El otro "costo" de la innovación

No innovar nos cuesta:

No disfrutar más.
No lograr ventaja competitiva; (eventualmente) no sobrevivir.
No poder ahorrar tiempo.
No dar a surgir nuevos hábitos/usos.
No crear riqueza.
No llegar a ser un campeón de la innovación :-)

El DNA de los Innovadores (9): "Many innovators hit on an innovative idea while taking something apart"

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

***

Un gran regalo para su hijo esta Navidad : ¡Un kit de destornilladores! :-)

Un decálogo para emprendedores innovadores

Aquí la página de Apps.co de dónde fue tomada

"Nosotros los emprendedores Apps.co creemos en:

1.El riesgo como tu compañero de aventura, lo que es Robin a Batman o Pinky a Cerebro.

2.La necesidad de revisar muy bien tu emprendimiento si crees que lo único que necesitas es dinero.

3.Que tu éxito depende de tu capacidad de probar y validar tus hipótesis en el mercado, trabajar en red y crear comunidades.

4.Apasionarse por el emprendimiento. Pero no dejar que está sea la única consejera en la toma de tus decisiones. La razón y la perseverancia te llevan a materializar tu pasión y tener resultados.

5.Que si creas una propuesta de valor que apasione tanto a tus clientes no podrán imaginar sus días sin ti.

6.Que el camino al éxito está pavimentado con lecciones de aquellos que fallaron y aprendieron de sus errores. Fallar es clave, si no lo haces duda de tu emprendimiento.

7.Las ideas compartidas se enriquecen y multiplican. Escondidas se debilitan y mueren.

8.Que la creatividad e innovación te ayudan a descubrir los caminos. La creatividad ilumina tu camino y el aprendizaje continuo afirma tus pasos.

9.Que las intuiciones no son negocios, los negocios se construyen con perseverancia, trabajo duro y pasión.

10.Que el tamaño del reto es directamente proporcional a los desafíos que tienes que enfrentar y a las recompensas que podrás obtener."

***

¿Y quién califica como emprendedor innovador?

R/ El que no se rinde jamás: lo logra, o, (triste pero valientemente) perece en el esfuerzo :-)

Investigación de Mercados y Big Data

Aquí la entrada completa desde Innovations Tools

Extracto introductorio:

"The combination of Big Data and ethnographics can be a potent toolset for uncovering innovation opportunities, as a growing number researchers are discovering.

For many years, marketing has been in love with Big Data as a means of discerning what customers want and delivering products and services to them. In this role, it has been a lagging indicator, telling us what consumers are doing and have done, but it has been of limited utility by itself as a driver of innovation.

At the same time, ethnography has been growing in importance as a tool to "go deep" and understand what challenges customers are having by observing them in their natural environment. Often, this illuminates jobs to be done and pain points that cannot be discovered in any other way. This type of input tends to be more reliable than focus groups, where customers are brought into a sanitized environment and asked a series of questions. Taking them out of the context in which they use a product tends to skew their answers, and once again is backward looking. Consumers can easily tell us what they are using and doing today, but are notoriously bad at articulating what their unmet or future needs may be. For example, a focus group could have never envisioned the Apple iPhone."

***

Parece como si finalmente todo el esfuerzo (de algunos pioneros) de construir una ciencia desde el marketing, una que resuelva óptimamente, velozmente, y continuamente las "necesidades básicas" del ser humano, estuviera coronando. Son buenas noticias sin duda, porque resuelto lo anotado, quizá podamos finalmente empezar a ver más allá del agite diario del sueño y los apetitos, con unos ojos y una visión que hasta ahora no hemos tenido; que no han tenido tampoco los que desde siempre han dormido y apetecido en calma :-)

Tele[a distancia]Comunicación - Innovación - Local[cerca]ización

Aquí el reciente Special Report from The Economist: A sense of place

Extracto introductorio:

"THERE WAS SOMETHING odd about the black car at the junction of Sutter and Hyde Streets. It was an ordinary saloon. Its windows were clear, and it looked in good condition. And yet, as the lights changed and the car pulled away into the bright San Francisco morning, a question remained. Why was it sporting a luxuriant pink moustache at its front?

