Video Interview - Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi at the World Business Forum this week at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. You can see the video interview here:





Saatchi & Saatchi is a well-regarded advertising agency and Kevin Roberts has a lot of great insight on the customer. In this short video we chat about the evolving relationship between customers and their mobile devices, the state of integrated campaigns with social media as a component, and about Saatchi & Saatchi's "Do One Thing" (aka DOT) campaign.

For those of you don't know, Kevin Roberts is a contributor here on Blogging Innovation.

What do you think?

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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.

Interview and Book Review - Ric Merrifield, Author of "Rethink"

I had the opportunity to interview Ric Merrifield on camera about his new book "Rethink" and here are the questions I asked him:

1. What inspired you to write Rethink?


2. What is the key insight you want to share with this book?


3. What is the most common mistakes people are making in cost cutting mode right now in this recession?


4. What is the most common barrier to innovation that you encounter in your work?


5. In your opinion, what recent innovation (or area of innovation) has the most intriguing potential?

"Rethink" arrived in my mailbox a couple weeks ago and after completing it, overall, I would give it a thumbs up.

For me, the second half of the book was the most interesting part. The case studies were good, and I felt they brought the book's thesis to life. While I found myself thinking about core competencies and value curves when I was reading the book, I could also see how creating 'what' heat maps would integrate quite nicely with other business frameworks like these. They all fit together.

Looking back at my experience of reading the book, my favorite chapter was the 'Key Concepts' chapter. Personally I feel that all too often, the authors of business books spend too much effort expanding a single insight to the requisite thickness, only to omit a proper summary or useful cheat sheet that the reader can go back to for easy reference. The 'Key Concepts' chapter also gives you a glimpse into the level of detail and complexity that these 'what' heat maps actually deliver in practice. I had the opportunity to see one in all of its glory in Ric's office, but there are supposed to be some examples in color at http://www.rethinkbook.com.

So, if your organization is seeking to escape the 'how trap' and refocus its energies on identifying the 'what' changes that will have the greatest impact, I encourage you to check out "Rethink" by Ric Merrifield.

I would be interested to hear what you think of the interview and of the book. Please post a comment with your thoughts.

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

Charlie Rose Interviews Evan Williams of Twitter

Charlie Rose interviews Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter about the service and its effect on Internet usage, and the future of the company.

The most interesting point he makes is about how strong the developer community is, with at least 2,000 applications and growing, and how they plan to develop the service from a usefulness perspective.



Will Twitter survive as an independent company?

What do you think?

@innovate

Interview with Humdinger Wind Energy's Shawn Fayne

I had the privilege yesterday to interview Shawn Frayne, a founder of Humdinger Wind Energy. This being the Internet Age, we didn't have to wait until we could sit down in person to chat. Instead it was an almost commonplace phone to Skype, to mobile (Skype Forward) call from Seattle to Hong Kong.To my parents, I would say "I interviewed him by phone."

Background



Humdinger Wind Energy was inspired by Shawn's discovery of the story of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940. From seeing video of this historic collapse, Shawn became inspired to try an alternative approach to generating electricity from wind energy. The genesis of the wind belt and subsequent founding of Humdinger Wind Energy Was the result of an initial goal 4 or 5 years ago to create an inexpensive wind generating device to power simple LEDs for lighting, or to recharge cell phones in Haiti. This original goal then evolved to a goal of developing affordable rural lighting and rural electrification solutions.

The genesis for the company may have come out of seeking to do social good, but Humdinger Wind Energy is not a pure social play. They are a for-profit start-up that can stand on its own. Humdinger has already gone through a significant angel round that is enabling it to a technology transfer level.

Implications - Wealthy vs. Developing Countries

Though the wind belt technology has developing country implications, it also has wealthy country uses that they can address through technology licensing to existing energy players. The goals of the organization when fused together are to use revenue from wealthy country applications to fund longer term developing country applications. They are more akin to someone like Motorola developing an inexpensive phone to address low-income customers, than an international development organization. Humdinger has a triple bottom line, but also endeavors to meet traditional company goals of making revenues and profits.

Education

In part to support the different goals for wealthy countries and developing countries, Humdinger has decided to make part of their intellectual property available for educational exploration. One of the purposes of doing that is to treat the wind belt as open source hardware in the developing countries while at the same time patent protecting it in developing countries. Shawn had some of the following things to say about this:

• "We've built the system described in the education document ourselves in three minutes."


• "Hopefully having more people working on it will advance technologies faster."


• "People were downloading videos and experimenting with the idea itself and a community was starting to develop."


• "This community inspired us to put out more information than we had previously explored."


• "So far we have had 1,100 downloads of the document."


• "To this point we haven't gotten much feedback other than saying they are excited to work on it."


• "This approach is also in our best interests because any company seeking to harvest or create energy in a new way has to convince people that the new approach works in order to move out of the fringe."

Open Innovation

We also discussed the open innovation movement and Shawn doesn't fully agree with the open innovation approach. He doesn't think that the human species has reached the point where invention is highly social at scale. He believes that optimal invention is still limited to small groups of people working together in person. Also for Humdinger to be financially viable he feels they must have some amount of protection around their ideas in wealthy countries. Here are some more of his thoughts:

• "The problem is not generating new ideas..."


• "There are 1000 different ways to address a problem, the bigger problem is how do you effectively select what to test. You can't test all the approaches. How do you pull out the right ones to test?"


• " You still need a small group to select the correct solution to pursue."

Social vs. Commercial

There are four primary members of the leadsership team: Shawn Frayne, Jordan McRae, Jerry Chun, and Kurt Kornbluth. As they grow, they will likely merge some of their ideas with those of one of their informal advisors (Paul Hudnut at Colorado State University) and create small incubators of 4-5 people ("Virtual Innovation Factories"). These teams will not be together under one roof (the Edison or Dean Kamen approach), they will be dotted around the world and bring the best minds to bear on very fundamental problems (energy harvesting, energy storage, and water treatment).

Humdinger was formed to generate funds over time for this grand experiment. This is not what we are currently doing with the group in Xela, Guatemala. As they are a separate organization that we partner with - we like to call this "Cloud Inventing".

• "When we talk to the group in Guatemala (we Skype in to see what's going on at the site and to talk to them), there is a lot of personal contact and we know that they are very good at inventing and engineering, and it is a small group."

Humdinger is trying to develop a new type of wind cell that is flexible and modular and works inexpensively on a smaller scale that only solar or batteries could have before.

• "What if you could break up a big turbine and split it up into 1000 pieces at the same efficiency ($2/watt)?"


• "Most of the folks we talk to get really excited about this being a fundamental change in how power can be generated."

Conclusion

Overall it was a great talk and I hope this gives the readers a bit of insight into an example of one of the many hybrid commercial and social good models that we are blessed to have existing during our lifetimes. There are obviously a lot of potential applications for this technology in the wealthy countries - everything from powering sensors to other types of micro-generation. I wish Shawn and Humdinger every success with this endeavor.

Sites mentioned during the conversation that are worth checking out:

- http://www.instructables.com/
- http://www.makezine.com/
- http://www.brightidea.com/
- http://www.ideorg.org/

Related articles:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2008/id2008106_231604.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily