Versatile Amphibian

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...

Let me get this out here right now: there are some awesome TVs  at CES this year. Never has the industry been bigger and bolder. Slim, sexy, 4K affairs drip from every surface of the megabooths at Sony, LG, Panasonic and others. But one OEM is the boss man of TV bling. You want OLED? You want SUHD and QUANTUM DOTS ? You want 170"? Samsung's got that, yo! "The World's Largest 170" TV" screams the advert for TVZilla, which looms on one entire wall of a darkened, reverential space in their city block-sized temple to screens. The colour from all of those independently-lit pixels is so bright that it leaves afterimages when you break the trance and look away. It's a monster; a poster giant for the industry's latest acronym: HDR. HDR, for the uninitiated (read: well adjusted) is all about luminosity. It stands for High Dynamic Range and basically means that the pixels on the screen are able to stretch from true black (i.e. the absence of brightnes...

Car technology has grown in importance at CES in the nearly 10 years since Ford became the first automotive company to exhibit here. Much of the talk in the lead up to the show was about the pace of change towards self-driving or autonomous vehicles. Needless to say that this was an important topic for most of the manufacturers I visited, but it was far from the central focus. Here’s my summary of what I saw and chatted about with Ford, Mercedes Benz, Audi, Toyota, Fiat, Hyundai, Kia and VW. Let’s start with the elephant in the exhibit hall: Autonomous vehicles The word on the street (see what I did there?) in the run up to the show was that there would be big announcements about self-driving technology. This didn’t really materialise, although Ford did suggest that they were hoping to get a ‘Level 4’ self-driving car on the roads for public consumption around 2020. ‘Level 4’, for those of you who are not doyennes of World of Jargon, means that the driver should not be re...

While I'm always cautious about announcing goals in advance of their completion ( because it makes them less likely to be achieved ), I've got a really exciting research agenda on the cards in 2016 and I therefore thought I'd share it to get some advance ideas and insights. So without further ado, here's the three Rumsfeldian 'known-knowns' for 2016. Eight Traits of a Digital Business - perhaps no surprise because I've talked about it a lot during 2015, my first business book, on the characteristics of successful (and unsuccessful) organisations in the Digital Economy is out in February. I'm super-excited about it as the response so far has been positive and I've finally finished editing several hundred references! More on this closer to the time... Productivity Benefits of Digital Cultures - a one year study I've been doing with Julian Birkinshaw at the London Business School, along with a number of colleagues. I think we've finall...