The moustache is the trade mark of Lyft, a ride-sharing service that began in the city this summer. Its drivers are private individuals who, in effect, rent out seats in their cars for a few dollars a time. Lyft’s cut is 20%. It works through a smartphone app. When you register as a customer, you supply your phone number and credit-card details. When you want a ride, you open the app and see a map with the locations of the nearest moustachioed motors. You tap to request a ride, and the app shows you your driver’s name, his rating by past passengers (out of five stars) and photos of him and his car. He will probably greet you with a friendly fist-bump. Afterwards you rate him and pay through the app. He rates you, too, so if you are poor company you may not get another Lyft." ...

***

En verdad algo así no podría haber sucedido hace 30 años; no sólo porque aún no teníamos los c-phones, sino también porque vivíamos en una época en la que la "propiedad" o era desestimada por unos (hippies), o exageradamente estimada (hasta venerada) por otros: y tenida por símbolo de poder... En la carretera la cosa era (ligeramente) diferente... Lo interesante, y novedoso, de esta historia con la que comienza el Special Report, es la combinación (eventualmente m a s i v a) de 1)optimización económica, y 2)construcción de relacionamiento humano. Algo está pasando :-)

El DNA de los Innovadores (8): "Diversity of experience"

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

***

Nunca se sabe cómo se van a "juntar los puntos" :-)

De esto puedo dar testimonio por experiencia propia. Y lo más sorprendente: la cantidad de veces, que una cantidad de gente, no alcanza jamás a dar el paso que permite "juntar los puntos", no obstante estar estos ahí: al frente de los ojos, a unos centímetros de la punta de la nariz.

El DNA de los Innovadores (7): "Tap Outside Experts"

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

***

La especialización del conocimiento (al lograrlo, al utilizarlo, etc.) es la gran ganancia, y pérdida al mismo tiempo, de la época moderna (1.500 DC en adelante). Quizá lo que los innovadores han descubierto vía el desarrollo de esta skill no es otra cosa que el inicio de un remedio a esta lamentable situación: que la ganancia TENGA QUE SER pérdida al mismo tiempo.

El DNA de los Innovadores (5)

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

***

1. "Faster, cheaper, better" ha sido desde siempre el "mantra" del desarrollo de productos.

2. Clayton Christensen precisó qué era eso de "better", descubriendo que los compradores lo que hacen es contratar los productos para que estos hagan por ellos los "jobs" que no desean (o no pueden) ellos mismos hacer.

3. Así, la cantidad de Jobs-To-Be-Done bien resueltos que provee un producto, determina en últimas su VALOR para el comprador.

"Chilecon Valley"

Aquí el reportaje desde The Economist

Extracto introductorio:

"ONE by one they came to the stage and pitched their ideas to the crowd. There was the founder of Kwelia.com, which makes software that helps landlords mint more money from their properties. There was the co-founder of Chef Surfing, an online service for people looking to hire chefs, and for culinary wizards keen to tout their skills. And the creator of Kedzoh, which has an app that lets firms send short training videos to workers via their mobile phones or tablet computers.

These and other start-ups, some sporting fashionably weird names such as Chu Shu, Wallwisher and IguanaBee, won rapturous applause from the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the audience. To your correspondent, who is based in Silicon Valley, it all felt very familiar. Yet this scene took place in Chile, a nation better known for copper-mining and cheap wine than for innovation."

***

Otra cara de la globalización sin duda.
Una muy amable por cierto.
Y que señala el camino de las nuevas migraciones: ya no por el hambre (la carencia física de alimentos), sino por el hambre de un espacio propicio para la creación :-)

El DNA de los Innovadores (4)

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

***

En estos días observé (y lo había observado antes muchas veces, sin "caer en cuenta") una pareja que lidiaba con exprimir un "octavo" de limón sobre la empanada en ciernes de ser degustada.

