Experts crack cancer 'gene codes'
Faulty genes help cancers grow
US scientists have cracked the entire genetic code of breast and colon cancers, offering new treatment hopes.
The genetic map shows that nearly 200 mutated genes, most previously unknown, help tumours emerge, grow and spread.
The discovery could also lead to better ways to diagnose cancer in its early, most treatable stages, and personalised treatments, Science magazine reports.
The Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center says the findings suggest cancer is more complex than experts had believed.
Distinct differences
The mutated genes in breast and colon cancers were almost completely distinct, suggesting very different pathways for the development of each of these cancer types.
Each individual tumour appeared to have a different genetic blueprint, which could explain why cancers can behave very differently from person to person, the scientists said.
"No two patients are identical," co-author Dr Victor Velculescu explained.
Scientists hope to be able to tailor plans for preventing or treating cancer to each person's individual genetic profile
Ed Yong of Cancer Research UK
Now researchers will study how these mutations occur in breast and colon cancers.
Previous cancer gene discoveries have already led to successful detection and treatment strategies.
For example, the breast cancer drug Herceptin targets a breast cancer cell receptor made by the Her2-neu gene. Blood tests for hereditary bowel cancer are based on the APC gene.
Personalised therapies
Dr Anna Barker, of the National Cancer Institute, said: "Maximising the numbers of targets available for drug development in a specific cancer means that patients will ultimately receive more personalised, less toxic therapies."
Ed Yong, of Cancer Research UK, commented: "This is potentially a very important piece of research.
"Most of the cancer genes identified in this study have not been previously linked to cancer.
"These newly identified genes could provide rich hunting grounds for scientists looking for new ways of treating or detecting cancers.
"In the future, scientists hope to be able to tailor plans for preventing or treating cancer to each person's individual genetic profile. Studies like this can help us to accomplish this goal."
31 October 2006
26 October 2006
Electronic chip, interacting with the brain, modifies pathways for controlling movement
Electronic chip, interacting with the brain, modifies pathways for controlling movement
Mechanism may have potential in stroke and brain injury rehabilitation
Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) are working on an implantable electronic chip that may help establish new nerve connections in the part of the brain that controls movement. Their most recent study, to be published in the Nov. 2, 2006, edition of Nature, showed such a device can induce brain changes in monkeys lasting more than a week. Strengthening of weak connections through this mechanism may have potential in the rehabilitation of patients with brain injuries, stroke, or paralysis.
The authors of study, titled "Long-Term Motor Cortex Plasticity Induced by an Electronic Neural Implant," were Dr. Andrew Jackson, senior research fellow in physiology and biophysics, Dr. Jaideep Mavoori, who recently earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the UW, and Dr. Eberhard Fetz, professor of physiology and biophysics. For many years Fetz and his colleagues have studied how the brains of monkeys control their limb muscles.
When awake, the brain continuously governs the body's voluntary movements. This is largely done through the activity of nerve cells in the part of the brain called the motor cortex. These nerve cells, or neurons, send signals down to the spinal cord to control the contraction of certain muscles, like those in the arms and legs.
The possibility that these neural signals can be recorded directly and used to operate a computer or to control mechanical devices outside of the body has been driving the rapidly expanding field of brain-computer interfaces, often abbreviated BCI. The recent Nature study suggests that the brain's nerve signals can be harnessed to create changes within itself.
The researchers tested a miniature, self-contained device with a tiny computer chip. The devices were placed on top of the heads of monkeys who were free to carry out their usual behaviors, including sleep. Called a Neurochip, the brain-computer interface was developed by Mavoori for his doctoral thesis.
"The Neurochip records the activity of motor cortex cells," Fetz explained, "It can convert this activity into a stimulus that can be sent back to the brain, spinal cord, or muscle, and thereby set up an artificial connection that operates continuously during normal behavior. This recurrent brain-computer interface creates an artificial motor pathway that the brain may learn to use to compensate for impaired pathways."
Jackson found that, when the brain-computer interface continuously connects neighboring sites in the motor cortex, it produces long-lasting changes. Namely, the movements evoked from the recording site changed to resemble those evoked from the stimulation site.
The researchers said that a likely explanation for these changes is the strengthening of pathways within the cortex from the recording to the stimulation site. This strengthening may have been produced by the continuous synchronization of activity at the two sites, generated by the recurrent brain-computer interface.
Timing is critical for creating these connections, the researchers said. The conditioning effect occurs only if the delay between the recorded activity and the stimulation is brief enough. The changes are produced in a day of continuous conditioning with the recurrent brain-computer interface, but last for many days after the circuit is turned off.
"This unusually long-lasting plasticity may be related to the fact that the conditioning is associated with normal behavior," Fetz said.
Mechanism may have potential in stroke and brain injury rehabilitation
Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) are working on an implantable electronic chip that may help establish new nerve connections in the part of the brain that controls movement. Their most recent study, to be published in the Nov. 2, 2006, edition of Nature, showed such a device can induce brain changes in monkeys lasting more than a week. Strengthening of weak connections through this mechanism may have potential in the rehabilitation of patients with brain injuries, stroke, or paralysis.
The authors of study, titled "Long-Term Motor Cortex Plasticity Induced by an Electronic Neural Implant," were Dr. Andrew Jackson, senior research fellow in physiology and biophysics, Dr. Jaideep Mavoori, who recently earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the UW, and Dr. Eberhard Fetz, professor of physiology and biophysics. For many years Fetz and his colleagues have studied how the brains of monkeys control their limb muscles.
When awake, the brain continuously governs the body's voluntary movements. This is largely done through the activity of nerve cells in the part of the brain called the motor cortex. These nerve cells, or neurons, send signals down to the spinal cord to control the contraction of certain muscles, like those in the arms and legs.
The possibility that these neural signals can be recorded directly and used to operate a computer or to control mechanical devices outside of the body has been driving the rapidly expanding field of brain-computer interfaces, often abbreviated BCI. The recent Nature study suggests that the brain's nerve signals can be harnessed to create changes within itself.
The researchers tested a miniature, self-contained device with a tiny computer chip. The devices were placed on top of the heads of monkeys who were free to carry out their usual behaviors, including sleep. Called a Neurochip, the brain-computer interface was developed by Mavoori for his doctoral thesis.
"The Neurochip records the activity of motor cortex cells," Fetz explained, "It can convert this activity into a stimulus that can be sent back to the brain, spinal cord, or muscle, and thereby set up an artificial connection that operates continuously during normal behavior. This recurrent brain-computer interface creates an artificial motor pathway that the brain may learn to use to compensate for impaired pathways."
Jackson found that, when the brain-computer interface continuously connects neighboring sites in the motor cortex, it produces long-lasting changes. Namely, the movements evoked from the recording site changed to resemble those evoked from the stimulation site.
The researchers said that a likely explanation for these changes is the strengthening of pathways within the cortex from the recording to the stimulation site. This strengthening may have been produced by the continuous synchronization of activity at the two sites, generated by the recurrent brain-computer interface.
