Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives

By

Over the last years I have spent significant time assisting professional services firms to drive innovation. This year I am finding that the economic climate is intensifying the focus on these issues rather than pushing them to the background.

The pressures that commoditize services are intensifying, local and global competition is increasing, and clients are seeking value in different forms than they have in the past. Another critical driver is the war for talent. Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.

However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.

I’ve written before about innovation in professional services, including the White Paper I wrote for SAP on Service Delivery Innovation and in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.

Here are some reflections on where I see the greatest potential for value-creation in the space.

DOMAINS FOR INNOVATION

There are several key domains for innovation for professional firms:

Services and products. In a rapidly changing business environment, providing the services that are most relevant to clients’ needs can provide real competitive advantage. The issue is not just in quickly generating new offerings, but also in packaging these so they can be readily communicated to clients by front-line professionals.

Read more →

Gerontocracy is our future

By

Gerontocracy n. Rule by the elderly

When we think about the future, there are some things we can predict better than others. One of the things we have the best idea of is demographics and age distributions. There remain uncertainties such as improvements in health care and gerontology, the rise of unforeseen diseases and pandemics, and devastating war, but by and large we can be fairly confident of our demographic forecasts.

In recent keynotes I’ve done on technology in aged care and the future of the global health economy I examined the implications of future demographic profiles. The forecast profiles for 2050 for some of the world’s largest economies are shown below. Source for all of the profiles is NationMaster, an excellent repository of country information. Of all of these countries, USA is the country which will have the least imbalance to the elderly, accompanied by a dramatic shift in ethnicity of the young.

One of the many implications of these age profiles is the inevitability of gerontocracy – rule by the elderly. Given the age profiles below, it is starkly clear what segment of the population any warm-blooded vote-seeking politician will seek to woo. In other words, given a democratic future, we can expect government policies to be unmitigatedly pro-aged, with barely a look in for the young.

Fortunately I’ll be old by then.

Read more →

Video of TEDx on Future of the Enterprise in San Francisco

By

We finally have video of my presentation on Future of the Enterprise at the TEDx event in San Francisco on May 5. The video is a nice production, very kindly done by Denis Mars to pull in the slides and Flash that supported my presentation.

Read more about the TEDxAdvance event, organized by Advance San Francisco. The best description is Andrew Mager’s excellent review of the evening.

The TEDx presentation format is strictly 20 minutes, so my presentation fits into two 9 minute YouTube videos below. Feel free to start at Part 2 if you want a sampler of the content – the story pretty much hangs together from there too.

In the presentation I discuss:

* Origins of organizations, from pre-agricultural through pyramid building, the guild, and modern companies

* Enterprise vs. Corporation. The critical distinction that means the “enterprise” will be more important than the “corporation” moving forward

* My personal work journey, through distributed computing, financial markets, Japan, information broking and NLP formed my thinking on organizations

* Knowledge and relationships are the only resources that matter in today’s economy

* Living networks of people, organizations and industry emerge

* Organizations are media entities – the flow of information defines its functioning

* Three driving forces today: Connectivity, Expectations and Commoditization

* Enterprise 2.0 is about creating the next phase of organizations – it is done by creating parameters for experimentation

* In the Heuristic Age structured trial and error is the only viable path to responsiveness

* Five questions: I end with five key questions we must answer to create the future of the enterprise:

What structures will emerge for allocating capital to enterprise?

What models will best turn participation into value creation?

How do we best tap the global talent economy in a virtual world?

What role will reputation play?

How will we make work meaningful?

Read more →

The emergence of mobile augmented reality

By

A new mobile app called Layar has been launched recently. It will initially only be available for Android, with the intent of getting it onto the iPhone 3G S as a priority. At this point it only functions in the Netherlands, but will be available in Germany, UK and US this year. The video below shows how it could work, giving an example of identifying vacant real estate simply by scanning around.

One of the phone features required for this app to run is the magnetometer (compass). This has been available on many Nokia and some other handsets for a while, and makes its iPhone debut with the 3G S. Magnetometers are actually very inexpensive, but allow a wealth of new mobile applications that depend on knowing which way the camera is oriented.

There is no question that augmented reality will be a key feature of our technological future, and clearly this will be primarily relevant when we are mobile. Annotation of our environment, including detailed information about its features, and particularly user-generated content, will be extremely useful as well as fun. The pervasive nature of the iPhone means this is the platform which is likely to popularize mobile augmented reality. Layar is a player and no doubt there will be more.

Additional commentary from TUAW, IntoMobile, ReadWriteWeb, AndroidGuys, and MacRumors.

