INNOBLOG

The “most exciting phone in the history of phones” was just released on Tuesday, September 23. The HTC G1 will be available through T-Mobile in October, and it will wield Google’s relentlessly hyped Android operating system. So is this the next “Jesus Phone”? I think that while the phone may be successful, it’s nothing groundbreaking. The operating system at its core, however, has the potential to lead to truly trailblazing advances in mobile computing.

I recently argued in this space that Google’s new Chrome Internet browser doesn’t pose much of a threat to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on its own, but that when Chrome is viewed as a small piece of Google’s larger strategy to make it easier for us to do more of our computing jobs online in the “cloud,” the disruptive possibilities begin to take shape.  I see Android as something very similar: a product that, in its current incarnation, may not do much to the dominant incumbents, but has the potential to function as part of a broader disruptive strategy.

The G1 phone is not yet available to consumers, so hard facts about the Android’s quality are difficult to come by. That said, Android does not appear to be superior to the iPhone or significantly better than other incumbents and may need to fill in a number of gaps in its features (for example, it offers connectivity to Amazon’s MP3 store but unbelievably lacks a headphone jack).

The G1 enters an extremely crowded, competitive, and continually evolving market. I have no doubt that Google’s ability to deliver high-quality software will enable it to improve Android and add to its features, but right now Android is not a game-changer, and it does not offer any especially compelling or novel sustaining innovations in the mobile phone/Internet device space.

Nevertheless, I think Android is an exciting new development. As a mobile operating system (an open source one that allows software and hardware developers access to its innards), Android may very well find its way into the broader mobile computing space. If that happens, Android may (finally!) bring some standardization to the rapidly growing variety of devices that connect to the Internet, including set-top boxes and potentially cars, computers in televisions, and other products (as this blog post explains).

If Android appears in other devices it could target Internet nonconsumption. Many devices that could be usefully connected to the Internet aren’t yet (or are, but have mediocre operating systems and/or very limited functionality), so there could be a great disruptive opportunity for Google to make Android available in them.

Of course, one might reasonably wonder how Google plans to generate revenue from Android, since it’s being given away and is open source. I would imagine that, given Google’s dominance of search and the plethora of advertising revenue-generating applications it offers, the more people it can connect to the Internet more of the time, the happier (and more profitable) it will be.

Greg Daines from Ideanomics, who participated in last week's Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for The Innovator's Guide to Growth, has posted a three-part video interview with one of the book's authors, Mark Johnson. You can see the interview at these links:

Part One — Why the book was written and who it's for

Part Two — What is essential to disruptive innovation projects

Part Three — What are the most common misconceptions about disruptive innovation

This week the Innovator's Guide to Growth was featured on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour. Five different bloggers reviewed the book and interviewed the lead authors, Scott Anthony and Mark Johnson. We'd like to thank all the bloggers as well as Paul Williams, the organizer of Post2Post, who blogs at Idea Sandbox.

Here's the wrap-up on who posted what when, with links:

Monday:  Gordon Graham of Broken Bulbs posted an interview with Scott Anthony about the book's potential application in a broad range of circumstances including small business, business schools, and in what industries Scott expects to see disruptive innovation in the future.

Tuesday:  Greg Daines of Ideanomics posted a review of the book and promises to post video of his interview with Mark Johnson soon. Meanwhile, he called Innovator's Guide to Growth "the best business book of 2008."

Wednesday:  Josh Kutticherry of FutureThinkTank posted Part One of an interview Scott Anthony (second part, including an audio interview, coming next Wednesday), in which he asks Scott about ideation and inspiration, and poses the $100 million question: "What would you do with your copmany if someone gave you $100 million to grow it?"

Thursday:  Idris Mouttee of Innovation Playground posted an interview with Scott Anthony about special corporate innovation teams, overshooting, targeting nonconsumers, and innovation metrics.

