Versatile Amphibian

Well then: who predicted that sort of year? It's been a big one, no doubt, particularly for those of us to be working at the storm front between the Industrial and Digital Economies. Without giving away too much, the Digital Strategy business I run grew doubled in size for the third year running, driven both by our increasing understanding of how to generate growth in the Digital Economy, but also by increasing buyer awareness of what good looks like. More on both shortly. For my own benefit as much as anything else, I thought I'd document some of my lessons learnt in 2016. As ever, these are somewhat off the cuff and very much my own opinion. Here goes: The pace of change is both much faster and much slower than we expect . Science fiction technologies like self-driving cars made astonishing progress in 2016, both in terms of their capabilities and public awareness of them. Similar gains were seen in advanced prosthetics, space flight, solar panels. On the flip side 'k...

My friend and colleague Paul Lee forwarded me the following article on the role the West Coast Tech industry played in the election of Donald Trump a week ago. The article is interesting and here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/trump-election-silicon-valley-reels.html?_r=1 It raised some interesting thoughts for me about parallels between the sense of hopelessness that may be behind those voting for any change and that of similar people during other economic transitions. All the following is my instinctive off-the-cuff response to the article. I apologise in advance for any lack of compassion and empathy, also for occasional drifting into future musing. Take  it as read that I'm another out of touch member of the Liberal elite! The article is interesting in that it highlights the challenges of our shifting economic system. The point it makes is incomplete in that it is not just tech employees that have benefited from this economy – it is the relati...

As I mentioned in a previous post , I presented at this year's Health 2.0. I also stayed for a number of sessions on digital and innovation. As a relative newcomer to this industry it was enlightening to hear the common themes coming through in presentations from the big pharma companies, so I thought I'd share my main takeaways. The strategic direction of the industry can seemingly be summed up in the phrase "beyond the pill", which is a composite of two big ideas: Digital-only treatments that address the root cause of health problems, which are often bio-psycho-social. Lifestyle, not disease is killing people, so it may be possible to create highly addictive, game-like experiences that change lifestyles and therefore beat the statistics. Treatment ecosystems that reflect the fact that people's problems are often blends of ailments that cannot be effectively treated by a single drug provider or physician. Doing this for real suggests some kind of aggregato...

I was lucky enough to be asked to present at the Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara this week on the topic of digital innovation in the pharma industry. This might surprise some of you (given that three years ago I'd hardly every worked outside tech and media), but we've actually been doing some cool projects in the industry.  I thought you might be interested in the topic since pharma is yet another industry impacted by the Digital Economy, but one with some idiosyncrasies created by the hellishly long and expensive product development process and the role of regulators. If they're going to change from pills to outcomes some fairly major things will have to change and I like to think we're helping a little. As ever, I talked a little about the reasons why digital innovation fails: Failure to validate demand Failure to iterate Failure to track and measure (particularly since the root cause of positive outcomes is hard to figure out) Failure to structure e...

A short post from me to share a simple framework I developed last week to explain the options an organisation has in implementing a digital team. It uses two axes: Degree of coupling to the traditional organisation, which refers to how well integrated the digital team is into the hierarchy; and Way of working, which defines the culture of the team, from traditional to digital native I found it quite useful to determine the leadership team's level of ambition. Hope it's useful!

I’ve been thinking about the future of money, as you do. I’ve been doing this because I’ve been a bit disappointed by ‘challenger’ banks that have emerged in the UK recently. Why? Because they’re just banks… with a twist! Like they’re just a mobile app. Exciting stuff… but still a version of the storage and transfer of money machines that have existed for more or less two centuries. My thought experiment (ongoing) is about what we’d build if we didn’t have banks but did have our world of perfect information and connectivity. Here’s some semi-structured thoughts about it: Fundamentally (in any economy) I want to earn and use assets that enable me to reach my implicit and explicit life objectives.  Many of those objectives are about daily survival at a level of luxury to which I’m accustomed. Some are longer term and more complex. At the root are assets. Assets are a lot more liquid than they used to be because information about their value is more pervasive, as is infor...

