto my Kindle. I especially enjoyed dipping into Elizabeth Tuckett Pictures from the Tyrol and Elsewhere (1866)(sister of climber Francis Tuckett) - her journey covered many of the same areas we were visiting, rather surprisingly including the Lechtal -our final destination. The option of carrying it with me and comparing experiences in situ opened a whole new comparative research world, quite apart from adding a new dimension to my holiday. Of course in past perfectly possible to photocopy and carry but then there was the weight and bulk. In How Bad are Bananas Mike Berners-Lee cautions against seeing e-readers as saving carbon footprint and I would agree if all I was doing is reading novels. But being able to read work PDFs and out of copyright materials means I will print and travel less and so changes practice.

My reactions have surprised me - I love books, have a house and an office full of them. But using an e-reader has opened new possibilities and I am keen to see what follows.

How Bad are Bananas?

2010-05-22T23:05:00.004+01:00

Mike Berners-Lee runs his business Small World Consulting in the Lancaster University Environment Centre – very close the Management School.

We first met him a couple of years ago after we repositioned Innov_ex to focus on how the outdoor industries could respond to the challenges of global warming. First meeting highlighted shared interests from someone who had also worked in the outdoor door industry and is himself a keen fell runner, someone who was immediately interested in what we were trying to do through Innov_ex. We understood the same worlds.

But this was someone who combined a passionate enthusiasm for making a difference on climate change, who also has the scientific knowledge to explain the complexity of the problem and who was entirely honest about the difficulties of measuring man made impacts on the environment. The term carbon footprint is much abused, but Mike defines it as the best estimate of full climate change impact of the decisions we make. He likens measuring it to making a usable map, suggesting we are at the very beginning of understanding how to do it. He is immensely knowledgeable about the differing measuring techniques- something he has explored and debated at Innov_ex 09 and Innov_ex 10. His calculations help individuals and businesses make ‘choices that matter’ and this means looking at the whole supply chain NOT the ‘toe print’. As he says ‘the measures may not be perfect but they are better than nothing’. We got him to Carbon Footprint Innov_ex 2009 to see what we needed to think about to reduce out carbon foot. We have enjoyed How Bad are Bananas? because it is readable, honest and accessible, having a real integrity to it while avoiding evangelical preaching. It is full of surprises and explodes many myths.

Innov_ex delegates will be familiar with all the myths around natural versus synthetic – it generally is not greener to buy cotton rather than synthetic or leather rather than plastic because of the energy and nasty chemicals involved in processing. Mike explains why. Paper (even recycled paper) are not kinder to the climate than plastic bags, although Mike makes it clear that plastic is nasty for lots of other reasons as well. Making a difference in terms of climate change involves as Mike says ‘picking your battles and thinking of the whole.

The big underlying message of How Bad are Bananas is about avoiding waste – of energy, resources and time. He goes through common foodstuffs, products and processes and explains vividly why some matter more than others and how hidden waste lurks in so much of what we do. My favourite example is e-mail lower carbon footprint than a letter but we do it more and often unnecessarily leading to higher carbon living. So think the next time you unnecessarily copy someone into an e-mail!

A really great read, much recommended. And by the way bananas aren't bad at all !!
The book has had some great media coverage :

Click here for review in New Scientist
The Guardian
The BBC

Climate change needs collaboration

2010-03-08T21:09:00.000Z

Naturally we were all disappointed that the Copenhagen climate conference lacked concrete results. However, in another sense there was progress, with 190 countries agreeing that climate change is man-made. One of the people who has contributed significantly to actually making the shift in understanding from disbelief to belief is of course Al Gore, in his book An Inconvenient Truth. His new book Our Choice sets out to prove that change is possible and indicates those technologies that are working towards change, those which need improving and those which need replacing. The message that comes through strongly is that achieving change cannot be done in isolation. Sustainable economic progress will need collaboration within and across sectors and across boundaries. In an effort to stimulate debate and change in outdoor industries, his is a theme addressed at this year's Innovation for Extremes by members of the European Outdoor Group's see the Innov_ex 10 Conference Agenda

HANGING UP MY BOOTS?