Friday: Gregg Fraley at Gregg Fraley Creativity & Innovation posted a review calling the book "the new bible for innovation managers and leaders" and praising its "it’s womb-to-tomb" approach to innovation management and process.

And, the book tour lives on past its allotted week, as well — next Wednesday, Oct. 1, Josh Kutticherry will post the second part of his Scott Anthony interview and Doug Stevenson (Fraley's partner in "The Innovise Guys" blog and podcast series) will post a review on The Innovise Guys blog. We'll also be watching for Greg Daines' video of his Mark Johnson interview, and will link to that when it's up.

We've made our transition from print to digital on Strategy & Innovation! We published our first digital issue on Sept. 11. The most recent issue was published yesterday, Sept. 24. From now on, we will publish on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month.

You can access the stories from the Sept. 11 edition here.  The Sept. 24 edition leads off with a piece by Henry Eyring on how disruption can fix higher education, and also includes an Innovator's Insight column from Scott D. Anthony on the new Peek handheld, and a Voices of Disruption Q&A interview I did with Jim Lurie, president of the newly launched TVLowCost USA.

If you'd like to get the actual emai lnewsletter, with introductions to each story, go to our login page and register.

Rarely have I read a newspaper article peppered with as much clearly disruptive language as “The Tell-All Campus Tour,” by Jonathan Dee in the 9/21/08 New York Times Sunday Magazine’s annual College Issue. The story shines a spotlight on Unigo.com, a new college-search website that allows current students to review their school, posting videos and photos as well as extremely, um, candid opinions.

The site is so new, in fact, that last Friday when I clicked over to it midway through reading the article, I got an error page. But once I successfully accessed the site and poked a round a bit, I found a plethora of information — the kind of nitty-gritty details I would have killed for when I went through my own fraught college search.

About my alma mater, one of the 24 lengthy student reviews opened with: “The best thing about __ is that almost every single good thing you will read about in the recruiting materials is true. The one thing I would change is the level of outrageous unresponsiveness the administration often displays. The __ beurocracy [sic] is probably the one major reason why some people decide to transfer.” (I admit, it pained me to see the typo, but I felt a familiar twinge of Red Tape Angst.)

Unigo’s extremely entrepreneurial 26-year-old founder, Jordan Goldman, also co-founded one of the first college review books to include quotes from students, rather than being written exclusively by professional reviewers. But he still saw a huge gap between the needs of high school students and their families as they seek the perfect school, and the standard offerings from companies like Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report.

“My whole family chipped in for me to go to college,” Goldman said in the Times. “They were saving from when I was 2 or 3 years old. That the best resource for a four-year, $200,000 decision are these books — with no photos, no videos, no interactivity, only three to five pages per school on average, fully updated usually once every several years — just doesn’t make the grade. This is the most important decision people that age have ever made, and the information is just not there.”

OK, so we have a clear unsatisfied need. What’s the disruptive angle? Let’s let some denial do the talking. The Times contacted Christopher Gruber, who heads admissions for Davidson College in North Carolina, one of the 268 colleges currently covered by Unigo. His reply when asked if he’d looked at the site (the company sent letters to the admissions offices of all the reviewed schools, granting them early access before Unigo went live): “I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m not spending a ton of time navigating those student-driven sites. My sense is that the traditional big players, like Princeton Review, are the major sources for online information too, in part because those are the names that parents still recognize... The ones that we supply information to are the ones that we spend the most time on.”

If the Unigo model works, it will likely disrupt the typical college guidebook business, giving free, ad-supported content in far greater detail than the average Princeton Review manual can provide. But it will also shake up how college PR and admissions teams have to do their jobs. Challenged by a well-organized, extremely comprehensive resource that gives students a warts-and-all view of the school, official viewbooks and campus tours won’t seem as convincing. (Dee, the writer of the Times story, mentions one video posted about Notre Dame, in which an official tour guide goes around the campus with a friend, giving the official spiel and then letting her friend tell the left-out bits.)

