Invenção é diferente de inovação

Passei anos a ver o jornalista Fernando Pessa a entrevistar "inventores" que se queixavam que tinham criado algo espectacular mas que não tinha interessados.

"In most companies, innovation is the responsibility of the technical side of the organization. The research and development staff is supposed to come up with the cool new technologies, and the rest of the company takes them to market.
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But that model doesn’t assure success, as the recent history of innovation shows. Betamax lost out to VHS. Macintosh, to a lesser degree, lost out to Windows. We still use color-TV standards from the 1940s, despite many initiatives to improve picture quality.
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Put simply, bad things can happen to good technology. And much of what can happen is due to the business model the company uses to commercialize the technology. This is the next wave in innovation: to innovate the business model that commercializes promising new ideas and technologies. Doing so is, for the most part, a simple process of trial and error. But at most companies it also requires the removal of some barriers to such innovation.
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What are those barriers? Perhaps the most basic is simply this: Companies get trapped by their own success. Once a company’s business model has proved effective, the tendency is to seek out additional opportunities that fit that model — and to play down any technologies that don’t fit that model.
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One problem is an organizational gap in most companies: Who is responsible for business-model innovation? It can’t be left to the chief technology officer and his or her staff alone; business-model innovation clearly requires leadership from the business side of the organization. Yet who within the company short of the CEO is responsible for the way the business creates value in its products and services and captures that value in the form of revenue from its customers?"

Relaciono isto com "O elemento realmente diferenciador" e com "Lc, 10, 24"
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Trechos retirados de "Why Bad Things Happen To Good Technology"

De-commoditize

O Paulo Peres há dias chamou-me a atenção para o livro "Beating the Commodity Trap: How to Maximize Your Competitive Position and Increase Your Pricing Power" de Richard Anthony D'Aveni.
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Folheei algumas páginas na internet e fixei esta tabela:

Para já, anotar os dilemas e desafios associados à armadilha da "Deterioração".
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Entretanto, encontrei logo aplicação ao ler este artigo "Serendipity and Samples Can Save Barnes & Noble":

"It’s a lovely picture, but bookstores don’t make money by giving you a place to read to your kid. They make money by getting you to buy their merchandise -- a business model that requires spending a lot on rent and inventory. A retail store is an expensive place to store books, especially if people are just going to flip through them and buy elsewhere.
So here’s an idea, for the publishing industry, Barnes & Noble or a tech-savvy retail entrepreneur: Instead of fighting showrooming, embrace it.
Separate the discovery and atmospheric value of bookstores from the book-warehousing function. Make them smaller, with the inventory limited to curated examination copies -- one copy per title. (Publishers should be willing to supply such copies free, just as they do for potential reviewers.) Charge for daily, monthly or annual memberships that entitle customers to hang out, browse the shelves, buy snacks and use the Wi-Fi. Give members an easy way to order books online, whether from a retail site or the publishers directly, without feeling guilty. And give the place a good name. How about Serendipity Books?"

E também "Should Barnes & Noble Turn into a Mini-Mall?"

"It is probably a long shot and B&N probably has a lot more locations than this approach could support. But it is a way of utilizing the book heritage to provide a shopping experience that no one, including Amazon, would be able to match.
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And if I were to do it, I would use the approach that Harrod's employs. Most people do not realize that while Harrod's looks like a store, it is actually a mini-mall with each merchandise area leased out to an independent seller — an extension of the model that department stores use with their cosmetics/skin care floor.
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I would turn each B&N into a mini-mall in which each individual category is run by a lessee who is expert in that particular category. B&N would act as the systems integrator, putting together a multi-category offering that attracts sufficient customers into the mini-mall. It would also use its book-buying experience and power to stock each lessee with the book inventory required for their category assortment."

Jogadores de bilhar amador

O jogador de bilhar amador, como eu, só pensa na jogada de agora, só tenta continuar a jogar, saber se a jogada que vai fazer agora o vai prejudicar no futuro, isso é secundário, o amanhã é numa outra era geológica.

"A Argentina vai oferecer incentivos às companhias energéticas que investirem mil milhões de dólares (762 milhões de euros) ou mais durante um período de cinco anos, no país, por forma a aumentar a produção petrolífera e reduzir a dependência das importações."