El proceso suele ser bastante molesto:

1.- El "octavo" de limón resbala entre los dedos
2.- Salpica, a los ojos, o a la ropa
3.- Las manos quedan untadas y oliendo por un rato
4.- Y lo peor, pocas gotas finalmente "caen" dentro de la empanada :-)

Quienes venden estas (deliciosas) empanaditas colombianas, de cara a una mayor satisfacción y consumo del producto, tendrían que proveer a sus comensales, por ejemplo, de un exprimidor desechable: una versión de bajo costo del diseño clásico o un diseño mejorado del mismo (ver abajo). Puede no ser desechable, pero esta solución implicaría el proceso-logístico de recogida de la mesa y lavado. En fin, identificado el Job To Be Done, la tarea es ahora de ingenieros y diseñadores :-)

Entrepreneurship: desde el Ludwig von Mises Institute

Aquí, por John Dellape

Extracto 1:

"I am hard-pressed to think of a more fitting time for the book Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm by Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein to be read. The book's aim is to integrate the study of entrepreneurship with the theory of the firm under economic analysis. Nationally and globally we are at a pivotal moment in which people need to understand how businesses function arnd the entrepreneurial abilities necessary for continued economic progress. Without further ado, I give you chapter 1 of the book."

Extracto 2:

"Chapter 1. The Need for an Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm

Foss and Klein (FK) lament from the start the schism that has been erected in economic science between the firm and the entrepreneur. They argue that, for a full understanding of the firm, one must understand the entrepreneurs who make decisions within the firm; while for a full understanding of the entrepreneur, one must understand the environment of the firm in which he acts. Their effort is to make the needed connection where a substantial gap currently exists between the firm and the entrepreneur.
The Theory of the Firm in Economics

FK give evidence to show that "the economic and managerial analysis of the firm is a vibrant area of research and application." At the same time, "the theory of the firm as a contractual or organizational entity … is … a relatively new development" that emerged in the 1970s. The authors argue that it was Ronald Coase who first propelled the theory of the firm.
Entrepreneurship

FK also note that there has been a considerable push in the study of entrepreneurship within the past decade as economists have seen the entrepreneur more worthy of inspection in order to understand technological progress. FK pose the question "What is entrepreneurship?" Typically economists have either defined entrepreneurship in terms of either (1) an outcome or a phenomenon (self-employment, startups) or (2) a way of thinking or acting (creativity, innovation, alertness, etc.)."

Extracto CLAVE:

" [cita desde el propio libro comentado] The firm … is the entrepreneur and the assets he owns, and therefore ultimately controls. The theory of the firm is essentially a theory of how the entrepreneur exercises his judgmental decision-making — what combinations of assets will he seek to acquire, what (proximate) decisions will he delegate to subordinates, how will he provide incentives and employ monitoring to see that his assets are used consistently with his judgments, and so on."

El DNA de los Innovadores (3)

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

***

"La necesidad (la carencia-NO HAY, la urgencia-NO HAY TIEMPO) es la madre de todas las invenciones"

Las "restricciones" son una puya a la creatividad; en la holgura y la comodidad es más fácil la relajación que nos duerme; ensaye (por ejemplo) a vivir un día de su vida con una sola mano disponible, y apreciará cuántas "estrategias" se le ocurren para compensar :-)

El DNA de los Innovadores (2)

Aquí su página en Amazon

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Jeff Dyer (Author)
Hal Gregersen (Author)
Clayton M. Christensen (Author)

"Mejor colorado una vez y no pálido para toda la vida..." :-)

***

Una de las características que hace poderosos a los grandes innovadores, afirman los autores-investigadores, es su permanente actitud cuestionante: hacer preguntas una y otra vez, todo el tiempo, en relación a todo. Aquí se ilustra porqué NO todos se comportan "naturalmente" así; y qué cabe hacer al respecto.


Recuerdo que Kenichi Ohmae, en "La Mente del Estratega", relataba cómo los ejecutivos más brillantes (exitosos) de las organizaciones en Japón allá por las décadas 70s y 80s se caracterizaban por lo mismo: preguntar ¿Por qué? y ¿Por qué (otra vez), y otra vez, y así hasta el cansancio, a objeto de llegar "a la raíz" del problema (u oportunidad :-)

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 24 - final)

p.404 [desde su diario]

“10/9/42: Mankind is prepared to believe anything except the truth.”

“5/29/43: Humanity does not care for freedom. The mass of the people realize that they are not up to it: what they want is being fed, led, amused, and above everything, drilled. But they do care for the phrase [freedom].”

