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Creating Generational Legacies

Monday, February 13, 2017

Is AI good or bad for humanity?

Go to the profile of Loic Le Meur
Published by Loic Le Meur

Everything is getting smarter. Basic AI is already here. It flies our planes on autopilot, plays video games and beats humans at chess and Go.

Better yet, AI can now teach itself to play a video game. How long will it take until it teaches itself to take over the world? Remember, AI already produced a brief financial crash.

AI is accelerating at an incredible pace, so quickly it’s said that AI should exceed our own intelligence between 2040 and 2060. Yes, even if “the brain is the most complex object in the known universe” (Nick Bostrom). “In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ — we don’t have a word for an IQ of 12,952.” (Tim Urban in his must read AI story)

source: waitbutwhy

How bad could it be?

The train won’t stop when it exceeds our intelligence. Who knows what will happen when machines exceed our brains. There is no way to predict what the consequences will be for us.

Stephen Hawking says the development of AI “could spell the end of the human race”

Yes, that bad. But wait, it could be good.

Experts believe there is a 52% chance that it’s going to be good. Experts are people who know more and more about less and less, so let’s trust them for a minute.

Okay how good?

“Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) could solve every problem in humanity” says Tim Urban. It could “halt CO2 emissions by coming up with much better ways to generate energy that had nothing to do with fossil fuels. Then it could create some innovative way to begin to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Cancer and other diseases? No problem for ASI — health and medicine would be revolutionized beyond imagination. World hunger? ASI could use things like nanotech to build meat from scratch that would be molecularly identical to real meat — in other words, it would be real meat. Nanotech could turn a pile of garbage into a huge vat of fresh meat or other food. Better yet, Artificial Super Intelligence could allow us to conquer our mortality

People think the chances of AI taking over the world are high enough that there is even a consortium between Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. Reid Hoffman and Pierre Omidyar have invested $27m to fund Ethics and Government of AI research.

There’s been a lot of money raised and many companies acquired in AI space in the last 12 months. Self driving seems to be where most of the funding is going.

If you have some time, you should read The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence part 1 and part 2. Watching the TED Talks on AI is great to.


Life after Jobs

Rapid automation is taking place in restaurants, airports, supermarkets and warehouses.

45,000 robots installed by Amazon.

Motor manufacturing becoming almost totally automated.

An insurance company that laid off 90% of its employees and replaced them with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders, which produced an increase productivity of 30% and they will see a return on its investment in less than two years . 

A Chinese factory just replaced 90% of its human workforce with automated machines, it experienced a 250% increase in productivity and an 80% drop in defects.  It is hard to argue against automation when statistics are clearly illustrating its potential.

The  factory used to need 650 human workers to produce mobile phones. Now, the factory is run by 60 robot arms that work around the clock across 10 production lines. The number of people employed drops to just 20, and given the level of efficiency achieved by automation, it won’t be long before other factories follow in their footsteps.  Three people  are assigned to check and monitor the production line, and the others are tasked with monitoring computer control systems. Any remaining work not handled by humans is left in the capable hands of machines.


 This is just the tip of the iceberg and the replacement of people by AI continues that acceleration.


This efficiency of automation comes at a price, though: our jobs. 

Last year, McKinsey showed that currently demonstrated technologies could automate 45 percent of the activities people are paid to perform and that about 60 percent of all occupations could see a minimum of 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated, again with technologies available today.  Within 5 to 10 years we could see unemployment up to 60% of the available workforce.

According to a joint study conducted by Oxford University and the Oxford Martin School, “47 percent of jobs in the US are ‘at risk’ of being automated.”  And these won’t just be factory jobs, either. At the rate that robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are advancing, machines will soon be able to take over tasks in a variety of industries and do them just as well as, if not better than, humans. We already have robot lawyers capable of defending a range of violations, an AI that can deliver a medical diagnosis more accurately than a human doctor, robot journalists, and even therapists that can outperform their human counterparts.

The uncertainty surrounding the future of human employment in the age of automation is already apparent, and machines are poised to keep getting better and better at what they do. 

So what's the solution? How will we make ourselves useful? 

Governments and private organizations are putting some serious thought into this subject and are come up with some potential solutions to address widespread employee displacement.

