New Florence. New Renaissance.

Book excerpts - Chapter 9 Arsonists

As promised, here is another of excerpt from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book is built around 8 “Polymaths” like GE (excerpt from that chapter here) and showcases 11 building blocks for the Polymath to leverage. Each corresponds to an alphabet in the book’s  RENAISSANCE framework . The two A’s stand for Arsonists, covered here and Analytics, covered in a later chapter.

“Customers do keep writing those checks when they should be turning to disruptors like Bill Hambrecht with his mantra of “80% value for 20% of the price,” as we see in Chapter 10.”

“Most rebels tend to be start-ups, but often larger, established vendors will go after one another, especially when they are trailing in a market or introducing a new product. Let’s first look at how some start-ups are disrupting technology markets, then how some bigger vendors target each other.

We look at MAXroam, which is disrupting the international mobile roaming market; Zoho, focused on the Microsoft Office market; Cartridge World, focused on printer ink from HP and others; Rimini Street, focused on maintenance charges from Oracle and SAP; and ZDNet which is disrupting traditional industry analysts and media coverage. Next we look at Agresso, whose value proposition is that it helps its customers adapt rapidly to disruptions in their own sectors.Then we look at larger vendors disrupting each other - HP and Cisco, pharmaceuticals and generics, SAP and Oracle and Verizon versus other telcos and cable companies.”

“As we know, the 1990s were a chaotic time for Russia as the Soviet Union’s centralized, defense heavy infrastructure was gradually torn down and replaced by decentralized, commercial enterprises. Seth Ravin describes his work there blandly as “defense conversion,” but it was dangerous work where he faced kidnapping and death threats.  He is now into another type of conversion—going against what some would call today’s “evil empires.”

“Following Rimini Street’s 2009 results that include a strong 270% year-over-year revenue growth, Oracle declared war on Rimini Street and Seth Ravin personally by filing a complaint in US Federal Court alleging copyright infringement, unfair competition and other transgressions. In what may end up becoming marketing fodder for Rimini Street, the legal language claimed Rimini Street is selling its services for too low a price. Reflecting on the battle ahead, Seth says “Oracle started this war. I intend to finish it with a clearly free and open market for enterprise support providers.” The “converter” continues to does his thing.”

“Plattner’s radical concept is to get a 100 times compression by rethinking traditional data and storage optimization. The research at HPI shows that columnar databases can yield a 10 times space advantage compared to row-based ones. With increased processing power available today we can also compute on-demand aggregate data which historically was more efficient to store in databases. That provides another 2 times advantage. Finally, Plattner would tier data based on currency—storing only recent (and more likely to be accessed) data on the memory on the blade server, which could provide another 5 times compression. 10´2´5 would get the 100 times compression he seeks.”

“Why do the Pat Phelans and Seth Ravins carry their slingshots around looking for Goliaths like Verizon and Oracle? Whatever their personal drivers, they represent one hand clapping. Until customers step up and take advantage of their flame throwing, magic cannot happen.  Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, is supposed to have said “Innovation is sudden cessation of stupidity.” There is plenty of stupidity in technology spend.”

Book excerpts: Chapter 8 - The Plantronics Polymath profile

As promised, here is another excerpt from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. This time it is from the case study on Plantronics.  It has earned the right to be called polymaths when it comes to devices which allow consumers to make landline, mobile and VoIP calls, and listen to music and, and ….