“You can review anything online,” Goldman said in the Times. “You can review the most trivial things, but you can’t review your college. There’s no platform for this incredibly important decision that costs so much money.”

In the year preceding its launch, Unigo developed a network of unpaid interns at the colleges it covers, who in turn got fellow students to write about their schools. 100 of the interns were sent Flip video cameras (another disruptive product!) and filmed typical scenes on campus or interviewed fellow students.

From the Times article:

“[Unigo] changes the game from an economic standpoint too: it costs a lot of money to travel far away from home to check out schools, and Unigo offers an unfiltered, detailed, often somewhat eccentric view of campuses all over the country. A 45-second video in which an unseen student pans around the courtyard at Sarah Lawrence on a sunny day and simply describes what she sees (including a student-run barbecue pit called PETA, which stands for “People Eating Tasty Animals”) is so evocative that it makes the one-page U.S. News summary — or the descriptions in Sarah Lawrence’s own admissions catalog, for that matter — read like junk mail.”

And one of the young editors for the site, Max Baumgarten, summed it up nicely in the article: “I don’t think [the colleges] know the numbers. The whole package is something they should be a bit scared of, but they’re not. They don’t really understand the immensity of it.” 

As a loyal supporter of Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader, an email from a client titled "Throw that Kindle away!" was sure to catch my interest.

The email linked to a video demonstrating an electronic reader that a U.K. company called Plastic Logic plans to launch next year. The video is eye-catching. Plastic Logic's device — which is powered by the same E Ink technology behind readers offered by Amazon and Sony — is the size of a sheet of paper and has a stunning 13-inch screen.

As the company's name implies, the device is based on plastic technologies originally developed at Cambridge University. Plastic Logic is betting that lower capital costs and a simpler production process will provide it with a sustainable cost advantage over devices based on silicon.

A beautiful design and a sustainable cost advantage certainly sound troubling for Amazon. How worried should Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos be?

Innosight's lenses suggest not too worried, unless Plastic Logic dramatically shifts its approach.

There are two problems with Plastic Logic's approach. First, the company appears to be targeting business users. Its demonstration showed how users can carry the device instead of bushels of documents.

What's wrong with that focus? After all, the business market is where the money is after all. And who likes being weighed down by thick stacks of paper?

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard management blog, Innovation Insights.

With the launch of its banking-by-shoebox service, Amsterdam-based bank Insinger de Beaufort created an elegantly simple offering that overcomes the barriers of time and skill that limit consumption of financial services.  While Insinger’s shoebox service targets high-end consumers, could the model be altered to create a low-end disruption?

Here’s how the service works: After meeting with a private banker to discuss financial planning goals, Insinger’s customers receive a shoebox by mail into which they can drop everything from tax return forms, speeding tickets, insurance-related forms, bills to be paid, investment statements, and bank statements.

On a monthly basis, Insinger collects the box via courier service, processes all the paperwork inside, and sends the clients a notice of the resulting transactions within three business days.  Once every quarter, clients receive a full report outlining the status of their transactions, accounts, spending patterns, and overall financial position. This information serves as fodder for annual discussions between the client and his/her banker to assess changes in financial position and planning.

The shoebox service addresses functional jobs, such as “Pay my bills on time,” “Ensure I don’t miss any payments,” “Remove the hassle of handling my finances,” and “Have more time to do what I enjoy.” Just as critical are the emotional jobs addressed by the service, such as “Reassure me that my financial affairs are taken care of and nothing has slipped between the cracks,” and “Know that someone is keeping track of my spending and investments to help me make good financial decisions.”

In its current form, the shoebox service is a sustaining offering, given that it targets the most profitable, demanding banking customers with a high-cost service (rumored to run €415 to €850 per month, depending on service level).