Tit for tat!
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Mas há sempre esperança, afinal essa parece ser a mensagem comum a todas as religiões, quebrar o "tit for tat",,, com um papa argentino!
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Trecho retirado de  "Argentina oferece incentivos a energéticas"

Curiosidade do dia

"Os novos dados, divulgados nesta quarta-feira pelo Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) no âmbito da Síntese Económica de Conjuntura, indicam que a recessão continuou a perder força em Maio, fruto de um reduções menos intensas do consumo privado (em particular do consumo corrente) e do investimento, que foram acompanhadas por uma aceleração das exportações.
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Para o conjunto do ano de 2013 – e pela primeira vez em longos meses, senão anos – as novas previsões do Banco de Portugal, ontem actualizadas, são menos negativas do que as anteriores e até menos sombrias do que as da troika e da OCDE. A instituição presidida por Carlos Costa antecipa agora que o PIB recue 2%, menos do que os -2,3% que eram previstos no Boletim de Primavera e pela troika, e menos do que a queda de 2,7% que a OCDE calculava ainda em Maio."

Trechos retirados de "Recessão continuou a perder força em Maio"

E descobrir uma micro-empresa tuga a trabalhar num componente que fará parte dos Porsche?

"This is madness!"

"Germany’s no-nonsense finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble will fly into austerity-strapped Athens on Thursday bearing words of encouragement for the Greek government in the wake of recent nationwide protests."

Imaginei logo um Schäuble de tom mais escuro, a gritar: "This is madness!"

"Schäuble heads to Greece in ‘demonstration of confidence’"

"A Segurança Social é sustentável"

Um cenário do INE, publicado em 2004, estima que a população portuguesa em 2050 possa rondar as cerca de 7,5 milhões de almas.
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Quantos anos, em média, vive um português na reforma ou aposentação?
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Nesse cenário dos 7,5 milhões de habitantes, passaremos de 102 idosos por cada 100 jovens, para 398 idosos por cada 100 jovens.
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Fico com curiosidade, embora não ceda, de ver quais os malabarismos e artimanhas que Raquel Varela avança no seu livro "A Segurança Social é sustentável"

E se?

"European car sales still going in reverse"

"In the ongoing car crisis in Europe, auto sales in June plummeted to their lowest level since 1996. Major carmakers like BMW expect national car markets in the EU to continue shrinking for at least another year.
Registrations of new cars in the 28-member European Union totaled 1,134,042 in June - a fall of 5.6 percent compared with the same month last year, the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA) said Tuesday.
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According to ACEA data, the United Kingdom was the only car market to expand last month as sales grew 13.4 percent. Other major EU markets contracted sharply with auto sales in France slipping most significantly at a rate of 8.4 percent, ahead of Italy, minus 5.5 percent and Germany, down 4.7 percent.
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Noting that June sales were the lowest for the month since 1996, ACEA attributed the ongoing sales crisis to high unemployment and a protracted recession in most EU countries."

E se esta queda não se dever em exclusivo ao elevado desemprego e à conjuntura económica recessiva?
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E se também estiver relacionada com a evolução demográfica europeia?
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E se também estiver relacionada com a evolução do estilo de vida e dos valores do europeu médio?
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E se também estiver relacionada com a evolução de novos modelos de negócio baseados na partilha e aluguer?
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Certezas? Não tenho; contudo, acho perigoso escolher uma resposta tão fácil.

Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte V)

A propósito deste texto "Do Things That Don't Scale" lembrei-me logo de Christensen e de Don Peppers.
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Quem pensa em ter sucesso "doing things that scale" pensa em crescimento do volume, pensa em ganhar escala, pensar em drequência de produção, pensa em eficiência.
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Daí Christensen, como sublinhei em "Sobre a paranóia da eficiência e do eficientismo". E, sobretudo, daí Don Peppers em "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)":

"Quando se compete pelo preço e se elege a redução de custos como o vector fundamental para o negócio, procura-se quantidade, volume, market share para maximizar o retorno do agregado daquele SKU. Quando se sobe na escala de valor e se trabalha do cliente para trás, para a oferta, para o produto, aposta-se no aumento do valor percepcionado pelo cliente, por cada cliente. Assim, aposta-se na maximização do valor criado com cada unidade de SKU e não pelo seu agregado. O negócio não é quantidade, não é market share!"

