Translating innovation into US growth

Is America losing its innovation edge? For decades, the country has debated this question whether the United States was losing its economic advantage. Pessimists point to startling statistics, such as the rise in the number of patents filed by foreign inventors or the growing corps of engineers graduating overseas. These statistics are indeed alarming. Yet despite the historical challenges, the United States has remained the home of innovation. From the Internet to mainframe servers to pharmaceuticals, major innovations are still “Made in the USA.” So what is the disconnect? Is America’s innovation advantage simply too large to overcome? Are numbers of patents and engineers no longer relevant metrics in a digital world? Perhaps. However, looking solely at innovation and leadership in basic research is far too narrow. The key question is whether the United States has been losing its ability to translate innovation into economic leadership.

Innovation may create profits and headlines, but it is only part of the economic engine. Intel’s Andy Grove writes that the United States has “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups.” German research labs may have created the MP3, but it was the scale-up capabilities of American technology firms that took this innovation and unlocked its value, from Apple’s iPod to file sharing to digital-media vendors like the iTunes store, and beyond. This ability to take basic innovation, deliver it at scale, and refine it with second- and third-order innovations plays a critical role in driving growth and jobs. To do all this, a country must be at the center of cutting-edge technologies, market demand, talent, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Is the United States truly behind? From one angle, it’s hard to see anything but positives. The country has a business culture and a legal and capital market system that encourage and reward risk taking and entrepreneurship. It continues to attract top students and teachers from around the globe and remains the dominant investor in research and development, with total spending more than that of the next four nations—Japan, China, Germany, and South Korea—combined.

However, there are clear warning signs.

1. Cutting-edge technology: In leading industrial technologies, United States finds itself competing against or even catching up with foreign companies and engineers.

2. Demand: The composition of global demand has changed dramatically over the past few decades. For the first time in recent history, more than 50 percent of the global middle class lives outside North America. Meanwhile, many next-generation engineered products are in high demand not by US or European customers but by those in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. From airplanes to offshore wind turbines to nuclear technology, these foreign customers are creating markets and dictating preferences, often with local-content requirements. US companies can no longer build products just for the US market and expect to export them readily without modification.

3. Talent: Partly as a result of the declining prestige of the US engineering profession and the lagging effectiveness of the education system, scientific talent is building outside the United States. Almost one-third of US manufacturing companies responding to a recent survey say they are suffering from some level of skill shortage. Foreign labs are becoming more ambitious, leading cutting-edge research that used to be the exclusive domain of US companies and universities.

4. Entrepreneurial spirit: Entrepreneurship is the magic that binds all these elements, yet we see an increasing risk aversion toward new ventures in the United States.

How should the United States respond?

Whatever the cause, the United States faces a future in which the key elements of economic leadership are moving abroad. Action is imperative.

1. Clear the way for the cutting-edge industrial technologies of the future. policy makers must ramp up public-sector procurement targets and set standards for next-generation technologies.

2. Rebuild infrastructure

3. Attract and retain talent

4. Reenergize the entrepreneurial spirit in large US companies

Effective Brainstorming

Companies run on good ideas. From R&D groups seeking pipelines of innovative new products to operations teams probing for timesaving process improvements to CEOs searching for that next growth opportunity—all senior managers want to generate better and more creative ideas consistently in the teams they form, participate in, and manage. However, most attempts at brainstorming are doomed around the world. The scene is familiar: a group of people, often chosen largely for political reasons, begins by listening passively as a moderator (often an outsider who knows little about your business) urges you to “Get creative!” and “Think outside the box!” and cheerfully reminds you that “There are no bad ideas!” Ideas pop up randomly—some intriguing, many preposterous—but because the session has no structure, little momentum builds around any of them. However, this shouldn’t be done this way. The trick is to leverage the way people actually think and work in creative problem-solving situations. This is usually referred to as “Brainsteering” and while it requires more preparation than traditional brainstorming, the results are worthwhile: better ideas in business situations as diverse as inventing new products and services, attracting new customers, designing more efficient business processes, or reducing costs, among others.

We can significantly reduce the odds of success by following the following seven steps

1. Know your organization’s decision-making criteria

Managers hoping to spark creative thinking in their teams should therefore start by understanding (and in some cases shaping) the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas.

