Desde Innosight: historias de Innovación

Vinay Venkatraman: “Technology crafts” for the digitally underserved

Así comienza:

"Frugal Digital is essentially a small research group at C.I.D. where we are looking to find alternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society. That's what we're after. And we do this because we actually believe that silicon technology today is mostly about a culture of excess. It's about the fastest and the most efficient and the most dazzling gadget you can have, while about two-thirds of the world can hardly reach the most basic of this technology to even address fundamental needs in life, including health care, education and all these kinds of very fundamental issues..."

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 7)

p.181

"For a whole industry, the litmus test of innovation becomes more complicated. Any industry more than a few years old contains powerful elements pulling in opposite directions. Some companies, often the incumbent market leaders, tend to be more conservative and risk-averse than startup firms. By contrast, in new industries with hundreds of companies –such as automobiles in 1900- the more Schumpeterian the particular’s firm culture, the likelier its chances to win the race. Companies in “mature” industries, such as today’s tires, textiles, steel, and automobiles, often do not appear to be Schumpeterian at all. Key innovations have long since worked their way into the routines of every company. But time ant time again, as Schumpeter liked to point out, innovative firms have unexpectedly altered an industry’s apparent maturity.

To take a modern example, when the French company Michelin started mass producing the radial tire in the 1940S, it began a sequence of creative destruction that by the 1980S had shattered America’s long dominance of the industry. The shift to radials killed off all of the big five tire companies except Goodyear and ended the reign of Akron, Ohio, as the Rubber Capital of the World. An industry-wide culture of complacency, deriving from long success, simply prevented American firms from responding effectively.

During the twentieth century, innovative companies also transformed the “mature” textile industry by developing rayon, nylon, polyesters, spandex, and other synthetic fibers. In steel, the advent of basic oxygen furnaces and minimills ended the supremacy of United States Steel, British Steel, and other giant firms.

One of the best examples of all has been the revolutionary Toyota Production System. Toyota Motor, funded in the 1930S, produced only 42,000 cars in 1960 –but 2.3 million in 1980, an increase of 5,240 percent. And its new production system not only transformed the making of cars –ending seven decades of supremacy by Detroit- but also changed the face of manufacturing in general. Toyota’s quality-control mechanisms, its lean manufacturing, and its empowerment of assembly-line workers spread to innumerable factories throughout the world."

Innovation at LEGO

Aquí la entrada desde Knowledge@Wharton, titulada: Innovation Almost Bankrupted LEGO -- Until It Rebuilt with a Better Blueprint

Extracto introductorio:

"It was 2003, exactly 56 years after Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic bricks for building-block toys. On the surface, or so it seemed, the LEGO Group had done everything right over that time period.

The company was an iconic name in the toy business -- plastic building block toys were "LEGOs" in customers' minds, just like all tissues were Kleenex and all flavored ice pops were Popsicles. LEGO was also rare among big companies in that the firm was still run by the founding family, with Christiansen's grandson, Kirk, serving as CEO. While LEGO had always looked for new products, after a sales slump in 1993, the firm tripled its offerings, and in 2000 went on a binge of innovation, adding on LEGO-branded electronics, amusement parks, interactive video games, jewelry, education centers, and alliances with the Harry Potter franchise and the Star Wars movies."

***

Las organizaciones líderes son las que TIENEN posibilidades de seguirlo siendo. En ellas la Innovación (y el cambio que viene con ella), día a día, es su día a día :-)

Urshuz

Aquí su sitio web

"Each season, shoe companies employ teams of people to answer one question: What do we think the consumer wants? Designs are chosen, colors selected, uppers and soles are permanently attached, and products are put on the shelves.

After fifteen years as a shoe designer, Grant Delgatty thought it was time for a change. He felt the final product should be less the company’s shoes and more “Ur“ shoes.

Dedicated to this idea, Grant ultimately created his greatest design: the convertible shoe. With that, Urshuz was born, along with its unique and revolutionary approach to footwear."

***

Había visto un primer desarrollo de algo así con un par de tenis Puma que traían dos pares de cordones, dos colores (café y blanco), lográndose así dos "looks" (más formal, más informal), sobre el mismo resto de cuerpo de zapato.

Con Urshuz podemos "cambiar" el zapato: upper+sole; y al cambiar recombinar uppers y soles a discreción; no sólo colores, también estilos en el upper.

Esto significa:

1. Compramos dos pares de Urshuz y tenemos (el look de) hasta 4 pares.

2. Podríamos intercambiar (al menos el sole :-) con amigos de la misma talla.

3. Podría (alguien) poner un servicio-rápido de intercambios de soles, y alquilar las mismas :-)

4. Las remontadoras odiarán esta innovación (me imagino uno puede comprar una y otra vez sus sole favoritas, sólo estas, sin el upper :-)

5. Por verse: ¿podrán diseñar algo tal para zapatos más formales, para otros estilos de soles?; la puerta de la innovación ha sido abierta :-)

Un símbolo para la Innovatividad :-)

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 6)

p.179

"The test of a Schumpeterian innovation is easy to apply at the level of the entrepreneur, and only a little harder for the firm. Students of business history are familiar with a long list of great innovators: Josiah Wedgwood and Richard Arkwright in the eighteenth century; Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, August Thyssen, and Alfred Nobel in the nineteenth; Henry Ford, Giovanni Agnelli, Estée Lauder, Akio Morita, and Sam Walton in the twentieth; Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and Toshifumi Suzuki in the late twentieth and early twenty-first. The same is true –for most of heir histories- of innovative twenty-first-century companies such as Microsoft, IKEA, Nokia, and Google. But by Schumpeter’s definition, all successful firms have been entrepreneurial at some moment in their histories, though a given company is certain to be more entrepreneurial at one point and less so at another. When their innovation dwindle, firms begin to die."