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 23)

p.358

“The case for capitalism, says Schumpeter, “must rest on long-run considerations.” In the short run, it is impossible for people generally, and even intellectuals, to ignore what seem to be un reasonable “profits and inefficiencies.” They therefore have difficulty in seeing long-range trends in which capitalism is benefiting society as a whole. Uniquely among economic systems, therefore, capitalism “creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” With its bountiful production, it underwrites the education of a class of hostile intellectuals who have no “direct responsibility for practical affairs” and little experience in managing anything.

In the larger sense, the emotional feelings of human beings are so complicated that there can be no assurance that people in general are “happier” or “better of” under industrial capitalism than they had been in medieval manors or villages. Economic efficiency is only one of many human goals, and not necessarily the most important to every individual. Thus the future of capitalism cannot be assured on the basis of its superior economic performance alone.”

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 22)

p.356

“In pre-capitalist times, he writes, no economic achievement, by itself, could advance anyone into the living standards of the ruling class. But when capitalism began to spread, persons of “supernormal ability and ambition” could now reach a much higher standard of living, provided they would pursue business careers. Yet business success did not confer the charisma that had attached to feudal lords and others leaders of earlier times: “no flourishing of swords about it, not much physical prowess, no chance to gallop the armored horse into the enemy.”

As time passed, however, the economic juggernaut of capitalism began to subvert most of the underpinnings of feudal society –knightly service, the craft guild, the village, the manor. In place of the old webs of reciprocal personal responsibilities –lord and knight, landowner and peasant, patron and artisan- capitalism substituted impersonal efficiency and opportunity. People were no longer part of an organic social system. They could achieve material gains, but they also became “free to make a mess of their lives.” They now had sufficient “individualist rope” to hang themselves.”

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 21)

p.356

“It seemed plain to Schumpeter that continuous technical innovation and organizational remodeling, not monopolistic profits, accounted for the prosperity of most great companies. “These units,” he says in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, “not only arise in the process of creative destruction and function in a way entirely different from the static schema” but often actually make their own markets: “They largely create what they exploit.” Monopoly profits might flow for a while, but only briefly, in the form of big but single-pay-off “prizes offered by capitalist society to the successful innovator.” Pushing his analysis to its limits, Schumpeter identifies capitalist entrepreneurship with technological progress itself. As a matter of historical record, they were “essentially one and the same thing,” the first being “the “propelling force” of the second.

Schumpeter ends this part of his discussion of capitalism with a remarkable statement that foreshadows the ironic style he uses later in the book:

[Schumpeter:] I am not going to sum up as the reader presumably expects me to. That is to say, I am not going to invite him, before he decides to put his trust in an untried alternative advocated by untried men, to look once more at the impressive economic and the still more impressive cultural achievement of the capitalist order and at the immense promise held out by both. I am not going to argue that that achievement and that promise are in themselves sufficient to support an argument for allowing the capitalist process to work on and, as it might easily be put, to lift poverty from the shoulders of mankind… I am not going to argue, that on the strength of that performance, that the capitalist intermezzo is going to be prolonged. In fact, I am now going to draw the exactly opposite inference.

He next lays the foundations for his much-quoted argument that capitalism has developed the seeds of its own destruction –not for economic reasons but for social ones. To show how this happened, he forthrightly traces the evolution of capitalism from its origins down to the present.”

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 20)

p.355

“The reader of these passages should make no mistake about the radical nature of what Schumpeter is asserting. He is indicting his own economics profession for what amounts to a capital crime: failing to acknowledge that continuous innovation is “endogenous to” (inherent in) capitalism. If this one conceptual alteration were adopted in orthodox economics, then a whole series of methodological shifts would ensue. To the extent that economists become more focused on change, they would pay more attention to the record of change. They would have to pursue a much more thorough investigation of economic and business history, as Schumpeter himself had done in Business Cycles. And against that historical background, they would recognize that large-scale units of control were not merely to be tolerated as necessary evils. Instead, they would see big business as part and parcel of “the most powerful engine of [economic] progress and in particular of the long-run expansion of total output” that the world had ever witnessed.

