Tuesday June 27, 2006 Innovation Happens Elsewhere?????
I just finished watching an online lecture by Geoffrey Moore talking at Microsoft Research about how his new book, Dealing With Darwin - How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution relates to Microsoft. It is clearly applicable to any large technology company, and I couldn't help thinking about how it directly relates to what we are doing within Customer Network Services, a group within Sun Software. On an internal engineering call today, a Vice President repeated the comment that "Innovation Happens Elsewhere", I think that is a great perspective for Sun's tools development groups (who are trying to help developers innovate with our tools) and some of the opensource strategy (which is trying to give a platform for innovation to happen on top of, more on that later), but for my group (Customer Network Services), innovation MUST happen here.
Moore talks about different types of innovation within the product life cycle. At the beginning of a product or industry's life there is disruptive innovation. This is the type of innovation that causes true differentiation and changes markets. Moving on from truly disruptive innovation we get into application innovation, which is where an established technology is brought into a new market. An example of that is how Amazon used the WWW to sell stuff. Next is product innovation, where someone takes an established product and does it better. The example here being Google making search better. Then there is platform innovation, where a company opens their platform to others and new products are built on top of that platform. This is what Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and many others are trying to do by opening up their api's so that developers an build on top of their produts. CNS is trying to do this to some extent with the services that we are offering by building a platform that others can build additional add on services on top of. The problem with this is that platform innovation requires that the platform is ubiquitous, an advantage that CNS and Sun do not currently enjoy.
These types of innovation are somewhat rare, especially the succesful ones. But there are other areas of innovation that are possibly eve nmore important. Moore breaks these up in the Mature Market portion of a products lifecycle. They consist of the Customer Intimacy Zone and the Operation Excellence Zone. In Customer Intimacy its really about how a product differentiates itself that provides value. There are different types of innovation here as well, but the key to all of them is that the Customer's experience is king and tailoring the software to that is what drives these types of innovation. I truly believe the in CNS we are simply trying to play catch up even in this area by providing services that will make a customer's experience better. The area of innovation I think that we have the most potential in is the Operational Excellence Zone. This is where some of our new products can truly differentiate Sun as a whole. Through innovations in the area of Integration where we are working to eliminate complexity of disparate systems. Also through innovation in the area of Process where we can leverage productivity gains from changing the business practices of how people manage their systems.
One serious issue with Innovation that Moore touches on is that there has to be alignment across organizations towards a common innovation. "When each team strives to be unique in its own way, the net result is little to no overall differentiation." I fear that there are too many innovation vectors that we are trying to take and it is leading us towards a net sum of zero. So what do we do about it? Moore gives three steps: 1) Analyze the environment (what are we good at? where are sompetitors focusing? what competing products do we need to neutralize, and where can we differentiate ourselves?); 2) We need to pick an area to focus on; and 3) Everyone needs to align around that focus. The goal of innovation is not to play catch up, but to differentiate ourselves, it is to gain a competitive separation. I believe that CNS is one of the few groups in Sun that has the ability to truly differentiate our products and services from our competitors. I only hope that we can have enough focus to deliver on that.
Bibliography:
- The Online Lecture
- Dealing With Darwin - How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution
- Dealing With Darwin Website
- More Microsoft Research Online Lectures - Some very interesting ones.
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