It's been a while since I've posted. Work is the reason for this: there is lots of it! My assumption as to why this is is that many more organisations are feeling the impact of the broad spectrum disruption that's coming down the line from increasingly established Digital Economy businesses. Great for me, troubling for my clients...  The disruption is characterised by: Unequal competition between relatively local, focused, traditional organisations and global, digital-first conglomerates A rapid move to consumer-centricity from product-centricity as the predominant business model Uncertainty about how to achieve rapid change from a standing start or even where to begin with a programme of strategic change I'm coming to believe that mobile telecoms carriers are likely to be the next to suffer reimagination of their industry. Open infrastructure projects, network virtualisation and over-the-top services, combined with zealous regulators suggest that is now...

Mobile World Congress is not typically a place where innovation is overt. The industry comes here to talk shop and make deals, not to imagine a radical future. In the handset market this means taking steps to assure a place in the shrinking ranges of the big buyers, who're generally trying to slim down the range they show customers to improve the customer experience. This means not stepping too far from what customers understand right now. No innovation & no disruption. But there are exceptions. Sony, for example showed three products that disaggregate the handset to make it more useful. They showed off a tiny earpiece that enables voice and gesture control of the smartphone that it's Bluetooth tethered to. Although still slightly nerdy-looking, it potentially removes the need to constantly pull out a phone or tap a watch. Even more radical was the companion camera device. This moves the camera phone to a lanyard or shirt clip. Again, a modicum of AI enables the ca...

YouTube and the multichannel network (MCN)/ vlogger ecosystem it supports represents the largest current emerging media type. By my estimate, YouTube streams 4.2Bn hours of content a month, much of which (probably) ends up substituting for time spent with traditional media. But all of the coverage of the platform focuses on whether YouTube itself is profitable for Google, rather than the impact of a global platform on local creativity. Just as was my intent with the report we published on TV last year, which highlighted the impact of accelerating sports rights spending on the creative economy , I'm now looking at the effect of a global platform that exchanges local viewing, flowing directly to local creatives, for consumption of global channels, which goes into international pockets. Numbers on YouTube are really very hard to obtain as the platform is not independently reported on by Alphabet, Google, or anyone else. Even estimates of its top line revenues vary wildly, being as...

As you know, I spend an excessive amount of time trying to describe how Digital Economy businesses are different from Industrial Economy ones. A structure I've tried out recently is the one shown in the picture below, which is intended for a TV/ filmed entertainment company. The idea is that the business can be abstracted into three layers: A Presentation Layer, that enables their products/ service/ content to be accessed/ used/ consumed; A Monetisation Layer that enables assets to be... well, monetised through the presentation layer; and An Asset Layer that describes the explicit and implicit assets of the business On the left side of the diagram are the traditional controlled and ordered layers of the Industrial Economy. On the right is the often unknown and anarchic world of the Digital. I think it's quite fun to play with, which you do by picking one square on the left and imagining how the squares on the right would change how your business operates and comp...

One of the advantages of shows like CES is that you can see everything (or near enough) in a category in one place. Drones had their own 'marketplace' at the show, and also appeared dotted around other areas. What struck me more than anything else was not the innovation in the category, but its ubiquity. Drones only really began to spring up at trade shows five years ago. These were either heavyweight units the size of a small aircraft or tiny, plastic toys with no range and impossibly delicate controls. Step forward to 2016 and there are now dozens of credible manufacturers offering a wide range of styles of quad/ sexto/ octo-copters for professional and consumer use. Better still camera and computing technology means that these drones are far easier to use, able to position themselves automatically to capture that time you got great air . Intel's demonstration of RealSense as a collision avoidance device was impressive. Picture of how it sees the world below. All of...

For completeness, I'm going to write a series of short posts on other themes I saw at CES this year. First up, the connected kitchen. There's been gigantic hype around the connected home for years now, so it's little surprise that lots of tech turned up at CES. I do think that some breakthroughs are being made, mind you. On the stands of LG, Bosch, Whirlpool and Samsung I saw ranges of practical high-end kitchen appliances that offered interesting marginal gains versus their un-connected predecessors. Here's Bosch's summary of the use cases for the category: For example, Bosch's washing machine and dryer combination enables you to programme the machine far more precisely to the load being washed through a slick, user-centric iPad application. I wouldn't change my washer to get this, but I could see how it would be a selling point if I were buying a new one. Interestingly Bosch, LG and Whirlpool all avoided the temptation to put touchscreens into the de...