Schumpeter then returns to the question of monopoly, mounting an attack on many American’s mistaken idea that monopoly and big business are the same thing. The word monopoly itself, he says, is a label “sure to rouse the public’s hostility” because of its association with privileges bestowed by British kings during America’s colonial period. Then, too, the evils of monopoly had been invoked by scores of American statesmen, from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and now by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But under modern capitalism, long-run cases of monopoly are almost nonexistent –even rarer than instances of perfect competition. Hence, high entrepreneurial profits are always temporary. And on balance, big business is unquestionably a positive force for innovation and growth.

It was perverse, Schumpeter believed, that so many people in the United States had confused monopoly with big business and made the latter into a whipping boy. The country was, after all, the seedbed of giant firms. Because of its huge internal market and its entrepreneurial culture, it was the home of about a half of the world’s largest companies. Schumpeter felt very strongly about this issue, even more so than he reveals in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. And he believed that he had found a psychological reason for it. As he wrote in his diary: “American opinion is so anti big business precisely because big business has made the country what it now is and in doing so it has set the secret standard of the American soul: who is no part of big bus., feels he does not meet the standard and by compensation turns against it.”

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 19)

p.354

“In real life, anything approaching perfect competition is extremely rare.

Instead, much of modern business in advanced industrial countries has evolved into a form of organization known as “oligopoly.” This word was introduced by Sir Thomas More in Utopia (1516), then revived 410 years later by Schumpeter’s Harvard colleague E.H. Chamberlin. It now refers to industries in which a small number of large and powerful firms compete with one another in the same line of business: oil, steel, automobiles, chemicals, and a few others. Most of these companies are engaged in mass production, mass distribution, or both; and they often require very large capital investments. In oligopolies, Schumpeter writes, “there is in fact no determinate equilibrium at all and the possibility presents itself that there may be and endless sequence of moves and countermoves, an indefinite state of warfare between firms.” Hence the analogy with military strategy. But these new situations –like others aspects of Schumpeter’s theories, such as the pivotal importance of entrepreneurship- do not easily lend themselves to equilibrium analysis and to mathematical modeling.

One result of the alternative approach Schumpeter proposes would be a sharper focus on product quality and marketing as elements of competition. This new perspective would reduce what had been an overwhelming emphasis on the analysis of price. “In capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not [that kind of] competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization.” This kind of competition “strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.” It is effective even “when it is merely an ever-present threat. It disciplines before it attacks.” A theoretical analysis that “neglects this essential element of the case neglects all that is most typically capitalist about it; even if correct in logic as well as in fact, it is like Hamlet without the Danish prince.”

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 18)

p.353

“In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter next mounts a spirited assault on the idea of “perfect competition,” a key theoretical tool used by academic economists in his own time and in ours as well. Models of perfect competition cannot take business strategy into consideration because they assume that every industry contains innumerable firms, each of which is by definition too weak to affect the economic landscape through strategic behavior. Perfect competition assumes unlimited numbers of both buyers and sellers, all of whom possess complete information about all product and services being bought and sold. Such models contemplate frictionless transactions, with no need for lawyers, accountants, brokers, partnerships, corporations, contracts, or other essential accoutrements of actual business.

Perfect competition lends itself very well to mathematical modeling, however, and that advantage has been almost irresistible to economists. But because it neglects the dynamics of creative destruction, Schumpeter finds perfect competition wholly unsuitable for understanding a modern capitalist economy. When, for example, a new product or process is introduced, all buyers and sellers cannot possible have complete information about potential markets. “As a matter of fact,” Schumpeter writes, “perfect competition is and always has been temporarily suspended whenever anything new is being introduced.” And the continual emergence of new products and new ways of doing things is “the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion.”

Despite its irrelevance to perfect competition, he continues, big-business capitalism has proved its superiority, in the long run, at expanding total output and raising living standards: “The actual efficiency of the capitalist engine of production in the era of the largest-scale units has been much greater that in the preceding era of small or medium-sized ones. This is a matter of statistical record… the technological and organizational possibilities [of firms in the perfect competition model] could never have produced similar results. How modern capitalism would work under perfect competition is hence a meaningless question.”