2010-02-04T18:48:00.004Z

well not exactly!

exiting the cornice, taken by Al Hinkes on Feb 3rd 2010.

and the story of the boots above? well what is follows in next blog is the story of my personal footwear and how it is inextricably intertwined with my footwear career.Here are some action pics of 'hanging my boots up'.

Having had 3 weeks skiing already this season we had been sort of missing our on the ice work; at last the action came before conditions bunked out with
a sortie with Marian up the gullys beyond Pinnacle ridge.

When Al Hinkes called Tuesday and suggested a route well who could resist? Marian dropped us at 8:30am at the cottages top of Grisedale and we were in Nethermost cove by 10, first the ice falls on the main crag (which were discontinuous) followed by Jogebar (3/4) topping out for a second time in a rising snow storm (as forecast) with a rope assisted drop back down over the cornice to reach our packs left in the cove. It snowed all the way back home, reached 18:30, a 10 hour day. A good day, inner glowing; thanks Al!

2010_InnovEx_blog_Collaboration

2010-01-18T21:09:00.018Z

Collaboration, Social Media and Cloud Computing

On 10 December 2009 a small group of members of the Outdoor Industries Association (sponsors of Innovation for Extremes ) participated in the closing workshop of our Innovation course on the MSc in E-business and Innovation programme on social media and collaboration. The idea of drawing business and the university together is core to the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development where our research and teaching is inseparable from the work we do with business.

The session was a taster, drawing attention to the importance of collaborative platforms and social media, the speed of change and the implications for business.

Students were asked to address three fundamental questions relating to collaboration, cloud computing and social media, from a business perspective these are outlined here.

The three questions in their simplest form asked:

1 How would you overcome the scepticism associated with introducing a collaborative software platform to a company where communication is typically based on e-mail ?

2 A recent Forrester report identified Google as having the potential to be a collaborative platform. How might this be achieved through
Google Wave?

3 Explain how you can use Social Media in business and how you would encourage traditionalists that this could bring genuine business benefits?

In identifying why this matters for business you could start with two separate quotations :

1 You are what you share ( Charles Leadbeater)

2 Collaboration involves passing over power to others.

The first one sums up much about what this workshop was about. The second partly helps to explain why it can be so difficult to establish collaborative processes and platforms in businesses with established practices.

So what did the student presentations demonstrate?

In non- technical terms, they explained cloud computing as being the use of the
internet as a computing platform.

There are cost advantages and potential productivity gains from combining collaborative platforms and cloud computing.

The gains from cloud computing come from :

a) Being able to reduce levels of IT support. A recent Business Week article highlighted the way in which companies are looking at alternatives to the PC . Given time and a range of adjustments there is potential for hardware reduction.

b) Allowing greater flexibility in working. You really can work anywhere providing you have internet access. This is especially obvious when you look into using Cloud Computing, which brings access to working documents where ever an internet connection and or a WiFi network.

c) Gains from collaborative platforms come from ease of knowledge exchange and- once users have familiarised themselves they can achieve greater productivity since they focus on adding value. This is increasingly in contrast with systems based on e-mail. Increasingly this has been described as 'yesterday's technology' and a way of losing rather than building knowledge.

d) The use of social networking sites has grown exponentially recently. Facebook now has 350m users, there are 100m videos on You Tube and there have been 1 billion Tweets.
But what does this mean for business - after all many businesses ban the use of Facebook as a time-waster. Social media is about sharing and encouraging development of user content. It involves customer engagement and has the potential for customer contribution to innovation and increases responsiveness.

An illustration comes from the winner of the 2008 Dell Small Business Excellence Award was Wiggly Wigglers, a UK gardening company.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY9AhiY0JBM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BI85TPxcGw&feature=related

This a company without technical credentials, which uses social media, not only to promote their products, but also to help develop their catalogue through customer engagement.

They were able to reduce their advertising budget by 80% by a mix of media- Facebook, Blogging, combined with conventional PR and marketing.

Of course number of outdoor companies such as Rohan, Berghaus, and Rab have Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, around which communities are building. Rohantime in particular has a highly interactive customer community. But it is North American companies-such as Patagonia which are among the most active users of social media.

Those OIA members who attended the session were nevertheless astounded at how fast things were moving and the opportunities and challenges Web 2.0 presented for businesses. This was highlighted in a December 2009 Forrester Report which predicted that, in 2010, the changes we are witnessing would mean marketing, as we currently know it would be irreversibly changed.

