The NOSE

some more anti-innovation please

Innovation is all the rage these days. Every management book preaches it, and every MBA class teaches it. It's even a category on this blog. But can't we all use a little bit less innovation and more old-fashioned customer service?

All is not lost. Zappos.com is a great example of a company that built an internet retail business by delivering a more reliable service.  A shoe company founded at the tail end of the dotcom boom, it's founder, Nick Swinmurm, was unable to attract venture capital. "I didn't have any store experience --- I didn't have any business experience." Through trial and error, Swinmurm and his team discovered that a sure fire way to attract customers and to build loyalty was by providing good service.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos's CEO: "It's not really a secret. People have known for a long time that companies that provide good service do really well. Yet no one does it."

 

Designs and Design Architecture

Skyscraper   Ingi. FlickrGallery

"Designs are the instructions that turn knowledge into things that people value and are willing to pay for. In human cultures, almost all value inheres in designs. Designs in turn span the whole universe of human artifacts and activities. Tangible product and their production processes, intangible services and experiences, methods of transacting, contracting, governance and dispute resolution, and peaceful, representative government---all of these things are human artifacts and have designs. And fundamentally, the wealth of an economy equals the total value of the designs that can be realized within its boundaries."

So begins an insightful research paper (available through the Social Science Research Network) by Carliss Y. Baldwin (Harvard University) and Kim Clark (Dean of Harvard Business School).  Baldwin and Clark argue that designs and design architecture provide an overall framework for thinking of innovation of all types --- not just in software --- and offer an important "missing link" between knowledge and the economy.

In future postings I will explore one of the authors' arguments, namely that "among all design architectures, those that are 'modular' and 'option-rich' have the greatest potential to create innovative value and to engender economic turbulence."

joel spolsky at oreilly emerging tech

I am sorry I missed the OReilly Ed Tech conference but particularly Joel Spolsky's talk. Reemer provides an excellent  synopsis.  Read it and imbibe Spolsky's three principles:

1. Make people happy
2. Think about emotions
3. Obsess over aesthetics

distance learning coordinating council (dlcc) conference

I am spending part of this week attending the 2005 Distance Learning Coordinating Council (DLCC) Conference. The DLCC is a working group committee of the Military Education Coordinating Council (MECC). Along with MECC this year's conference is co-sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School's Office of Continuous Learning (OCL).

I am particularly interested in the track on games and simulations. I hold to the view that some of the most important innovations in learning will come from gaming environments. It just happens that the military is also a pioneer in this area.

optaros and open source vertical markets

I enjoyed catching up today with Robert M. "r0ml" Lefkowitz at my office (the Starbucks @ Kendall Square). r0ml, who is one of the smartest and most insightful people (naturally, he is an MIT grad) working in open source, has taken on a new position on the leadership team at a startup company called "Optaros". He was formerly VP of Enterprise Data, Systems and Architecture for AT&T Wireless. r0ml gave a fabulous talk at O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2003 and one of the keynotes at O'Reilly 2004. We compared notes. I shared with him some of the open source projects coming out of MIT, particularly .LRN. He told me about his new company, which is going after the vertical enterprise market space with open source solutions.  Optaros is a company to watch: we all know about open source at the infrastructure level (linux, mysql, jboss, yadah yadah yadah); the interesting action will now be in the vertical markets and in enterprise integration. Optaros has an impressive leadership team and solid financial backing, giving it a great head start.