How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors

By

One of the most interesting issues regarding Twitter is its impact on the media and journalism. The Insight Exchange is running a lunch event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism in Sydney on 23 June which promises to be extremely interesting, with insights from among others Mark Pesce, Renai Lemay, Paul Colgan and Corrie McLeod (click on the names to see pre-event interviews of the speakers by Beth Etling) as well as in-depth discussion by all participants.

Below are some of my thoughts on the topic. As an introduction, in the ABC TV segment below Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC and myself are interviewed about the role of Twitter in media. Mark emphasizes that people want a trusted source for their news, whereas I point to the value of Twitter in breaking news. At the time I wrote more about these different viewpoints on Twitter and media, noting that Scott’s stance “just takes us back to the traditional view that news is only news once a journalist has reported it.”

I see Five Fundamental Factors on how Twitter impacts media and journalism:

1. Twitter’s role in breaking news

Read more →

Hanging out with Paul Krugman

By

I just got sent this nice picture of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and myself at the residence of His Highness Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research. We were invited to his home in the evening for an informal conversation after the MegaTrends conference we both keynoted at in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks ago.

HH Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan is looking at a copy of my book Living Networks.

abudhabi_krugman_dawson.jpg

Top Twitterers: US, Canada, Norway, Australia, UK, New Zealand

By

[UPDATE:] Here is the updated Twitter nation data from January 2010

Sysomos has just released extensive research on Twitter use, filled with all sorts of fascinating information, such as 72% of Twitter users have joined since the beginning of this year, 53% of Twitterers are women, and marketers are 50 times more likely than normal people to follow over 2000 people.

I am always interested in comparing countries, so I pulled out and analyzed their statistics on where Twitter users are located to calculate the proportion of the population that are use Twitter. I used the Sysomos data on Twitter usage, the ever-handy Nationmaster for population figures, and a combination of the recent https://rossdawson.com/blog/at_current_grow_1 combined with Sysomos data on recent growth, as well as our own estimates.

Twitterusers_country_Jun09.jpg

The US is in the lead, not surprisingly, though by a far lower margin than even just six month ago. The global growth of Twitter has accelerated recently, making usage in a number of other countries not far behind that of the US. The English speaking countries – Canada, Australia, UK and New Zealand – follow close behind, with Norway the stand-out in non-English speaking countries, together with the Netherlands and Sweden. The figures suggest Twitter is a truly niche interest in other countries, including France and Germany.

Read more →

The Upsides of Downturns at Creative Sydney

By

This evening I spoke at the Upsides of Downturns event at Creative Sydney. The Creative Sydney festival is intended to celebrate the creative wealth and diversity of the city, which is far deeper than most people appreciate and absolutely world-class. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get to any of the other events, but I heard some great things about what has been happening through the festival.

I’ll post separately on what I spoke about – below are the unedited notes I took during the presentations and discussion. There were some great ideas put forward, with the most prominent theme of the evening how more and cheaper space in and around city centers can support creative connection and communities. There are clear lessons for urban planning and driving creative cities.

Andrew Ramadge, News.com.au

Challenge of the death of newspapers. The upside is that young journalists are experimenting and trying new things.

Read more →

Innovation Bay angel dinner: great stories from start-ups Goanna, Posse and AdSoft

By

Since Victoria and Phoebe are still in hospital, last night I snuck out to Innovation Bay’s angel dinner. Innovation Bay has been running for five and half years, bringing together an invitation-only group to a variety of compact events. The founders Ian Gardiner, Rand Leeb-du-Toit and Phaedon Stough recently got together to reassess what they should do with the community and decided to run an ‘angel dinner’, inviting all of their speakers over the years plus some other successful entrepreneurs and investors to see some new start-ups. I in fact spoke at Innovation Bay’s second event in early 2004, giving an overview of the social networking space at the time, including key players and business models.

It was an excellent evening, and all three of the companies that presented were very impressive with very good stories to tell. Here are some brief notes from the evening:

Read more →

Phoebe Dawson born today!

By

Hello to the world from Phoebe Dawson! One more perfect instance of the daily miracle of life…

She was born 7 June 2009 at 12:44pm, and weighed 3.85kg (10% more than Leda at birth), looks gorgeous, and is bright and healthy. Both Phoebe and Victoria are doing well.

Phoebeand Leda_070609.JPG

Leda is very excited about baby sister! Daddy and Leda are back at home and baby sister and Mummy will come home soon.

Mythologists will note the connection between Leda and Phoebe.

We intend to all get away on a little holiday soon to have a bit of a relax if we can, then the rest of a busy year beckons…