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Research, Reviews

The Digital Transformation Playbook by David Rogers (2016)

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The Digital Transformation Playbook by David Rogers (from now on: Rogers 2016), professor at the New York Columbia University, has been published on April 2016. I read it thanks to Fabio Paracchini @fcvg –he handed it over to me in an immaculate, shiny hardcover format. To the best of my knowledge, this is the second notable book offering an overview and a framework on the topic, following Leading Digital by George Westerman, Didier Bonnet e Andrew McAfee, published in 2014 (from now on: WBM 2014). I wrote about WBM 2014 more than one year ago.  Before getting into Rogers 216, I have to say that I am a bit puzzled by the relative rarity of these works. Let me clarify. The literature on the relationships between technology, business and society at large is vast, to say to least. However, studies that are precisely focused on the phenomenon dubbed as “Digital Transformation” are still few and sparse, especially if we restrict the range to solid, extensive analysis, discussing it in terms of boundaries, origins and evolution. Yet the formula is very much in vogue. Most likely I have missed this or that other book or paper. So anyone willing to point me in the right direction is very much welcome.

Rogers 2016 has a different genesis than WBM 2014. The latter started from two primary research cycles that provided the authors with an empirical basis, from which they shaped an interpretative model. Rogers has followed a more articulated path. The beginnings come from an earlier book by Rogers dedicated to people and consumer behaviour (sorry, I haven’t read it: The Network Is Your Customer: Five Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age, 2011). Then Rogers has drawn from a series of interviews, personal exchanges and feedback collected over the years as he was advising companies or giving executive education course all over the world. Finally he has researched a number of academic papers, magazine stories, analyst reports and blog posts, all rigorously cited in the notes.

One of the more valuable contributions of Rogers 2016 is the identification of a number of cases that explain how all of those companies founded before the Internet came around cope with what we call “Digital Transformation”. The analysis starts with the definition of five domains: customers, competition, data, innovation and value. A newly launched startup or a well-established corporation would show very different choices and course of actions in tackling these strategic contexts. Yet both of these types of businesses have to transform themselves according to “digital era principles”. From this point of view, Rogers 2016 has a very similar standpoint to WBM 2014, in which too the primary focus was on all of the businesses that are not centred on digital technologies, even though they have to use them. This is not optional: their customers and collaborators have adopted these technologies anyway. In other words, here we are looking at those enterprises that at times are loosely categorized as “traditional” companies, implying that under this label falls any entity that has not its core in the Internet technologies. I think that this a good reason for making the reading of Rogers 2016 mandatory for anyone in the service business, not less than it was the case for WBM 2014. Be you someone working at an agency or consultancy, a solution provider or a vendor, of global scale or in a specialized niche, corporate or freelance, I think these books are highly relevant to your work.

As said, the case studies make one of the most interesting aspects of Rogers 2016. Even a 244 years old business like the Encyclopaedia Britannica can successfully embark on a digital transformation journey. The famed publisher, once dependent from the sales of the leather bound paper edition, has reinvented itself as a solution provider for the educational market. To get it there, it has shaped a new balance between its scientific heritage and a novel, more dynamic operational model. The Weather Channel is another case of radical transformation. It used to be a pure media company, highly specialized in weather forecasts, based on the daily elaboration of huge amount of data. Then it found out that these capabilities were not only a key asset but also a source of innovation and competitive advantage. Starting from them, they have developed an all-new range of services for a number of industry verticals that relies strategically on weather modelling and forecasts. Data have become the cornerstone of their transformation (The Weather Channel has been acquired by IBM in 2015; a few months ago they have announced a new “hyperlocal” weather forecast service).