However, many of the jobs and barriers addressed by the service are ones also found amongst low-end non-consumers of financial services.  While the low end of the market may not have as many jobs related to investment management, these potential customers are also constrained by time and skill when trying to satisfy jobs related to bill payment and financial management.

Could a similar service have disruptive potential at the low end of the market by using a different business model? At Innosight, we would ask the following types of questions to assess the feasibility of such a model:

• Which components of the service are critical for meeting the jobs most important to low-end customers and, therefore, need to be retained? Which components can be cut without diminishing the value to low-end customers? For example, could the personalized financial planning service be stripped out and replaced with templated trend reports of a customer’s spending and investments, along with automated recommendations based on those trends?
• Could the service be offered through a low-cost business model relative to Insinger’s labor-intensive, personalized approach? For example, could the transfer of documents, bill payment, or trend analysis be automated to avoid the costs of couriers and manual processing?
• Are there distinct jobs and barriers for low-end consumers that should be considered in designing the product? For example, is there an additional job of, “Make sure I don’t overdraft on my bank account” that is related to the cash-flow challenge faced by many low-end consumers and is important/unsatisfied for this market? Could this job drive development of a new feature to provide a credit cushion to customers or otherwise prevent overdrawing on accounts, or is the cash-flow challenge a big enough barrier to prevent such a service from taking hold with the masses?
• Are there potential partners with capabilities that could minimize the investment required for an initial service offering and that would be motivated to support the model? For example, would Intuit (maker of TurboTax) be interested and able to provide automated report generation capabilities or input on selling the service as a subscription or as a software product?

If the questions above can be answered favorably, a viable opportunity may well exist for a disruptive product that could enter the low-end market and eventually develop into a good-enough alternative to more traditional, expensive financial services.

Last week the Wall Street Journal noted that light-emitting diode (LED) technology has now reached the point that LED lights will begin to show up more and more in daily life. According to the article, "prices for LEDs on the market today can be more than five times what an incandescent bulb costs. However, the LEDs use about 85 percent less energy and last 30 times longer. They also use about half as much energy and last five times longer than compact fluorescent lights."

The article also offered an interesting look at how LED makers are managing the adoption curve on this promising yet still expensive technology. Quite rightly, they are first targeting commercial and industrial customers whose jobs-to-be-done involve leaving lights on most or all of the time, and have to pay time and labor costs to change bulbs. "Longer-lasting lights that use less energy thus offer them significant savings over time," notes the article. "Then, as sales increase, creating economies of scale and bringing down production costs and prices, the industry will expand its marketing to residential customers in a push that many observers expect will make LEDs the lighting of choice for years to come." The article's well worth reading, as it goes into much more detail about strategies for driving wider adoption of LEDs.

The illustration at top left shows one of the places in the consumer market LEDs have begun appear widely: Christmas lights. In the context of the adoption strategy the article describes, this makes perfect sense — people generally leave their Christmas lights on for long stretches of time and certainly don't want to have to change bulbs often.

Apple held a somewhat underwhelming press event on Tuesday, September 9th, but while the deafening buzz Apple’s unveilings typically generate made this one seem a little dull by comparison, I found it quite interesting. The beautiful (and very colorful) new iPod nano wasn’t what made me sit up and take notice, though. What caught my attention was a feature in the new iTunes 8 called Genius.

Genius is, in a nutshell, a music-recommendation feature that works with the songs in your own library. It does basically two things for the user: it can suggest songs similar to the one being played that the listener might like to buy from the iTunes Store, and it can instantly sift through the listener’s library to generate a playlist of songs that are musically similar to the one currently playing. The former functionality is a transparently good idea to inspire more purchases (tailoring suggestions to what the listener is demonstrably in the mood for at any given moment makes a lot of sense), while the latter has already come in handy for me as it has shown me songs from my cavernous music library that I was in the mood to hear but had forgotten about.