Timing is critical for creating these connections, the researchers said. The conditioning effect occurs only if the delay between the recorded activity and the stimulation is brief enough. The changes are produced in a day of continuous conditioning with the recurrent brain-computer interface, but last for many days after the circuit is turned off.
"This unusually long-lasting plasticity may be related to the fact that the conditioning is associated with normal behavior," Fetz said.
24 October 2006
$1.65 Billion Innovation and Counting
$1.65 Billion Innovation and Counting
When was the last time a company innovated from zero to $1.65 Billion in market value in less than two years from founding, and in less than one year from launch of their key product?
Beginnings of a new Broadcast company
YouTube, a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide, serves over 70 million videos daily on their website - videos that are created and shared by everyday people. YouTube also draws 34 million unique visitors a month, ranking it in the top 15 sites by traffic volume. YouTube's mission is to convert everyday people into broadcasters of tomorrow. Is YouTube the beginning of a new broadcast company? A company that fundamentally changed the rules where people choose what they want to watch, when they want to watch, and for how much (and free in most cases) without the overload of advertisements.
Who came first?
Is YouTube a modern-day community of all the people who were using Microsoft's NetMeeting for sharing live video many years ago? There was a huge wave of people who initially embraced the live capability of sharing video in NetMeeting in the late nineties using a simple Webcam and simultaneously conducting conferencing using integrated live chat and audio. A market of live conferencing and video sharing softwares got created overnight based on this initial success. Some of the applications of live video even created a whole new adult industry. However, not a single vendor experienced any type of consumer mass market success. And then TIVO emerged from the Internet boom (or bust), wherein you can buy a simple hardware device (technically a large hard-drive that saved analog TV broadcast into digitial media) and pause, rewind and store live broadcast TV, and watch it on demand anytime. TIVO was innovative and revolutionary, and single-handedly created a huge market following for On demand TV. TIVO even became a verb wherein thousands of TV fans would talk about "Just Tivo it." However, TIVO was a personal device that did not let you share the videos with friends and families. Nor TIVO allowed you to capture your own video and store it (at least not easily) and then send it someone else.
New Innovations
Until Steve Jobs and Apple started the iPod and then iTunes revolution, which morphed into video downloads of hit TV shows onto iPods or desktops to allow people to view the shows on demand. However, even the brilliantly innovative Jobs missed what was to become a people Video revolution. Whereas Jobs was focused on creating partnerships with TV broadcast companies to monetize the market of recorded broadcast videos and grow the business at Apple, YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim were focused on the exact opposite - free video service created by the people for the people. They were trying to create the world's best platform and Video network wherein people can upload, tag and share videos for free. The founders almost went broke trying this innovative experiment out after the launch when the number of people uploading videos to share, and the number of people downloading videos to watch grew exponentially. However, the growth of Internet as a network and the fall in price of broadband, bandwidth and storage kept their vision going (and a few million dollar capital investment eventually by Sequoia capital). The YouTube Innovation Revolution was just beginning.
Zero to 70 million Videos served daily
YouTube, founded in February 2005, created many timely innovations that made it successful in such a short time paving its way to an acquisition by Google for $1.65 Billion dollars.
First, the vision of Founders to create a Video download service for FREE (and not getting caught up in monetizing the Video Service from the get go) at the right time when the broad consumer market was evolving into creating and sharing home videos at personal websites or community sites from just sharing pictures and images. Sound familiar? Think Google (that created the Search engine for free and did not monetize it for the longest time).
Second, the intense focus on providing the best and most comprehensive experience for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos. This is no easy feat. YouTube made it as easy as 1,2,3 to upload and share a video. And to create a vibrant community, it added such key features as categories, video ratings, most requested videos, most watched videos, and more. This made it extremely easy even for a novice to simply go to YouTube site and browse a video that they want to watch at the click of a mouse. And the ease of uploading and sharing videos meant that there was always fresh content that people want to watch daily. People can also create their own accounts and create their own list of favorite videos, categories, etc. Of course to make all these possible, YouTube created an innovative seamless Video platform that can deliver hundreds of millions of Video to people all over the world.
Finally, YouTube created key partnerships with various Music and Broadcast players in the industry (who soon realized that YouTube was upto something big). This included CBS, Sony, Universal, Warner, NBC and more. This gave YouTube and its people ability to watch snippets of TV shows, news, movies, sports and entertainment shows - short-form video programming or short clips. This became a win-win for both YouTube and its partners. YouTube wins because it brings in fresh content from hundreds of broadcast channels that people around the world want to watch online at their convenience for free, and the credibility from playing with the big boys. Partners win because they use YouTube to market their broadcast programming to the people in the hopes of creating more business on their TV broadcasts.
These timely innovations in business model, technology and user experience, and partnerships made YouTube an overnight success. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google pointed out in the Press Release announcing the acquisition: "Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”
YouTube and Google
Google has announced that YouTube will remain an independent business retaining its distinct brand identity. What is not clear is what Google will do to its own Video service. What Google will provide though is the monetization for YouTube's Video services through its advertiser relationships and global reach. If 1% of the 70 million Videos that are served daily click on a Google served advertisement, this would result in 700,000 daily click-through or 255 million click-through in a year (without accounting for any new growth). And if you take a five year period, it would cost Google $1.29 a click in today's dollar. Or to put it another way, Google can create new revenue of $329 million a year without making any profits (assuming it sells ads at $1.29 a click). A steep price to pay for a Video click? Only time will tell as to how big the new YouTube Video Service becomes under the auspices of Google, and how Google will be able to cash in on its investment and eventually make this a $1 Billion business.
When was the last time a company innovated from zero to $1.65 Billion in market value in less than two years from founding, and in less than one year from launch of their key product?
Beginnings of a new Broadcast company
YouTube, a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide, serves over 70 million videos daily on their website - videos that are created and shared by everyday people. YouTube also draws 34 million unique visitors a month, ranking it in the top 15 sites by traffic volume. YouTube's mission is to convert everyday people into broadcasters of tomorrow. Is YouTube the beginning of a new broadcast company? A company that fundamentally changed the rules where people choose what they want to watch, when they want to watch, and for how much (and free in most cases) without the overload of advertisements.
Who came first?
Is YouTube a modern-day community of all the people who were using Microsoft's NetMeeting for sharing live video many years ago? There was a huge wave of people who initially embraced the live capability of sharing video in NetMeeting in the late nineties using a simple Webcam and simultaneously conducting conferencing using integrated live chat and audio. A market of live conferencing and video sharing softwares got created overnight based on this initial success. Some of the applications of live video even created a whole new adult industry. However, not a single vendor experienced any type of consumer mass market success. And then TIVO emerged from the Internet boom (or bust), wherein you can buy a simple hardware device (technically a large hard-drive that saved analog TV broadcast into digitial media) and pause, rewind and store live broadcast TV, and watch it on demand anytime. TIVO was innovative and revolutionary, and single-handedly created a huge market following for On demand TV. TIVO even became a verb wherein thousands of TV fans would talk about "Just Tivo it." However, TIVO was a personal device that did not let you share the videos with friends and families. Nor TIVO allowed you to capture your own video and store it (at least not easily) and then send it someone else.
