Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Friday, December 02, 2005Ambient Findability - Part II
As a follow-up to my first post on Ambient Findability, please consider the following propositions:
- An increase in the information content of products and services will cause an increase in industry clockspeed.
- Increased clockspeed will give rise to greater ambiguity (Flash).
- Flexibility becomes more valueable as ambiguity increases.
- Modular systems composed of loosely linked, specialized capabilities offer the prospect of great flexibility.
- Specialized capabilities have to be found before they can be used.
- Capabilities that are hard to find are hardly found, because people tend not to work very hard at search.
This leads to a sort of paradox. Information technologies have contributed to the acceleration of business and, as a consequence, have increased the potential value of highly specialized capabilities. However, the concurrent explosion in the amount of information (in the absence of a commensurate increase in available attention) means that potential value of specialized capabilities is likely to go unrealized unless real effort is made to enhance findability:
- The quality of being locatable or navigable
- The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate
- The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval
Let me offer a very recent example from my work at Evergreen Innovation Partners. At EIP, our goal is to help branded manufacturers of consumer products innovate continuously by accelerating their access to compelling products. We collaborate with individual inventors to identify, develop, validate, and license patented concepts. In other words, we are Product Capitalists(TM) who earn returns on our investment of time, money, and social capital by sharing in royalties from successfully commercialized products.
Functionally, my partners and I act as process network orchestrators. That is, we identify compelling value proposition hypotheses; iterativelly assess key risks; and identify, recruit, and engage specialized capabilities in order to resolve those risks en route to successful commercialization or abandonment. Furthermore, we have to work fast and cheap in order to add value to our "BigCo" partners and make a profit.
Not long ago, we teamed with the inventors of a promising concept for a new and different baby stroller. However, we identified some potential obstacles in regard to the design and manufacturability of the concept. So, we needed some very specific expertise. Right away.
At the time, I knew exactly zero stroller design experts. Within 24 hours, however, I had connected with a senior designer at a leading juvenile products company who, in turn, introduced me to George Campbell at keydesign. That lead to a successful first engagement within the week.
The original connection was made using LinkedIn. George found the lesson in findability compelling enough to create his own profile. After all, it's highly unlikely that he would have found an outlet to push the relevant information about his background to me at the right time in the right place. However, by exposing his unique capabilities in thoughtful ways, he can make himself even more findable and successful.
Ambient Findability - Part I
Thanks to a recent blog by John Hagel, I read Ambient Findability, a new book by Peter Morville. I gleaned three broad points from my reading:
- As Hagel and others have argued, the nature of business interactions are shifting away from push toward pull.
- In a pull world, customers have to find your product or service before they can use them.
- As a general rule, people don't tend to work very hard at searching, so you'd better make yourself findable.
In the remainder of this post, I'd like to share some thoughts regarding the third point. In my next post, I'll discuss how a successful collaboration was facilitated by LinkedIn, which enhanced the findability of a source of specialized expertise.
In a previous post, I wrote the following after reflecting upon my experiences with my Pioneer Entrepreneurs project:
Search outside the boundaries of geography and occupation seems to come in to play when the perceived value of the desired expertise is quite high. Once again, this is consistent with the hypotheses of [John Seely] Brown and [Paul] Duguid: "People learn in response to need. When people cannot see the need for what's being taught, they ignore it, reject it, or fail to assimilate it in any meaningful way"...In my experience to-date, knowledge value has to be pretty high for the search [effort] to reach an "escape velocity" sufficient to break out of one's existing network of fairly close friends and colleagues...
As a consequence, Morville's observations ring true:
After all, we know accessibility is "the single most important variable governing the use of information." In the spirit of our tribal ancestors, we absorb most of our information passively and rely on who we know for much of what we know. Search can be an integral part of the decision-making process. What we find influences what we do. But the first step is deciding to search, and the smallest of barriers will deter us. The primacy of accessibility is among the firmest ties that bind our rationality. We trust the informal gossip of the grapevine without seeking the analysis of experts. And our source bias feeds our anchoring, memorability, and confirmation bias to further tangle our judgment.
As Adam Smith observed 230 years ago, well coordinated specialists tend to be much more productive than generalists. As a consequence, as communication and transportation technologies create opportunities for effective collaboration across time and distance, we become more specialized. The amount of information increases as a result, but it is not evenly distributed. "Information that's hard to find will remain information that's hardly found." The effectiveness of broadcast is diminishing. As Hagel asks, "How findable are you personally? What can you do to improve your findability for those that matter?"