So why is this interesting? Genius takes advantage of the wisdom of large numbers of people to recommend music in a way that makes Apple’s job easier and makes the service more accurate. As Steve Jobs (vaguely) explained in his speech, Genius will initially recommend music based on a proprietary, Apple-designed algorithm, but as more and more users turn on Genius it will (anonymously) gather data about users’ listening and playlist-management habits in order to “get smarter” (i.e., refine recommendations and more accurately determine which songs share qualities).

Pandora, an Internet music-streaming service that plays songs that share qualities with songs or artists you like, bases its recommendations on the mammoth Music Genome Project, which requires very smart people to spend up to half an hour per song creating a database of musical “genes” or shared qualities. But why spend all that time and effort (and money) when the preferences of the people you actually care about – end users – can easily be aggregated to produce recommendations that may even be more accurate?

Finding ways to take advantage of the information waiting to be gathered from large numbers of people is advantageous in many areas. Amazon.com, which disrupted brick-and-mortar retailers through an online offering with a limited ability to interact with customers, doesn’t need to develop a sophisticated recommendation system for determining which of its products go well together; it can simply track purchasing habits and tell you what other people combined with the purchase you just made.

The Dash Express, a potentially disruptive GPS navigation device (see here), doesn’t use the hard-to-gather and often inaccurate traffic information provided by the complex variety of traffic monitoring services; instead, it simply aggregates the positions and speeds of its users to come to more accurate, real-time conclusions about traffic conditions. Amazon and Dash are particularly interesting in that they have utilized this kind of information to strengthen their highly disruptive offerings by making them much better than competitors’ products along the dimensions that matter most to their customers (i.e., quality of product recommendations and quality and quantity of real-time traffic data).

Genius thus joins a long list of systems that leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to create improved products and services. The system may not make iTunes a more disruptive product (it adds features without any trade-offs), but it has the potential to be a powerful sustaining move. More broadly, seeking out and using crowds’ wisdom is easier than it has ever been, and many more new ways of taking advantage of it are undoubtedly yet to be discovered. 

We’ve written a number of times [here and here and here] about the emerging industry dynamics that are propelling solar energy up a truly compelling disruptive trajectory. As the signals become increasingly clear that solar will indeed be a significant energy technology, billions of dollars of investment have poured into the industry and the pace and scale of innovation has exploded.  

A terrific recent post on Treehugger.com, a leading cataloguer of emerging sustainability innovations of all kinds, recaps 15 exciting advances in photovoltaics over the last year. The majority of the advances relate to the ongoing conversion efficiency race, as companies and labs working with different base technologies seek to design cells that convert sunlight into power in ever more effective, and therefore cost-effective, ways. Conventional silicon-based solar cells are getting closer and closer to their target of grid parity, at which point they figure to displace conventional sources of electricity without relying on government subsidies and incentives. 

Meanwhile, disruptive thin film-based solar panels are nearing “good enough” efficiency – performance rates at which they become economically viable. Some, led by industry pioneer First Solar, have already reached that point, and have grown astronomically as a result. 

Beyond the efficiency race, the Treehugger post recounts exciting adjacent developments like radically new approaches to mounting solar cells and breakthrough printing processes to mass manufacture them.  

With all these exciting developments, how can we begin to sort killer businesses from the fascinating technologies that will never make it out of the lab? We’d start with a couple of core disruptive innovation principles.

First, we’d like to see innovation efforts directed at the business model as well as the technology. Historically, business model innovations that make the consumption of a new technology easier, cheaper, more accessible or more convenient have been the best predictor of success in an emerging industry. Think of the way that Apple created iTunes to definitively separate the iPod from all the other MP3 players.

Some technologies are different enough from the herd to really lend themselves to new business model approaches.  One can imagine all sorts of avenues for CoolEarth’s solar balloons, for example.  By freeing solar collectors from their rigid mounts, CoolEarth can take the capability to produce clean and renewable power to new contexts, such as the developing world.  

