Some years back, in Boston, I helped out on a shoot for Public Enemy‘s Revolverlution video. It was a lot of fun, and pretty amazing to hang out with such seminal artists. I was going through some old pictures today and came across some fun images from the shoot.

A portrait of Chuck D, the idea man

My wife, Theresa, and me (with permed straight hair!) hanging out during lunch break with Flava Flav

And one of the hardest rocking shows I’ve ever seen, at the Middle East nightclub in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Excellent times! Public Enemy has been consistently innovative, not only in their music, but in their willingness to experiment with new approaches to producing and distributing their work.

Today we “attended” a webinar about innovation in services. The talk was to create some buzz for an upcoming IIR/PDMA conference about Service Innovation Design and Development and was presented by Jeneanne Rae from Peer Insight.

The slides and recorded audio may be forthcoming (although there was a lot of technical problems that really took away from the whole experience) but in the meantime, they’ve got a very detailed report from a study of the service innovation process available as a PDF here

. The first few pages will give you a reasonable overview of the talk.

Some tidbits and thoughts:

1. Services are the dominant economic force in developed countries, but the buzz/mindshare/process is around the creation of products.

2. Some of the service companies described were surprising: i.e., Wal-Mart, Home Depot. Is retail a service business? Not in the same way banking is (although it’s interesting that they call their offerings products). Not in the same way hospitality is, either. Maybe this is a commonly understood distinction but it wasn’t clear to me.

Is software a service? If it comes in a box (i.e., Adobe Illustrator)? What if it’s on the web (i.e., Google Docs)? What if it’s tied to a product (i.e., iTunes)? Or resident on a device (i.e., Windows CE)?

3. The IHIP framework dates back to 1978 and is the classic articulation of what differentiates services from goods. IHIP stands for inseparability, heterogeneity, intangibility, and perishability.

• Inseparability – Unlike a product which can be taken home after purchase and used later, services are consumed in the same time and place where they are purchased.
• Heterogeneity – Although each product produced can be identical, the experience of interacting with a service is always going to be different from customer to customer.
• Intangibility – You can see and touch a product before you buy it; you can’t experience a service experience until you experience it.
• Perishability – You can count how many products you have on hand; you can’t taken inventory of a service.

Haven’t seen any posts about The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It? from the weekend NYT. Perhaps it’s because the thesis isn’t novel or well articulated? G. Pascal Zachary reminds us unnecessarily that some products are hard to use and that some products are released but fail miserably. He conflates technology and innovation, and ignores any notion of user experience or marketplace success from his implicit definition of innovation. And he reminds us that getting people to buy and use something new is the big question that all companies want an answer to.

These are good themes to be explored further. Zachary wasn’t given the time or the space to offer anything new on the topic, though, and I end up wondering just why the paper did this particular article anyway.

Our primary giving in 2007 was in support of two organizations: one local, and one in support of developing nations.

Coastside Hope is the “primary provider of safety net services” in our local area. They provide “monthly food harvest, emergency shelter and rental assistance services, crisis intervention and referral services, clothing vouchers, Christmas Adopt-a-Family program, [and] citizenship services.”

The Free Wheelchair Mission

has taken an innovative approach to producing wheelchairs for developing countries: “to use components that are manufactured in high volume for other products…He removed every extra feature possible, ending up with the least expensive design that will satisfy a large portion of the world’s need for wheelchairs. This wheelchair design lends itself to manufacture by highly efficient companies where assembly costs are relatively low.”

I’ve blogged here and here about good and bad implementations of wipes in grocery stores.

I found another one in Coupeville, WA, the other day.

Despite the rather industrial graphics, there’s a few improvements. It’s very clearly for cleaning the cart, not your hands (as Safeway suggested).. It’s right next to the carts, so when you take a cart, you use it (rather than located near the exit, at Safeway). And should the Red Apple employees fail to maintain the display, there’s at least an encouraging reminder to the customer that they should ask to have it replenished.

This is no iPhone, it’s not a radical innovation, but it’s a definite response to a need, and tracking how it is and isn’t being dealt with is enlightening. First, one has to understand the need. Then one has to develop a solution. Then the solution must be implemented. Properly. Effectively. And throw in iteration, for fun. The fact that something as simple as this fails around solution/implementation at a major chain like Safeway tells you something about the organizational barriers to even the most mild of innovations.

I recently found myself at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, where I discovered that the outdoor amusement park industry has been continuing to push the snack food envelope.

I’ll start with my personal favorite:

Deep Fried Twinkies

Hey, and if you can deep fry a Twinkie, why not . . .

Deep Fried Cheesecake

Treat someone who’s named you as the beneficiary on their life insurance policy to a couple of those!

And then, there’s the cutting edge in frozen dessert:

Dippin’ Dots, the Ice Cream of the Future

It may be hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it yourself, but these are tiny dot-sized balls of ice cream, served in a cup.

Call me old-fashioned, but amidst all this Food 2.0, I was heartened to see an old favorite still going strong.

Burgers

I love blog convergence. The discussion on this post fits well with this article in the the New Yorker that I read yesterday. It’s ostensibly a book review, but also a stimulating essay on adoption, evolution, and social construction of technology/innovation. I’ve pulled my favorite pieces out here (it’s not a long article, but the extracts make for a long blog post).

It’s common to think of technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things-ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. But it’s also possible to view it just as things (or, indeed, processes) that enable us to perform tasks more effectively than we could without them. The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.”

…

The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation-the steam engine, electricity, computers-brings a new age into being. In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology. The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same-indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”

…

Learning how to make new technologies is one thing; learning how, as a society, to use them is another. Carolyn Marvin’s illuminating book “When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century” (1988) notes that, during the early years of the telephone, there was confusion about what codes should regulate faceless and socially clueless speech. The telephone operator, typically female, often had the responsibility of waking up the master of the house, and so joined the wife as a woman who could talk to the man in bed; Marvin writes that “sweet-voiced” telephone girls at the turn of the century “were often objects of fantasy.” It was also thought that, if just anyone could use the new device, its utility would be completely undermined. Marvin notes the firm opinion of the British postmaster general in 1895 that “the telephone could not, and never would be an advantage which could be enjoyed by the large mass of the people.” He was wrong, but understandably so. The story of how we came to terms with the new technology-how we adjusted to it, adapted to it, domesticated it, altered it to suit our purposes-didn’t come with the technical spec sheet. It never does. No instruction manual can explain how a technology will evolve, in use, together with the rhythm of our lives.

…

The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness. When we cannot conceive what life would be like without e-mail, say, we correctly note the pervasiveness of the new technology, but we may incorrectly assume that the things we now do through e-mail could not have been done in other ways. Of course, we must know that many things now done through e-mail were once done, and to some extent are still done, by telephone, fax, snail mail, or actually stopping by to see someone. But we can never know how the technologies that existed before electronic communication would have developed had e-mail not become dominant, or what other technologies might have come along whose development was forestalled by e-mail.

…

In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways-new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. “In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,” Edgerton writes. “In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.” John Powell’s marvellous [sic] study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, “The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers” (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: “As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair.” Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted “creole” technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.

Maintenance has implications for the identity of technological artifacts. There’s a traditional conundrum about “my grandfather’s axe“: over its lifetime, it has had three new heads and four new handles, but-its owner insists-it remains his grandfather’s axe. Philosophers have their proprietary version of the axe problem: “Locke’s socks” developed a hole, which he had darned, and then darned again. The socks kept the philosopher’s feet warm, but they troubled his head. Many people make their living repairing things; a very few make their living pondering whether repaired things are the same.

…

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” If he meant that we are unfamiliar with the principles on which the technology around us works, he was right-there’s an enormous gap between the knowledge of makers and the knowledge of users-but this is exactly as it should be. As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don’t want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all.

BusinessWeek’s Customer Service Champs supports my plan for innovation through empathy that I outlined previously: Everyone – EVERYONE – will go through the process that their “clients” go through, on a regular basis.

But new research from Katzenbach Partners offers an updated metaphor. The firm stresses the importance of an “empathy engine,” which looks at the role of the entire organization, including middle and senior management, in providing great service. If that engine is thought of as a heart, “the whole company has to pump the customer through it,” says Traci Entel, a principal at Katzenbach Partners who recently studied 13 leading service companies’ best practices. “It starts much further back, with how they organize themselves, and how they place value on thinking about the customer.”

Helping employees become more empathetic with customers was a common focus among the brands on our list. For instance, USAA, whose home and auto insurance are only open to military members and their families, serves new employees MREs (meals ready to eat) during orientation so they can better identify with military life. All frontline workers at Cabela’s, the outfitter famous for its massive retail shrines to hunting, fishing, and camping, partake in a free product-loaner program. Staffers are encouraged to borrow any of the company’s more than 200,000 products for up to two months, so long as they write a review that’s shared via a companywide software system when the goods are returned. That’s not only a perk for employees; it also helps them better empathize with product issues customers might have.

