Microsoft - Apple - Google in Tablet Battle

by Braden Kelley

2010 may be the year of the man purse, and it will be very interesting to see what people to choose to put in the new gadget bag they will keep close at hand.

In this article we've got a video sneak preview of another potential Apple Tablet application, and two videos of what Microsoft's entry into the tablet wars might look like. Microsoft might actually fire the first shot in the tablet wars at this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Apple (iSlate) and Microsoft (along with HP) are both already trying to re-imagine what my be possible in the mobile computing environment, and I'm sure Google with join the fray soon (along with HTC). The key thing to watch here though is not the technology that the companies come up with, but the changes that we are going to start seeing in people's computing behavior. That will be the fascinating bit. Computing is about to undergo a major transformation, and while I would rather see an extensible mobile phone than a proliferation of new devices, I think they'll help us get there.

First let's take a look at a video sneak preview of Microsoft's Courier:





And then here is another video showing a conceptualization of how Microsoft thinks people might use it:





And finally, Coursesmart, a digital-publishing joint venture of five major textbook publishers,looks to move beyond their current iPhone and iPod Touch offerings to woo students to adopt their planned eTextbooks for the planned Apple Tablet in place of regular textbooks. Check out the video here:





So what do you think?

Which device would you like to have close at hand in your gadget bag?

Follow the link for another sneak preview of a magazine application for the Apple Tablet.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Value Networks and Innovation

by Tim Kastelle

Today I will tell you why it is so hard for you to get your innovative new idea to spread quickly. Well, one of the reasons, at least. It's because the economy is so interconnected. This is a bit counterintuitive - after all, I was just telling you how we can use networks to spread ideas. The good side of networks is that they can make it easier for ideas to spread. The problem with networks is that to get people to actually adopt your new idea, you often have to get them to break links within their existing network, and this can be very difficult. That is why it is important to understand how to build a position within the value network.

Value networks show up in most of the various business model frameworks. The idea is that when you have an innovation, you have to understand what products, services and routines are related to your new idea. Once you understand this, you can then figure out how much of the value network you need to control yourself. Anders Sundelin just wrote a terrific post on his Business Model Database blog describing how you can map the value network for your innovation, anlyse your position within it, and take steps to improve your position. He does a great job of explaining the mechanics of value network analysis. I would like to show you why it's important.

As an illustration, here is a model of the value network for mobile phones, adapted from the book Invisible Engines by Evans, Hagiu & Schmalensee. It shows the postion within the value network that Apple has taken with the iPhone:



Apple has chosen to control everything within the circle - in other words, everything! Even the application developers don’t have full autonomy, since every new app has to be approved before it shows up on iTunes. The advantage to taking a position like this in the value network is that it is easier to coordinate the system. Because Apple controls nearly everything, every time they have a new idea, it is relatively easy to decouple the existing value network, insert the innovation, and move along. The disadvantage is that having such tight control over the value network limits the scope of the innovations that can emerge.

In contrast, look at the position within the value network that Google has taken with Android:



They have taken almost the exact opposite approach, controlling only the operating system directly. This greatly increases the the range and number of innovation opportunities within the value network. There are two big downsides though. The first is that they are at the mercy of the other players within the value network. One of the reasons that there are very few Android phones here in Australia is that all of the handsets using it so far have been lousy. The second problem is that with less control over the network, all of the innovations within this network take longer to diffuse as there is no central coordination.

Google has the market pull to take a position within the mobile phone value network that is similar to Apple's if they choose to. So we have to assume that this is a strategic decision, and that their bet is that the increased innovation scope provided by their more open value network will outweigh both Apple's first move advantage, and also their relatively slow increase in market share.

And this illustrates the problem that most of us face with our value network - we can usually only control a small piece of it - as Google does with Android. This means that not only do our end users have to prefer our idea, but we also have to get others within the value network to stop using our competitors. This process is slow, difficult, and frustrating - and it adds an extra delay to the spread of our great new idea. Innovations require many players within the value network to unconnect from competitors before they can reconnect with us. This unconnect-reconnect process is often independent from the process of customers adopting our innovation, and it adds another delay to the spread of our new ideas.