This is undoubtedly worth thinking about, given the number of established business models- including publishing and media which are being re-evaluated. Indeed the future of old media is being fundamentally questioned.

The implications of these changes for business are highlighted in the closing lecture of our course : Summary and Conclusions see especially slides 18-34.

What are the pitfalls and challenges?
The biggest challenges can be encountered in attempting to introduce collaborative platforms - which tend also to be linked to cloud computing. Partly this comes from trying to change long standing practice and failing to appreciate the level of suspicion of altered processes. The shift to cloud computing is seen as potentially risky for companies, with tangible fears of industrial espionage and a cloud computing disaster.

The pitfalls and challenges of using social media relate to existing attitudes within a company, to expectations and to preparation. It is not enough to set up a blog, a Facebook page or a Twitter account or post a video on You Tube and wait for the community to develop.

Social media is not naturally social, it is what you do with it and the extent you co-ordinate use, monitor it and engage others within it that is important. Give two different companies the same collaborative software or social media and the results can be very,very different. A blog or a forum can be terribly lonely if no one is reading it, commenting or engaging. Success can involve much back-room planning and 'managed spontaneity' to ensure initial engagement before going live. There is of course many more social processes involved, the subject of a later blog.

Carbon footprinting of Innov_ex

2009-09-11T16:01:00.002+01:00

Carbon Foot-printing of Innov_ex

Having our conference carbon foot-printed certainly made us think about the impact of what we do. It gives you the information to make choices, and that was a major reason why we approached

Mike Berners-Lee

founder of Small World Consulting.
With his business based in the Lancaster Environment Centre and his background in the outdoor trade and outdoor sports, and involvement in carbon foot-printing Lancaster University he was ideally placed to
assess our conference.
Back in 2008 we began thinking about the impact of our conference on the environment

as Innov_ex focused on Innovation in context of global warming. We used video-conferencing to broaden our potential range of speakers and this allowed us to include CEOs of Mountain Equipment Co-operative, Patagonia and Polartec. Click here to hear a recording of the Mountain Equipment Co-operative session. We knew that busy executives would have been unlikely travel – in two cases from the US West Coast- for our conference and we were able to include their contributions without the carbon footprint of transatlantic air travel. This experiment added enormous value to the conference and widened its reach. We were also live web-streaming, at a very experimental level with limited publicity.

For many of our delegates the video- conferenced sessions were the highlight of the day. They were high quality and interactive allowing dialogue with some of the leaders of the outdoor industry on their environmental policies. The implications both for our conference and for our teaching began to sink in. It was exciting, it could allow us to do new things, allow real time international interaction. It also set us thinking about ‘greener’ conferencing and the impact our conference had on the environment, how could we reduce the carbon footprint of the event without destroying the very thing that our delegates valued – having the chance to meet, to talk , to discuss. Meeting people and talking to them is crucial and stimulating but is conventional conferencing sustainable in terms of either energy consumption or time?

So what does carbon foot-printing involve and what does it mean?

The technique used takes expenditures on all aspects of the conference, from consumables, through accommodation, catering, heating and lighting, waste to travel (both air and car travel) The footprint for car travel was based on estimates linked to anonymous delegate addresses.

Mike is clear about what his technique provides, it provides information which helps you make choices which will have an impact on carbon emissions and can save money; it helps your company concentrate on what really matters, and provides a potential new framework for your business model. This all helps you think well could there be another way of doing this?Jonathan Porritt cannot redesign your business model for you, however, what he is attempting to do in Capitalism as if the World Matters is to provide the framework within which you can develop the business model which is sustainable for the company and the planet. Critically though for carbon foot-printing to have an impact inside and outside any organisation it needs to be transparent and understandable.

The following calculations help put choices in perspective in terms of CO2 :

To travel to Hong Kong return 9.1 tonnes of CO2

A pair of running shoes 10kg

Disposable shopping bag 10 grammes

The actual carbon footprint for our 85 delegate conference was just over 8.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide

- 60% of which was for car travel and 16% air travel for 3 delegates. Clearly our main impact came from travel.