Second, we’d look to ride disruptive waves.  Industry leading silicon-based cells have plenty of headroom to grow, and many of the companies that make them will likely enjoy lots of success in the years to come, but thin film manufacturers are nipping at incumbents’ heels. There are signals that the disruptive wave is picking up steam: SunPower, one of the foremost silicon-based incumbents, received a huge new order a few weeks back from California utility PG&E; significantly, though, they only got a fraction of the contract – the lion’s share went to new thin film player OptiSolar. 

The advantages inherent in the thin film paradigm (flexibility, lower cost manufacturing via reel-to-reel “printing” rather than semiconductor fabrication) will assert themselves as technologies approach economic viability. Thin film will exert more and more cost pressure on conventional solar, and could also open up new markets that silicon-based cells just can’t reach.  

Meanwhile, the next disruptive wave after thin film is beginning to gather, as so called organic solar cells being developed by companies like Konarka make their way into initial foothold applications. 

So, how should one monitor an explosively dynamic, fast moving, ascendant yet bubble-prone field like solar? Try to spot developing waves, watch carefully for signals that disruption is underway, and all the while pay special attention to companies that innovate with their business models, not just their technologies. 

You want to surprise people in your office? Ask them to estimate the percent of U.S. mobile phone subscribers who use email on their phones. Depending on who's doing the estimating, the figure ranges from seven to 13 percent .

A startup company called Peek looked at those figures and saw disruptive opportunity. After all, one of the most powerful ways to create new growth is to expand markets by making consumption simpler, more affordable, or more convenient.

This week, Peek's first product appeared in Target stores. The simple device, designed by product design powerhouse IDEO, costs $99. It allows users to send and receive email using T-Mobile's wireless network for $20 a month. And that's it. No phone, no wireless Internet connectivity, no attachments. Just email.

Will Peek follow the Apple iPod or Pure Digital Flip video camera--both elegant devices that have grown markets through simplicity--on the road to disruptive success?

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

In need of legal advice, a man went into a lawyer's office. He knew how expensive lawyers could be, so he inquired, "Can you tell me how much you charge?"

"Of course," the lawyer replied, "I charge $500 to answer three questions."

"Don't you think that's an awful lot of money to answer three questions?"

"Yes it is," answered the lawyer, "What's your third question?"

To an average family or small business owner, legal advice feels expensive because you pay (a lot) and you pay by the advice. What you get is assurance that your interests are protected against generally unlikely events or liabilities. The majority of families, who rarely consult with lawyers and have not been on the losing end of a legal issue, are not accustomed to spending $200 per hour for advice. To those families, the benefits of legal advice don’t seem to outweigh the costs. Could the popularity of greedy lawyer jokes be the indicator of a disruptive innovation opportunity?

Yes! Even those of us who do not have frequent needs or resources to regularly seek legal advice still relate to the emotional satisfaction of having a lawyer in our corner to make us feel more protected. The question is, why can’t legal advice be more affordable, to satisfy this need for assurance amongst those who don’t have deep pockets?

Prepaid Legal (PPD) recognized this opportunity back in 1972, when its original founder began to offer legal expense reimbursement to motorists through a membership club after he suffered a collision and significant legal fees not covered by his car insurance. Prepaid Legal Services developed into a membership-driven organization that provides a range of specific legal services to any member for a flat monthly fee. 

Here’s how it works: You pay Prepaid Legal a monthly fee ($16 per month in Massachusetts for a standard family plan). This membership provides you access to a lawyer at a local law firm who is a part of Prepaid Legal’s partner network. For that membership fee, you get access to an attorney for phone consultation at any time. If the lawyer believes it would be prudent to pursue a legal matter in more depth, you have access to a menu of services that are limited to a set number of specific activities per year, such as document review or drafting legal letters. 

Prepaid Legal has proven it has a successful business model, with over 1,481,531 active memberships reported at the end of first-quarter 2008. What makes them an interesting example in the disruptive playbook?

Targeting constrained customers: By focusing on the question of “How can we make legal advice accessible to non-consumers?” Prepaid Legal discovered an innovative way to design the pricing and distribution model for legal services, making it accessible for those who were previously priced out of the market. Sixteen dollars a month for on-going basic legal service is much more feasible to these customers than paying $500 to hire a lawyer one time to review a document.

Offering “just good enough” service: Customers get an inferior product by traditional standards, sacrificing unlimited service for a cheaper price point. If you need a lawyer to review documents to purchase a home, a membership affords you up to two reviews of legal documents that are no more than 10 pages. If additional services are needed, you are entitled to a 25% discount on your lawyer’s regular fees.  For the majority of infrequent advice seekers, this level of benefit is a good deal. Their legal matters tend to be straight forward and the reassurance of having a lawyer on call by phone provides a significant emotional and practical benefit.   

Changing the business model: What makes the offering possible is the scale that Prepaid Legal can provide to the distribution channel (its partner law firms). This is done through multiple business model innovations that deliver the same old legal services from the same old law firms, but to new consumers: 

• Prepaid Legal changed the financial model to aggregate receivables before legal services are rendered. Their partner law firms benefit from a predictable revenue stream
• Prepaid has created a marketing network of associates who are usually members and who receive commissions for referrals. This pyramid type of marketing approach has garnered criticism for its ability to drive sustainable growth. But it keeps marketing and sales expenses low and allows the company to remain profitable with its low cost positioning.
• Finally, the company created a new value proposition in the marketplace that positions legal services much more like insurance. This was done by limiting the features and benefits of the service to the most scalable and frequent kind of legal advice, and by targeting that advice to traditional non-consumers.

Innovation is tough in the best of times. What do you do when times are tough and your industry's very survival is in question?

A newspaper executive asked me that question during a discussion this past Monday. While just about every organization is feeling some economic pinch these days, few have it as tough as newspaper companies. Print circulation continues to slide. Advertisers are fleeing to the Internet, where newspapers continue to lose ground to Google, Yahoo!, and countless others.

Newspaper companies are experimenting with new approaches to disseminating content, but those ventures aren't getting big enough quickly enough to offset declines in the core business.

To their credit, most newspaper executives with whom I've spoken recognize that they have to keep pushing. They know they have little hope of maintaining their relevance if they don't innovate. Yet, the pressure to staunch the bleeding in the core business makes it incredibly difficult to do things differently, to commit to innovating.

It's a tough challenge, and it highlights for other businesses that maybe aren't in the dire situation that newspapers are just how important it is to start innovation efforts when times are good, when you have the time and resources to allow your efforts to reach escape velocity. Had the newspaper industry really pushed the innovation agenda in the mid 1990s, we would be having a very different conversation today.

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Management blog.

 A growing number of physicians believe that the interoperability of medical devices — their ability to communicate with each other — could make hospitals safer and more efficient,” reported MIT Technology Review in a July 2008 article surveying the state of interoperability in the increasingly high-tech world of hospital care. Interoperability could help realize the full potential of many of the new devices now finding their way into ICUs and operating rooms, and could also help reduce the distressingly high rate of errors in hospital care.

Cited as an example was the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT)'s Medical Device Interoperability Program, based at Massachusetts General Hospital. CIMIT has developed two demonstration projects that illustrate the idea of the "plug and play" operating room. One project is an integrated ventilator that tackles the job of taking an x-ray of a patient on a ventilator without having to turn the ventilator off while the image is taken, as is common today. The integrated ventilator reduces risk by "simply not having to turn off the ventilator at all," says Peter Szolovits, a professor of computer science at MIT who studies medical data integration.