“Each decade or so Plantronics has successfully transitioned with major swings in the telecommunications industry…Gunjan Bhow, a vice president at Plantronics, recounts the company’s history. “We spent much of its early life making specialized headsets for aviation and space, including the one Neil Armstrong used. We also found a niche in mission-critical communications in the air traffic control system and emergency services.” Then came growth in toll-free numbers in the 1980s (even though AT&T had first offered what it called “inward WATS” in late 1960s) fueled by the declining prices as the “Baby Bells” divested from AT&T competed vigorously for long-distance calling. That opened up a vast new market in contact centers. Personal computers started to proliferate, and the need for headsets to stay productive while typing on keyboards opened up another market.  The 1990s saw the company grow into the emerging SOHO (small office, home office) market, which had mushroomed as companies allowed employees to work from home or at satellite offices and as corporations shrank and used smaller contract firms more. The last few years have seen Plantronics products get untethered. Bluetooth headsets have grown rapidly with the explosion in mobile phones and with an increasing number of laws mandating hands-free calling while driving. By the end of 2009, Plantronics had grabbed almost a third of the retail market for Bluetooth headsets. Says Bhow, “UC [Unified Communications] is what is driving our next stage of growth.””

“Darrin Caddes, vice president of corporate design, spent more than 20 years designing products for some of the world's best automotive and motorcycle brands, including BMW, Fiat, and Indian Motorcycle. His unique design philosophy at Plantronics is summarized in these comments:

Each member of the Plantronics Design team brings a specialty expertise from human behavior and anatomy to color and complex surface development.

Headsets will continue to evolve as fashion accessories as we have seen with both watches and eyewear . . . we make decisions on which ones to wear based on how we feel or choose to express ourselves at that moment. I believe headsets are destined for the same cultural evolution.”

“More advances in audio quality come with the Plantronics Voyager PRO Bluetooth headset, which has a dual-microphone boom to accurately isolate voice signals: One microphone captures voice while the second microphone identifies and removes background noise. It also incorporates the company’s WindSmart technology, which filters and reduces wind distortion. The end result is the cancellation of ambient noise in a crowded restaurant or car without overprocessing audio, so voices sound natural during conversations.

Looking ahead, the company has qualified for a patent for a “movement-powered headset.” Wireless headsets are convenient, but having to charge them regularly is not fun. The patent seeks to use kinetic energy from the user’s body movements to charge the headset”

Juan Enriquez, Polymath

My book defines The New Polymath as an enterprise which is putting together 3,5 10 strands of technology – infotech, biotech, greentech – to create new solutions. But it also talks about individual Polymaths – from history like Michelangelo and  Plato – and modern ones like Steve Jobs, Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Joy.

At last week’s Cognizant Community I heard another one I wished I had interviewed for the book. Alan Alper of Cognizant describes the speech Juan delivered: 

“With a nod to Vinnie Mirchandani's soon-to-be published work, Juan Enriquez  is the embodiment of The New Polymath . Juan, like the Renaissance men of yesteryear revealed complete mastery of the multiple disciplines of bio-tech, education, and economics as he took the audience on a mesmerizing journey that was simultaneously scary and uplifting.

His thesis: prosperity will come to those who master the code (i.e., the double-helix known as DNA).
Juan had the audience in the palm of his hand from his opening to closing lines (when he removed and put on his jacket). He artfully delved into the causes of the persistent global debit crisis and then segued into the role bio-tech and science education can play in curing disease and the world's economic ills.

While it's excruciatingly painful to replay Juan's thinking on the impact the growing national debt is having on the U.S. economy, he balanced the doom and gloom with numerous enlightening moments. For starters, he argued that control of the code is passing from west to the east, as evinced by the soaring economies of China and India. He attributed this to improved access to knowledge (thanks to the Internet) and the vastly improved quality of education across Asia.

Juan then talked about the strides made to use goat and cow milk to produce medicines for treating cancer and the work under way to regenerate tissue (skin) and organs (mouse hearts and ears). From there, he transitioned to the work researchers are conducting in Boston to code tissues for bladder replacement surgery. Juan said these new approaches have enabled science to create standardized programmable platforms to boot-up different species.