A later blog will share our Innov_ex 2010 proposal.

INNOVATION - in new apps

2009-07-03T17:15:00.004+01:00

The content of the presentation in the last blog explains the shift of some brands from being transaction brands to relationship brands and explores the role of Web 2.0 ( including use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media) to build web presence, relationships with customers and innovation. Innovation takes many forms and is supported by many different business models many of which are changing rapidly either per external forces or by management direction.

The presentation application Slideshare used in this presentation gives us a look at the issue of the dominant design (what we all expect as standard when we buy something) of presentation software.
Microsoft have been the owner of a large share of the market for the accepted dominant design with .PPT and updates were the usual every 3 year or so. MS.ppt 2007 was a disappointment for us because it did not take us on-line but the possibilities are opening rapidly with new players. Have a look at this Slideshare app – online and free in basic versions, (new business model of course) and has had arguably more updates in last 2 months than MS ppt had in 3 years. What was amazing was the speed of embedding into our blog, no pasting html code any longer, just ‘click’ and ‘allow’ and ‘click’, and the content is Google searchable. We have used Slideshare on this site to give you access to all the presentations easily

The Future of Retail and Selling (Gerd Leonhard at eComm 2009 in Berlin)

2009-05-27T19:23:00.005+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The Future of Retail and Selling (Gerd Leonhard at eComm 2009 in Berlin)

View more Microsoft Word documents from Gerd Leonhard.

Lead user innovation

2009-05-18T22:29:00.011+01:00

Lead user innovation.
Lead user innovation- or innovation for use- has always happened and was especially common during the industrial revolution. . Today its existence has been re-identified and its growing in importance; to explain; a growing body of research led by Eric von Hippel, from the 1980s onwards has highlighted the importance of users and lead users in particular, in the innovation process. Lead user innovators may either be businesses or consumers who, through operating at the ‘leading edge’ of activity, ‘face new needs significantly earlier than the majority of the customers in the market segment’. They are motivated by the benefits they will reap from a solution to a user problem, not initially by the sale of the product. (Von Hippel, 2005)

‘Designing for use and testing by use are the essential characteristics of user innovators: they may subcontract production and parts supply, but

they cannot subcontract the innovation’s design or testing and
be user innovators…’
(Baldwin, Hiernerth and von Hippel, 2006:7)

Examples of lead user innovation are many; the original Californian 1968 mountain bikes were user made from 'old clunkers' and eventually they evolved into commercial products. Surf boards, snowboards, kayaks, and the windsurf are all dramatic examples of lead user innovation and this can only happen where the technologies are accessible to people in everyday life. As the authors of the definitive book on innovation in the outdoor industry we have been able to ascertain from our research that many of the original equipment concepts from the 1850's onwards were created by lead users; maybe simply to enhance their performance but more often out of necessity (eg Whymper's tent) to meet the challenges of the mountain environment.

In today's industrial world the concept is growing very fast. Software users, frustrated with lack of suitable means or speed of improvement are often developing their own apps which often then reach others by them becoming OS (open source). Another example is 3M who are reported by Von Hippel's as having a higher sucess rate where they have commercialized a lead user innovation and hinting at the great potential for industrial operations.

We ourselves see lead user innovation as synonymous with what we do and who we are; our innovation lectures have needed us to innovate in teaching processes and of course we are doing that only for our own use but are happy to pass it on. In my OMM business we use a team of lead users who are given freedom to generate new ideas, not in an industrial way as if they are a quasi NPD department but with total freedom to cut, stitch and use and try their own ideas some of which are successfully brought into the market place. To do that it takes lots of additional input and processes but that's another story, another blog maybe?

start up blog

2009-05-15T09:31:00.005+01:00

We jointly organise the innov_ex conference which is unique, being the sole outdoor sports industry conference in the world focused on innovation. We teach innovation (all products, systems and services) at Lancaster University Management School and are based in the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development. and our book Invisible on Everest: Innovation and the Gear Makers explores 150 years of innovation in the outdoor industry.
Our joint research work, in collaboration with researchers at the Universities of Southampton, Leeds and Derby and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, led to the replication of the Mallory garment layers which totally changed perceptions of 1920's clothing. This work was undertaken on behalf of Mountain Heritage Trust.