2. Ask the right questions

The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective because whenever you look for new ways to attack an old problem you naturally gravitate toward thinking patterns and ideas that worked in the past. Changing your participants’ perspective will shake up their thinking. The second characteristic of a right question is that it limits the conceptual space your team will explore, without being so restrictive that it forces particular answers or outcomes.

3. Choose the right people

Pick people who can answer the questions you’re asking. It’s not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the organization chart.

4. Divide and conquer

Don’t have your participants hold one continuous, rambling discussion among the entire group for several hours. Instead, have them conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of three to five people—no fewer, no more. Each subgroup should focus on a single question for a full 30 minutes. Why three to five people? The social norm in groups of this size is to speak up, whereas the norm in a larger group is to stay quiet.

The boss’s presence, which often makes people hesitant to express unproven ideas, is particularly damaging if participants span multiple organizational levels. Take the 15 to 20 questions you prepared earlier and divide them among the subgroups—about 5 questions each, since it’s unproductive and too time consuming to have all subgroups answer every question. Whenever possible, assign a specific question to the subgroup you consider best equipped to handle it.

5. On your mark, get set, go!

After your participants arrive, but before the division into subgroups, orient them so that your expectations about what they will—and won’t—accomplish are clear.

6. Wrap it up

One thing not to do is have the full group choose the best ideas from the pile, as is common in traditional brainstorming. Instead, have each subgroup privately narrow its own list of ideas to a top few and then share all the leading ideas with the full group to motivate and inspire participants. But the full group shouldn’t pick a winner. Describe to them exactly what steps will be taken to choose the winning ideas and how they will learn about the final decisions.

7. Follow up quickly

Decisions and other follow-up activities should be quick and thorough. Make sure to communicate the results of the decisions quickly to everyone involved, even when an idea was rejected. Participants are often desperate for feedback and eager for indications that they have at least been heard. By respectfully explaining why certain ideas were rejected, you can help team members produce better ideas next time.

Viral Marketing demystified

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, it's called "viral marketing."

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The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,

2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,

3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,

4. Who see the message,

5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then

6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

A carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

3. Scales easily from small to very large

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

6. Takes advantage of others' resources

Let's examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

"Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free "cool" buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the "pro" version. "Cheap" or "inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but "free" will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives".

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

The transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others' resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message.

Solving the talent problem - A decision approach

Leadership supply, a/k/a the “war for talent,” is a perennial item on every executive’s agenda. CEOs and other leaders devote considerable time and resources to finding, developing and deploying the people they need in critical jobs throughout the organization. But the conventional tools—recruitment and retention efforts, training programs and the like—often do no more than keep a company in the game. Essential as they are, they rarely help an organization pull away from the competition. And they’re woefully inadequate for acute challenges such as expanding rapidly in a new market. A more fruitful approach, is to approach the talent issue from a different viewpoint entirely—that of decisions. Ultimately, any organization’s performance depends on its decision effectiveness. Consistently high performers make good decisions, make them quickly and execute them well. They know which decisions are most important to creating value, and they make sure that those decisions get the attention they deserve. Decision effectiveness correlates tightly with financial results.

The framework followed is:

1. Identify the positions with the biggest impact on decisions

That depends on how the company creates value and on how it plans to grow in the future. A position as head of global IT, for example, will be more important in a company that relies on IT as a competitive advantage than in a company whose priorities lie elsewhere. Often, however, the key positions are not high-level jobs at all, because the critical decisions must be made and executed farther down in the organization

2. Assessing Talent

Who are the best people for these positions? Today’s organizations often require a different set of skills than those needed in the past. Work is more collaborative. Also, there is a need to tighten the entire performance management system

3. Matching individuals with jobs—and reducing the demand for talent

Once you know your critical positions and your top performers, you can assess the degree of overlap.

While most companies understand the importance of leadership supply, they still find themselves struggling with practical ways to put the issue squarely on the table. A decision focus gives them a means to do so. It also sends two powerful messages. Decisions are what matter in this organization, and both people and processes will be evaluated on the extent to which they contribute to good, speedy decision making and execution. That kind of clarity frees everyone up to concentrate on getting things decided and done—and in the process, to improve the organization’s performance.

