If, like me, you didn’t attend Nokia World, there are some online presentations you can view. Unfortunately, it seems the higher up in a large company you get, the less you seem to have to really say.

One presentation I did make the end of was by Geoffrey Moore of TCG Advisors. His presentation on innovation gave lots of brain food. Here are the things I could relate to within the context of mobile…

• Waste vs Failure. Failure is acceptable and expected as it’s a learning process. Waste is caused by innovation that didn’t go far enough to differentiate from possible competitors. I have seen too many mobile projects such as this.
• Core innovation. Committing extreme resources such that competitors are unwilling or unable to copy. Fashioning the company culture around core innovation. I think Google is an example of this.
• Process innovation. Doing the same as a competitor but faster and more efficiently. LG and Samsung are trying to do this with the S60.
• Projects which are less about features and more about products that are closer to the mind/experience of the user. This is a ubiquitous theme in mobile.
• Platform innovation where an ecosystem evolves. Symbian and Windows Mobile are larger scale examples. Flickr is a smaller scale example.
• The problem that nothing remains innovative forever. Successful things get copied. In time, increasing resources get spent on keeping things going which provides a poorer rate of return and hampers new innovative projects. The solution can be instrumenting, modularising, optimising and introducing processes such that day-to-day activities can be outsourced and release the innovators in the company. Omitting the ‘modularising, optimising and introducing processes ‘ leads to the failure of many companies when outsourcing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Mobile. Both comments and pings are currently closed.