All posts in English

• October 21, 2010

  The Reinvention of Industry

  A point I’ve been harping on within my consulting engagements and during my workshops is the fact that, in my opinion, a deep transformation is taking place before our eyes.  The last few years have witnessed the toppling industries that, as a child, I took for granted as powerful and enduring.  Last year, more than 200 US newspapers went bankrupt, the music industry distribution channel has been reshaped and a good number of banks failed and others would have failed were it not for government help.

  Now, before going to bed, I read that a number of high powered players in tech and the VC industry have created a US $250M fund to invest in companies focused on the “social web.”  Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, one of the investors in the fund, states that “We think every industry is going to get fundamentally rethought and redesigned around people.”  Nothing like validation from the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos and John Doerr for a guy in faraway Colombia.

  Nevertheless, I actually think that the opportunities are even greater in emerging regions such as Latin America.  This is the reason that I’ve been giving workshops on what I call Digital Innovation in order to get people up to speed on the changes happening and to provide practice (through exercises) in the use of tools to reinvent their business models. If you’re in Colombia, register for the next workshop on December 15th.

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• September 23, 2010

  Talking About Digital Innovation in Paipa

  Paipa is small, but beautiful city in Colombia, which is a nice place for companies to hold client events.  Intergrupo, one of the biggest technology firms in the country, invited me to their event here in Paipa to speak with some of their large customers about Digital Innovation.  I had the opportunity to speak to them about how I think one should think about the adoption of digital tools and about success stories of companies taking advantage of cloud computing, social media and other tools.  It was great to hear the audience’s comments and opinions.

  Many in the audience mentioned many challenges here in Colombia (and Latin America) in order to adopt new digital tools in order to create new competitive advantages.  I saw much interest from all of the companies in investigating new ways to analyze, collaborate on and design new business models, the topic of my workshops.

  Mi premise is that, first, a solid strategy needs to be in place for your company to develop or enhance its competitive position (differentiation).  This is by no means a trivial process (and it’s one that I’m passionate about). With this strategy mapped out, then, one can start selecting technology that will help you achieve your objectives.

  This is the topic that I’ll be talking about during my speech on digital innovation during the B2B event that Legis is holding in a few weeks.  I hope to see some of you there!

  Paipa is small, but beautiful city in Colombia, which is a nice place for companies to hold client events.  Intergrupo, one of the biggest technology firms in the country, invited me to their event here in Paipa to speak with some of their large customers about Digital Innovation.  I had the opportunity to speak to them about how I think one should think about the adoption of digital tools and about success stories of companies taking advantage of cloud computing, social media and other tools.  It was great to hear the audience’s comments and opinions.

  Many in the audience mentioned many challenges here in Colombia (and Latin America) in order to adopt new digital tools in order to create new competitive advantages.  I saw much interest from all of the companies in investigating new ways to analyze, collaborate on and design new business models, the topic of my workshops.

  My premise is that, first, a solid strategy needs to be in place for your company to develop or enhance its competitive position (differentiation).  This is by no means a trivial process (and it’s one that I’m passionate about). With this strategy mapped out, then, one can start selecting technology that will help you achieve your objectives.

  This is the topic that I’ll be talking about during my speech on digital innovation during the B2B event that Legis is holding in a few weeks.  I hope to see some of you there!

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• September 19, 2010

  Digital Innovation in Every Industry

  On Thursday, I had the good fortune to sit down with a number of startups in a host of industries to analyze their successes up to that point and ascertain, along with five other judges, the viability of these businesses to scale. Each one of these businesses was innovative in its own right by any standards (e.g., global or otherwise).  Nevertheless, what really struck me was that the three business we chose in industries from fashion to education, digital innovation was an integral part of the company’s present and future strategy.

  As I mentioned in a previous post about the workshops I am teaching on Digital Innovation, I believe that the time is ripe to evangelize business men and women from all industries on the possibilities for real differentiation through digital innovation.  The companies we analyzed on Thursday had done an amazing job of marketing, human capital management and bootstrapping, yet they saw even more opportunity ahead thanks to the strategies they were each developing for taking advantage of digital tools.

  This was truly an excellent confirmation of my thinking up till this point.  I needed this “sanity check” because of my immersion in technology these past few years.  During my speeches I certainly exposed the opportunities that I felt were available for organizations willing to make use of these tools, but my experience on Thursday was the confirmation I needed.  Here we were hearing entrepreneurs who had come to that exact same conclusion all on their own.

  During the next year, I will be executing many more digital innovation workshops and evangelizing these concepts even more.  Organizations that don’t take advantage of digital innovation will, more and more, find themselves at a clear disadvantage.

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• September 15, 2010

  Open Innovation and the Cloud

  At the conferences where I speak, when I talk about Cloud Computing and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, one of my premises is that this new paradigm requires new competencies. More than ever, companies offering Software-as-a-Service need to be true to the “service” component and be responsive to customer requests.

  Upon hearing this, many companies immediately think of customer service, which is indeed important.  Nonetheless, many customers and non-customers offer suggestions that could or could not be of value to such organizations.  Companies that hear their customers are also open so something called “open innovation” whereby innovations can come (in part or in whole) from outside the company’s boundaries.

  In terms of suggestions, one example revolves around the team at Zoho, a SaaS provider. As can be seen by the image at the top of this post the company made a slight change to its headline statement at the top of its web site between September 4th and the 13th of this year.  About a year ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing the company’s founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu and must admit I was quite impressed by his vision and intelligence.  At that time, the company web site was little more than a listing of all their applications.

  I asked Sridhar if they were thinking of revamping their messaging to focus on customer benefits and improve the general design of the site.  He said they were and a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon the new site, which, in my mind, is an improvement.  Nonetheless, in my email congratulating them on the new site, I did mention that it might be a good idea to include two messages: 1) Who Zoho makes companies more productive and 2) the millions of users they have.  See my email below.

  

  It says a lot that a few days later, they had taken action on these suggestions (from outside of their company) and implemented them.  It was certainly possible that the suggestion would not have been implemented, but it is apparent that they take these suggestions seriously and are open to anything that helps them improve. This is a great lesson in whatever name you’d want to put on this (e.g., open collaboration, open innovation, etc.) for other SaaS providers and highlights the type of open company culture that such companies would do well to embrace.

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