“The best way to kill creativity in a team is letting the boss speak first”

Mass customization, business model of the future ?

I recently bought a laptop on Dell Computer‘s website. No problem. Ten days later, the device was delivered.

Among the many options within Dell’s order process, I could choose de design on the back of the laptop. My choice, though, was limited to a range of propositions, going from a full purple colour version to an arty futuristic composition. And what about a drawing of mine ? Or a picture of my childrens ? The view from my appartment, during the last vacation ? No clue…

Would Dell be in a mindset of Mass Customization, this feature would have been available on the website, may we think.

What about design mass customization ?

All right. Perhaps plastic printing technologies is not that developped yet. So far, any electonic device manufacturer isn’t abble to deliver a washing machine in the exact olive green colour I wish to fit with my walls. Though, several online companies live now on the model “the customer is the designer”. Not the least are textile producers like Threadless, Lafraise or Spreadshirt. He/she can bring his/her own symbol, drawing, tattoo, message (as far as not copyrighted) and make it printed on the clothes. Cafe Press users, another example, sold goods for 100 millions $ of self customized T-shirt.

Mass customization is taking ground. Examples flourish, where one can custom its own wine, its music instrument or a piece of furniture.

Frank Piller, a researcher from the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, is confident that mass customization is heading to a bright future. Even if we are still in early days :

“The market for mass customization still is a tiny niche, but growing rapidly. Confirming the research we recently finalized for our SERVIVE project (an EU funded project on mass customization or apparel), the Spreadshirters confirmed our assumption that customized products are still addressing a very small fraction of the market only. The core task today is to educate the market, not so much surprising it with ever new offerings. Most consumers just have never heard about the opportunity that there is something else then ready-made stuff on the shelves. Sounds strange to you when you are reading this blog and this lengthy posting until here, but these people exist. And they are the majority!”

Personaly, I look forward to see car manufacturers letting their customer order and choose online the colour and the flavour of their new vehicle’s outfit….

Crowdsourcing and supply chain

The toy producer Lego is not doing something else, by the way, with his succesful Lego Mindstorm platform, where fans can design their own robot, machine, truck, etc.

But the Danish company adds something on top of that. The best designed products will be put into production and broadly marketed, with a royalty fee given back to the original designer. There, mass customization meets crowdsourcing and the boundaries between client and vendor are shrinking.

Should mass customization  take off, the impact for the supply chain management, transportation, logistics, will be substantial. Or maybe not. After all, we already live in a time-to-market economy, as Dell, Nike or Levi-Straus show. With mass customization, the challenge will be to open the array of choice, not restrict it to a preselected list of features,  in order to allow a real personnalisation of the items. That is a new way to innovate.

What is lacking in Europe’s innovation policy

Here is a thought about Europe’s innovation policy I wrote as a comment on Innovation Unlimited, a forum collecting ideas for “reinventing Europe through innovation”.

1. Left and right brain innovation

European policy makers have long seen innovation as a left brain thing: scientific, rational, processed, structured, top-down…
Europe has been pretty good in doing that. Many European companies are world leaders in a number of key sector, like aerospace, chemistry, automotive, etc.

But innovation is also a right brain stuff, based on creativity, imagination, entrepreneurship, emotional behaviour, human and social relationship, bottom-up… This part needs informality, serendipity, interactivity, unleashed thinking…
Those later aspects are as important to drive the innovation potential up. To let right brain innovation grow, we need to set up open and inspiring environments (physical or virtual), to ease and amplify human interactions, to free up radical imagination, etc.
On that field, though, Europe is lagging behind.
We use to say that succesful companies have managed to create a right balance between left and right brain. So can it be with economies.

2. Untapped bed of creativity and innovation within corporations

Huge innovation potentials sleep in employees head, untapped by their employers. Top-down, command management focuses on efficiency at the expense of creativity and side moves. Hereabove, “Job” told about management innovation. Perhaps is it the most difficult to achieve. However, there lies one of the biggest innovation tank we can dream of.
A.o., it can pave the way for more intrapreneurship, then more innovation.

3. The tight link between entrepreneurship, innovation and culture

Should it be within (intra) or outside an organisation, innovation comes with entrepreneurship. Foster people to speak up, believe in their skills and ideas, help them interact with the best experts to make the case for their project, will boost innovation.
A European economy with many startups, well connected, with access to bigger corporation’s open innovation processes, or just cluster of SME’s, could sparks.
For sure, that is a matter of culture. Europe should lead by as many examples as possible. We should also tell the story of a changing economical environment. Why are we heading toward a more innovative economy ? A.o., because knowledge, today, is almost everywhere. Globalisation has made the world economy so fluid that, soon, anyone can become a partner or a competitor. Change comes from the outside as well.

“An efficient social media presence often goes with a cultural shift within the organisation”

Netflix: drive a company by values, not by processes

Obama’s speech on innovation and economy could fit in a corporate environment

The last days were more difficult for the “rock-star” US president Barack Obama on the internal front. Popularity is slipping, getting nearer the 50% threshold. Most recent economic figures, though, are bringing some relief to the White House.

The recession is coming to an end, says the president. In his weekly address to the US citizens, Barack Obama stressed that a solid recovery should be supported by a recaptured spirit of innovation.

“It is only by building a new foundation that we will once again harness that incredible generative capacity of the American people. (…) All it takes are the policies to tap that potential — to ignite that spark of creativity and ingenuity — which has always been at the heart of who we are and how we succeed”

For the American president, innovation is part of anybody’s DNA. Innovation doesn’t belong to scientist and white coats solely. Innovation is embed in any active or would-be entrepreneur. Innonvation blooms thanks to fresh looks, unleashed from any kind of prejudice.

On that respect, the American president is in tune with similar considerations regarding the corporate world. In a country’s economy as in a private company, innovation pops up from individuals. The creativity and the engagement of individual people is the first engine of it. In order to fuel a new period of growth, one needs to put a appropriate climate that will foster individual innovators to speak up, and set a proper environment to help them convert ideas into achievements.

Obama’s statement could (should) be, today, what CEO’s say to their employees and executives. Trust people. Forget paternalism.