New Innovations
Until Steve Jobs and Apple started the iPod and then iTunes revolution, which morphed into video downloads of hit TV shows onto iPods or desktops to allow people to view the shows on demand. However, even the brilliantly innovative Jobs missed what was to become a people Video revolution. Whereas Jobs was focused on creating partnerships with TV broadcast companies to monetize the market of recorded broadcast videos and grow the business at Apple, YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim were focused on the exact opposite - free video service created by the people for the people. They were trying to create the world's best platform and Video network wherein people can upload, tag and share videos for free. The founders almost went broke trying this innovative experiment out after the launch when the number of people uploading videos to share, and the number of people downloading videos to watch grew exponentially. However, the growth of Internet as a network and the fall in price of broadband, bandwidth and storage kept their vision going (and a few million dollar capital investment eventually by Sequoia capital). The YouTube Innovation Revolution was just beginning.
Zero to 70 million Videos served daily
YouTube, founded in February 2005, created many timely innovations that made it successful in such a short time paving its way to an acquisition by Google for $1.65 Billion dollars.
First, the vision of Founders to create a Video download service for FREE (and not getting caught up in monetizing the Video Service from the get go) at the right time when the broad consumer market was evolving into creating and sharing home videos at personal websites or community sites from just sharing pictures and images. Sound familiar? Think Google (that created the Search engine for free and did not monetize it for the longest time).
Second, the intense focus on providing the best and most comprehensive experience for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos. This is no easy feat. YouTube made it as easy as 1,2,3 to upload and share a video. And to create a vibrant community, it added such key features as categories, video ratings, most requested videos, most watched videos, and more. This made it extremely easy even for a novice to simply go to YouTube site and browse a video that they want to watch at the click of a mouse. And the ease of uploading and sharing videos meant that there was always fresh content that people want to watch daily. People can also create their own accounts and create their own list of favorite videos, categories, etc. Of course to make all these possible, YouTube created an innovative seamless Video platform that can deliver hundreds of millions of Video to people all over the world.
Finally, YouTube created key partnerships with various Music and Broadcast players in the industry (who soon realized that YouTube was upto something big). This included CBS, Sony, Universal, Warner, NBC and more. This gave YouTube and its people ability to watch snippets of TV shows, news, movies, sports and entertainment shows - short-form video programming or short clips. This became a win-win for both YouTube and its partners. YouTube wins because it brings in fresh content from hundreds of broadcast channels that people around the world want to watch online at their convenience for free, and the credibility from playing with the big boys. Partners win because they use YouTube to market their broadcast programming to the people in the hopes of creating more business on their TV broadcasts.
These timely innovations in business model, technology and user experience, and partnerships made YouTube an overnight success. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google pointed out in the Press Release announcing the acquisition: "Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”
YouTube and Google
Google has announced that YouTube will remain an independent business retaining its distinct brand identity. What is not clear is what Google will do to its own Video service. What Google will provide though is the monetization for YouTube's Video services through its advertiser relationships and global reach. If 1% of the 70 million Videos that are served daily click on a Google served advertisement, this would result in 700,000 daily click-through or 255 million click-through in a year (without accounting for any new growth). And if you take a five year period, it would cost Google $1.29 a click in today's dollar. Or to put it another way, Google can create new revenue of $329 million a year without making any profits (assuming it sells ads at $1.29 a click). A steep price to pay for a Video click? Only time will tell as to how big the new YouTube Video Service becomes under the auspices of Google, and how Google will be able to cash in on its investment and eventually make this a $1 Billion business.
iPod - The Perfect Thing
iPod - The Perfect Thing
Five years ago, Apple engineers used foam core and old fishing weights to craft a model of a new MP3 player. The age of the iPod was about to begin.
By Steven Levy
In mid-October 2001, I received an invitation to one of Steve Jobs' carefully choreographed, exquisitely casual shows. It was to be held at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, on October 23. The most interesting thing about the invitation was the teasing addendum: "Hint: It's not a Mac." Usually, I would have hopped on a plane to see the latest wrinkle in the consistently fascinating saga of Jobs. His return to Apple was a great business story in itself, but what was novel about his whole career was its unapologetic and unprecedented grafting of 1960s values – everything from rock and roll to cracker-barrel Buddhism – into the corporate world. Jobs was a great salesman, a guy who out-suited the suits when it came to mastering the pulleys and levers of global high tech product development and manufacturing, a chief executive of two companies traded on the Nasdaq (Apple and Pixar Entertainment). But I'd also seen him stroll into his boardroom wearing scissor-cut shorts almost up to his balls and a pair of flip-flops. All of this – the austere authority of a Zen poet, the playfulness of Mick Jagger, and the showmanship of David Copperfield – would be on display at this event. And if history was any guide, the product he unveiled would be worth writing about.
But I didn't make it to the show. I wasn't traveling much those days. It was, after all, little more than a month after 9/11, and I, like just about everyone else in New York City, was depressed.
I did, however, follow news of the event carefully. Steve Jobs is maniacal about maintaining total stealth in his operation, but a cat of this magnitude could not be fully bagged, and word was leaking that the "not a Mac" was some kind of digital music player. The prospect did not exactly thrill people. Digital music players – also known as MP3 players, in reference to the encoding algorithm that compresses music into data files – had been around for a few years already, but novelty was their main, if not their only, virtue. They generally held too little music, had impenetrable interfaces, and looked like the cheap plastic toys given to losers at carnival games.
I don't recall being so negative myself: I made plans to write about this new toy, discussing with Apple when we might be able to photograph it. It was sometime in the afternoon of that launch day that the Apple couriers reached my office. They had been racing up and down the Atlantic seaboard spreading the new MP3 players to tech writers. So they didn't have time to do much of anything but leave the box. The packaging was a distinctive cube, with a picture of Jimi Hendrix that evoked the excitement of his volcanic performance at Monterey Pop. Inside was the iPod. It was beautiful.
Before I left the office to play with my new toy, I took my prearranged call from Jobs. He sounded out of breath. It was a quarter after one Cupertino time, and he had been chatting up his new product for hours. As interview subjects go, Jobs is a self-starter. He always has a message to deliver, and he does so with unstinting enthusiasm.
I asked him how many iPods he thought Apple would sell. "I don't do predictions." But he did do proclamations. "iPod," he said, "will be a landmark product."
That night, Microsoft hosted a small dinner in New York for a group of journalists, a prelude to its launch of Windows XP the next day. I have lots of experience talking to Bill Gates and do not break into tears when he yells, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!" so the Microsoft PR team seated me next to the chairman.
I brought along my new iPod. At the end of the meal, just as the other guests at the table were pushing away their chairs, I pulled out the iPod and put it in front of Gates.
"Have you seen this yet?" I asked.