Ou, melhor ainda, e ainda com Don Peppers num texto que descobri muito recentemente e sublinhei em "Isto é tão bom" (Não consigo destacar nada em particular, é tudo tão bom!!!)
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Em vez de escalar, concentrar a atenção em cada cliente, como se não houvesse mais nenhum no mundo. O texto é sobre as startups mas startups são o ADN primordial de futuras empresas:

"The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.
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And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.
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Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers is that they worry it won't scale. But when founders of larval startups worry about this, I point out that in their current state they have nothing to lose. Maybe if they go out of their way to make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to do so much for. That would be a great problem to have. See if you can make it happen. And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers will by then have permeated your culture.
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What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great morphs into as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a startup's life. It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
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Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
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Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups. You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise. Eric Migicovsky of Pebble said one of things he learned was "how valuable it was to source good screws." Who knew?
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The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."

Parte I, parte II e parte III e parte IV. 

Go Rui!!!

Um sintoma? (parte I)

Há cerca de 15 anos apoiava uma empresa na implementação do seu sistema de garantia da qualidade. Era uma empresa de produção de vestuário com marca própria, na gama média-alta, para o mercado nacional e, com produção sob o regime de private-label para exportação.
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Certa vez, ao ajudar na preparação dos elementos de entrada de uma das suas revisões do sistema, encontrei uns números que me deixaram a pensar:

• cerca de 10 referências da marca própria representavam mais de 60% das vendas;
• a empresa desenvolvia em cada época cerca de 250 referências.

Já não me recordo das justificações que me deram na altura para o esforço de desenvolver tantas referências por época.

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Hoje em dia, encontro cenários parecidos no mundo do calçado. Em cada época que passa as empresas desenvolvem cada vez mais modelos, a maioria pouco ou nada vende.

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O que acontece quando se inflaciona o número de modelos?

Sobrecarrega-se o sector da Modelação, sobrecarrega-se a Produção que vai ter de produzir esses modelos, sobrecarrega-se o sector das Compras que vai ter de aprovisionar uma grande variedade de materiais e componentes e, tudo isto custa dinheiro.

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Ainda esta manhã no Twitter apanhei alguém que afirmava, ou citava, em inglês, algo como:

"Queres ter uma boa ideia? Tem muitas ideias!"

Se tivermos muitas ideias, a probabilidade de aparecer uma boa ideia aumenta.
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A lógica parece ser, queres vender muito? Produz muitas referências, desenvolve muitos modelos, alguns hão-de ser best-sellers.
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Só que as "mais ideias" não colocam os mesmos problemas e desafios que os "mais modelos".
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Será que mais modelos, será que a explosão de referências é um sintoma de algo mais?
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Continua.
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Parte II - consequências da cauda longa de referências
Parte III - a cauda longa de referências e a estratégia de uma marca

Mais uma ferramenta para Mongo

"Forget 3D printing—3D subtraction is going to arrive in your garage first"

"A funny thing happened on the way to our supposedly 3D-printed future: A simpler, older, but no less revolutionary technology made its way into every automated factory on earth, and now it’s coming to a garage near you. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s mostly because it has a completely unbankable name—CNC routing (or CNC milling.) Also, unlike the usurper technology 3D printing, which has only lately become popular, CNC milling has been around since MIT pioneered the technology starting in the 1950s.
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CNC routing is basically the inverse of 3D printing. Instead of using a computer to control a basic armature and print head that deposits plastic or some other material in three dimensions, CNC routing uses a spinning drill bit to carve wood, metal or plastic. It’s the difference between making a sculpture out of clay and carving it from marble, only there’s a robot doing it instead of a human.
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And now CNC milling is becoming as accessible as 3D printing."

Apostar na formação

O livro de Rita McGrath, "The End of Competitive Advantage", expõe a ideia do fim da vantagem competitiva sustentada, todas as vantagens competitivas são transientes!
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Esta ideia, todas as vantagens competitivas são transientes, também explica esta evolução "Prepare for the New Permanent Temp".

"The most serious question going forward is not simply whether or how more full time jobs return, it's whether or how part-time and temporary workers become more valuable. Will employers invest in developing the knowledge, human capital and capabilities of their contingent workforces and independent contractors? Or is the new "permanent temporary" merely about a fair day's work for a fair day's pay?"

A formação de cada um é demasiado importante para ficar nas mãos de um empregador... recordar Janeiro de 2008 "O velho existencialismo..."
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Um dos problemas é que a escola prepara-nos para sermos vasos à espera de serem enchidos... ainda na semana passada ouvi um dirigente de uma associação de directores escolares (?) defender que deviam ser as escolas a escolher as opções dos seus alunos.