And corporates are starting to get in on the action. DuPont, for instance, recently sold its petrochemicals business to fund the creation of bacteria for producing recyclable clothing. And that's just one piece of evidence: The activity in life sciences, Juan said, is unlike anything ever witnessed. It's the Renaissance on steroids, Juan dead-panned. Investments like these can easily double or triple the size of our economy and could be a way to help pay down the national debt (as long as the government doesn't further overextend the U.S. debt- to-equity ratio).

Juan concluded with importance of educating youth in technology, engineering and the sciences. The U.S. economy can be resurrected and sustained for the long term if we make sure American youth have the code necessary to create wealth. Juan ended his lecture by commanding attendees to follow the advice of Nike and Nissan: Just do it, and enjoy the ride.”

Health, not health care

Esther Dyson has a nice column on tech which helps with healthy lifestyles…the old adage of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Book excerpts: Chapter 7 – Networks

As promised, here is another of excerpt from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book is built around 8 “Polymaths” like GE (excerpt from that chapter here) and showcases 11 building blocks for the Polymath to leverage. Each corresponds to an alphabet in the book’s  RENAISSANCE framework . The two N’s stand for Networks – the first one for telecoms, the other for the “human network” – communities, crowds, collaboration etc.

This week I moderated a panel at Cognizant Community and summarized some of the elements in the chapter on telecoms:

Innovation in the “new normal” in telecommunications

• Limitless telco opportunities – global markets and nomads, sensory networks, cloud computing, social networks
• Golden age of applications - Cisco telepresence, Westwood One digital audio, various mobile apps stores, Go Go wi-fly, Seanet, many more
• Global revolution - S. Korea, Estonia, Macedonia, Tibet, Rwanda, next gen telecoms
• Device richness – Apple, Android, Plantronics, Netbooks, Tablets, Navigation systems
• Infrastructure innovation – NSN, Huawei, greener technology, managed services
• Social CRM opportunities – ComcastCares, managed services
• Content/media churn – citizen journalism, weakening of previous “channel masters”

Challenges in the “new normal” in telecommunications

• Reputation International – telcos - 4th lowest of 25 industries across 32 countries
• Fall out from iPhone 3G service issues
• France Telecom spate of suicides
• Community discontent – Lafayette, LA; more aggressive FCC, Google Broadband
• Quasi-government image – stodgy customer service, high taxes, surveillance wariness
• Economics – telco/cable versus thermostat
• Global Competition – MPLS, roaming options, EU caps, cutting teeth on ARPU of $ 5 (a quarter)
• Perception of innovation “around” not “from” telco/cable cos

Here are a couple of extracts from the chapter

“Karl Marx must be turning in his grave: Telecommunications, not competing political ideologies, are changing the world.

§ Fifteen years after genocide left a million dead and tore the country apart, the country of Rwanda has invested in buses with laptops and satellite dishes. These buses travel around to provide the countryside—despite the lack of paved roads or electricity—a taste of the web.

§ The Qinghai-Tibet railway is the highest in the world and goes through some of the harshest terrains. It already has 80% mobile coverage and keeps expanding. The Chinese may be wary of Tibetan strife, but it has not stopped the development of a Tibetan-language user interface. (Few of the locals speak or write the official Mandarin language.)

§ The whole country of Macedonia—one of the poorest in Europe—is a Wi-Fi hotspot with equipment funded by the Chinese and U.S. Agency for International Development. Its landlocked children can now easily revisit, over the web, the path of its famous son, Alexander the Great as he took his armies all the way to India. “

“Now let’s look at the Lafayette Utilities System. After five years of bruising court battles with AT&T and Cox (the local cable company) which went all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, the community can now take advantage of broadband download speeds approaching 50 megabytes per second (mbps) for $58 a month.⁸

The maximum AT&T offered the community was 6 mbps; Cox did somewhat better with 15 mbps. (though this year it finally started to increase speeds - it started offering the Cisco DOCSIS 3.0-based "Ultimate Internet" service with up to 50 mbps). Of course, both wanted customers to sign up for bundles including local/long-distance calling, and TV services. And they wanted long-term contacts and installation fees. The Lafayette community clearly decided—and fought—to get choices beyond the local telcos. “

“Martin Geddes was strategy director at BT Innovate & Design division and now runs an independent consultancy business. He has major makeover ideas for the telcos. Geddes is somewhat unusual for a telco executive in that he is thinks in terms of applications, not just network infrastructure.