Gates went into a zone that recalls those science fiction films where a space alien, confronted with a novel object, creates some sort of force tunnel between him and the object, allowing him to suck directly into his brain all possible information about it. Gates' fingers, racing at Nascar speed, played over the scroll wheel and pushed every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen. I could almost hear the giant sucking sound. Finally, after he had absorbed every nuance of the device, he handed it back to me.
"It looks like a great product," he said.
Then he paused a second. Something didn't compute.
"It's only for Macintosh?" he asked.
Yes, it was. (Then.)
Anthony Michael Fadell was on a ski slope in Vail, Colorado, on January 23, 2001, when his cell phone rang. The 32-year-old hardware engineer was taking a rare few days off. He had recently started a small digital-music company and was more than happy to continue with it. The fiercely independent Detroit native liked the control of heading his own firm.
But this call was from Apple. All his life, Fadell had idolized the company. When he was 12, he'd combined his summer earnings as a caddy with a contribution from his grandfather to buy an Apple IIe. An ace programmer, he started three companies before he graduated from the University of Michigan. His first job out of college, in 1992, was at a startup called General Magic, working beside two of the stars of the legendary team that had created the Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. It was like joining a basketball team and finding yourself teammates with Larry Bird and Dr. J.
Unfortunately, the General Magic product, a handheld communicator, was a flop. After that, Fadell went on to a weird few years at Philips Electronics. Concerned about its overly staid reputation, the Dutch conglomerate had offered Fadell, still in his twenties, the chance to head its new mobile computing group. He was by far the youngest manager at that level in the entire titanic company. Even if Fadell had had a steady temperament and been mature beyond his years, this would have been controversial. But he embraced the role of execupunk. He'd sometimes show up at work with bleached hair, and at meetings he would blast anyone within earshot. When a Fast Company reporter asked him where he'd be if he'd grown up before computers were invented, he responded, "In jail." Nonetheless, Fadell headed the development of Philips' Windows-based PDA, which sold half a million units. That gave him the idea to create a home digital entertainment device with a hard drive-based jukebox to store thousands of songs. He talked with RealNetworks about developing some of the software – and then accepted a job at Real, figuring he'd have a better chance of shipping a challenging product at a company that still retained a startup mentality. But in part because of a disagreement over whether he'd move to Seattle, he quit after only six weeks.
Now Fadell was developing the idea with his own company, Fuse Networks. But here was Jon Rubinstein, Apple's very top hardware guy, telling him to come in and talk about a project. Fadell took the meeting. Of course, Ruby, as he's known to Apple insiders, couldn't tell him anything about the project, because of the company's near-paranoia about keeping secrets. All Fadell knew was that Apple was offering him an eight-week contract to do something that it thought he was qualified to do. What could he say but yes?
Only after agreeing did he learn that the job was to put together an MP3 music player that would work with Apple's existing iTunes application and would not suck. Essentially, he'd have to build a small computer – because, once you get down to it, that's what an MP3 player is, something with a nice visual interface that runs the database program that stores the digital song files, then performs the high-speed mathematical processes that make those files into the same Jimi Hendrix and Yo-Yo Ma tunes that you'd hear on a CD player. No one mentioned that this product might transform Apple and set the technology world, the business world, and especially the music industry on their heads. Because no one suspected it would.
Apple wanted Fadell because of his expertise in the burgeoning world of handheld components. The company had been focusing on the possible elements in a new MP3 player, particularly the brand-new 1.8-inch hard drive made by Toshiba. Despite its diminutive size, it held 5 gigabytes of data – enough for 1,000 songs.
At the time, the cost and capability of such a component were sort of a crazy joke, one of a series of absurdities unleashed by Moore's law. As a yardstick of how ridiculously compact and capacious this hard drive was, consider the situation when Apple unveiled the original Macintosh in 1984. The computer badly needed a hard drive, but they were so expensive that including it in the package would have almost doubled the $2,500 price. When one finally appeared as a third-party peripheral almost a year later, it was half the size of a shoebox and cost around $2,000. It held 10 megabytes, which seemed like an enormous amount of storage at the time. Ha! The entire capacity of that 1985 disk drive is insufficient to store the MP3 file of Neil Young's "Down by the River."
Now Toshiba had a 5-gig drive so small you could swallow it, with enough capacity to pack in three days' worth of music – a thousand songs. And its cost was measured in tens of dollars, not thousands.
Fadell was assigned a partner in his efforts, a sort of consigliere who would connect him to the sometimes-confusing Cupertino culture. Chosen for the task was Stan Ng, a hardware marketing manager who had been with Apple for six years. Ng and Fadell quickly got to the nub of what was required. "'In your pocket' became the mantra for the product, because that was definitely the size and form factor that hit the sweet spot," Ng says. "There were products out there that were small but held maybe 20 or 30 songs and didn't have great battery life, and other products that had a hard drive but weighed over a pound and didn't fit in your pocket. We wanted to create something that merged the best of both worlds."
Apple demanded total stealth, so on their quest Fadell and Ng would talk to people but not really tell them what they were working on. Not even people inside the company. Eventually, Fadell began to make models of what an Apple MP3 player might look like, cutting pieces out of foam-core boards and gluing them together. He finally came up with one that he felt was ideal: a box slightly bigger than a cigarette case with a sharp screen toward the top end and navigational buttons below. But the model felt too light. He went to his garage and recovered the old tackle box he'd used many years before when he'd gone fishing with his grandfather. Still inside were some fishing weights. After flattening them with a sledgehammer, he stuck them into the model to provide a heft that approximated what the final device might feel like. He showed it to Rubinstein, who was delighted.
Fadell's contract ended in early April, and a meeting was scheduled for him to bring his conclusions to the Apple executive team. He had done his homework, not just on the project but on the politics of presenting to Steve Jobs. He came to the meeting with three different versions. Two of them were sacrificial lambs that he felt would rightfully be rejected, setting the stage for the third one, which he was sure was the perfect solution. Before the meeting, Fadell and Rubinstein hid the mock-up of this favorite under the large wooden bowl that Jobs kept on the long table in the fourth-floor conference room.
The key people were all at the meeting: Rubinstein; iTunes czar Jeff Robbin; Apple's worldwide marketing vice president, Phil Schiller; and, of course, Jobs, who had been in contact with Ruby on the project but had yet to meet Fadell. The session started out with Ng showing the usual sort of slides – stuff about the market potential, the competition, how horrible the current choices were, and the question of whether Apple could innovate. Jobs, as always, kept things moving with his interruptions. Then Fadell took over. He laid potential parts on the table – Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive, a small piece of glass for the screen, various battery alternatives, a sample motherboard – and began instructing the group on the finer points of handheld economics, the current pricing curves of memory and hard drive storage, what the latest battery technology was, and the kinds of displays one could use.
