Five for the Future: Creating Competitive Advantage

November 16, 2007

The Council for Competitiveness (www.compete.org) recently released a paper titled “Five for the Future“

The Council’s Roadmap contains five imperatives:
1. Challenge the frontiers in science and technology
2. Renew access to secure and sustainable energy
3. Achieve advantage with creative and
cutting-edge talent
4. Transform risk intelligence into resilience
5. Engage in the global economy

The document is an excellent read for anyone looking for a synthesis of the top business issues today.

    Summary

Creating Competitive Advantage:
Five for the Future is a Call to Action. In this hyper-competitive, rapidly changing environment, it is only prudent to glance in the rear view mirror from time to time.

But America needs more than rear view mirror policies. The United States needs a roadmap for success in the global economy—one that charts a strategic direction between complacency and panic. And the time to act is now, when the U.S. margin of leadership is strong.

Our success will, in large measure, be built on our ability to understand how the game has changed and respond with a new set of strategies and capabilities:

• Lead in research discoveries that promise to create whole new industries and markets
• Build on knowledge and technology fusions that have the capacity to transform products and services
• Provide every American with the tools to compete in the global economy
• Develop risk intelligence and resilience in an age of turbulence
• Extract value by being a first mover in addressing global challenges

This demands an environment that supports innovation in all its forms and anticipates the new dynamics that create competitive advantages for robust risk management and productivity-enhancing approaches to sustainability. It offers a framework for policy makers, presidential candidates, private sector decision makers and others to move forward decisively to secure America’s competitive future.

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Posted by alanwunsche

American Express - The Members Project(sm)

June 4, 2007

American Express recently launched “The Members Project“

It looks like a simple idea but look under the marketing and this is a brilliant idea. The tagline for the project is: “Our Money. Your Ideas. Your Decision.”

The basics of how “The Members Project” works is described on the site:

1. Register. It’s easy. Just for registering, American Express contributes $1 to The Members Project.(up to $5 million!)
2. Explore. Read, rate, and discuss the projects submitted by fellow Cardmembers.
3. Create. If you’re feeling inspired, share a project idea of your own.
4. Vote. Starting July 3, help narrow it down to one winning idea.

On the Project site, American Express says its motivation is to be influence by its member community:

“We are asking cardmembers to submit their biggest and most innovative project ideas.”

“Whether you want to make a difference across the globe or in your neighborhood, we’re looking for original, achievable ideas that have a broad positive impact. So get creative.”

What American Express does not say is that beyond potentially funding a major global project, explicitly connecting their members’ ideas and their voting patterns will enable American Express to develop a vast database on their members’ personalities, their causes, their closest thoughts. This is a brilliant stroke of member relationship management.

No Comments » | Customers, Ideas, Innovation, Strategy | Permalink
Posted by alanwunsche

Google Apps Grows Up - and plays a ‘Strategic Option’

February 22, 2007

In an official Google Blog posting today called Google Apps Grows Up, Google announces its foray into the enterprise space with its own “Office” productivity offering:

Now, I’m excited to tell you that our baby has finally graduated and is entering the business world. Google Apps Premier Edition is a new version designed to take on all the challenges presented by businesses with complex IT needs. For $50 per account per year, you get the whole Google Apps package plus many new business-oriented features, including access to our APIs and partner solutions (so it’s easy to integrate with existing systems), conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of inbox storage, extended business hours phone support, and mobile access to your email on BlackBerry devices (just in case you can’t get enough at the office).

While up to now providing its online services for free, this move could herald an entirely new revenue stream for Google.

Already, companies big and small, like Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, Prudential, and SF Bay Pediatrics, are talking about how this new version of Google Apps makes it easy to offer low-cost communication and collaboration tools to all their employees so they can get on with what they do best.

Further, as outlined on the Google Docs and Spreadsheets Blog, Google is trying to make the switch to online applications as painless as possible:

Google Apps lets you offer private-labeled email, instant messaging and calendar accounts to everyone in your organization so they can share ideas and work more effectively. As of today, Google Apps now includes Docs & Spreadsheets. The Google Apps version works just like the Docs & Spreadsheets you know and love but with a few special new features like the ability to publish a document only to your co-workers and support for making everyone in your company a collaborator. Everything is hosted by Google, and no hardware or software is required. Check it out: we think you’ll agree that we look pretty dapper in a suit and tie.

Now, considering this all in the context of Michael Raynor’s (Deloitte Consulting) new strategy book, The Strategy Paradox, one could call this entire play an option on a future of online software that is not yet certain. While software as a service (SAAS) has been around for years and Salesforce.com has been the posterchild, there has not been a significant avenue until now for the enterprise to move from Microsoft’s Office suite. For the past several years, we have observed Google acquiring and testing a series of office applications that could be one day competitive with Microsoft Office. At the same time, Google’s commitment to its online services has been somewhat timid, and it told the market it was not intending to compete with Microsoft. Today’s announcement indicates that Google has decided to invest further in a strategic option of moving to an outright head-to-head assault on Microsoft’s offline Office productivity suite. While some may call it a shot across Microsoft’s bow, it can also be considered a further investment in a strategic option that mitigates its strategic risk of being beholden to online advertising for its primary source of revenue - and a move that executives in any industry should watch closely.

Update: Press Release quote…

Mountain View, Calif. - February 22, 2007 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) - today introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, a new version of Google’s hosted services for communication and collaboration designed for businesses of all sizes. Google Apps Premier Edition is available for $50 per user account per year, and includes phone support, additional storage, and a new set of administration and business integration capabilities.