Among those is universal basic income (UBI), a system in which all citizens of a country receive an unconditional amount of money on top of income they generate through other means. Pilot studies in countries like the United States, India, Canada, and Finland have already begun, and thus far, they’ve delivered promising results. It’s too early to say if UBI could address widespread job loss due to automation head on, but it could ultimately prove to be an empowering economic move as we make the transition.

The times they are a changing . . . and extremely rapidly.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Tim Cook thinks augmented reality is a 'big idea like the smartphone'


https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/mashable.com/2017/02/10/tim-cook-augmented-reality-opportunity-apple.amp

Apple's CEO Tim Cook told "the independent" that augmented reality (AR)  has the ability to change the world even going as far to say it's a "big idea like the smartphone."

"The smartphone is for everyone, we don't have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic, or country or vertical market: it’s for everyone," Cook said. "I think AR is that big, it’s huge. I get excited because of the things that could be done that could improve a lot of lives. And be entertaining."

Cook said he thinks of AR as a "core technology" and not a single product -- which, depending on how you want to interpret it, could mean the company's not looking to launch a pair of AR smart glasses, contrary to a claim from AR/VR evangelist Robert Scoble.

"AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what's happening presently."

As a "core technology" Apple could implement AR more broadly across its products rather than tie it down to a single device.

But despite his excitement for it, Cook thinks existing AR technology isn't ready yet, saying "there are things to discover before that technology is good enough for the mainstream."

Cook also dissed VR again. "I’m excited about augmented reality because unlike virtual reality which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what’s happening presently."

"Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world for a long period of time and today you can’t do that because you get sick from it. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance." Ouch. I guess Mark Zuckerberg won't be inviting Cook to try out the latest Oculus Rift VR tech anytime soon.

Sunday, February 5, 2017

How to Make Practical Innovation Sustainable

 

When Richard Branson told a group of startups who met to “thrash out” inspiring visions for the next three decades of business, that “small businesses are nimble and bold and can often teach much larger companies a thing or two about innovations that can change entire industries,” he knew what he was talking about. 

Whether they’re coming up with new products that meet their customers’ needs, joining forces with their competition to gain economies of scale and make significant breakthroughs, or approaching uncharted marketplaces, SMEs are the very cornerstones of innovation in today’s business world. 

The good news is that Innovation doesn’t have to break the bank nor does it require unlimited human resources to happen, nor do  have to come up with a revolutionary invention to be innovative. 

Many innovations coming out of today’s organizations are just small wins that slowly help the company make incremental moves toward achieving its overall mission. In other words, don’t assume you have to spend millions of dollars and allocate hundreds of hours of manpower to creating the “next best thing” that will knock everyone’s socks off, only to watch that dream take a backseat (much like an overly ambitious New Year’s resolution) as everyone refocuses on their day-to-day responsibilities.

BREAKING THROUGH THE GRIDLOCK

So how can companies break through this innovation gridlock and come out winners? The key is to leverage your firm’s “nimble and bold” qualities to always be innovating. And don’t assume you have to come up with the next iPhone, medical miracle, or manufacturing breakthrough to be innovative. A fairly nebulous term defined at its simplest as “the introduction of something new,” innovation assumes different shapes depending on the organization, people, and processes involved.

Clif Bar is a good example of how innovation doesn’t require big-company resources or even a physical location. It does, however, require devoted inventors, a true customer need, and a willingness to put the time and effort into making a product that people will actually like. Starting in their own kitchen back in 1990, the company’s founders began baking their own protein bars because they didn’t like what was on the market at the time. Needing fuel for their long bike rides, they originally marketed their creations to fellow athletes. Fast-forward to 2017 and Clif Bars (and its since-extended product line) graces the shelves of Target, Walmart, and many other mainstream online and offline retailers (not just those targeting athletes).

So how do you do practical innovation regardless of company shape or size? 

You can kick off the process with this 3-step exercise:

Start thinking out of the box. Yes, we know you’ve probably heard this one before, but it’s important when you talk about innovation — an area where the words “But we’ve always done it this way and it has worked,” can quickly derail even the most innovative ideas. When you think out of the box you invite new ideas, brainstorming, and collaboration, all of which support innovation. By keeping an open mind and exploring options that you’ve never considered before, you can start the innovation train rolling in the right direction.