…for each Britannica there is a Kodak or a Blockbuster

On the other hand, Rogers warns that for “each Britannica there is a Kodak or a Blockbuster”, or, in other words, there is a company that refuses to acknowledge the new rules of the game, trying to avoid the strategic change required by the digital reality. Once again, the advice recalls similar warnings of this inevitable wave of change already emphasized by WBM 2014. On a second thought, these warnings might sound a little bit too obvious for those of us that are in the agency or consulting business. One could wonder if these calls to action actually resonate as they should. Perhaps we are in a transition phase, in which many companies prefer to tackle the all thing with a lot of caution, encouraged by the fact that in their field there is still no startup going after their business with a disruptive technology and an innovative business model. It would be interesting to assess if that’s the case in analytical terms, looking at the specific situation of each country and each market.

One more very valuable and distinctive contribution of Rogers 2016 consists in the elaboration of a set of strategic planning tools, based on a combination of scientific literature and hands on consulting expertise, as they draw from the workshops led by the author. They cover pretty different domains, from ideation to mapping and planning. If used as analysis models they indeed can lead a team in defining shared and sound conclusions, following a rigorous process. This is the “playbook” core of Rogers 2016, rich of advice for real life practice, encouraging readers to take advantage of these helpers to better cope with digital transformation challenges.

There is further contribution of Rogers 2016 that sounds particularly new and original to me: it is the discussion on the “disruptive innovation” concept coined by Clayton Christensen, following the earlier path of “creative destruction” defined by Schumpeter. First Rogers starts defining the subject – a much-needed step considering that the expression has become a sort of buzzword. “Disruption” does not mean “extremely innovative”. So yes, a company, product or service are “disruptive” when they provide something of unprecedented value to the market, thanks to a business model that traditional competitors are not able to replicate. This is not to say that whatever extraordinary innovation anyone is able to achieve is less valuable in any way. However, it would trigger different market dynamics. They might open up novel business spaces, but without making traditional competitors plunge into a crisis, as is happens when proper “disruptive innovation” occurs. Having said that, Rogers delve into the discussion of Christensen theory; according to his model, “disruptive” innovators displace traditional competitors by reaching new customers with initially less robust but cheaper solutions, exploiting some sort of new technology. Then they keep improving them until they become mature enough and of greater value than those offered by the incumbents. Now, Rogers acknowledges famed independent analyst Ben Thomson for a critical intuition on the nature of Christensen model: it works well with business to business market contexts, but it fails to explain the cases in which consumers are those that determine success or failure of a given product or service. If we take the iPhone, which is more of a product-service system than an isolated product, what has happened is has displaced the dominant incumbent with a combination of higher quality and price, something very far from the pattern identified by Christensen. There was no price discount at all and the overall experience was superior from the very beginning, so that it became an instant success even with the customer of the best Nokia phones. The “disruptive innovation” brought in by Apple has provided consumers with something of unprecedented value and over time has proved to be impossible to replicate by Nokia in a short timeframe. Rogers’ explanation to this case is a theory of “business disruption” that would make Christensen model a special case of Rogers’ approach. Using the logic and the concepts typical of the business model theory, Rogers focus his attention on two core elements, the “value proposition” and the “value network”. According to Rogers, we have “disruptive innovation” when a company manage to bring radical change in both of these dimensions, and only then. To make its argument, Rogers discusses three big cases. Beside Apple vs. Nokia, he focuses on Blockbuster vs. Netflix and Warby Parker vs. Luxottica. I enjoyed very much the reading, here: these pages are very timely and clear, and they illustrate well how the theoretical models presented earlier are translated into real business stories.