“The era of minute-based telephony is going away; however, there is a huge opportunity to replace it with something different. Global communications platforms need to make communication between enterprises and their customers more efficient and more effective. This flips the business model on its head. Make money from enterprises who want to interact and transact with telecoms users, not directly from the users themselves. Think of it as the “Googleization” of telecoms, where users pay in privacy and attention, not cash.””

Book Excerpts: Ada Lovelace Day edition

More excerpts from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book celebrates innovators from around the world including sections focused on innovative technology women and I thought it would be good to showcase it today "the international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science." Here are 3 out of many sections of women innovators in the book - all inspiring in their own ways

1. “Your question has me stumped,” responds Gerlinde Gniewosz to a question the author posed to several women in technology fields: “Which women in tech do you consider innovative? Not powerful or successful, but innovative?” Gniewosz has experience at Yahoo! (the web company), Orange (the telecommunications company), and McKinsey & Co. (the strategy firm). She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is now an entrepreneur developing learning products on mobile devices. She was born and educated in Australia; went to business school in the United States, has worked in Germany and the United Kingdom and has traveled the world. It is a telling comment if someone that global and aware of technology trends is stumped by the question. Depressingly, a couple more women, also long in the technology industry, responded the same way. They point to the fact that science and technology are not attracting enough women.

Mary Hayes Weier provides the breakthrough. She used to be editor-at-large at InformationWeek and points to WITI—Women in Technology International, a trade association for tech-savvy women.It honors innovative women each year, and Weier was one of the judges for the 2008 awards. She has several candidates for innovative women in tech, including Mary Lou Jepsen, the cofounder and CTO of One Laptop per Child. Julia King, executive editor for events at Computerworld, mentions Cora Carmody, former CIO at SAIC and now at Jacobs Engineering, for founding Technology Goddesses, an organization to attract girls into science and math at a very early age.

Marilyn Pratt, who works at SAP, points to inventive women from history including Marie Curie, the first female recipient of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of radioactive elements, and Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar. Karen Beaman, who runs a consulting firm appropriately named Jeitosa (Portuguese for “innovation”), names Linda Avey, who brought genetic testing to the masses with 23andme. Avey has since left to start a foundation related to Alzheimer’s disease.

Other recommendations start flowing in. They include Lily Allen, who pioneered music distribution via social networks like MySpace, and the astronaut Sally Ride, for her work encouraging young girls to take a bigger interest in science and engineering. Esther Dyson is mentioned - she has been a investor and industry influencer in infotech and healthtech and is preparing to be a space tourist. Others point to Ada Lovelace Day in March, when bloggers post about women they admire in technology.

Gniewosz thinks some more and comes back with a similar, wider-reaching body: GWIIN—Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network.

But even if these role models and recognitions do not drive women to science and technology in droves, there is a significant opportunity to leverage women in product design as technology enters so many consumer products.Take the New York Times story about Alison Lewis, who is part of a wave of young product designers embedding electronics into “soft” areas, such as fashion or home furnishings “In Alison Lewis’s girlish, pale-blue living room here, pillows light up when you sit on them and the sofa fabric has a dimmer switch.” Lewis may seem out of left field—but not for too long. Women like her will influence our design and deployment of technology-led-innovation much more going forward.

2. Elizabeth Horn, mother of Sophia, a child with autism, says: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] calls autism an epidemic. The newest statistics are shocking: 1 out of every 100 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder. Even with that remarkable prevalence, there is little cause/effect data compared to other diseases.”

