• Home //
• Work //
• Blog //
• Run //
• Contact

How to Evaluate Innovation

One of the more complicated questions we ask ourselves here at WebFWD every time we receive a new application is: How innovative is the idea? And how do you measure this in an objective fashion?

A while ago I came across Doblin’s “Ten Types of Innovation” model - although it is by far not perfect, it provides a really neat, concise way to look at (and evaluate) innovation. The way Doblin’s model works is: For each innovation (project) you check them on each of the ten factors of the model (which fall into three broad categories: Configuration, Offering and Experience). Essentially you then make a binary decision - does the project innovate on the profit/business model? Does it innovate on the network? etc. The more boxes a project ticks, the more innovative and disruptive it will be. Clean, clear and easy. Not perfect - but usually good enough.

Harvard Business Review published an excellent infographic on the model and its application and if you like long(er) form content, the W.F. Kellogg Foundation has published a paper on “Intentional Innovation” (in the context of philanthropy and social impact”.

Happy Innovating!

The Funnel

If you have ever seen a presentation which talks about customer acquisition or similar topics, you will have inevitably come across the infamous funnel image. The basic premise is: You start out with a whole bunch of prospects (people) and by virtue of the process they get less and less until you end up with your customer(s) (or whatever it was that went through the process). The image most often referenced for this is a funnel.

Now - when I last looked that’s exactly not what is happening in a funnel… A funnel doesn’t “loose” any unit of stuff I put in at the top. The whole premise of a funnel is to not loose anything (and turn your kitchen into a dump in the process).

Well, well… it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, right?

Pitch 101

All you need to know about pitching your startup. Seriously.

…and don’t forget to read Guy Kawasaki’s “Art of the Start”.

Quote of the Day

I don’t deny that it’s easier, cheaper, and less risky to put up a website than it is to open a store, manufacture products, or provide a service to customers. At the same time, however, driving traffic to a website and turning visits into sales are other matters. Few of the would-be Web moguls I meet have figured out how to do these things. Most, I suspect, never will.

Norm Brodsky on the New Breed of Entrepreneur in Inc. Magazine

Read the article - Norm has a point.

Innovate in the Open (TCC Keynote)

Here’s the video of my keynote at this year’s Teladata Technology Convergence Conference where I talked about “Innovate in the Open”.

Link: http://www.teladatatcc.com/video-opening.php

Cashflow matters.

If there is a single thing, a single activity and a single metric you should care about when building a business (or a sustainable open project - which you should run like a business anyway), it is cashflow.

Cashflow is simple: Money in minus money out. If your cashflow is positive your business lives, if your cashflow is negative your business dies. Simple as that.

Yet I am befuddled by the lack of understanding for this essential fact of business. I literally haven’t had a single discussion about the actions which lead a particular business to get to positive cashflow or even the notion of cashflow with any of the many startups I’ve met over the course of the last couple of years. It seems that Silicon Valley’s obsession with growth and the vague notion of “we’ll figure out the business model later” led to a culture of people building companies with the single goal of selling them. And as Silicon Valley culture spreads throughout the world these days, founders all around the globe follow suit.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to get to positive cashflow as soon as possible. Unless you’re the next Facebook/AirBnB/Name-your-preferred-hot-startup and swim in heaps of venture capital (which to be honest you most likely won’t be - the cards are clearly stacked against you… just look at the stats) having positive cashflow means you are master of your own destiny. Cashflow puts you into the driver seat. It allows you to do the things you want to do. And even if you want to raise money to accelerate your growth it puts you into a position of power, not one where you need to beg for money.

So - unless you want to build your business as an acquisition target (nothing wrong with that - just know that the odds are heavily stacked against you) but want to build a business which lasts, read up on cashflow, understand the principals by heart and make it one of your key objectives!

And to that end - we’ll make cashflow discipline an essential part of Mozilla’s WebFWD program. Time to build the next crop of 100 year organizations!

P.S. Here’s some recommended reading for you - Don’t Build A Company To Sell, Build It To Last by Kanyi Maqubela and anything you can find by Norm Brodsky (a columnist at Inc Magazine), e.g. this piece on cashflow.

Quote of the Day

Trade in personal data has emerged as a driver of the digital economy. Many tech companies offer products for free and get income from online ads that are customized using data about customers. These companies compete for ads, in part, based on the quality of the information they possess about users.

There is no free lunch.

Putting my money where my mouth is

Two days ago I mentioned that I intend to write a book about Open Innovation (the Mozilla way).

I am thinking about finding a company (ideally not in tech) which is interested in implementing an Open Innovation strategy into their business process and which would like my support/help to do so. It would help me refine my thinking and gain insights into challenges, problems and opportunities outside of Mozilla’s world and hopefully would help the company on their own journey (and make the book more useful).

This is all still pretty raw in terms of thinking - but do let me know if you represent such a company (ideally mid to large size) and are interested.