GroupMe

Aquí

"Group Messaging
Start groups with the people already in your contacts. When you send a message, everyone instantly receives it. It’s like a private chat room that works on any phone."

"Photo Sharing
Capture your group's moments as they happen, and share them instantly within the conversation."

"Location
Share your location with the people in your group. Find out where your friends are and see them all on a map."

***

En principio, las TICs son todo acerca de ACERCAR a la gente... solo que, CON LA GENTE, primero hay que haberse acercado (entrado en real contact) para así quizá haberse amistado o fall in love... ¿Será posible que las TICS (más allá de los servicios de DATING) podrán coadyuvar en ésto algún día?

Intoxivation...

...es el título de la columna de "Schumpeter", aquí, en The Economist de esta semana

Extracto introductorio:

"ROALD DAHL, a children’s author, wrote the best study of innovation in the food-and-drink industry. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, he describes how old products can be delivered in new ways (eg, by teleporting chocolate bars into people’s homes via television). And he describes how a gifted innovator can produce entirely new products, such as cavity-filling caramels and everlasting gobstoppers. Dahl grasped that a company is most likely to innovate if the boss (Willy Wonka) and his minions (the Oompa-Loompas) are obsessed with their products. All these insights apply to adult beverages, too.

The drinks business is one of the world’s most conservative. Wine drinkers value ancient vintages. Regulars ask the barman for “the usual”. Brewers tussle mightily to increase their market share by a single percentage point. But none of this is true in emerging markets. There, drinkers have yet to become set in their ways, and innovation is rife..."

***

LA LECCIÓN: TODO es I N N O V A B L E :-)

AdWorks clicks (el valor de una innovación :-)

Con los ingresos de Google, aquí, rondando los USD 40 billones año, y sabiendo que AdWords responde por el 99% de estos, y poniendo (a dedo) un precio promedio por click facturado de USD 0,5, podemos "calcular":

1. En el planeta Google-Tierra, alguien (es) está (n) haciendo click en un anuncio AdWorks a razón de poco más que 2,500 veces por segundo.

2. Dicho de otra manera, al total de la población colombiana (45 millones de habitantes) les tomaría equiparar lo dicho, haciendo click cada quien en grupos de a 2,500 en 2,500, uno detrás del otro, poco menos de 5 horas.

3. O bien, cada segundo, Google factura por los clicks, algo así como USD 1,250. Más claro USD 76,100 por minuto. Clarísimo: poco más de USD 4,5 millones por hora (casi USD 110 millones al día :-)

***

PS: Just las "Páginas Amarillas" del siglo XXI, just planetarias.

El señor J.A. Schumpeter

*****

De quien todas estas ideas de innovación e innovadores, recibieron en principio
a l u m b r a m i e n t o :-)

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 5)

p.177

"In an important piece called "The Function of Entrepreneurs and the Interest of the Worker," which he published in 1927 in a labor magazine, Schumpeter tries to show how the long-term interests of entrepreneurs and workers are almost identical. He begins with an overview of nineteenth-century industrialization in Britain and finds that even with the inmense increase in wealth, the distribution of income remained almost constant. Therefore, the wide-spread notion that industrialization brings the impoverishment of the masses is mistaken.

He then asks whether wealthy people in Britain received too large a share of the rewards of industrialization. He says the answer may well be yes, but that the question itself is flawed. The more appropriate issue is the way in which high earnings motivate entrepreneurs to translate innovations into actual production -and thereby raise the general standard of living. He underpins his argument with a simple calculation of how much money rich people in Britain actually possess -an amount which, if divided among the rest of the population, would hardly raise living standards al all.

Schumpeters's key point here is one he hammered home many times: it is the insatiable pursuit of success, and of the towering premiums it pays, that drives entrepreneurs and their investors to put so much of their time, effort, and money into some new projects whose future is completely uncertain. High entrepreneurial returns are essential to generate gains not only for individuals but also for society, through the creation of new jobs. Financial "speculation," though it gets a very bad press, is an important part of this process. Speculators often turn out to be investment bankers funding the entrepreneurs who in turn push innovations through the economy."

T.I.M.E. de LMFAO

La parodia siempre ha sido un modo de la innovación. Por tanto la innovación en la parodia viene a ser una "al cuadrado" :-)

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 4)

p.166

"In his autobiographical novel fragment, composed a few years after Annie [la esposa] and Johanna [la madre] died, he wrote:

And for modern man his work is everything -all that is left...
Doing efficient work without aim, without hope...
No family.
No real friends.
No woman in whose womanhood to anchor.

Constant work is what he continued to do, and not only to suppress his grief. He still had his enormous debts in Vienna to pay, and that task required a diferent type of work from the "scientific" economics and sociology he was pursuing."

¡Qué sea Troya de una vez (schumpeteriana :-)!

Aquí columna resumen de Antonio Caballero en Semana sobre RIO+20.

Ya había dicho yo hace unos años: confío más (¡pero un planeta más!, cabría agregar hoy) en Toyota (y en otras multinacionales) que en cualquier gobierno (de los de por acá, por allá o acullá): ni un peso más (o dólar o rublo) en impuestos, que sea Troya de una vez: ¡todo nuestro arduo ganado-ahorrado dinero a acciones (y acciones) de Toyota! (y otras multinacionales así de serias) :-) Es en serio :-/