Executing the Goldilocks gambit, Fadell showed his first model; it had a big slot that could accept either a hard drive or a flash memory card to hold music. This was a clumsy solution and not well received. Too complicated, Jobs sniffed. Then came the second proposal, a device that would store tunes with dynamic RAM; it would be cheap and hold a bunch of songs, but if the battery died, the songs would vanish and you'd have to reload. That will never sell, grumbled Jobs. Finally, Fadell went back to the table and began grabbing the pieces he'd used to demonstrate what parts were available. As if constructing a Lego device, he snapped them together, creating something that might today be considered iPod-esque, and handed it to Jobs. The silence said, This is more like it. Then it was time to show Jobs the more polished model under the bowl, with the angling weights and mock-ups of buttons on the front to control the software. This time Jobs' pleasure was obvious.
Just right.
There was another surprise to come. Schiller asked, "Can I bring out my thing now?" He left the room and came back with a number of different-size models of a playback device – big ones, tiny ones, in all sorts of shapes. They had one thing in common: a wheel-shaped contraption on the front. The idea, Schiller explained, was that by using a single finger, tracing the circular pathway on the wheel, you could easily scroll through lists – of songs, of artists, of albums. To select something, you'd press the bull's-eye in the center of the wheel. What's more, as your finger moved around, the scrolling speed actually accelerated, so you could go through long lists at a fairly brisk pace.
(Schiller later explained to me that the idea had crystallized at an earlier meeting with Jobs and Rubinstein. "All the other MP3 players had these little Plus and Minus buttons to go down a menu one song at a time. We were going to hold a thousand songs on this thing – you can't hit the Plus button a thousand times! So I figured, if you can't go up, why not go around?")
Jobs asked Fadell if he could build something like Schiller's scroll wheel, and Fadell said he could.
The project was a go.
The formal codename was P-68, but informally, people also used a more evocative term: Dulcimer.
There is no single "father of the iPod." Development was a multitrack process, with Fadell, now on staff, in charge of the actual workings of the device, Robbin heading the software and interface team, Jonathan Ive doing the industrial design, Rubenstein overseeing the project, and Jobs himself rubbernecking as only he could. For specific tasks, Apple drew on experts working elsewhere in the company. Fadell also contracted with key outsiders, notably a San Jose company called PortalPlayer and a small firm of Apple expatriates called Pixo. And, of course, the Apple people had full-contact sessions with Jobs. He would pick up the device and say what he liked and didn't like, and he would fire questions at everyone, pushing hard: "What are you going to do about it?" It was Jobs who told everyone what the device would be called. "He just came in and went, 'iPod,'" says one team member. "We all looked around the room, and that was it. iPod. And we're like, 'Where did that come from?'" (Excellent question, and one that proved increasingly elusive the more I pressed people at Apple. I was finally able to corner Jobs on it, and he said that to the best of his knowledge the name sort of emerged, not exactly in a form of immaculate conception but in a lengthy back-and-forth between him, his marketing people, and TBWAChiatDay. "The ad agency loved it," he told me. But I get the distinct impression that the iPod moniker won out not because of its brilliance but because Jobs had had enough of the naming process and the hour was getting late.)
Sometimes his pronouncements would astound his employees. When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, he simply said no. And that was it. It was a harsh aesthetic edict on a parallel with his famous refusal to include cursor keys on the original Macintosh keyboard. From Jobs' point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)
In August, the team finally got one of the physical prototypes to play a song. A group of people working late at night took turns listening on a set of headphones from someone's old Sony Walkman. That first song, by the way, was Spiller's "Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)," a house-music dance tune with vocals by the British diva Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Copy protection wasn't part of iTunes or the iPod, which happily accepted songs in the free-flowing MP3 format. But Jobs was concerned about piracy, so he did take modest steps against it. Until very late in the development phase, the iPod's designers intended not only to let people load songs from their Macintoshes onto the devices but to enable a reverse process: the ability to add songs to a computer from an iPod. But Jobs, convinced that this two-way sync would make it too tempting for people to plug their iPods into a friend's computer to download entire collections of songs, mandated that the sync work only one way. Likewise, Jobs announced one day that iPods would come packaged in an outer wrapping that said: don't steal music. What about other languages? he was asked. "Put multiple languages on it," he said.
Everyone seemed to have a moment of enlightenment when the clouds parted and it was clear that something amazing was emerging. For Jobs, "It all clicked for me when we designed the user interface. We had the wheel, and we started to lay out the menus and argue about this and that, and it took us about a week where we had most of it done, and once you saw the user interface and how easy it was going to be to get around and how well the wheel worked and how well the concepts of the user interface worked, then it was really clear that you'd be able to [navigate through] a thousand songs. Having a thousand songs in your pocket wouldn't be that exciting if you couldn't navigate and access them easily. Once that user interface clicked, it was like, 'Oh my God, this is gonna be so cool.'"
That interface made the iPod experience special even for those who had been intimately involved in designing it. For Stan Ng, the head-slapping moment came when he took his own prototype home for the first time. "I probably had 80 or 90 CDs' worth of music on my Macintosh; transferring down superfast over FireWire and then being able to pick any music, any album, whenever I wanted to was a feeling of freedom, of empowerment. It was just magic. I don't know how else to put it."
While such informal experimentation was the closest thing to market research Apple performed, there were all sorts of tests to make sure that everything worked, especially when the device came into contact with the physical insults it would face from users in the real world. The most fragile piece was the hard drive. "No one had really ever put such a tiny hard drive in a device that was really pocketable," one engineer explains. "So we were doing things like dropping hundreds of disk drives in these models to figure out if they were going to be robust or not." The testers set up robotic arms that methodically dropped the drives – some on their own, some in cases – from different heights to see how far they could fall and survive, like digital crash test dummies. Apple figured that an iPod should be able to withstand a 30-inch tumble, and the dummy disks passed the test.
Just before the launch, the first production iPods arrived, ready for the lucky first wave (like me) who would receive them in advance of the thousands that would be snapped up instantly when Apple began selling them to the public in November 2001.
Looking back on the process, Jobs waxes philosophical. "If there was ever a product that catalyzed Apple's reason for being, it's this," he says. "Because it combines Apple's incredible technology base with Apple's legendary ease of use with Apple's awesome design. Those three things come together in this, and it's like, that's what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example."
Five years ago, Apple engineers used foam core and old fishing weights to craft a model of a new MP3 player. The age of the iPod was about to begin.
By Steven Levy
In mid-October 2001, I received an invitation to one of Steve Jobs' carefully choreographed, exquisitely casual shows. It was to be held at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, on October 23. The most interesting thing about the invitation was the teasing addendum: "Hint: It's not a Mac." Usually, I would have hopped on a plane to see the latest wrinkle in the consistently fascinating saga of Jobs. His return to Apple was a great business story in itself, but what was novel about his whole career was its unapologetic and unprecedented grafting of 1960s values – everything from rock and roll to cracker-barrel Buddhism – into the corporate world. Jobs was a great salesman, a guy who out-suited the suits when it came to mastering the pulleys and levers of global high tech product development and manufacturing, a chief executive of two companies traded on the Nasdaq (Apple and Pixar Entertainment). But I'd also seen him stroll into his boardroom wearing scissor-cut shorts almost up to his balls and a pair of flip-flops. All of this – the austere authority of a Zen poet, the playfulness of Mick Jagger, and the showmanship of David Copperfield – would be on display at this event. And if history was any guide, the product he unveiled would be worth writing about.