Horn has teamed up with Pramila Srinivasan, also mother of a child with autism, Siddharth. Srinivasan founded MedicalMine, which developed ChARM (Children’s Autism Recovery Map).

ChARMtracker is treatment management software created for the 1,400-plus parents who have signed up since it was launched in May 2009.

Says Elisabeth Einaudi, one of these parents: “With a few easy keystrokes, I enter basic treatment info once and daily observations, and then ChARM converts it into information that I can use.”

Although today parents need web access to enter the data, there is no reason why they could not use text or Twitter messages with short hash tags to make such notations directly from their mobile phones.

The ability to post observations about their children is a very promising feature of the tracker. Parents can document an unusual word or gesture and their thoughts on what may have caused it. The hope is that this growing database will help to identify biomarkers that which may help guide treatments in the future.

ChARM Physician, the physician portal, allows the same data to be viewed by medical practitioners. Physicians can communicate, visualize, and analyze patient data from any web browser. Researchers might one day be able to use sophisticated tools to analyze the data in this longitudinal tracking system. So in many ways it is an EMR for the physician as well as a treatment management and a social networking site.

Granted Horn and Srinivasan are no ordinary mothers. They are tech savvy and live in Silicon Valley. Their husbands are chief executives of software companies. (Zach Nelson is profiled in Chapter 18, Sridhar Vembu in Chapter 9.) Horn spent the early part of her career making movies for technology companies. In her doctoral research at Purdue, Srinivasan focused on problems in data processing algorithms for analysis and classification. She has helped with algorithms in several engineering start-ups in the valley.

Beyond ChARM, Horn and Srinivasan are exploiting other technologies to bring more attention to autism. For the last decade, Horn has worked on the production and marketing of a film about children recovering from autism entitled Finding the Words. The documentary has been seen by over a million people around the world. Its YouTube preview has also been seen by thousands. Horn is currently editing a new version for American television entitled The Fight for Children with Autism. Horn says:

Traditional views of autism are being challenged now by new research and new ways of thinking about this disease. It’s no longer “incurable” or “untreatable,” and the children in this film prove that. If just one child who was given no hope of ever having a normal life can get dramatically better, that child changes the paradigm for all of us. And once you have hope, you can change things for your child. And ChARM will help you do that.

ChARM is a harbinger of similar social networks of patients with other afflictions. While governments around the world try multiyear, multibillion-dollar healthcare initiatives, affordable web services, video, and other technology can provide hope and help in the interim. It just needs passionate, driven sponsors like Horn and Srinivasan.

3. Rural Sourcing was the brain child of Kathy Brittan-White, former CIO of Cardinal Health and now on the board of Mattel and Novell. Brittan-White was driven to start Rural Sourcing partly by Hamilton’s “Misery Meter” in her role as CIO and partly by altruism to give back to the region where she was born—the town of nearby Oxford, Arkansas with a population of just 650. More recently Brittan-White has moved her rural sourcing focus to one of the most depressed areas in the US - Pocahontas County, W. Virginia. And, she has become involved with the nearby High Rocks Academy which focuses on creating positive role models for young women in that state.

Oxford, Arkansas, not Oxford, England? That’s more innovation from left field.

Picture credit - Wikipedia

Book excerpts: Chapter 6 - The Cognizant Polymath profile

As promised, here is another excerpt from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. This time it is from the case study on Cognizant.  Cognizant has earned the right to be called polymaths when it comes to leveraging “exotic” sources of innovation - they harness and integrate talent pools from many parts of the world to service a wide range of industries and technology platforms.

BTW - The text is pre-copy edit and likely to go through some changes.

""The third chapter has seen Francisco D’Souza take over reins, in 2007, as chief executive officer of the company. At 38, that made him of one of the youngest public company CEOs around. It has been a trial by fire, as the world economy tanked soon after. But Cognizant has maintained its growth in spite of the turbulent climate, staying focused on its reputation for operational excellence and distinctive industry acumen. The continued growth also qualified Cognizant for Fortune’s 2009 list of “supercharged performers.” "

"The last few years have given D’Souza even more appreciation for the modern-day version of the competitive advantage of nations.