Come up with your own definition of innovation. Go beyond “the introduction of something new,” and figure out what innovation really means to your organization.

Is it:

  • Implementing new ideas?
  • Creating dynamic products?
  • Responding to customers’ changing wants and needs?
  • Improving existing services?
  • Finding new avenues for business growth?
  • Adapting in a challenging marketplace (or to changes in your environment)?
  • Changing your current business model?
  • Developing a culture that’s focused on continuous innovation?
  • Finding business partners to collaborate with to come up with new products and/or services?
  • Some other measure?

These are just a few ways that you can define innovation, but you get the idea. The important point here is to come up with your own picture of what innovation looks like within your organization and then start taking the necessary steps to put it into action.

Go beyond lip service and put innovation into action. Have SMART innovation goals (specific, measurable achievable realistic and within a set time frame )

Talking about innovation doesn’t make it happen. Brainstorming new ideas don’t make them come to life. And hashing out the details of a “future” plan doesn’t mean it’s ever going to come to fruition. To create the greatest impact, you need to actually put the innovation into action by addressing these questions:

  • How do I design my customer interactions?
  • How do I design my new service or product?
  • Who can I work with (both internally and externally) to help make this a reality?
  • What internal and external resources do I have at my avail?
  • Who is going to pioneer this innovation and see it through to the end?
  • And finally, how will I quantify the success of this innovation?

REMEMBER, INNOVATION HAS NO END POINT

Innovation isn’t just about coming up with the next, cool product. It has no end point, and it includes everything from how you take your product to market to how you serve your customer to how you come up with effective pricing solutions. All of these activities fall under the broader contexts of innovation and go well beyond the very narrow “cocktail napkin” approach to innovation.

By adopting this mindset, organizations not only become more competitive and customer-friendly, but they can also become more profitable. The latter is a particularly important point in today’s business world, where thinner and thinner margins — and the need to do more with less — are challenging companies to find more innovative ways to generate revenues.

Pretty much every business that’s surviving today — and that will survive for the long haul — will have to be competitive and innovative across all segments of their workflows. From hiring and compensation to selling to market strategy, positioning, and branding; all of these elements are part and parcel of innovation. In fact, as I survey the business landscape right now, I can tell you that all companies that are “surviving” are leveraging innovation in some way — whether they know it or not.

For some companies, of course, the urge to innovate comes quite naturally. A maker of highly-engineered products, for example, is always on the lookout for the next best product introduction and spends much time and money honing its existing offerings. This commitment to continuous innovation can be applied in pretty much any setting. All companies have the same opportunities to innovate, and particularly when they are pushed to do so by forward-thinking personalities, leaders, and/or owners. Those that are succeeding in competitive markets (e.g., those that are commodity-driven, for example, and that have been hit hard by online sellers on both the business-to-consumer and business-to-business segments), tend to follow some basic principles, which are:

Tight focus on purpose. In other words, why are you here and what purpose does your company serve? The purpose-driven organization has a much better chance of succeeding than the one that’s just selling something to people. Apple and Google are two good examples of firms that are well known for their innovative and creative strategies — not all of which are focused on product development.

Willingness to go beyond the basics. Think beyond just creating a product to your intrinsic value proposition, be it to serve your customers better, save the planet, or some other core value. Through this exercise you’ll be able to create an identity and a true purpose that, in turn, dictates your firm’s position in its industry.

Solid value propositions. Having a value proposition in place also helps organizations answer questions like “How am I going to serve my customer?” “How am I going to price my products and services?” and “How can we create a better execution model for success?”

Vision of a profitable model. Companies must also consider their core competencies, and then turn those advantages into capabilities or differentiations that will be used to build out a platform for innovation. You may have a great vision and terrific partners, but if you can’t create a service platform then you’re not going to be able to develop a profitable model.

Nurturing ecosystem. Last but definitely not least, innovation requires a support group that includes suppliers, customers, and other business partners. This is particularly important in today’s business environment, where companies rely on suppliers to deliver quality products; their employees to sell, deliver, and support the products being sold; and their customers to put the products to work out in the field. By continually nurturing that ecosystem, companies can innovate effectively on a regular basis.

This combination of purpose, platform, and ecosystem can be leveraged effectively across all innovation models, and by companies of all shapes and sizes. Build out innovation based on these guiding principles and use it to develop customer-centric innovation that truly differentiates your organization and helps it stand out in the marketplace. You’ll be glad you did.