But I didn't make it to the show. I wasn't traveling much those days. It was, after all, little more than a month after 9/11, and I, like just about everyone else in New York City, was depressed.
I did, however, follow news of the event carefully. Steve Jobs is maniacal about maintaining total stealth in his operation, but a cat of this magnitude could not be fully bagged, and word was leaking that the "not a Mac" was some kind of digital music player. The prospect did not exactly thrill people. Digital music players – also known as MP3 players, in reference to the encoding algorithm that compresses music into data files – had been around for a few years already, but novelty was their main, if not their only, virtue. They generally held too little music, had impenetrable interfaces, and looked like the cheap plastic toys given to losers at carnival games.
I don't recall being so negative myself: I made plans to write about this new toy, discussing with Apple when we might be able to photograph it. It was sometime in the afternoon of that launch day that the Apple couriers reached my office. They had been racing up and down the Atlantic seaboard spreading the new MP3 players to tech writers. So they didn't have time to do much of anything but leave the box. The packaging was a distinctive cube, with a picture of Jimi Hendrix that evoked the excitement of his volcanic performance at Monterey Pop. Inside was the iPod. It was beautiful.
Before I left the office to play with my new toy, I took my prearranged call from Jobs. He sounded out of breath. It was a quarter after one Cupertino time, and he had been chatting up his new product for hours. As interview subjects go, Jobs is a self-starter. He always has a message to deliver, and he does so with unstinting enthusiasm.
I asked him how many iPods he thought Apple would sell. "I don't do predictions." But he did do proclamations. "iPod," he said, "will be a landmark product."
That night, Microsoft hosted a small dinner in New York for a group of journalists, a prelude to its launch of Windows XP the next day. I have lots of experience talking to Bill Gates and do not break into tears when he yells, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!" so the Microsoft PR team seated me next to the chairman.
I brought along my new iPod. At the end of the meal, just as the other guests at the table were pushing away their chairs, I pulled out the iPod and put it in front of Gates.
"Have you seen this yet?" I asked.
Gates went into a zone that recalls those science fiction films where a space alien, confronted with a novel object, creates some sort of force tunnel between him and the object, allowing him to suck directly into his brain all possible information about it. Gates' fingers, racing at Nascar speed, played over the scroll wheel and pushed every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen. I could almost hear the giant sucking sound. Finally, after he had absorbed every nuance of the device, he handed it back to me.
"It looks like a great product," he said.
Then he paused a second. Something didn't compute.
"It's only for Macintosh?" he asked.
Yes, it was. (Then.)
Anthony Michael Fadell was on a ski slope in Vail, Colorado, on January 23, 2001, when his cell phone rang. The 32-year-old hardware engineer was taking a rare few days off. He had recently started a small digital-music company and was more than happy to continue with it. The fiercely independent Detroit native liked the control of heading his own firm.
But this call was from Apple. All his life, Fadell had idolized the company. When he was 12, he'd combined his summer earnings as a caddy with a contribution from his grandfather to buy an Apple IIe. An ace programmer, he started three companies before he graduated from the University of Michigan. His first job out of college, in 1992, was at a startup called General Magic, working beside two of the stars of the legendary team that had created the Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. It was like joining a basketball team and finding yourself teammates with Larry Bird and Dr. J.
Unfortunately, the General Magic product, a handheld communicator, was a flop. After that, Fadell went on to a weird few years at Philips Electronics. Concerned about its overly staid reputation, the Dutch conglomerate had offered Fadell, still in his twenties, the chance to head its new mobile computing group. He was by far the youngest manager at that level in the entire titanic company. Even if Fadell had had a steady temperament and been mature beyond his years, this would have been controversial. But he embraced the role of execupunk. He'd sometimes show up at work with bleached hair, and at meetings he would blast anyone within earshot. When a Fast Company reporter asked him where he'd be if he'd grown up before computers were invented, he responded, "In jail." Nonetheless, Fadell headed the development of Philips' Windows-based PDA, which sold half a million units. That gave him the idea to create a home digital entertainment device with a hard drive-based jukebox to store thousands of songs. He talked with RealNetworks about developing some of the software – and then accepted a job at Real, figuring he'd have a better chance of shipping a challenging product at a company that still retained a startup mentality. But in part because of a disagreement over whether he'd move to Seattle, he quit after only six weeks.
Now Fadell was developing the idea with his own company, Fuse Networks. But here was Jon Rubinstein, Apple's very top hardware guy, telling him to come in and talk about a project. Fadell took the meeting. Of course, Ruby, as he's known to Apple insiders, couldn't tell him anything about the project, because of the company's near-paranoia about keeping secrets. All Fadell knew was that Apple was offering him an eight-week contract to do something that it thought he was qualified to do. What could he say but yes?
Only after agreeing did he learn that the job was to put together an MP3 music player that would work with Apple's existing iTunes application and would not suck. Essentially, he'd have to build a small computer – because, once you get down to it, that's what an MP3 player is, something with a nice visual interface that runs the database program that stores the digital song files, then performs the high-speed mathematical processes that make those files into the same Jimi Hendrix and Yo-Yo Ma tunes that you'd hear on a CD player. No one mentioned that this product might transform Apple and set the technology world, the business world, and especially the music industry on their heads. Because no one suspected it would.
Apple wanted Fadell because of his expertise in the burgeoning world of handheld components. The company had been focusing on the possible elements in a new MP3 player, particularly the brand-new 1.8-inch hard drive made by Toshiba. Despite its diminutive size, it held 5 gigabytes of data – enough for 1,000 songs.
At the time, the cost and capability of such a component were sort of a crazy joke, one of a series of absurdities unleashed by Moore's law. As a yardstick of how ridiculously compact and capacious this hard drive was, consider the situation when Apple unveiled the original Macintosh in 1984. The computer badly needed a hard drive, but they were so expensive that including it in the package would have almost doubled the $2,500 price. When one finally appeared as a third-party peripheral almost a year later, it was half the size of a shoebox and cost around $2,000. It held 10 megabytes, which seemed like an enormous amount of storage at the time. Ha! The entire capacity of that 1985 disk drive is insufficient to store the MP3 file of Neil Young's "Down by the River."
Now Toshiba had a 5-gig drive so small you could swallow it, with enough capacity to pack in three days' worth of music – a thousand songs. And its cost was measured in tens of dollars, not thousands.
Fadell was assigned a partner in his efforts, a sort of consigliere who would connect him to the sometimes-confusing Cupertino culture. Chosen for the task was Stan Ng, a hardware marketing manager who had been with Apple for six years. Ng and Fadell quickly got to the nub of what was required. "'In your pocket' became the mantra for the product, because that was definitely the size and form factor that hit the sweet spot," Ng says. "There were products out there that were small but held maybe 20 or 30 songs and didn't have great battery life, and other products that had a hard drive but weighed over a pound and didn't fit in your pocket. We wanted to create something that merged the best of both worlds."