There are specialized pools of talent—some are regional, some are industry based, some language based—you learn to harness. Take voice-based services. Philippines is grabbing the global leadership from India. Hungary is doing that around many European languages.

But such competitive advantage is fleeting. Bangalore can no longer be as competitive around application management services as other Indian cities, so it is diversifying by attracting entrepreneurs in a number of other areas. You see that with Silicon Valley—different genre of start-ups every few years."

"The larger Western firms had plenty of their own opportunities to develop a global delivery model like Cognizant did in its first decade. Accenture (back then, part of the Arthur Andersen family) had helped SGV, an affiliated firm in the Philippines, set up a software development center as far back as 1986. That could easily have been leveraged and expanded as a link in Accenture’s global delivery supply chain. That talent base was used primarily to service its Asian clients. EDS set up a subsidiary in India in 1996 and did business with local branches of Western companies, such as GM. It eventually bought a majority stake in MphasiS, another Indian outsourcer, in 2006. Through that decade, the storied firm that Ross Perot had built stagnated in revenue growth and eventually was sold to HP in 2008. IBM had reentered the Indian market in the early 1990s but did not start to bulk up local hiring until a decade later. Also, none of these firms could come anywhere close to Cognizant’s TIB model. In general, their own Western staff looked at their global colleagues as “commoditizing” their brand."

"Cognizant 2.0 has helped knit our organization together, essentially making distance and geography a nonissue.

In a Harvard Business School case study on Cognizant 2.0, Robert G. Eccles and Thomas H. Davenport describe how Cognizant employees who blogged and were otherwise active in the community reported ”higher levels of satisfaction and engagement with their jobs”. According to research house International Data Corp., Cognizant 2.0 is “a ‘game changer” for Cognizant, helping to shift the competitive field from labor arbitrage to intellectual arbitrage."

"D'Souza's clients, of course, expect him to be the tour guide. Born in Kenya, he is intimately familiar with the Serengeti, where guides take you in hot air balloons to watch the spectacular annual migration.

D’Souza provides his clients a much wider “balloon”—and the view is even more spectacular. It allows you to see pockets of innovation around the world—especially those coming out of left field."

Book Excerpts: The Irish edition on St. Patrick’s

More excerpts from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book celebrates innovators from around the world including two from the Emerald Isle.

BTW - The text is pre-copy edit and likely to go through some changes.

“Penrose Quay in Cork celebrates the tens of thousands of Irish emigrants that left its shores and enriched the world. In the 1800s, vendors walked the quay offering passengers the last of clean water and cooked meals they would find for a while. Cork’s modern-day son Pat Phelan offers today’s global nomads something as elusive: reasonable mobile roaming service. Phelan wants to create the first “global mobile company.” In his vision, the world would become one giant area code with no roaming charges.

Says Phelan:

Roaming is 4% of mobile revenue but 35% of mobile margins for larger telcos . I am counting on telcos remaining addicted to those margins while we offer rates which are 60 to 80% lower. With my MAXroam, you don't need a fancy $500 phone, you don't need flaky Wi-Fi, and you don't need to download any software. All you need is an unlocked GSM phone and to replace your SIM card with ours and you are good to go in most of the world.”

“When he is impressed, a distinctive nod accompanies a smile. Tony McCormack is nodding vigorously as a visitor shows him his house on Google Maps on a PDA. But the roads leading to his house in Longford, Ireland, are mostly unnamed on the map. “We are low tech here in rural Ireland,” he says with a shrug.

But once you get McCormack talking, he catalogs how technology has changed his dairy farm. A decade ago, calving season meant interrupted sleep as he woke in middle of night to check on his cows. Now he can monitor them via web cam from the warmth of his home office.