One last topic that unfortunately is only briefly outlined concerns the role of agencies and consultants. As Rogers weights the competencies needed to face the new behaviours of digitally enabled consumers, he writes that outsourcing would be a serious mistake. The turn that organizations are facing is so important that delegate it to someone else would be to concede that they are not able to steer their future direction. On the other hand, Rogers is also ready to acknowledge the positive role played by external partners. Discussing rapid prototyping, he recalls e.g. the case of R/GA with a quote of the former CTO John Mayo-Smith. For a partner committed to the innovative Nike projects like R/GA it was essential to “build something” even in a 2 weeks’ cycle, so that athletes and other stakeholders could be shown something real to get feedback, and feed it into further fast development cycles. So, apparently the cooperation between agency and client company can be beneficial, as the first not only provides efficient delivery but also conveys with it new values and a new way to work, modelled on digital principles. I think that this is a very important issue, not only from my point of view as an agency professional. The capabilities and the technologies that are shaping the big changes ongoing now are very distributed: as said earlier, we have the big platform player, with their unique dynamics (GAFA and other similar leaders) and the all spectrum of solutions providers; we have the marketing and communication holdings and the independent agencies; the large consultancies and the individual freelancers. All of these actors collaborate in constellations that to me are also proper “value networks”, different for each company, playing an important role in the company business model. I believe that thorough investigation of these dynamics is necessary: we need to identify patterns and best practices. Rogers 2016, not less than WBM 2014, will be a valuable companion for those willing to start the work.

I report here another review of Rogers 2016: Kathy Anne Cowie, “Book Review—Inspiring Transformation for Decades to Come”, Global Business and Organizational Excellence, July/August 2016; it is a premium content, available on demand or via a library subscription (I bought it on Readcube).

Reviews

Leading Digital (2014) by Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee

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I read Leading Digital with a mixed sense of anticipation and suspicion. Heightened anticipation was there for a reason: I think that it is not common to read some rigorous, organic, extended, articulated analysis focused on how traditional corporations face the changes brought about by digital technologies. That slight suspicion came instead from the frequent déjà-vu that often happens to me when I get hold on something on the subject. This is an old debate now. Two decades have gone by since the New Economy highs and lows; some of the very same questions have been raised there, and left unanswered I’m afraid. Then, a few years into the new Millenium, with the advent of Social Media and the much awaited mobile explosion, and the new wave of enthusiam and investments that ensued, we got into the same discussion once again, especially in the professional service realm (where I have been working for a long time, as an agency guy – perhaps I should specify “digital agency” – or as a freelance). Sometimes this debate has turned into a rhetoric, or worst a trade event kind of cliché; paradoxically, it is often addressed to people already convinced of the importance of the issue – very much preaching to the converted, as they say. So, beside the debate and all of the digital “evangelism” (how dated it sounds!), now I would really like to read some systematic overview, have research results, and examine well founded reasoning. This is the promise of Leading Digital, and I think that to a large extent it delivers on that promise.  The book is the outcome of a collaboration between the MIT and Capgemini. It has been written by three authours: two of them have an academic profile, George Westerman and Andrew McAfee (the latter is also co-author of The Second Machine Age, with Erik Brynjolfsson), while the third, Didier Bonnet, is one of the global leader of the French-based consultancy.

The book is based on a three-years research work, from about 2010 to 2013 I would say (it is not specified but the book has been published in 2014). First, Westerman, McAfee and Bonnet, with the help of a team, have interviewed about 150 executives and managers at 50 large corporations that don’t have technology as a core business. This is an important distinction, as it specifies the generic term of “traditional corporation” I have used above. Secondly, they have run a survey involving almost 400 large corporations in 30 countries (“large” it means with revenues in excess of 500 million dollars). The authors are very clear about their global perspective, not centred on the United States. In fact, even if most of the major technology leaders are indeed from the US, as a matter of fact a vast number of large and very large corporations are based outside of the US in Asia or in Europe (where I’m based, en passant).

The focus on “traditional corporations”, defined as the ones that don’t have technology as core business, is a cornerstone of the all work: these firms make “the 90% of the economy”, so it is of outmost importance to understand how they react to the tecnologies brought on the market by the global platform leaders or by the all range of startups  – many of them coming the Silicon Valley or the US. The strenght and momentum of this wave of digital technologies, platforms and services are such that nobody can escape it. Westerman Bonnet and McAfee have no doubts: the firms that choose not to react are going to face obsolescence and decline.  Here it comes an analogy that has been made many times in these debate: digital technologies are the Second Industrial Revolution. Nothing can resist their momentum. It’s a warning for the executives out there: we have come to a point in which it is possible to discern between the corporations that have undergo a successful transformation, taking advantage of these technologies, and those that haven’t. The analysis of these outcomes has allowed the authours to devise an approach or a transformation roadmap that others can follow too.