Copyright (c) 2017 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved.

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Business and tech trends in 2017



The new year looks to bring with it a whole new range of business and technology trends. At Brennan IT we have close partnerships and relationships with both our clients and vendors and we keep a close ear to the ground. So without further ado, we bring you the business and technology trends that we will see the most of in 2017. 

1. Focus on training remote employees and mobility set to dominate

Startups and technology companies are leading the way in terms of hiring staff remotely, using platforms such as Skype and Zoom to interview prospective candidates. This extends to enabling successful candidates to work remotely once they are hired, as well as do on-the-job training, needing nothing more than an Internet connection and a secure, connected device.

2. Leveraging the sharing economy style of working/ adapting to digital transformation

Customer expectations are driving digital transformation. Customers now expect the same level of interaction from every company they engage with, not only the sharing economy giants like Uber and Airbnb. The new sharing economy will be increasingly customer-centric and businesses need to adapt, or risk losing their customer to another provider that shows customer-centricity.  

3. Cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure must keep pace

Security issues are rating as a higher business concern across all industries. Customers are also becoming more aware of the importance of choosing a trusted business provider who will keep their personal information safe and secure. This will prove to be a key differentiator, so organisations will face increased pressure to ensure they are equipped to deal with the latest cyber threats.

4. Increased organisational change management as part of technology adoption

As businesses continue their transformative paths through the addition of new technology, the role of organisational change management becomes more intrinsic. It will be of paramount importance that staff are ready and fully equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to take advantage of the new technological developments within their organisation, in order to maximize the value of those investments.

5. Customer journey mapping as a way to understand and anticipate customer needs and emotions.

Companies are waking up to the fact that getting the customer experience right is a critical component for the success of their business. Customer journey mapping can be a powerful way to improve customer experience and gain real insight into what customers want and to stay ahead of the curve.

6. Acceleration of the cloud market and hybrid cloud operations

The economies of scale that cloud infrastructure can offer to enterprises, will enable them to better provide for customers. We will also see the cloud market continue to accelerate, with more businesses moving their core applications to the cloud.

7. Growth of mesh app and service architecture and adaptive security architecture

The set of endpoints people use to access applications and information or interact with people, social communities, governments and businesses need to be managed, integrated and secured, and the market for bringing these various endpoints together and having them talk to each other is set to increase dramatically.

 

8. Destroying silos in business operations

Organisational silos will continue to be broken down, as the climate of collaboration and the technology to support it continues to flourish. This will be complemented by collaborative social tools, such as Facebook for Business.  

The future of jobs and evolution of skills

 

In the words of the famous author Elbert Hubbard:

 “ONE MACHINE CAN DO THE WORK OF FIFTY ORDINARY MEN, NO MACHINE CAN DO THE WORK OF ONE EXTRAORDINARY MAN”

Disruptive changes to business models will have a profound impact on the employment landscape over the coming years. Many of the major drivers of transformation currently affecting global industries are expected to have a significant impact on jobs, ranging from significant job creation to job displacement, and from heightened labour productivity to widening skills gaps. In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. In such a rapidly evolving employment landscape, the ability to anticipate and prepare for future skills requirements, job content and the aggregate effect on employment is increasingly critical for businesses, governments and individuals in order to fully seize the opportunities presented by these trends—and to mitigate undesirable outcomes.

The future guarantee for employability (finding a job) and continual productivity is a work environment focused on human-only skills:

Subjective reasoning, Imagination, Negotiation, Questioning, Empathising, Story-telling, Connecting, Creativity and Design.

I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots. (Albert Einstein)

Past waves of technological advancement and demographic change have led to increased prosperity, productivity and job creation. This does not mean, however, that these transitions were free of risk or difficulty. Anticipating and preparing for the current transition is therefore critical.

In the current era of global value chains, many companies are locating different job functions and categories in different geographic locations to take advantage of the specific strengths of particular local labour markets. Demographic, socio-economic and—increasingly—technological trends and disruptions to the business and operating models of global companies have the potential to rapidly change the dynamics of the global employment landscape. What is the outlook for existing jobs functions, but more importantly what wholly new occupations and fields of specialisation can we expect to in existing and/or emerging industries as well as those that are foreseen to be made obsolete over the coming years.

