Tech is back, people. Two huge reasons:
- Tech is still innovating big-time. Thanks to innovation, tech-centric industries (software, networks, online, services), and closely related industries (electronics, telcos, digital media, entertainment, gaming, tech consulting), are going strong in tough economic times. We’re the ‘real’ economy now!
- Hardcore tech is easier to access than ever. It’s never been easier to move beyond being just a ‘user’ by actually customizing, assembling, and developing your very own apps and services.
In an effort to capture the excitement of this new era, we have launched the non-award-winning “You belong in tech” ad campaign to get students fired up. The campaign only consists of an eight slide presentation, but each slide is extremely high impact.
We have also launched the Campaign for Real Tech (CRT), which consists entirely of this blog post. CRT believes that a business school education in San Francisco deserves serious tech coverage. Students, if you want to learn more about any of these topics, leave a comment on this page, or grab your nearest b-school administrator:
social media, social technologies, online communities, tech product management, tech marketing and sales, web 2.0, open source, open innovation, enterprise architectures, web analytics, web apps, e-commerce (yes, it’s back), content management, customer relationship management, APIs and platforms, search engine placement, online ads, online experience management, usability, virtual worlds, mobility, location-based services, sensor tech, or enterprise 2.0
If you want to change the world, this is the time.
The newly-released book Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion looks at how positive visions of the future convince people to invest in, adopt, and use new technologies. For many emerging technologies, rational arguments and financials aren’t enough, because of the uncertainty. At some point, there has to be a leap of faith. But how does this leap of faith happen?
My chapter, “Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies,” is a study of more than 2,500 articles published over a 10 year period, to see how companies in the once-hot Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) space convinced themselves to make big investments in the technology.
Through arguments with colorful names such as new mass markets, killer features, inevitable progressions, bundling together, and the ever-popular horse race, 34 of the leading companies in computing, telecom, and consumer electronics convinced themselves to make major PDA investments, though most were soon abandoned. When success didn’t materialize as quickly as they hoped, they used variants of these arguments to rationalize their failures.
The chapter includes two short case studies of companies that were able to successfully resist the prevailing rhetoric of the day, and how they did it. The British PDA maker Psion managed to resist the craze for ‘pen-based computing’, while the American company Palm resisted the conventional wisdom of phone-based ‘communicator’ PDAs with their own vision of a ‘connected organizer’.
(Added 6/23/08) A nice review of the book here that mentions the chapter.
Why the obsession with Macworld? The iPhone is hot, of course, and Macs are great machines. Steve Jobs is the 21st century genius of tech marketing. But there has to be something more fundamental to explain how Macworld can simultaneously overshadow the entire consumer electronics industry at CES, and the retirement of Bill Gates.
I think everyone’s crazy for Apple because people are desperate for consumer electronics innovation. Exciting, innovative, easy-to-use software was supposed to be the future of consumer electronics. But who else besides Apple is really delivering?
The Wall Street Journal argued a few years ago (”Power Switch”, 3/10/05; see my letter to the editor published in the WSJ here) that American companies were finally making headway in the Asian-dominated consumer electronics industry because of their superior software skills. They provided three examples: iPods, Kodak EasyShare cameras, and Palm organizers. Fast forward to 2008, and it looks like Apple is the only game in town.
The consumer electronics companies are giving us 150-inch plasma screens and screaming fast wireless routers, but where’s the software innovation? Which universities are providing the great ideas? Which venture firms will touch the consumer electronics space? Which companies are focusing on important consumer tasks, and making them easier from start to finish? People want iPhone or iPod-like design in their future, not the nightmarish menu system on my new big-screen monitor.
Corporate entrepreneurship is the idea that large corporations can overcome their “risk-averse cultures” that “stifle innovation” and learn how to “create, develop, and sustain innovative new businesses”.
I’ve prepared a new executive lecture session on the opportunities offered by new information technology for promoting corporate entrepreneurship, broken down into three categories:
- Collaboration through ’social computing’ - enabling people to find each other and not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’, let voices and ideas be heard, and allow people to describe and categorize knowledge in the way they find most useful.
- Analytics and business intelligence - finding ways to take advantage of the masses of data being collected by firms.
- ‘Mass collaboration’ with the outside world - linking to innovation capabilities outside of any one business.
But can mere technology make a difference? Conventional wisdom says that corporate culture and leadership ultimately determine whether businesses can become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and that technologies are just tools. I wonder. Maybe the technology itself, if it connects enough people together, can be the source of significant change. Let’s see what our visiting executives have to say.
The slides are available here. This session will be part of the USF Corporate Entrepreneurship Latin America program for the ADEN Business School of Argentina, rated as the top MBA program in Latin America by Latin Trade magazine. Thanks to my colleague Carlos Baradello for organizing the session.
According to NASA, over 95% of the universe is made up mysterious substances known as dark matter and dark energy. We only really understand less than 5% of the cosmos.
Modern biology suggests that 98% of the human genome is non-protein coding, or so-called ‘junk’ DNA. We are just beginning to figure out how the vast majority of our genetic material works.
In physics and biology, progress comes in the form of “knowing what we don’t know”, opening up promising new lines of research and technology development. Is there an equivalent in the business world–something that is fundamental, yet we know very little about? I can think of at least two possibilities.
My first candidate for the ‘dark matter’ of the business universe is services.
Though services make up almost 80% of the US economy, they are defined more by what they aren’t–not manufacturing, not agriculture–than what they are. Recent research papers are arguing that most of our definitions of services are wrong. It’s not about the lack of a physical product. Services are a fundamental challenge because they require businesses to treat customers as both a ‘wave’ and a ‘particle’: simultaneously as a customer to be served, and as a supplier or a producer to be managed.
My second ‘dark matter’ candidate, perhaps even more mysterious, is knowledge.
Economists will tell you that intangible, knowledge-based assets have made up the majority of capital in the US economy since the late 1960’s, and businesses “know” that knowledge is fundamental to innovation and competitiveness. But knowledge is not just another asset to be managed in the same way, or another form of property to be bought and sold. There is a fundamental ‘uncertainty principle’ around knowledge. Unlike information, knowledge is a capacity for action based on human understanding, placing limits on how easily it can be created, shared, and applied to different situations.
How can the ‘dark matter’ of the business universe open up promising new directions for business theory, and business practice?
In terms of theory, both services and knowledge challenge our most fundamental understanding of what it means to be a business firm operating in a market. The boundaries of the firm are much less solid, as knowledge-centered business depends on complicated relationships between shared knowledge in the outside world, and the businesses that try to exploit it for private gain. The inside-out relationship with customers in service-centered business also challenges traditional firm boundaries.
The concept of a well-functioning competitive market gets stretched to the limit because knowledge-based and service-based products are the opposite of well-defined commodities, and because of the extreme lack of ‘perfect information’ held by buyers and sellers. Rather than seeing ‘dark matter’ as an extreme but rare case of normal reality, we have to change our thinking to make knowledge-centered or service-centered business the norm, not the exception.
In terms of business practice, we have the emergence of the ultimate global, open, low-cost technology for sharing knowledge and delivering services–our old friend the Internet. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you know what the Internet is capable of. We are only today getting reasonable broadband, always-on penetration in the developed word. Only one-sixth of humanity is on the Internet. And we are just beginning to figure out how to use the Internet in truly innovative ways that don’t simply automate what came before (see e-commerce). It took us almost ten years to figure out how to blog! We might speed things up by focusing on fundamental business unknowns, rather than just reacting to new applications that emerge from geekdom.
Do we know how little we know about the business universe?
Thanks to my colleague Steve Alter for the recent research on services.
Research shows that IT investments pay off nicely in general, and that IT is a big contributor to labor productivity. So why are so many companies frustrated with their IT department, and complain about disappointing and inflexible enterprise technology?
My presentation on what I call the ‘IT Innovation Gap’ tries to show why so little IT investment is spent on innovation, and how the next generation of ‘Open innovation models’ might provide a much needed innovation boost to a tech industry that sometimes gets in the way of change.
The presentation slides are available here. This talk was given as part of USF’s executive education program for the Management Institute of Paris, France. Thanks to my colleague Nick Imparato for inviting me to speak.
Sadly, I never had a chance to try out my Français très mauvais on the group.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 