En passant, Leading Digital is also the book of choice to get a synthesis of the many scholarly articles and white papers coming out from the cooperation between the MIT and Capgemini on the “digital transformation” idea. The expression has been quickly adopted by the industry jargon but it could be that many are not aware of the original formulation, or, better yet, of the formulation that has got the widest adoption. A 2011 MIT and Capgemini document reported the following definition:

Digital transformation (DT) – the use of technology to radically improve performance or reach of enterprises – is becoming a hot topic for companies across the globe.

I think it’s important to start again from here – it’s not about defining something once and for all but bringing some clarity about the context in which has been shaped. The first Altimeter report on the topic (published in 2014) says that in their instance digital transformation is analysed from the customer experience lens. A second Altimeter report on the same subject credits an earlier formulation by scholars Erik Stolterman and Anna Croon Fors. For what I can read through Google Books scans, they were pretty distant from an interest in corporations performances. In that discussion, “Digital transformation” is an emergent phenomena that calls for a critical scrutiny, it is a novel focus for information technology research – they might even quoting Marcuse if I’m not wrong.

… the most crucial challenge for IS [information Systems] research today is the study of the overall effects of the ongoing digital transformation of society. The digital transformation can be understood as the changes that the digital technology causes or influences in all aspects of human life. This research challenge has to be accepted on behalf of humans, not int their role as users, customers, leaders, or any other role, but as humans having a life.

This was about 2003. Fast forward to 2014 and typing “digital transformation” in the Google bar will get you a couple of ads from big and huge consulting businesses (Accenture, to mention one), followed by a deluge of organic results. Anyhow, my point is that for all of these mentions there is little research, so it’s worthwhile to have a close look at the book from the people that triggered the most informed debate.

I think the book offers three main original results and contributions. The first is a set of models and categories that frame and define the all question; they are the tools that allow to investigate its dynamics and produce practical recommendations. The second set of results includes the case  and example reviews, the corporations that have been analyzed, with all of the excerpts from the research interviews. The third is a proper “discovery”, so to say, regarding the fact that the best corporations from the digital transformation angle show also better business results.

Let’s have a look at the first and at the second point. One key categorization or model makes a distinction between three dimensions relevant to the digital transformation concept: customer experience, operations and business models. These are different but interdependent aspects, so that changes in one would influence the others, to some degree. All of the corporations cases mentioned in the book can be mapped to these domains. So Burberry and Starbucks e.g. are explored mostly in the customer experience perspective. Very distant businesses like Asian Paints (India), Codelco (Chile, mines) or Zara are in the spotlight when it comes to the operations dimension. Hailo, Uber, Airbnb, Fujifilm, Zipcar, Car2go and many others illustrates the business model discussion. So this is about how corporations react to digital technologies in one or another of these key three dimensions, or all of them at once. Then the authors introduce also a typology based on another distinction. There are digital capabilities or competencies and leadership capabilities. Here you get a typical two axis matrix with four cases, in which the upper right quadrant is for “Digital Masters” . I think that these are the most analytical parts of the book. Combining these models with real cases offers a very rich material, interesting per se and useful as the basis to build advice for other corporations. In fact the book offers plenty of checklists, summaries and an entire final “playbook” addressed to executives that want to face the digital transformation challenge. Those are not at ease with the business book flavor might be slightly annoyed at this point, but the authours have been impeccable in pointing to the many scholarly or public sources in the endnotes (to testify again the research rigour).

By the way. The book has 9 mentions of the term “advertising” and 8 of the term “campaign” (just 7 in the proper advertising context) and just one of the expression “digital advertising”. I am aware that this is nothing scientific but this rough count made me think that the research has not been conducive to the discovery of some distinctive way of doing advertising by the digital leaders. It is as if a smart, sensible usage of digital advertising is taken for granted, just as a necessary element of a broader framework. In other words, where the digital transformation is in place digital advertising will be   a part of it, but simple budget shifts from one channel to another don’t make a big difference.