At the same time, education and training systems are not keeping pace with these shifts. Some studies suggest that 65% of children currently entering primary school will have jobs that do not yet exist and for which their education will fail to prepare them, exacerbating skills gaps and unemployment in the future. Even more urgent, underdeveloped adult training and skilling systems are unable to support learning for the currently active workforce of nearly 3 billion people.

In addition, outdated cultural norms and institutional inertia already create roadblocks for half of the world’s talent – and are getting worse in the new context. Despite women’s leap forward in education, their participation in the paid workforce remains low; and progress is stalling, with current forecasts for economic parity at 170 years.

However, if leaders act now, using this moment of transformation as an impetus for tackling long-overdue reform, they have the ability not only to stem the flow of negative trends but to accelerate positive ones and create an environment in which over 7 billion people on the planet can live up to their full potential.

How?

By investing in human capital and preparing people for the new opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution and a radical transformation of the existing educational ecosystems. Many education systems are so far behind the mark on keeping up with the pace of change today and so disconnected from labour markets that nothing short of a fundamental overhaul will suffice in many economies. The eight key areas of action here are: early childhood education, future-ready curricula, a professionalized teaching workforce, early exposure to the workplace, digital fluency, robust and respected technical and vocational education, openness to education innovation, and critically, a new approach to lifelong learning.

The rapid pace of change means we need to act urgently. Transforming education ecosystems, creating a humanistic economy and managing the transition to a new world of work require political will, innovative policy, new financing models and, most importantly, a new mindset.

The fourth industrial revolution will turn the world of work as we know it on its head as it continues to unfold.

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Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Can Innovation be

Great article by Anand Venkataraman about some of the impact of the innovation practices we developed and used at SRI — "Can Innovation Be Learned?”  

https://www.quora.com/Can-innovation-be-learned-or-taught/answer/Anand-Venkataraman

I’d like to answer this based on my experience of having worked for almost a decade at one of the most magical places in the Bay Area - SRI International. SRI has variously been described as “The Mecca of R&D”, “The powerhouse of Silicon Valley’s innovation”, and “Where the mouse was born”, if not “The source of the very first Internet communication in the world.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my tremendously fulfilling years at SRI, it is that we are all, every one of us, innovative and creative at our cores, but many incorrectly believe otherwise because of a bad habit that’s been ingrained in us. We fail to adhere to the discipline of innovation, and our innovative flashes often die out before they see light of day. Unfortunately, sometimes these flashes are even killed off before they reach cognitive maturation in our minds, thereby leading us to think that we lack creativity or innovation!

Luckily for us, recent research is generating increasing evidence that these old habits can be broken for good, and that a growth mindset can be cultivated in which anyone can consciously work to improve their mental faculties (See Dweck’s work [1], for instance). With the right mindset one begins to recognize and appreciate that all innovation and creativity starts off as simple ideas that must be nurtured to grow into the resplendent trees they will become with the right effort.

Not surprisingly there are many calculi for nurturing the germ of innovation, even for identifying it in the first place within the vast forests of our thoughts. The one I was trained to practice, and the one for which I have grateful first hand evidence of utility, of course, is SRI’s own. If you haven’t read the book [2], I highly recommend that you get Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want.

TL;DR? You’re in luck. In a nutshell, the discipline is to follow the iterative four-step practice we call NABC. The letters stand for the four cornerstones of innovation: Need, Approach, Benefits and Competition. These are built into an iterative quantitative framework that allows one to measure progress on the scale of innovation and improve the value proposition of their solution. Yes - the quantification is important. How else would you make objective progress?

The Need

Focus on the customer’s need - Not your need as an innovator, or a shareholder’s need for value. Does the customer have a need for something? How acute is this need? Would a solution be a lifesaver, a painkiller or a supplement? [3]. Furthermore, how can you quantify the need? Is the need relevant to one person, a few people, or an entire demographic? Is it like this shade of pink you accidentally painted your daughter’s bedroom in that you find personally distasteful and would like removed, or is it a need to automatically filter and transform images incident on a retina to make them pleasing to the eye - any viewer’s eye? The first thing you do is to record the need as you see it and determine just how big the scope is. If it’s not large enough (doesn’t impact a significant number of people) can it be made to? These questions can’t be answered and refined until after you’ve quantified the need. So as a first step, write down a tentative number on how big you think this need is.