There are many different models of business models available for you to use. I don't care which one you use, but you have to use one of them. They all include an element like the value network as one of the key things that you have to understand and manage when you try to get your innovative ideas to spread. The better your understanding of this network, the more effective you'll be at innovating.

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Tim Kastelle is a Lecturer in Innovation Management in the University of Queensland Business School. He blogs about innovation at the Innovation Leadership Network.

Open Innovation and Nokia - A Good Match?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have always respected Nokia which I consider to be a quite innovative company. Lately, I have been wondering how they approach open innovation so I did some research on their activities.

First, let's take a look at how Nokia defined open innovation in a presentation given by Kari-Pekka Estola, VP, Nokia Research Center in 2007.


"The sourcing, integration, and development of product and business system innovations through win-win external partnerships to capture maximum commercial value for R&D investment."


Kari-Pekka Estola also argued that open innovation is a critical trend and not yet another management fad due to these reasons:

• Innovation happens in smaller companies, global innovation hotspots and increasingly influential user communities.


• Several factors such as workforce mobility and venture capital are eroding the ability of corporate research labs to contain their useful knowledge.


• A new breed of independent research labs create a new source of R&D development.


• "Innomediaries" - innovation intermediaries - are enabling an increasingly active and distributed market for ideas.

As it shows, Nokia had a pretty good understanding of open innovation early on. They also execute fairly well. Let's take a look at their many open innovation-like initiatives:

Nokia Research Center is the hub of their open innovation efforts. It is very much focused on selective and deep research collaborations with world-leading institutions.

Open Threads is a newsletter by Nokia Research Center on open innovation. In the latest issue 2/09, the Nokia IPR team began a series of articles aimed at clarifying the basics of IPR and explaining how open innovation collaborators can engage with Nokia. Worth checking out!

Forum Nokia exists to serve everyone who is interested in the creation, testing, or business of mobile applications, content, or services. Forum Nokia provides several entry points for companies interested in developing new offerings with Nokia or towards to the mobile community.

Symbian. Last year, Nokia bought Symbian and then gave away the software code to the non-profit Symbian Foundation. In Why Nokia Bought Symbian, Then Gave It Away, Scott Anthony of Innosight, presents some good views on why this happened.

The Maemo platform. Dutch innovation consultants, Fronteer, recently mentioned that they will help Nokia on their work with Maemo which is an open source software platform with over 16,000 members. Fronteer mentions that Nokia in previous projects developed ideas and concepts with a selected group of lead-users and experts in a co-creation sessions. This time, they will take it a step further: they will share their ideas and concepts with the complete Maemo Community, both online and off-line, to collaboratively develop new Maemo concepts.

Although, I think Nokia overall does quite well there are a couple of issues that I would like to learn more about.

• External contributions in the later stages of their innovation process. Their open innovation initiatives primarily focus on technology and the early phases of generating new product and service offerings. Open innovation should include key external contributions in all phases of the innovation process; not just in the technology or idea development phases. I had difficulties finding information on how or if Nokia does this.


• Beyond technology. Nokia has a Corporate Business Development unit that looks for breakthrough ideas that are 'industry shakers' - innovative business concepts and technologies - that integrate with and expand beyond Nokia core business.

Having validated new opportunities with sound business cases, Corporate Business Development further develop them as new business programs within Nokia or collaborate with companies to establish licensing deals, joint ventures, acquisitions, or partnership agreements. It sounds interesting. However, I have difficulties finding information on how this unit defines and approaches open innovation and how they work together with Nokia Research Center on open innovation. Maybe they don't?

Nokia definitely appears as a technology-focused company and Nokia Research Center is all about research collaborations with world-leading institutions. Perhaps there could be a stronger link to the business community?

Nokia might already be doing the things I would like to learn more about. Hopefully, I will soon get the chance to discuss this with innovation leaders at Nokia. Until then, it would be great to hear your input and comments on this.

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

iPhone Virtual Reality

Real and virtual worlds are about to collide in a big way.