The Rewards of Growing Your Mission vs Your Headcount

A little while ago I met the wonderful people from SecondSight, a Dutch think tank which publishes a quarterly magazine/book on future trends (their tagline is rather fittingly: “Open Your Eyes to the Future”). They asked me to write a piece for their latest edition titled “New More Free Power”.

After a long, engaged discussion with the team we settled on a story on the rewards you get from growing your mission as opposed to your headcount (i.e. you choose to stay small and forgo certain aspects of growth).

Here’s the article:

Your organization is growing rapidly, which is good. Or so you think.

When organizations (including companies as well as non-profits) grow, they tend to hit plateaus they must pass to successfully continue on their chosen path. Unfortunately, growth rarely (if ever) happens linearly, and to scale an organization from garage to multi-national corporation you need to accomodate massive changes along the way. You will have to change the way you operate.

Often this change is painful. When you were three people in a garage everyone knew about and helped out with everything. This won’t happen when you run and manage a multi-national corporation. Growth will change your corporate culture from one built on deep levels of trust to systems which include the awkwardness of more formal, scheduled performance reviews. This change will touch the very root of your organization: when a little sandwich shop that you start in the hopes of changing the world one sandwich at a time evolves into a national food chain, you start measuring success in three-letter acronyms.

This challenge is compounded at the point you no longer become the sole master of your own destiny: shareholders demanding quarterly growth and board members calling for industry benchmarking change your focus. You inadvertedly find yourself, as Author Steven Pressfield once described, “in the belly of the beast.” And this beast demands to be fed by further growth.

But your evolution need not occur in these ways. Organizations choose not to grow at any price. These organizations put their principles, values, beliefs - and quite often a specific mission - first.

Take for example the backbone of Germany’s industrial success, the Mittelstand (loosely translated into English as “SMBs”: small- and medium-sized businesses). These companies are typically just a few hundred employees strong. They pride themselves in producing to the highest quality standards. They are the reason why “Made in Germany” is such an accolade. And they choose to be big fish in small ponds. They are typically family-owned businesses with strong beliefs and principles. These are companies where the founder typically hangs in the CEO’s office and is often his great-grandfather.

What’s notable is how these companies deliberate choose to prioritize values (such as quality and the way they treat their employees) over growth. Quite a few of these companies would be highly attractive acquisition targets for large multi-national corporations or prime candidates for a public listing on the stock market. Yet their owners decided to grow slowly, organically and only to the extent that their values & beliefs are preserved, if not advanced.

The Open Source movement is a fascinating angle on this approach to growth. In Silicon Valley (and now, effectively around the world) a growing number of founders, dissatisfied with the way business is done, start companies with Open Source at its core. They are out to change the world - but they are doing it under their own terms, with strong beliefs, cultures and missions.

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox web browser, is one of these organizations. Founded as a non-profit with a mission to “provide choice and innovation on the Internet,” Mozilla took on the mighty Microsoft Corporation and turned a virtually monopolized browser market (thanks to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) into a thriving and competitive ecosystem. Firefox is a feather in Mozilla’s mission cap. To continue building on its mission, Mozilla is creating WebFWD, an incubator and accelerator program for mission-based Open Source organizations.

Among the first organizations Mozilla is fostering is CASH Music, a non-profit startup founded by musicians to help fellow independent artists market themselves on the Web, effectively making artists masters of their own destiny. When CASH grows, Mozilla grows - not in revenues or headcount, but in expanding its core mission.

Let’s return to that sandwich store. There is a wonderful story from the founders of 37 Signals, a software company which itself chose to grow slowly, carefully and organically. Their neighborhood has a sandwich shop which makes the best sandwiches. They use carefully-selected ingredients and ensure each sandwich is freshly-made. Customers love the little shop. Every day at lunch time long queues form outside of the shop. Usually the shop sells out long before meeting all the demand. They are often asked why they don’t produce more sandwiches, as higher production would allow them to serve more customers, grow their business and ultimately make more money, The owner’s response is: “it wouldn’t be the same shop. It would hamper quality as we couldn’t deliver the same product for our customers.” They wouldn’t be able to change the world one sandwich at a time.

Building your organization around true values, beliefs and a mission gives it a human quality. Which can be far more valuable than growth and sheer profit. And just what we need. As human beings.

The Mozilla Way - Innovate in the Open

It all began with a rather innocent question: After experiencing the amazing qualities of operating completely in the open here at Mozilla, creating and leading some very exciting Open Innovation projects such as Mozilla’s Design Challenges & since last year our WebFWD accelerator program and thinking, analyzing, discussing and talking more and more about Open Innovation and how we do things here at Mozilla… wouldn’t it be great if we document this knowledge and thus enable more organizations to benefit from it?

This lead to a slightly less innocent tweet:

And so here we are – I am going to write this thing. And use this blog as a testbed for ideas, text fragments, discuss interesting source material I find elsewhere and generally rant about my inability to express myself properly in the English language.

To be clear: Anything I write will only be possible because I stand on the shoulders of giants. So many awesome people have done so much amazing work on this - both inside and outside of Mozilla. I am just a messenger.

Join me for the ride - and please provide feedback!