His cows have transponders that help him customize the quantity and composition of feed for each one. Try doing that manually, when cows eat on average eight times a day. On large farms, farmers use global positioning systems (GPS) to apply fertilizers more precisely. McCormack gets animated when he describes how he had heard GPS tracking had helped track down stolen tractors being shipped to Poland.

As for unnamed roads—that’s still the beauty of Ireland. You get to stop and ask neighbors for directions. And those conversations meander into so many other topics in “social networks” have been going for centuries.”

Mousepad Photo Credit - zazzle.com

Book excerpts: Chapter 4 – Consumerization of Technology

As promised, here is the third set of excerpts from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book is built around 8 “Polymaths” like GE (excerpt from that chapter here) and showcases 11 building blocks for the Polymath to leverage. Each corresponds to an alphabet in the book’s  RENAISSANCE framework . Here is the first one – R for Residence – to highlight the trend of the last few years where we have given the consumer unbelievable access to technology – and how that empowered consumer is changing every aspect of business.

BTW - The text is pre-copy edit and likely to go through some changes.

“The Wii reshaped our expectations of computer interfaces; the Kindle, our expectations of books. Electronic House magazine has celebrated houses with all kinds of home theaters and elaborate security systems. eBay has built a cottage industry of individuals doing business from home. JetBlue has moved call reservations to agents working from home. SOHO is no longer just a Manhattan neighborhood but a growing revenue category for technology companies as the acronym for small office, home office.”

“Snowhorn and Wald and Scott are increasingly the new consumer, and they are changing expectations of the technology they expect from every industry, not just from the high-tech industry.

Take hospitality: “Somewhere along the way . . . the hotel industry fell behind with regards [sic] to the in-room technology. Even in high end luxury or resort level hotels, the average guest settles for an in-room technology package that was far less than what he or she had available at home. “

And sporting arenas—no slouches when it comes to adopting technology— having to react to home theaters with HD and 3-D TV and surround sound: “That has forced sports officials to rethink the game experience and desperately attempt to bring the living room to the game, not the other way around.” 

“Indeed—bring the living room to the game, not the other way around. And increasingly you don’t even need Snowhorn’s high-powered, data center of a house to stake a claim for such a living room. If Cardinal Richelieu were alive today, he would surely be tempted to write: “The Den Pen is Mightier than the Board Sword.””

“Some companies are trying the superficial—let’s “put a lipstick on the pig,” - change the user interface to look more “cool,” and use language and graphics in manuals younger employees can relate to.  That will not help with Mia Lindheimer, who knows treasure hunts are not for Easter alone. Since she was six she has been geocaching. In this game, people set up caches all over the world and share their locations on the Internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. How do you find more about the game? “Oh, just Google it,” she says to the annoyance of her father, who works at Microsoft and would rather she say “Bing it.””

“Enterprises are gradually waking up to the fact there is no law precluding them from using products aimed at consumers themselves, sometimes at startling savings”

“As companies embed technology into their products, they are learning they have to start behaving like technology companies themselves. It means thinking of service engineers, spare parts, and service depots. It means contact centers. It means understanding nuances of technology licensing, warranties, and other legalities. Nike+ described earlier has four pages of terms of use on its Web site.It means getting used to Moore’s Law–type steep price declines. Not every industry adjusts to that easily. Take auto dealers. Initial versions of DVD players, navigation systems, and Bluetooth speakers all cost thousands of dollars. Dealers continue to expect those prices even as handheld Garmin GPS units and BlueAnt speakerphones are available at a fraction of the cost. “

“Enterprises have a poor track record with technology projects. Embedding technology in products, in some ways, jeopardizes more than an IT project—it could tarnish brands and lead to product liability”