But few places make empathizing with customers quite as luxurious an experience as Four Seasons Hotels. At most of its properties, the final piece of the seven-step employee orientation is something the chain’s executives call a “familiarization stay” or “fam trip.” Each worker in these hotels, from housekeepers to front-desk clerks, is given a free night’s stay for themselves and a guest, along with free dining.

While there, employees are asked to grade the hotels on such measures as the number of times the phone rings when calling room service to how long it takes to get items to a room. “We bill it as a training session,” says Ellen Dubois du Bellay, vice-president of learning and development. “They’re learning what it looks like to receive service from the other side.”

A few months ago I received a press inquiry from James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report. He wrote:

Mr. Portigal,

I am currently writing a story on innovation for US News & World Report, and I trying to cast a wide net for ideas and insights. Let me ask you this: If you were appointed America’s Innovation Czar (no idea what such a gig would pay), what three things — include more if you wish — would you recommend that government do to foster innovation or make our economy and/or government more innovative? I am trying to get beyond “push kids to study science more” or “cut capital gains taxes.” Any insights would be most appreciated!

It’s kind of a crazy question, but what the heck. I sent in a long answer, but I guess it never made it into the piece. Anyway, I’ll share it with you all here…

If I was given this prestigious new position, I would do a few things. I would demystify the sense of innovation by encouraging problem solving in small areas. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle (as do many other newspapers) runs a regular section called Chronicle Watch. In it they present reader-reported problems typically in public space. A misleading sign, a broken curb, construction materials left behind, a trip hazard, rotting stairways, littered highways, and so on. They also publicize the agency and individual responsible. When fixes are made, they publish their results, or when fixes are delayed, they update the status. The fixes themselves are not innovations. Repairing a curb, fixing a handrail, posting a sign – these are solutions we’ve long since known how to create. The problem is why these situations recur and are so challenging to address. The Chronicle is an attempt, at least, at an innovation in process. Cutting through bureaucracy where possible, although sometimes their failures highlight the difficulty of doing that. My point here is that there is a great deal of small improvement to be done; sanding off the rough edges of the things we touch every day. It won’t create a new Internet or iPod to do this, but solving these small problems (that are hard to solve) will improve the underlying fabric of everyday life. Buckminster Fuller spoke of the “trimtab” – the small change that has a big effect; perhaps finding ways to address this sort of thing would qualify.

I would introduce empathy processes into government, especially departments that interact with the public or with businesses. Everyone – EVERYONE – will go through the process that their “clients” go through, on a regular basis (say, once per year). DMV clerks who stand in line (as the obvious example) will have an opportunity to see what the “other half” experiences.

The neat trick with empathy is that it leads to understanding, and then leads to problem solving. Seeing what the tax filing process is like from the perspective of someone else begins to suggest how it might be improved. There are lots of examples of this in business, many that go even further such as the elder-suits that car designers wear to restrict their mobility, sight, and so on. Since they can already drive a car, there’s little empathy (or problem solving) created until they more accurately simulate the conditions of their “users.”

A goal would be for the government to develop a set of best practices for user-centered-design – where design is making anything that gets used or experienced by someone else, apply those as broadly as possible throughout government, and then help businesses adopt more of these into their own practices. The thrust being to get people out of their own environments and their own mindsets, into the moccasins of those who are they are trying to serve. Creating empathy, understanding, and problem solving.

That would remake life in our culture, and if that isn’t an innovation, I don’t know what is!

Recently we were interviewed for two different global studies on global innovation. Both the German Research Foundation or Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs and Centre for Economic and Business Research or FORA separately came through the Bay Area as part of as study of leading innovation/design entities in the US and around the world.

Both groups offered to share their results with me and so I’ll post more specifics here when I’ve got ’em. Meanwhile, it was fun to be interviewed instead of doing the interviewing, even if it was clearly a conversational, expert-interview type of thing, and not an ethnography (neither did a huge amount of following-up or probing, it was pretty much based on what I had to say). One interesting technique, though: the group from FORA asked me to reiterate some of my key points from our longer interview (recorded on audio) for a 5-minute summary video. They went over with each other, and with me, what points seemed the most salient, and then reinterviewed me into the video camera. The point was not to get more information, but simply to create an effective deliverable. I was not at all uncomfortable with it, indeed I felt very listened to in having a precis of my interview created on-the-fly. It reminded me that being able to communicate what is learned from the field is crucial; that methods could be innovated around the effective communication as much as the effective discovery.