The Approach

It’s all about how you solve this particular need of the customer. Here is where you’ll ask yourself what your secret sauce is. It’s important to have a secret sauce because that’s what tells you how innovative your original idea is. Besides, a secret sauce is your entry barrier - A successful company needs an entry barrier to give it an opportunity and a kind of monopoly and incentive to develop its idea to its fullest. Without an entry barrier, rather than focus on refining the core of the idea at a time when it’s needed most, you would be expending all your energy on deterring others from eating your lunch. Instead of simplifying your idea, which is the key to success, you’ll end up making it more complex which spells certain doom.

Don’t worry if you don’t have an approach completely nailed down just yet because by the time you’re done with this process, you will have one, sure as day follows night.

Again, it’s critical that you somehow quantify the approach, even if tentatively. You might write down things like “allows the user to reach their destination in half the number of miles” or even “One Click purchase? How about NO-CLICK purchase?” Incidentally, that last one was exactly the approach I wrote down in 2004 when we developed the value proposition for a technology that would enable users to purchase things by voice. You may now be thinking “Purchase by Speaking N words? How about Purchase by Speaking NO Words (i.e. Just by STARING)? Or even the holy grail of advertisers - “How about Purchase by Thinking it for N Seconds?” Better still - how about “Purchase by NOT EVEN THINKING IT (0 seconds)?” - Incredibly, such a product is already out there in the real world! Today, you can buy a refrigerator that knows its contents using a combination of sensors and can purchase things for you before you even realize you’re about to run out. Eat that, Mr. Dash!

The Benefit

This tells you not only what a difference for the better your solution will make in the life of the customer, but also how much of a difference. It’s important to understand that almost every significant benefit can be quantified even if only by proxy. Sometimes we may consider benefits that seem vague and think that it’s impossible to quantify them, but that’s only because we haven’t yet got the discipline to look at them closely enough - We give in to the euphoria of having identified a need and run with it without critically examining it. Or we give in to the fear that if we looked at it too closely it might turn out there wasn’t really a need after all. Discipline gives us the courage to transcend the fear and the willpower to resist this premature euphoria.

With patience, perseverance and practice we will learn to identify things in a customer’s life that are inherently valuable. It doesn’t always (rarely, in fact) boil down to the number of dollars a person would save by using an invention. Often the quantification of a benefit may be in terms of intangible but yet quantifiable things - for example, increasing the number of hours of their free time that they would spend with family and friends or on their hobbies, the number of words they have to use to communicate a particular idea, the amount of effort expended (in footsteps or calories, for instance) to get to a certain place, or the number of minutes one could be continuously immersed and engaged in an entertaining or other valuable experience. It may even be some combination or collection of multiple benefits, each of which has its own quantification cell. The important thing is to get this down, and not worry about putting down something incorrect because you will get numerous chances to go back and revise it. Remember that NABC is an iterative framework.

The Competition

This is what others are and could be doing to address the same need you have identified. Many times young innovators are bound to think that their idea is so radical that there exists no competition. But that’s a mistaken notion. Every idea and proposal has competition if we look at it closely enough. I appreciate that an empty slate is hard to get started on, so here’s at least one competition you can write down for any possible idea. Humanity has survived until now, hasn’t it? Thus it must have found some way to live with that need you identified - or we’d all have been killed off by now. So there you have it - your first competitor is the prospect that users would simply continue to do whatever they’ve been doing in the past to address that need. The number one competitor to your invention is the alternative of not having it.

The source of the difficulty that most people have in identifying competition is that they always think of their approach and not the need when trying to find competitors. It’s understandable that the approach takes center stage, of course, because that’s where your secret sauce is - the thing of value you bring to the table, and naturally the thing you feel the greatest affinity for. But to really understand your competition, the NABC framework teaches you to step back and give up being intoxicated by the coolness of your approach for a bit. Think of the need and try to make a list of everything anyone is or could be doing to address the need. Don’t think “Who else is using the same or similar approach as mine to meet that need?” but think “What have people done or could do to meet this need.” If you came up with the idea of sticky tape as a way to fix notices to doors, don’t only think of glue as your competitor. Think of thumbtacks, chalk, email, Facebook, Twitter, Trump and why, even gossip, fake news, and word-of-mouth propagandization as competition.