Apple demanded total stealth, so on their quest Fadell and Ng would talk to people but not really tell them what they were working on. Not even people inside the company. Eventually, Fadell began to make models of what an Apple MP3 player might look like, cutting pieces out of foam-core boards and gluing them together. He finally came up with one that he felt was ideal: a box slightly bigger than a cigarette case with a sharp screen toward the top end and navigational buttons below. But the model felt too light. He went to his garage and recovered the old tackle box he'd used many years before when he'd gone fishing with his grandfather. Still inside were some fishing weights. After flattening them with a sledgehammer, he stuck them into the model to provide a heft that approximated what the final device might feel like. He showed it to Rubinstein, who was delighted.
Fadell's contract ended in early April, and a meeting was scheduled for him to bring his conclusions to the Apple executive team. He had done his homework, not just on the project but on the politics of presenting to Steve Jobs. He came to the meeting with three different versions. Two of them were sacrificial lambs that he felt would rightfully be rejected, setting the stage for the third one, which he was sure was the perfect solution. Before the meeting, Fadell and Rubinstein hid the mock-up of this favorite under the large wooden bowl that Jobs kept on the long table in the fourth-floor conference room.
The key people were all at the meeting: Rubinstein; iTunes czar Jeff Robbin; Apple's worldwide marketing vice president, Phil Schiller; and, of course, Jobs, who had been in contact with Ruby on the project but had yet to meet Fadell. The session started out with Ng showing the usual sort of slides – stuff about the market potential, the competition, how horrible the current choices were, and the question of whether Apple could innovate. Jobs, as always, kept things moving with his interruptions. Then Fadell took over. He laid potential parts on the table – Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive, a small piece of glass for the screen, various battery alternatives, a sample motherboard – and began instructing the group on the finer points of handheld economics, the current pricing curves of memory and hard drive storage, what the latest battery technology was, and the kinds of displays one could use.
Executing the Goldilocks gambit, Fadell showed his first model; it had a big slot that could accept either a hard drive or a flash memory card to hold music. This was a clumsy solution and not well received. Too complicated, Jobs sniffed. Then came the second proposal, a device that would store tunes with dynamic RAM; it would be cheap and hold a bunch of songs, but if the battery died, the songs would vanish and you'd have to reload. That will never sell, grumbled Jobs. Finally, Fadell went back to the table and began grabbing the pieces he'd used to demonstrate what parts were available. As if constructing a Lego device, he snapped them together, creating something that might today be considered iPod-esque, and handed it to Jobs. The silence said, This is more like it. Then it was time to show Jobs the more polished model under the bowl, with the angling weights and mock-ups of buttons on the front to control the software. This time Jobs' pleasure was obvious.
Just right.
There was another surprise to come. Schiller asked, "Can I bring out my thing now?" He left the room and came back with a number of different-size models of a playback device – big ones, tiny ones, in all sorts of shapes. They had one thing in common: a wheel-shaped contraption on the front. The idea, Schiller explained, was that by using a single finger, tracing the circular pathway on the wheel, you could easily scroll through lists – of songs, of artists, of albums. To select something, you'd press the bull's-eye in the center of the wheel. What's more, as your finger moved around, the scrolling speed actually accelerated, so you could go through long lists at a fairly brisk pace.
(Schiller later explained to me that the idea had crystallized at an earlier meeting with Jobs and Rubinstein. "All the other MP3 players had these little Plus and Minus buttons to go down a menu one song at a time. We were going to hold a thousand songs on this thing – you can't hit the Plus button a thousand times! So I figured, if you can't go up, why not go around?")
Jobs asked Fadell if he could build something like Schiller's scroll wheel, and Fadell said he could.
The project was a go.
The formal codename was P-68, but informally, people also used a more evocative term: Dulcimer.
There is no single "father of the iPod." Development was a multitrack process, with Fadell, now on staff, in charge of the actual workings of the device, Robbin heading the software and interface team, Jonathan Ive doing the industrial design, Rubenstein overseeing the project, and Jobs himself rubbernecking as only he could. For specific tasks, Apple drew on experts working elsewhere in the company. Fadell also contracted with key outsiders, notably a San Jose company called PortalPlayer and a small firm of Apple expatriates called Pixo. And, of course, the Apple people had full-contact sessions with Jobs. He would pick up the device and say what he liked and didn't like, and he would fire questions at everyone, pushing hard: "What are you going to do about it?" It was Jobs who told everyone what the device would be called. "He just came in and went, 'iPod,'" says one team member. "We all looked around the room, and that was it. iPod. And we're like, 'Where did that come from?'" (Excellent question, and one that proved increasingly elusive the more I pressed people at Apple. I was finally able to corner Jobs on it, and he said that to the best of his knowledge the name sort of emerged, not exactly in a form of immaculate conception but in a lengthy back-and-forth between him, his marketing people, and TBWAChiatDay. "The ad agency loved it," he told me. But I get the distinct impression that the iPod moniker won out not because of its brilliance but because Jobs had had enough of the naming process and the hour was getting late.)
Sometimes his pronouncements would astound his employees. When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, he simply said no. And that was it. It was a harsh aesthetic edict on a parallel with his famous refusal to include cursor keys on the original Macintosh keyboard. From Jobs' point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)
In August, the team finally got one of the physical prototypes to play a song. A group of people working late at night took turns listening on a set of headphones from someone's old Sony Walkman. That first song, by the way, was Spiller's "Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)," a house-music dance tune with vocals by the British diva Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Copy protection wasn't part of iTunes or the iPod, which happily accepted songs in the free-flowing MP3 format. But Jobs was concerned about piracy, so he did take modest steps against it. Until very late in the development phase, the iPod's designers intended not only to let people load songs from their Macintoshes onto the devices but to enable a reverse process: the ability to add songs to a computer from an iPod. But Jobs, convinced that this two-way sync would make it too tempting for people to plug their iPods into a friend's computer to download entire collections of songs, mandated that the sync work only one way. Likewise, Jobs announced one day that iPods would come packaged in an outer wrapping that said: don't steal music. What about other languages? he was asked. "Put multiple languages on it," he said.
Everyone seemed to have a moment of enlightenment when the clouds parted and it was clear that something amazing was emerging. For Jobs, "It all clicked for me when we designed the user interface. We had the wheel, and we started to lay out the menus and argue about this and that, and it took us about a week where we had most of it done, and once you saw the user interface and how easy it was going to be to get around and how well the wheel worked and how well the concepts of the user interface worked, then it was really clear that you'd be able to [navigate through] a thousand songs. Having a thousand songs in your pocket wouldn't be that exciting if you couldn't navigate and access them easily. Once that user interface clicked, it was like, 'Oh my God, this is gonna be so cool.'"
That interface made the iPod experience special even for those who had been intimately involved in designing it. For Stan Ng, the head-slapping moment came when he took his own prototype home for the first time. "I probably had 80 or 90 CDs' worth of music on my Macintosh; transferring down superfast over FireWire and then being able to pick any music, any album, whenever I wanted to was a feeling of freedom, of empowerment. It was just magic. I don't know how else to put it."