Arenas em vez de indústrias

Comecei a leitura de "The End of Competitive Advantage" de Rita McGrath de onde retirei estes trechos logo no início:

"One of the biggest changes we need to make in our assumptions is that within-industry competition is the most significant competitive threats. Companies define their most important competitors as other companies within the same industry, meaning those firms offering products that are a close substitute for one another.
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It isn't that industries have stopped being relevant; it's just that using industry as a level of analysis is often not fine-grained enough to determine what is really going on at the level at which decisions need to be made. A new level of analysis that reflects the connection between market segments, offer, and geographic locations at a granular level is needed. I call this an arena. Arenas are characterized by particular connections between customers and solutions, not by the conventional description of offerings that are near substitutes for one another.
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The driver of categorization will in all likelihood be the outcomes that particular customers seek ("jobs to be done") and the alternative ways those outcomes might be met. (Moi ici: A unidade de análise são os clientes-alvo, não a indústria onde se opera) This is vital, because the most substantial threats to a given advantage are likely to arise from a peripheral or nonobvious location.
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This further raises the issue that a firm may not have a single approach that holds for all the arenas in which it participates. Instead the approach may be adapted to the particular arena and competitors it is facing.
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The arena concept also suggests that conventional ideas about what creates a long-lived advantages will change. Product features, new technologies, and the "better mousetrap" sorts of sources of advantage are proving to be less durable than we once thought. Instead, companies are learning to leverage more ephemeral things such as deep customer relationships and the ability to design irreplaceable experiences across multiple arenas.(Moi ici: Cá está, o poder das relações, não a tecnologia!!! Recordar "O futuro também passa por aqui")
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The imagery of arena-based strategy is more that of orchestration than of plotting a compelling victory, and implementation on the ground by those actually confronting conditions within a specific arena becomes increasingly important." (Moi ici: "Orquestrar um enredo")

Desmitos... o nome de um blogue

Quando os dirigentes das associações patronais pedem mais crescimento, quando pedem mais despesa do Estado para fomentar procura, estão na verdade a pedir uma boleia paga pelos contribuintes.
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Incapazes de, ou ignorantes sobre como, conquistar o futuro, pedem que seja o Estado que faça esse trabalho.
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Nada de novo e nada exclusivo deste país, basta recordar "Mitos económicos":

"Many executives... Sensing a causal link between the progress of the overall economy and the 'micro' economy of their own firms, they blame the 'macro' economy for their problems and look to periods of economic expansion to fuel economic growth. 'When things go better,' they'll say, 'we'll do better.'"

Subitamente lembrei-me de um blogue... Desmitos.
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Desmitos vs Super Bock Economics.

Curiosidade do dia

"There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
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It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.
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But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God."

Trechos retirados de "Let us blaze new trails"

Não há nada a fazer (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.
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Recordo este trecho retirado da parte I:

"Há bocado vinha a subir a subir a Avenida da República de Gaia e ao passar junto a um hotel lembrei-me da afirmação do presidente da Associação da Hotelaria de Portugal que li no JdN de ontem:

"Para 2013 espera-se menos emprego, menos investimento, pior prestação em termos de resultados. Não há milagres"

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Se fosse presidente de uma associação, não alinharia no discurso côr-de-rosa dos amanhãs que cantam, no entanto, também não alinharia nos discursos niveladores negativos que não convidam à iniciativa para fazer diferente."

Entretanto, segundo o INE:

"A hotelaria registou 1,4 milhões de hóspedes em maio de 2013, +7,0% que em maio de 2012, e cerca de 4,0 milhões de dormidas (+11,8%). Este último acréscimo contou essencialmente com o contributo dos não residentes, cujo número de dormidas cresceu 15,5% face a maio 2012 (+2,6% em maio de 2012 por comparação com maio de 2011).
Os proveitos apresentaram igualmente uma evolução homóloga favorável (+8,9% para os proveitos totais e +12,2% para os de aposento), face aos resultados negativos registados no mês homólogo de 2012."

Preços e segmentação

Isto que se segue é precioso. Infelizmente pouca gente pensa assim!
O modelo do preço como o custo mais uma margem continua entranhado:

"The right place to start to set prices is to start with customers (Moi ici: Quem são os clientes-alvo?) and the reasons they buy the products. (Moi ici: Que experiências procuram e valorizam) Different customers – different reasons and you have customer segmentation. Another way to look at the reasons they buy a product as – “What jobs are different customers hiring a product for?”. That is customers have jobs to be done (needs to be filled) – they hire (which implies they can fire and switch to another) a product that best fills those needs.