Let’s move to the third result. Here we have a very sharp and interesting conclusion, based on the research empirical work combined with the typology created by the authors. “Digital masters” make more revenues and profits than their competitors.

[…] Digital Master outperform their peers. Our work indicates that the masters are 26 percent more profitable than their average competitors. They generate 9 percent more revenue with their existing physical capacity and drive more efficiency in their existing products and processes.

Even though Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee are keen to stress that this conclusion indicates a correlation and not a causal factor, it is evident that these are big figures (think about the 10% of a 1 billion in revenues). So here the authours are really zooming in on an opportunity, a huge one. Grab it is open for everyone – every company that is willing to. There is no need to be based in Silicon Valley, no need to have hundreds of software engineers, no need to have onboard some one of a kind maverick pioneer. For sure it will be an endeavor, more or less challenging depending on the starting point, and the honesty of your initial self-assessment, but it is something attanaible by every company with adequate willingness and practical means to go forward.

Once again, it is not just about a big opportunity. Beside the call for action to grab it, there is another take running through the book. Westerman Bonnet and McAfee warn readers that they need to get moving anyhow, since the transformation has just begun, and its effects are barely starting to emerge.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This is not secondary, as said above. Moreover, it highlights a sort of paradox, a relative lack of solid knowledge about the possible negative outcomes of the transformation as depicted by this research. If we accept that at this stage the impact of digital technologies and platforms is only beginning to take shape, and much stronger changes are to come, then the reason to react is not only the opportunity to have more revenues and more profits (as Digital Masters have), but first and foremost companies is about the companies survival and essential prosperity. So what are the “traditional corporations” that prove the point? Yes, the authors mention Kodak, or cabs (“Uberized” as it has been said), and then? Talking about the standard verticals, or categories that have lost their descriptive power (say “telecommunications”, “advertising” or “newspapers”) is of little help I think. Here again what is badly needed is solid research, well organized reviews, structured cases, empirical evidence and models. After so many years of debates about the effects of digital tecnologies, how one can’t see the paradox of not having a great pars destruens in the library? If you know it, please tell me where it is, and I’ll get it straight away (likely via Amazon Prime).

Design critique, News & miscellanous

ubicomp@Ikea (well, say TV@Ikea)

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Full disclaimer: I am a very happy Ikea customer, and I have spent endless hours walking along their aisles in search of the perfect match for an usually limited budget and some Bauhaus-ish/Scandinavian piece of taste and practical use. Ok, getting closer to reality, I spent some good hours when in company (i.e. girlfriend), while I have always tended to run through when I was on my own. I am not sure about the side-effects of these meanderings on my mood and relationship health, but well, furniture is here at home, in good use. Then Ikea is a Generation X cultural icon, and I am right there. When I ran into the small illustration about the “semidisposable Swedish furniture” in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X it has been a kind of epiphany, truly a moment of self-awareness (what a self you have, one might wonder). And I guess that there is an already large body of scientific literature about Ikea and business and strategy and design and culture and everything in between, and I have not checked it, so this is just my own immediate thinking, bla bla, and that’s the end of this too long premise.

Now, you might have seen the video here below. It’s about Uppleva, the new TV and furniture offer for the living room put forward by Ikea. It has had a broad coverage, so not need to talk about it in detail etc. The video itself is a very well done piece of communication I think; it would be nice to know who has authored it as well. It’s a promotional thing but really smart in conveying the context explored by the people behind the design and the all business initiative.

I read about Uppleva somewhere when it broke the news and pinned it on my Pinboard (yeah “pin it” to me is for super-functional “anti-social bookmarking” Pinboard first, not Pinterest, with all due respect for the wonderful Pinterest). Then I noticed on Twitter that Alberto D’Ottavi had a post about it, and we had a couple of exchanges on the topic there with him @dottavi and @evilelka (in Italian, here to credit people). Alberto’s post is in Italian but see here for some recent Alberto Dottavi posts in English at Forbes; second disclaimer: Alberto is a good friend of mine).