Taking a different approach to the problem is Cambridge Consultants, which in March announced the release of a new platform for wireless device connectivity… said to make almost any medical device wireless for less than $10 of extra manufacturing cost, according to the MedGadget blog. The platform can be used with multiple devices, providing a connection to online records through a monitoring station, home PC or set-top box, and can even be used to transmit data via mobile phone for health and fitness applications on the move.

Scott Anthony recently blogged about Google’s new Chrome browser, concluding that the offering has potential as a disruptive threat to Microsoft. I agree, but not because the browser itself is particularly remarkable; specifically, I see Chrome as a small part of a larger, Google-backed movement toward more Internet-based computing as opposed to Microsoft’s current desktop applications. I think that Chrome itself is a sustaining move in the browser space, but that it may help foster more disruptive change.

I’ve been using Chrome since its debut, and there’s no doubt that it’s clever. The frame the browser creates around the sites it displays (known to developers as its “chrome” – get it?) is impressively small: there’s no menu bar, tabs are all the way at the top, and the status bar at the bottom only pops up when it needs to, leaving extra space to view websites the rest of the time.  Useful features and shortcuts abound, like the versatile, search-capable address bar known as the “omnibar”.

Chrome is also technically innovative: it’s speedy, of course, and there are many innovations under the hood. One of the cleverest enhancements is the way tabs work. Each tab is completely separated from all the others, so when an especially complex (or unfortunately buggy) website causes problems and a tab crashes, everything else keeps humming along smoothly.

Finally, it’s… well… cute. Its features are introduced in a comic. Chrome reminds you that browsing in its unique incognito mode (in which no history is kept and no cookies are saved) won’t protect you from “secret agents” or “people standing behind you.”  When a tab crashes the error message is “Aw, Snap!” Typing "about:internets" into the address bar will take you to a Ted Stevens joke.

These innovations allow Chrome to do the things other browsers do (they all get at the same Internet) and to do them incrementally better. Through that lens, I’m not sure how successful Chrome will be; remember, as Scott mentions, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer maintains a 72.2% market share despite the existence of superior alternatives. All major web browsers out there are equally free, and many are also open source.

Viewed as part of a larger strategy, however, Chrome could be a small part of a truly disruptive change in computing. Google has been pushing hard in recent years to expand the range of jobs consumers are able to do online in the cloud, from word processing to working with spreadsheets to creating presentations, and Chrome is a speedier, more stable platform for those sorts of applications than other browsers. Furthermore, because Chrome is open source, Google is making it easy for other developers to adapt its features.

Chrome may not be disruptive to other browsers, but it will help enable the adoption of Internet-based computing which, as it provides enhanced portability at a low (or no) price in exchange for fewer features, fits the disruptive mold nicely.

On its own, Chrome is nothing earth-shattering, breathless pundits prophesying the gruesome demise of Microsoft notwithstanding. On the other hand, Chrome’s features do make Internet applications marginally easier to use and more reliable, and Google is working diligently to continue that trend. Relying entirely on the Internet to get our computing jobs done may seem difficult to imagine now, but viewed as part of a larger movement Chrome is certainly a small step toward a much "cloudier” future. 

It didn't take long for the hype machine to gear up. Seemingly minutes after news began to appear about Google's new Web browser (called "Chrome"), pundits started talking about "browser wars" and Google's "Microsoft killer." In this case, the hype might be justified, if Chrome delivers on its disruptive potential.

Early descriptions sound ominous for Microsoft. Google's browser was built from the ground up to make it easier and faster to run Web-based applications. It is completely open source, meaning developers can modify the source code and easily design applications that work with the browser. And of course, it is free.

Google hopes the browser will lead more people to spend more time using its applications, browsing the Internet, and contributing to its advertising revenue. Further, it hopes to lessen the chances that Microsoft uses its browser dominance to subtly push people towards its own Web sites and applications. 

Chrome presents an obvious threat to Microsoft's Internet Explorer software. But Chrome could do much more. ...

Read the rest at Scott Anthony's Harvard Management blog.