Innovation Catalyst

I attended one of the excellent monthly 'Entrepreneurs On the Move' (EOTM) networking meetings organised by Connected Cambridge this week, and was approached by an MBA student who was intrigued by my description in the attendee notes:

I'm one of those unusual individuals who works best at the intersection of technology, creative, and sales/marketing - coming up with innovation, persuasion, strategies, and new combinations / products / solutions for clients, marketing, creatives and developers. I have experience in all of these areas, but most of all, I have experience at utilising them in combination.

Now I would be one of the first to admit that this isn't a normal job description, and so I explained my mental model of entrepreneurship and what I did... As I did so, I was reminded of something that EOTM event organiser Peter Hewkin (the founder of the Centre for Business Innovation ) had said earlier in the evening, which boils down to something like: "Do it once manually, but after that make it happen automatically!" and so I'm publishing my reply so that others can find my explanation. (This is the first of a series of articles covering what I said...)

Here's a Venn diagram that shows the way that I think things work:


So there are the three areas of entrepeneurial/business endeavour that I mentioned: Technology, Creative, and Sales/Marketing, and there's me, in the intersection right at the centre. Technology-wise, I've worked on mechanical and electronic hardware, embedded firmware and a variety of software ranging from medical and industrial applications through telecoms coding, metadata and multimedia to music synthesis and installation art, both by myself and managing programming teams. Creative-wise, I've done photography, photoshopography, vector art, logos, videos, 3D animation and interactive narrative collaborations, again individually and as part of a team. Marketing-wise I've done everything from being a shop-floor salesperson to planning products to convincing clients that a technology was right for their application, once again as an individual and as part of a team.

I've always thought that the interesting parts of any subject are where it meets other disciplines, and so the next diagram looks at what happens in those intersections:



In my mind, the intersection of Technology and Marketing is where Products and Services happen. The mixing of Marketing and Creative is exploited in Advertising. And forcing Creative and Technology together is where Design occurs. Like all models, it isn't perfect, but it helps me to give structure to a complex world.

As part of the process of working in each of the big circles, then I've also worked in those intersections too, and so the diagram makes it very clear why Design is so different from Products - one is primarily a Creative/Technology result, whilst the other is primarily a Marketing/Technology result. But what is really interesting is that the dark intersection at the centre of the diagram is where the hardest and most challenging stuff happens, because here all three disciplines make contributions, and it is here where there are lots of forces pulling me in all directions.

The next diagram tries to show just three of those forces:



Actually, it is good to think of these three arrows as pieces of elastic, because then you can see the importance of the intersection that is opposite to the arrow. So for 'Persuasion', whilst Advertising and the Product or Service is important, it is often the Design that will make the marketing succeed. Apple is a good example of this happening in practice. Equally, Creativity in Design and Advertising is good, but the other end of the 'Inspiration' elastic is the Product or Service, and that really matters! Looking at the way that 'Innovation' is connected to Advertising is a reminder that technology innovations like Flash or HTML may start out as pure technology, but they can rapidly become incorporated as a key part of the Creative and Marketing story.

If we go into the centre of the diagram, then we can start to apply more buzz-words to those vectored forces:



With the diagram acting as a key to strategic thinking, then we've already thought about where Flash and HTML 5 sit - on the Innovation arrow where it meets Advertising. You can also now see that CRM is a way of Designing to Persuade people, and so on. Suddenly 'Zero Touch' is revealed not as just a neat way of using Technology to do the Marketing, but also a topic that requires careful Creative thinking as well as Design and Advertising consideration too!

I use the type of thinking shown in this diagram a lot to help me understand the way that the various parties involved in entrepreneurship and business need to work together. Working from the centre of the diagram, as I do, you need to be able to appreciate the different intersections and the vectored forces that connect them together. By using this model, I've been able to successfully innovate and strategise across the three circles in many ways. To learn more visit my LinkedIn profile, or contact me.

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The Future is about to start!

Time is subjective - the apparent rate is related to the density of events. So when there is lots happening, time rushes by, whilst when you are waiting for something to happen, then time can seem to creep by...

This subjectiveness also applies to groupings of time like The Past and The Future. I've deliberately avoided trying to apply any measure of how long 'Now' is because I think that it is normally so fleeting that it is almost just the membrane that separates Past from Future. Of course, if you don't have any significant events, then Now can be used to show the current 'state of the art', but as soon as you get any event, then it immediately becomes The Past.

The other aspect to subjectivity is knowledge and viewpoint. This particularly affects The Future. If you are living on the leading edge of technology, then your Now might be viewed as being The Future by many people who are slightly behind the leading edge. This was highlighted very strongly for me when I read the final report on 'Future Digital Content' that has just been published by the 'Beacons For Innovation' project in the UK's 'Knowledge Transfer Network for the Creative Industries', from the UK Government-funded 'Technology Strategy Board'. If you hadn't heard of the Technology Strategy Board, then their web-site provides this explanation:

The Technology Strategy Board is an executive non-departmental public body (NDPB), established by the Government in 2007 and sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

The activities of the Technology Strategy Board are jointly supported and funded by BIS and other government departments, the devolved administrations, regional development agencies and research councils.

The 'Future Digital Content' report is very much from the viewpoint of the Creative Industry, and makes interesting reading when you have 'subjectivity' in mind. Much of what it covers as Future seems like Now to me, but then I've spent the last ten years or more looking at the future of content, and so my viewpoint is very skewed. But it is fascinating to see how you can have different views of Now and The Future.

It is also fascinating to see how words and structure can get in the way of comprehension. I didn't know that the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) had changed to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) until I head about the Technology Strategy Board (whose web-site URL stresses innovation!), and I now think of these things using a more familiar metaphor: the 'breadcrumb trail' that you see for navigation on some web-sites:

UK Government>DBIS>Technology Strategy Board>KTN-Creative Industries>Beacons>Report