In short, as tweeted, I might be totally wrong but I feel like there is something not quite right about Uppleva. So, discussion.

People took good notice that Uppleva is more than the separate elements that made the thing. It’s more than a TV set, and it’s more than a standard TV cabinet or table. Alberto and others called it “a solution” – which of course is something that many want, as the increasingly complex lives of us are more or less always in demand of solutions (to more or less serious problems). And yes design does not want to stop at the design of things etc. (do not open that door! I agree on the general concept, but it actually raises so many more questions).

But what kind of solution is this? I’ll stick to the words of the Uppleva girl in the video. She says that according to research done “all over the world”, people are not at ease when it comes to their TVs placement in the living room, because TVs come with too much stuff around them, first audio boxes and set-top boxes and game consolle (but she doesn’t name them) and especially CABLES (she actually screams at that point), yes the cable mess we are so used to and that now could go away with Uppleva. And it’s not just cable-concealing. Ikea has also worked on the TV software / UI and on the remote, so that the integrated blu-ray and connected / smart TV features are all better accessible and easily usable and more enjoyable and everything, which I think it’s a very sensible effort and objective.

Now, there are still two or three interesting problems here to me, somewhat related, even though they are of different nature.

Let’s talk about CABLES first, as they have an unusual prime-time in this spot. Yeah they are not nice. It’s very true that they give that messy nerdy garage-like air to everything and some might think that this tech flavor is all so passé now that TVs are just a normal presence in our home environment. Say that their tech appearance, black electronics with blinking LEDs is out of place. Well, now let’s step back from the argument that tech flavor given by cables is passé, because I might not agree (nerdy electronics is a matter of love for many, perhaps rightly so!). The point is that Uppleva comes with a number of *ports* (USB and HDMI) that, guess what, are obviously done for the damned plugs and CABLES. So the nice picture from the catalogue might disappear pretty soon… CABLES again; not easy to get rid of them, definitively (of course I think that Ikea has very sensibly produced Uppleva with all these ports — my take is just on the cables disappearing and then coming back, really much like nasty snakes).

Let’s see the remote then. Here we have another typical classic case of design chaos in the living room. Raise your hand if you have never used a slide with a bunch of remotes in your UX presentation (third disclaimer: I think I did used one of these slides more than once, I confess).  But here it comes the same point. Once you have plugged your extra stuff that is not already put into the integrated (integralist?) Uppleva you are back into square (slide) one with a bunch of pretty remotes, badly designed by unaware designers (whose houses have at least one Ikea piece I bet!). Point is, remotes are just one side of a bigger game and getting rid of too many remotes is as easy as solving the all issue of interactivity and television, which is still *huge* – I mean, even Apple, kings and priests of Design and User Experience in their Most Noble Forms, are still quite working on it… (not joking on Apple btw… they do great design of course etc. but it’s a fact that with TV they still have to find success etc.).

And what about more general or abstract qualities? What about the very notion of order and cleanliness and messiness that are at stake here? Because there is it, the Uppleva girl tells us that people around the world are tired of messy living rooms, full of nasty cable snakes. And how not to note that order is such a central concept of everything designed, from architecture to the universe? (I am talking about all things/intangibles that are artificially made, no implication about the fact that the “natural” universe has been designed 😉 — Well the intriguing point is that the messiness of consumer electronics in the “home context” (scientific tone) might be at the heart of the all evolution of related technologies, something really central and inherent to the thing.