Steve Jobs address at Stanford

This is the transcript of the speech

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Outliers -the story of success by Malcolm Gladwell

We are all in search of Success – Success in our lives, Success at the workplace as well as success in our personal lives. We know that success is acheived through a combination of factors and relentless effort. However, whenever we speak about or look at the lives of successful people, we tend to attribute their success to one (or sometimes 2 factors).

We sometimes tend to forget that these “success stories” are about ordinary people with sometimes extra-ordinary perseverance who were fortunate to be gifted opportunities and had the insight to make most of these. OUTLIERS: The Story of Success is a book that talks about how extra-ordinarily high achievers are bred out of not a single reason, factor or circumstance – but often a combination of a huge number of these.

Outliers is about how success can be acheived in everyday life provided we are working hard and can spot the opportunities life presents us. Outliers is about creating more such opportunities – so that there are even more extra-ordinary people – and society, at large, can benefit.

“It is not the brightest who succeed. Nor is success simply the sum of decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. it is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

1. The 10,000 Hour Rule:

According to this rule, if you want to “master” anything, you have to give it 10,000 hours. Gladwell thinks 10,000 is the magic number for success at anything. He also refers to a research study which proves the hypothesis. And he goes on to state that the sooner you complete your 10,000 hours, the sooner you become a “master” at that particular activity. With examples ranging from Bill Clinton and The Beatles to references from lesser-known American folklore, Gladwell brings this point alive in ways that you cannot even imagine!

2. The Ethnic theory of Plane Crashes:

This talks about the flip side. If success is a combination of many factors, well so is failure. Gladwell refers to an in-depth analysis of airline crashes and brings up stories from global aviation history. He brings forth the point that plane crashes are not because of the ONE BIG technical snag, or JUST that there was no fuel or a SINGULAR reason. Planes crash, Gladwell says, because of a series of failures which could be as unrelated as:

• A pilot who has had a more-than-long stint at the cockpit

• Tired air-hostesses who spilt water on the floor, was busy cleaning it and did not adhere to the captain’s instructions

• A passanger who did not follow safety regulations and had inadvertently switched on his cell phone

• A co-pilot who, due to a “communication gap” with his superior could not apprise the captain of the situation and raise an alarm in time

When 4 such factors strike at the same time, we have a disaster waiting to happen. Interestingly, the rules of success are the same as the rules of failure.The book is very anecdotal, every statement is backed by data and an attempt is made to ensure that every insight shared has reason, rather than rhetoric. Hence, the obvious things have also been stated so cleverly.

Visual Roadmaps

Being able to communicate complex plans can be one of the biggest challenges for you or your business especially if your audience is very large, located in multiple locations, speaks different languages and may not even be part of your own organisation. Online collaboration software can go some way to overcome these challenges. But what steps can you take to ensure that you communicate effectively so that everyone understands your business strategy?

How a visual roadmap can help you?

Visual roadmaps are an excellent way of taking your business plan or strategy and representing it all on one page. Before you start your roadmapping you need to ask some questions and be clear as to the purpose of your roadmap, such as:

• Roadmaps are to inform, not impress. This is not about snazzy graphics and how cool it looks
• It's about conveying a message
• How do we summarise into one page
• How do we distill the information

Advantages of Visual Roadmaps

To take advantage of using a visual roadmap to create your business strategy roadmap or business IT strategy for example, you need to consider the following. There are four key aspects to focus on when creating your roadmap.

1. Frame - what goes inside the roadmap, what does the audience want
2. Structure - this is laying out a grid into which you can be asking the Why, What, How and Where are we, How can we get there and Where do we want to go - the vision
3. Relationships - understanding the dependencies and their impact
4. Direction - this provides the key message in a natural flow of discovery and understanding

There are several types of roadmaps and methods for creating your roadmap but in all cases the four steps listed above need to be addressed. Overall, roadmaps help you to structure the conversation that you want with your audience in a visual and simple way. That is not to say your roadmap is not complex but it needs to be framed in such a way that it can be viewed and consumed in what ever format your audience uses (paper, online, poster etc).

The applications of roadmaps are varied and can include:

• business strategy
• marketing plan, business to business marketing
• science and technology
• business performance roadmapping
• innovation
• small business
• sales
• products and services

The end user applications are endless. They can also be forward-looking or backward-looking.

One last important point, roadmaps do not always tell you the future. Being able to visualise that there is a gap or uncertainty at least tells everyone we have opportunities to shape the future, as you continue your journey along your roadmap.