Google Apps™, launched as a free service in August 2006, is a suite of applications that includes Gmail™ webmail services, Google Calendar™ shared calendaring, Google Talk™ instant messaging and voice-over-IP, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities now use the service. Google Apps Premier Edition now joins Google Apps Standard Edition and Google Apps Education Edition, both of which will continue to be offered for free to organizations.

“Procter & Gamble Global Business Services (GBS) has enrolled as a charter enterprise customer of Google Apps, a successful consumer product suite now available to enterprises. P&G will work closely with Google in shaping enterprise characteristics and requirements for these popular tools,” said Laurie Heltsley, director Procter & Gamble Global Business Services.

“So much of business now relies on people being able to communicate and collaborate effectively,” said Gregory Simpson, CTO for General Electric Company. “GE is interested in evaluating Google Apps for the easy access it provides to a suite of web applications, and the way these applications can help people work together. Given its consumer experience, Google has a natural advantage in understanding how people interact together over the web.”

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Posted by alanwunsche

Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

January 3, 2007

The Globe and Mail features a 7-part article series written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, the authors of Wikinomics (How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything)

The focus is on how businesses today can take advantage of technologies and practices based on collaborative posterchild Wikipedia (”the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit“):

Forget everything you know about the way we do business. Mass collaboration is revolutionizing the corporation, the economy, and nearly every aspect of management. In this seven-part series, co-authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, due out Jan. 2, explain new business models that will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust.

Tapscott and Williams provide these insights in the first article:

It runs on a wiki — software that enables multiple users to edit the content of Web pages. Despite the risks inherent in an open encyclopedia in which everyone can add their views, and constant battles with detractors and saboteurs, Wikipedia continues to grow rapidly in scope, quality and traffic. The English-language version has more than a million entries and there are ninety-two sister sites in languages ranging from Polish and Japanese to Hebrew and Catalan.

While Wikipedia’s mission is to make the sum of human knowledge accessible, not all examples of mass collaboration are guided by altruism. Take Linux, an open source operating system that emerged from the hacker-fringes of the Internet in 1991. At first, many doubted the efficacy of an operating system developed by a Web-enabled community of anarchist programmers. Oh how the critics were wrong.

…get your mass collaboration road map ready. Barriers to entry are vanishing and the trade-offs that individuals make when deciding to contribute voluntarily to projects and organizations are changing, creating opportunities to dramatically reconfigure the way we produce and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. Companies that recognize, address, and learn to tap mass collaboration will benefit, while those that ignore and resist will miss important opportunities for innovation and cost reduction, and may even go out of business. Now that the genie’s been unleashed, there’s no putting it back in the bottle.

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Chesbrough Delivers More on Open Business Models

January 3, 2007

On TechWeb, Henry Chesbrough introduces us to the innovation imperative and the concepts with his new book:

Companies that keep their intellectual property too close to the vest risk missing out on critical business innovations that idea-sharing could generate. Open business models foster collaboration with customers and suppliers to everyone’s benefit.

His Winter 2007 article in Strategy+Business is here: Why Companies Should have Open Business Models

Chesbrough’s new book and successor to Open Innovation is Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape

I’ve ordered it and will update this blog entry with a forthcoming review.

In the meantime, the jacket cover provides a glimpse of why this should be an important read:

In Open Business Models, Chesbrough takes readers to the next step—explaining how to make money in an open innovation landscape. He provides a diagnostic instrument enabling you to assess your company’s current business model, and explains how to overcome common barriers to creating a more open model. He also offers compelling examples of companies that have developed such models—including Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Air Products.

In addition, Chesbrough introduces a new set of players—“innovation intermediaries”—who facilitate companies’ access to external technologies. He explores the impact of stronger IP protection on intermediate markets for innovation, and profiles firms (such as Intellectual Ventures and Qualcomm) that center their business model on innovation and IP.

This vital resource provides a much-needed road map to connect innovation with IP management, so companies can create and capture value from ideas and technologies—wherever in the world they are found.

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2007 - Importance of Innovation Shows No Sign of Slowing

January 3, 2007

According to Fortune’s excellent blog Business Innovation Insider, 2006 was to be the year of innovation. As a quick recap in a previous role, I highlighted a variety of innovative practices and also presented some thought pieces:

> How Strong is your Idea Capital? In this world of hyperchange in virtually every industry, it’s time to think about ideas as a new form of capital available to your organization: Idea Capital. [more]

> Kraft looks to the world’s ideas for its next innovations
> Dell’s Build-to-Order now at Wal-Mart - Who needs to innovate when you can copy?
> Innovation Math: Innovation = Challenge + Response
> How will Innovation put you out of business?
> Culture of Innovation & the Future of the Enterprise…
> Everyone’s Ideas
> Challenge-Based Thinking
> Google’s Employees get the Limelight

I took a break from writing to embark on an exciting new role. Now looking ahead to 2007, we can safely predict that innovation will become even more important. Google continues to expand its online applications suite, and Chrysler has decided to outsource production to China.

As the year unfolds, I’ll pick highlights globally and share them here with you, along with some personal thoughts.

Happy New Year!

Alan Wunsche

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Welcome!

December 31, 2006

Welcome to White Space, a blog about innovation.

Feel free to browse around and contact me and be sure to read the disclaimer.

Please note this is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not reflect those of my employer.

Alan Wunsche

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Posted by alanwunsche