Take the argument of two top scholars. Even though I haven’t still managed to finish the reading (second confession, nth disclaimer!), Dourish and Bell recent book on ubicomp (Divining a Digital Future) outlines a vision of the real evolution of technology in which messiness is not a casual attribute or contingent nuisance. Quite the contrary actually: it stands really much as a distinctive aspect of an endeavor that progress by not planned competitive (techno-scientific I’d add) programs and additional layers, as it happens with many of the traditional infrastructures of the urban environment (think the networks of mass transportations for an analogy, or I’d say the city itself as an infrastructure for living). Can we remove this mess, if it is so rooted in the all thing? Or, how to deal with it? Perhaps the first question should be about the mess itself, its relation with technology, etc.

I’m afraid that messy ubicomp can not be easily stored in a cabinet. It doesn’t disappear in the background (or not yet), it’s not part of an integrated solution, because it can’t be (maybe it will).

One specific aspect of the latter issue is about design & industrial cycles I think. With consumer electronics and information technologies and especially everything digital, you often have cycles that are pretty fast, say 2 years and another game begins. I can’t see how it’s possible to match these cycles with those of the furniture consumption. What about my Uppleva wooden side in 2 years or 4? What will be the average TV size then? Furniture has a pretty long consumption curve, it just works for a long time until it breaks down (or one decide to dump it), while tech stuff goes up and down like on a rollercoaster.

Having said all of that, it’s a fact that Ikea has taken an interesting and new challenge here, so I’m very curious to see how the thing plays out. In the meantime, I’ll roll my cables on the bottom of my Ivar shelves.

Nasty cables on the bottom of a lower Ivar shelf, typical Gen X setting

PS if you wonder… according to Google Translate, Uppleva means “experiencing” (have to check with Swedish friends).

News & miscellanous

In memoriam: William Mitchell

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William Mitchell, MIT dean and professor, architect, urbanist and theorist, widely regarded as one of the most prominent thinker on “smart cities”, has passed away; see here the official MIT obituary.

William Mitchell
Photo Webb Chappel from MIT obituary page

Right now a Twitter search shows a flow of related messages. My personal impression is that Mitchell is being remembered by a really diverse big bunch of people, ranging from fellow specialists to an original crowd of professionals, scholars and students of different disciplines, all sharing the appreciation for his work and intuitions. It’s not something that I can prove with the numbers, but I feel it’s quite right. And I think it’s a mark of oustanding intellectual achievements.

Update: Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware, now at Nokia, has a short but intense post in memory of Mitchell: “Bill’s optimism about technology and cities was infectious, even if (like me) you thought of yourself as the kind of person who’d been inoculated by experience against anything as uncritical as everything implied by that word.” There is an upcoming book from Adam on technology, the city and “networked urbanism” titled “The City Is Here For You To Use” (see more on Speedbird, his blog).

I first heard about Mitchell quite late; it was end of 2004 or beginning of 2005. I was attending the first public meetings of what then became the network of Living Labs, a mixed formal and informal coalition of various organizations engaged with open innovation (see the site of ENOLL, European Network of Living Labs). In that context, Mitchell was credited as the one that originally forged the concept at MIT Media Lab. I remember especially references made by Veli Pekka Niitamo (Nokia, CKIR Helsinki) and architect/professor Jarmo Suominen. See e.g. this definition reported in a presentation given in Budapest by Niitamo (I can’t publish it right away as it reports a copyright notice; likely the document has been just shared between meeting participants — can’t remember exactly):

[The Living Lab idea] [O]riginates from the MIT, Boston, Prof Wiliiam Mitchell, MediaLab and School of Architecture and city planning. ‘Living Labs as a research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts’.

I found the idea quite fascinating. The “living lab” image was very powerful, if anything. Perhaps it might appear as nothing big when one considers the amount of books and scholarly work produced by Mitchell, but I think that these concrete imagery is badly needed in the research and innovation discourse. It helps a lot in communicating the vision, it creates the opportunity for more articulate conversations.

At that time I also started following a bit the Living Labs community, and I tried to kick-start an interest group in Milan, but without much success (see the archived page); anyway, I haven’t been much involved in the community as such since then, even though I managed to keep some contacts alive.