Once you identify and make a list of the competitive approaches as exhaustively as you can, you’ll find it to be a list of approaches to solve the original need. Your own approach will now be one of those in the long list. You can now start enumerating the pros and cons of each approach quantitatively. Does a particular competitor reach the same users (market) as your idea will? Does it offer the same benefits? Is it cheaper or more expensive to make? And so on. If the answer to any of these is questions is unfavorable, this is your chance to go back and see if either the need or the approach can be adjusted to accommodate this shortcoming. Feel fortunate that you found this issue now, before investing thousands, if not millions, of dollars into productizing your originally short-sighted idea.

You must remain calm, reassured, brave and courageous as you do this. Here is where it helps to be a team so that your partner can step in when you have a mental block against identifying a competitor’s strength and vice-versa.

The goal of this process is to boil your secret sauce down to its bare essentials and uncover the golden nugget hidden within it. That’s your core value proposition. Everything else? They’re just distractions and fluff that stand in your way of realizing your true value. The NABC is a tried and tested idea-mining process guaranteed to lead you to your golden nugget, or help you decide to mine elsewhere sooner than later.

Iteration

As I alluded to in the section on Competition, when you’ve looked at all four components of the NABC once, you get to go back and revisit the Need again, repeating the whole process as many times as needed. Chances are that your original thoughts on what you believed to be the need has changed. So you revise it. Just like a Scientific Theory progresses in the Lakatosian or Kuhnian framework, you start with the original need, and after having gone through one cycle of analysis, you come back and augment it to account for its shortcomings. You may patch it up here and there, or make fundamental changes. But the bottom line is that as long as the customer’s need is genuine, like the strong kernel of a Lakatosian scientific theory, it would have survived numerous attempts at falsification. Every failed attempt to take it down would only have made it stronger by fortifying it at all its weak spots. So even if nothing else, the NABC practice promises to at least strengthen your value proposition thus.

I often tell my students that the best scientists are those who are hell-bent on disproving their own theories, and the best programmers are those who try to crash their own code. So it is with innovation. The best innovators are those who feel pledged to proving that their own inventions are useless. The NABC framework enables you to do just that by detaching yourself from your idea and looking at it calmly, coolly, and objectively. That’s the only way it can make a dent in the universe.

Conclusion

Just this morning, I was talking to someone about why so many of us are reluctant to act upon our ideas and reify them. I remembered a story my father once told me - of a man who promised to lead people to the wealthiest place on earth. He led his followers to a cemetery.

When they seemed perplexed, he said “Here you will find all the loveliest symphonies that were never composed, the greatest plays never written, the most useful inventions never made and the most beautiful sentiments of love gone unexpressed.”

Given that every human mind is (and soon artificial ones will be) fertile grounds for creative ideas, what is it that prevents most of us from achieving our full inventive potentials? Why do people not follow through on their ideas with the discipline needed to actualize them? I now believe that craving and aversion might be the twin pernicious causes of all stifled creativity. These manifest in the form of a greed for specialness and a fear of losing whatever specialness we managed to find and thus cling to for dear life. We feel special when we encounter in ourselves one of those sparks of creativity that spontaneously erupt in our minds every now and then. But we immediately fear that if we scrutinize it too much, it may not be all that important after all. Better to savour the sensation of specialness than put it to rest by test, no matter how slim that possibility. Why kill the goose that lays golden eggs?

Yet when we step back and reflect we see that the stream of creative sparks is as steady as it has always been. If not one, then another is bound to come along soon. So armed with this new knowledge of ourselves as factories of creativity, we gain the reassurance that we would never run out of creative ideas. We shed the fear and garner the courage to scrutinize each idea to its very core, subjecting them to the rigorous NABC razor tests. For we know that if one doesn’t measure up to our exacting standards, sooner or later, another one is bound to blossom in its place.

References and Notes

[1] Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House, Chicago.

[2] Carlson, C. R., & Wilmot, W. W. (2006). Innovation: The five disciplines for creating what customers want. New York: Crown Business.

[3] Our original framework identified only two categories - Painkillers and Supplements (Aspirin versus Vitamins), but I have found it useful to talk about 3 categories, introducing Lifesavers.