In September with the expected release of iPhone OS 3.1, some pretty amazing augmented reality applications will begin appearing for the iPhone 3GS. These applications overlay useful info on your view of the real-world using the iPhone's camera. The new crop of augmented reality applications due in September make use of common features like an internet connection and GPS, but because they also utilize a compass, only users of the new iPhone 3GS will be able to install them.

There are several cool demos floating around which I have shared below, but these applications are using unpublished APIs which prevent them from being allowed on the App Store. Apple, however, told one developer that the tools necessary would become available in the pending iPhone OS 3.1.

Here is an application that shows the closest subway stations and how to get to them:





But, my favorite is this concept of an application that proposes to use facial recognition to overlay people's social networking profiles when the application is engaged. I hope they succeed in creating a working real world application based on this concept:





Finally, the innovations in augmented reality will not be restricted to the iPhone 3GS. A new augmented reality app called Layar is described as the world's first mobile augmented reality browser. The Layar browser currently runs on Google Android devices and shows you what is around you by displaying realtime digital information on top of reality through the camera of the mobile phone. Just flip through the directory to find ATM's, bars, houses for sale, hotels and other useful real world items around you.

While Layar is currently available only for Android devices, the developers are working hard on porting it to other platforms (read iPhone 3GS).

This video from the developer shows it running a real estate application:





What other cool applications can you imagine using this techology to augment the real world?

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Crowdsourcing Delivers Personalized Innovation

The new dimension of innovation is about having customer as an integral part of the system. Firms can no longer afford to stay separate from customers and still come up with great innovations. The success of social media websites (like Facebook) is frequently attributed to engaging customers in the creation of new innovations - also referred to as crowdsourcing.



The topic of innovation is multi-dimensional, which no firm in the globe can afford to ignore today. Being innovative is necessary to stay competitive in the business. The new age of innovation has a lot to do with making the customer an integral part of the innovation system by engaging and involving them with the product or service that the firm is working on.

This is all the more true with consumer-targeted social networking sites like Facebook, where the users drive how the product should look. The customer-centric innovation started off with creating and opening up a software development kit (SDK) for anyone to create and host their applications.

Want to get a real experience with what we are talking about? Just login to your Facebook or Orkut profile and click on the "applications" link. You will see an array of cool stuff in the form of quizzes, music, games, etc. Who do you think has developed them? Do you think Facebook or Orkut has enough employees to develop thousands of these applications? Definitely not!

It is done by enthusiastic folks around the globe with decent web programming knowledge. They downloaded the SDK, developed the app and hosted it all for free. The buck doesn't stop there. After it gets uploaded, the importance of these applications is decided by other users. As more folks add a particular application to their profile, its rating goes up. If the application is not interesting enough for the community, it gets automatically pushed down the stack. From the user's perspective, they can choose and install applications of interest to them, thereby 'personalizing' their profile. This is the real power of crowdsourcing - consumers as creators.

According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. In the context of social networking, the crowdsourcing goes beyond outsourcing, where users become voluntary creators to benefit of the community.

By democratizing their SDK, firms like Facebook benefit greatly by harnessing the innovative ability of anybody in the world. This breadth of innovation is impossible to groom and sustain within the confines of the firm's employees. Also, the cost of making such innovation happen inside the organization is extremely high compared to crowdsourcing.

On a larger scale, the idea of crowdsourcing has been harnessed by Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) - these firms designed a monetization model allowing developers to host their applications and quote a price. When users download the developer's application a portion of payment goes to the developer.

In his recent work on 'New age of Innovation', renowned management thinker C.K.Prahalad calls this phenomenon as 'N = 1 R = G'. In order to provide one unique user experience (N = 1) firms need to leverage resources (R) globally (G). It is mainly because every consumer has his unique preferences when using a product, which cannot be satisfied by the firm hiring more people. This new school of thought is much different from the previous generation of technology products where every feature was developed by the firm in a closed development environment. In this new age, the role of the firm is to create a platform and leave it open for consumers to create the applications they want.

So, next time you are set out to innovate something, ask yourself: 'Am I involving my customers in the process?'

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Jayakumar Balasubramanian is an engineer by profession. This article originally appeared on MyBangalore.