Photo source: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/obit-mitchell

Minutes, News & miscellanous, Research

Latest “Internet trends” from Mary Meeker

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Mobile business and online advertising enthusiasts have welcomed this latest deck from Mary Meeker, perhaps the most famous Wall Street Internet analyst to date (see the Wikipedia bio). I noticed it on the blog of London-based mobile agency Addictive (their weekly Mobile Fix is also worth reading).

The presentation has been given at a major industry event in New York just a couple of days ago. I read somewhere that Meeker has been often credited with an outstanding capability to capture big trends early on. So, her takes on the “unprecedented early stage growth” of the mobile Internet are of particular interest for all of those concerned with mobile things.

Meeker co-authored a seminal report on then emergent Internet industry more than 10 years ago — “The Internet report”. There is a digital version available from the Morgan Stanley web site but it comes also in book form from Amazon. The picture below is from KPCB site.

Mary Meeker portrait
Mary Meeker (pic from KPCB site: http://www.kpcb.com/partner/mary-meeker)
Minutes, Research

Design research “against needs”

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What we need from research is more than description, and especially, more than a list of “needs,” explicit or implicit, met or unmet.

This is from Rick Robinson‘s talk at IIT Design Research Conference 2010, very recently made available online as a video on Vimeo. I listened to it one first time while writing but I will strive to go for it a second time with more attention.

Among other things, Robinson argues against the point made by Donald Norman in a much debated post and following article on Interactions, in which he said that ethnography-inspired design research quest for “unmet needs” can not provide a basis for breakthrough innovations, which are rather a result of technology invention (Norman added also that still design research has a key role in improving innovative products, making them usable and enjoyable).

One of the key points of Robinson is that actually “needs”, and hence uncovering “unmet needs” is not or it shouldn’t be the main business of design researchers; instead, they should focus on the values that inform design decisions.

Now, it is interesting to note that at the end of the talk Norman himself stood up and expressed his praise for Robinson, saying that he was not in agreement 🙂 about their disagreement (and asking for one of the t-shirts exhibited by Robinson, namely the one with the “against needs” slogan).

IIT Design Research Conference 2010 on Vimeo via Putting People First.

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You don’t ask your customers what they want

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“Being customer-driven doesn’t mean asking customers what they want and then giving it to them,” says Ranjay Gulati, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It’s about building a deep awareness of how the customer uses your product.”

via Prototype – Seeing Customers as Partners in Innovation – NYTimes.com.

This is from an article by Mary Tripsas, associate professor in the entrepreneurial management unit at the Harvard Business School; it describes “Customer Innovation Centers”, special facilities set up by big companies like 3M. Bruce Nussbaum has a post on it in which he refers also to the discussion raised by a provocative short essay by Donald Norman on the role of technology in radical innovation (“Technology first, needs last”). I won’t try to make a synthesis of Norman’s argument and the related debate (see e.g. one of the always nice ChittahChatta Quickies by Steve Portigal pointing to an interesting and critical post). But I would like to add here my 2 cents. The quotation above points to a common negative prejudice about design research, way less articulated than the takes by Norman. Quite many design research methods and techniques — or even the entire design research approach (see e.g. the MIT Press reference) — are often miscoinceved as ways to just extract innovation directly from users’ and customers’ minds, e.g. by inviting them to dull focus groups in which they are asked “what they want”. This is *not* design research but a caricature at best <grin>
Update: if you are interested in the discussion raised by the original essay from Donald Norman, see this other post from Nussbaum and the related comments, including one from Norman himself. En passant, and with all the due respect to everyone (the big and famous and all the others), I am a bit puzzled by the almost total absence of explicit philosophical argumentation. E.g. am I wrong or the all discussion might also be seen as a reneweal of the debate on technology determinism? The comment from Michele Visciola on the relative importance of human needs and their relation to culture points in the same direction from this point of view. Then one could argue that the all idea of contrasting technology and culture is weird, as technology is a cultural phenomenon — the cultural phenomenon for some, but this leads to wider questions.