“Back to Southwest Airlines : a small army of its employees had for days to handle massive web traffic set off by Hollywood director, Kevin Smith and his more than 1.5 million Twitter followers. He was bumped from one of their flights earlier this year and took his grievance to his community. The new “social customer” discussed further in Chapter 17 shares positive - and negative - commentary with lightening speed and incredible reach. But does he or she represent the average customer? One of the biggest risks with the consumerization trend is that a focus on the tech-savvy customer may distract from other, more mainstream customers”

Book excerpts: Chapter 3 - The GE polymath profile

As promised, here is the second set of excerpts from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. This time it is from the case study on GE . This chapter explores innovation in 4 corners of the giant – at the Global Research Center, at corporate IT, at R&D in a business unit, and at IT in the Healthcare unit. As you can see it is pervasive throughout the organization.

BTW - The text is pre-copy edit and likely to go through some changes.

GE Global Research

“In the valley in Niskayuna, New York, where the Mohicans, the Mohawk, and the Huron roamed and schemed with the Dutch, the French, and the English, a new tribe has emerged at GE Global Research. There are no scalps to show off these days, but there are plenty of patents, Nobel Prizes, and other recognitions. The 1,700 technologists, a majority of them PhDs in a variety of science and engineering disciplines, are at the crossroads of a New World. It is a world of grand challenges laid out by the National Academy of Engineering and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. These are goals that call for new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.“

“The Global Research ethos is: “Innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines.” So, put chemists, mathematicians, engineers of all stripes, and biologists in close proximity and who knows where the conversations will lead. It is a great setting for what the Kate Beckinsale character in the movie Serendipity calls “fortunate accidents.”

“One of the competencies GE has honed is what Sedziol calls “traversing the Valley of Death.” It happens all the time where R&D hands off a product but a business cannot find a market for it or cannot get to manufacturing scale. According to Sedziol, deciding when to continue funding and when to pull the plug is an art form.”

“Art form is not good enough, though, so at the Pilot Development Center at the edge of GE Global Research campus, Paul Myers and Jonathan Janssen, both mechanical engineers, talk about the GE Manufacturing Readiness Levels methodology. It is an adaptation of the Technology Readiness Level maturity model the U.S. Department of Defense has been propagating. Says Myers: “Stages 1 to 2 deal with concept development, stages 8 to 9 with scaling of production. Stages 3 through 7 relate to prototypes and proof-of-concepts—where many new products typically fail. For each stage, we have maturity measures for components, packaging, etc., that make up the solution.”

Corporate IT

“In sector after sector, we find that technology vendors lack deep domain knowledge when it comes to vertical technology solutions. That has opened the door for GE Healthcare, GE Transportation and other units to become technology leaders in their markets. We are a multi-billion dollar software and technology company in our own right.”

“When we say aligning IT with business, it also means making these units smarter about what we have learned over the years in IT procurement and contracting. Part of my role is to coach these business units on the unique nuances of technology sales compensation, revenue recognition, IP issues and other technology industry opportunities and challenges. “

R&D at a business unit

“Last July, the GE Consumer & Industrial business unit announced plans to make the “net-zero” (as in annual energy bills) home a reality by 2015. The concept blends appliances it already offers with cleantech products it plans to introduce. The newer products include “small” wind products. GE has an investment in Southwest Windpower, which makes 3-kilowatt-rated Skystream turbines, ideal for homes. Other new products include the software that will be the “brains” of home energy management, hybrid home heaters, LED lighting, and next-generation batteries. As we saw earlier in the chapter, the Global Research Center has initiatives around many of those technologies in such products. “

Business Unit IT

“It’s been said that constraints drive innovation. . . . This project certainly forced the team to innovate. From the selection of boutique system integrators to the decision to adopt agile for a packaged application to the implementation of the “garden wall,” the team was continually pushing the envelope and redefining its own comfort zone. Just like the GEHC product teams who are constantly pushing the envelope of new medical technologies, IT can also innovate and change how solutions are delivered.”