Innovation Mindset

Shot on an iPhone pro

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date January 13, 2020

A quick reminder that my thought-provoking question from 2017: When Star Wars will be shot on iPhone? is less and less provoking. This is now mainstream Apple marketing, where “shooting” means a movie and now just DSLR-quality pictures:

The original video…

And the making off…

We Are still a few years before iPhones become cheap mainstream movie producing tools for Hollywood, but Moore’s law (and whatever apply for camera sensors) is getting there fast.

Understanding technology power laws is hard. Using them strategically is even harder.

Also, note that when you want to market movie-making in a fully digital age, we’re not seeing Hollywood, but Beijing. (It’s still early, but: happy new year of the Rat!)

Tags moore’s law, power law, Shot on an iPhone

Innovation Mindset

A practical way to gauge your innovation mindset

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date September 10, 2019

During my summer break from writing on the blog, I read a lot of articles on the innovation mindset. I am glad this became such an open topic lately. Stéphanie and I recognized that, years ago, as a cornerstone problem for most organizations getting serious about innovation. As with anything we work on, the way we speak of mindset is very practical: “It is an ensemble of patterns of thinking, assumptions that are made about self and the world that are illustrated or observable through its way of working: its behaviors.” (The Culture Framework).

But if the mindset is what shapes the organization itself and structures key processes (and biases), it’s easy to understand that it doesn’t solely stem from the organization exclusively. The personal culture of individuals, their education and former experiences have been critical in shaping their mindset way before they are introduced to the values of any company. At this point you can cue in a full discussion on how to recruit junior executives to change the culture. In this article though, I’ll just try to propose how you can gauge someone’s innovation mindset (yours maybe?).

Tags innovation culture, innovation mindset, tetralemma

Innovation Mindset

Interview – Innovative Management at Worldline

Post author By Stéphanie Mitrano
Post date May 30, 2019

I’m glad to be sharing this article about Claire Déprez, Innovative Management Programme Leader at Worldline, the youngest of the transformation leaders I’ve interviewed. I’ve met Claire in 2014 when she was a mentee in the mentoring pilot programme I designed for them. The year after, she became member of the voluntary mentoring coordination team. But this interview is not about mentoring even though the programme was the trigger for her career insight, her evolution in the company and the management culture transformations that followed.

Tags Innovative management

Innovation Mindset

Accepting the scale of failure

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date May 8, 2019

Around a cocktail, everyone will agree that you have to accept failure in innovation. During TEDx conferences smart people will boast about failing gracefully and empowering teams to do so. The question is are you walking to talk yourself? Are you ready to accept failure as an unavoidable harsh reality? At scale?

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.
2018 Letter to Shareholders – Jeff BEZOS

Tags amazon, fail, Failure in innovation, Jeff Bezos

Innovation Mindset

The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones…

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date March 21, 2019

The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil. It ended because bronze tools became cheaper.
The origin of that quote attributed to Ahmed Zaki Yamani who was the Minister of Oil for Saudi Arabia in the 70s, is actually difficult to trace back (and the analogy can be critiqued in many ways).

But in any case, as experts of any given industry this brings us back to what we love to forget:

We’re not going out of business, because what we are experts in is getting out of fashion by itself (or as a resource, is depleted). We get out of business because “better” comes in. Innovation answers to this simple formula: Customers x Time

So pause a minute and ask yourself:

What are your stones? What are the bronze tools coming in? And what can you do about it if your salary depends on cutting more stones?