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The needs could fall anywhere in the spectrum of perfectly utilitarian and perfectly emotional. But very few products get hired for purely utilitarian reasons and almost no product gets hired for purely emotional reasons. For the latter, the product should meet basic utilitarian threshold or given enough utilitarian reasons that will help rationalize the buying (hiring) decision."

Trecho retirado de "THE $100,000 PRODUCT’S CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION – PART 2"

Acerca do futuro do retalho

"Retail stores will become increasingly more like showrooms or “experience lounges” rather than points of sale, according to a co-produced study from Microsoft and Ogilvy & Mather.
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The research revealed that digitally-savvy shoppers are driving the retail space to become more than points of sale alone, but experiential showrooms.
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“As marketers we have the internet the wrong way around – we are looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope – always focusing on what we can do with new technology, but actually more it’s more valuable to view it as what does it say about human behaviour," he said."

Trechos retirados de "Cannes Lions: Retail stores will become “experience lounges” rather than points of sale, reveals Microsoft and O&M study"

"Online commerce has grown at different rates in different countries, but everywhere it is gaining fast (see chart 1). In Britain, Germany and France 90% of the rather modest growth in retail sales expected between now and 2016 will be online, predicts AXA Real Estate, a property-management company.
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When shoppers both know what they want and are willing to wait for it they will go online. And retail’s simple moneymaking ways of yesteryear—find a catchy concept, fuel growth by opening new shops and attracting more shoppers to existing ones, use your growing size to squeeze suppliers for better margins—have run out of steam. But that does not mean that there are no new options for bricks and mortar.
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Shopping is about entertainment as well as acquisition. It allows people to build desires as well as fulfil them—if it did not, no one would ever window-shop. It encompasses exploration and frivolity, not just necessity. It can be immersive, too. While computer screens can bewitch the eye, a good shop has four more senses to ensorcell.
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The future shopscape will be emptier, but more attractive. Shoppers can expect new rewards for simply showing up. Shopkick, a mobile-phone app, gives American shoppers points that earn them goodies like iTunes songs just for stepping across the threshold of a participating store. Inspired by Apple, shops promise “experience” and hope that sales will follow. Germany’s Kochhaus claims to be the first food store organised around recipes rather than grocery categories. The ingredients are strewn across tables, not stacked on shelves. Some shops will opt to sell nothing at all on the premises. Desigual, a Spanish fashion merchant, has shops in Barcelona and Paris that carry only samples. Shoppers are helped to assemble them into outfits that they then buy online."

 Trechos retirados de "The emporium strikes back"

Mongo - big change for brands and also for jobs

Ao longo dos últimos anos temos aqui referido várias vezes o fenómeno da economia da partilha e do aluguer.
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Aqui "Will the Sharing Economy Destroy Brands?":

"These services, which allow consumers to share their cars, homes, or possessions with one another, or to pay for a car only at the time they use it, are part of a new movement called “the sharing economy.” This move to an economy where consumers buy less and share more represents a big change for brands and also for jobs.
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A future in which car-sharing and ridesharing become the dominant forms of transportation has major implications for the automobile industry, for example, with its hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and sales jobs. Likewise, Airbnb and VRBO (vacation rental by owner) have big implications for the hospitality industry, another large employer."

Nada é eterno, a economia está sempre em evolução.
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Aquilo a que chamamos "emprego" vai ter de mudar. Afinal, aquilo a que chamamos "emprego" foi uma criação para a economia do século XX.

Curiosidade do dia

"The Bottom Line: Owning up to our mistakes allows us to take responsibility for our lives. If we can’t accurately perceive who we are, how we behave (and how others behave towards us), and how our behavior affects others and our own lives, life will always feel like something that’s happening to us, rather than something we are in control of. Men with an internal locus of control  – those who believe they can shape life through their own decisions and actions — are more confident, more likely to seek learning and be leaders, more disciplined, and better able to deal with stress and challenges. Men with an external locus of control, on the other hand, believe the course of their life is determined by luck and other people, and see themselves as victims. They are prone to problems with both their physical and mental health, and often plagued by stress, anxiety, and depression. When they make mistakes, they are apt to think, “Why is this happening to me?"
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The more you see success not as a function of inherent traits, but of effort and work, the less threatening making mistakes becomes. We must, as Tavris and Aronson put it, “learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.”"

Trechos retirados de "Personal Responsibility 102: The Importance of Owning Up to Your Mistakes and How to Do It"

Ver também "Personal Responsibility 101: Why Is It So Hard to Own Up to Our Mistakes?"