While such informal experimentation was the closest thing to market research Apple performed, there were all sorts of tests to make sure that everything worked, especially when the device came into contact with the physical insults it would face from users in the real world. The most fragile piece was the hard drive. "No one had really ever put such a tiny hard drive in a device that was really pocketable," one engineer explains. "So we were doing things like dropping hundreds of disk drives in these models to figure out if they were going to be robust or not." The testers set up robotic arms that methodically dropped the drives – some on their own, some in cases – from different heights to see how far they could fall and survive, like digital crash test dummies. Apple figured that an iPod should be able to withstand a 30-inch tumble, and the dummy disks passed the test.
Just before the launch, the first production iPods arrived, ready for the lucky first wave (like me) who would receive them in advance of the thousands that would be snapped up instantly when Apple began selling them to the public in November 2001.
Looking back on the process, Jobs waxes philosophical. "If there was ever a product that catalyzed Apple's reason for being, it's this," he says. "Because it combines Apple's incredible technology base with Apple's legendary ease of use with Apple's awesome design. Those three things come together in this, and it's like, that's what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example."
Co-Creation driving Innovation
Co-Creation driving Innovation
What does Doritos chips, Starwood hotels and Timex watches have in common? According to Gerhard Gschwandtner, Editor and Founder of Selling Power, they are all engaging their customers to co-create. In the latest issue of Selling Power, Gschwandtner talks about the role of co-creation driving innovation in mainstream businesses.
What is Co-Creation?
Gschwandtner summarizes: "Information (online) technology has empowered consumers to share ideas, documents, images, and movies across the forever- expanding digital world. The Internet allows businesses to engage customers in a creative workshop experience." This online engagement with the customers that creates new innovative solutions is Co-Creation.
Doritos and The Super Bowl
What is Doritos doing to co-create with the customers? How about a "story about eating your first Doritos chips or what life is like for the spices on the surface of the chip"? Consumers are invited to submit their 30-second homemade videos on stories about Doritos. Talk about whetting consumers' appetite for Doritos with the growing appetite of homemade videos - it appears that Doritos has created the perfect match. And the best part is the grand prize: the top video will be aired as a commercial during next year's Super Bowl (2007). Five finalists will also be awarded $10,000 each. Doritos wins by rallying hundreds of thousands of consumers to create playful videos about its chips, creating the consumer buzz around Doritos at time of the Super Bowl, and finally showcasing the advertisement in front of about a hundred million people watching the Super Bowl. Co-Creation in motion.
Aloft at Starwood
The next time you want to go to a great hotel, how about just logging online and typing in: www.virtualaloft.com. No need to leave home. Welcome to Aloft Hotel, the new futuristic hotel from Starwood. The virtual hotel invites guests to tour the hotel and get a 360 degree view, walk around the lobby, check into a room, swim in the pool, and even watch a sunset on the rooftop terrace. Starwood has taken the concept of co-creation to the next level (literally) by creating the first virtual hotel online, and simultaneously encouraging the customers to provide feedback and engage with the designers and architects who are building the real hotel.
The real hotel will not open until 2008 - plenty of time for Starwood to gather all the customer inputs and creating something that customers really crave for. What a great concept? For instance, at their website, the designers heard one question a few times on "why there wasn't a door in the bathroom." They immediately responded that "there will be a sliding door in the real hotel" and explained why it was missing in the first place. Co-Creation at work.
Timex and The Future of Time
Timex, as part of its 150th Anniversary celebration, and to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to design and innovation, conducted a global design competition: Timex2154: The Future of Time (2004+150 years=2154). Designers from more than 72 countries explored and visualized personal and portable timekeeping 150 years into the future and submitted 640 entries. An assembled world-class design team evaluated the entries in three categories: wrist-based, wearable, and conceptual, and chose the winners. Timex could not have done this alone (if they would have tried to design a futuristic watch). Instead, they were able to obtain 640 creative ideas from some of the world's best designers in a timely manner. Further, Timex created a leadership position as a Watch company by creating such a campaign and getting the inputs from some of the best designers. Co-Creation driving innovation.
Diversity drives Innovation
Gschwandtner compares the past and the present of customer innovations: "In the past, customers have been limited to communicating their wants and needs in surveys and focus groups; today, brands deploy existing technologies to map their customer’s imagination. Brands no longer view consumers as targets with a wallet, but as co-creators of exciting and profitable solutions." This is a tremendous shift. Rather than simply aiming customers for profits with obsolete products, now you are learning from them in real-time and creating better products that will in turn create profitable customers. And today's customer who is digitally engaged and enjoys personal service would not have it any other way. Gschwandtner aptly quotes the term "Diversity drives Innovation" from the book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson to demonstrate the effect of Co-Creation.
Bottomline
As Co-Creation demonstrates tangible results, more mainstream businesses will experiment and adopt it - not just technology companies. The best side effect of Co-Creation is it brings you that much closer to your customers and creates a positive business environment. The business should not become overzealous about deploying Co-Creation. It has to make observations and decisions based on sampling size and customer type on whether to go all out with customer inputs or experiment.
What does Doritos chips, Starwood hotels and Timex watches have in common? According to Gerhard Gschwandtner, Editor and Founder of Selling Power, they are all engaging their customers to co-create. In the latest issue of Selling Power, Gschwandtner talks about the role of co-creation driving innovation in mainstream businesses.
What is Co-Creation?
Gschwandtner summarizes: "Information (online) technology has empowered consumers to share ideas, documents, images, and movies across the forever- expanding digital world. The Internet allows businesses to engage customers in a creative workshop experience." This online engagement with the customers that creates new innovative solutions is Co-Creation.
Doritos and The Super Bowl
What is Doritos doing to co-create with the customers? How about a "story about eating your first Doritos chips or what life is like for the spices on the surface of the chip"? Consumers are invited to submit their 30-second homemade videos on stories about Doritos. Talk about whetting consumers' appetite for Doritos with the growing appetite of homemade videos - it appears that Doritos has created the perfect match. And the best part is the grand prize: the top video will be aired as a commercial during next year's Super Bowl (2007). Five finalists will also be awarded $10,000 each. Doritos wins by rallying hundreds of thousands of consumers to create playful videos about its chips, creating the consumer buzz around Doritos at time of the Super Bowl, and finally showcasing the advertisement in front of about a hundred million people watching the Super Bowl. Co-Creation in motion.
Aloft at Starwood
The next time you want to go to a great hotel, how about just logging online and typing in: www.virtualaloft.com. No need to leave home. Welcome to Aloft Hotel, the new futuristic hotel from Starwood. The virtual hotel invites guests to tour the hotel and get a 360 degree view, walk around the lobby, check into a room, swim in the pool, and even watch a sunset on the rooftop terrace. Starwood has taken the concept of co-creation to the next level (literally) by creating the first virtual hotel online, and simultaneously encouraging the customers to provide feedback and engage with the designers and architects who are building the real hotel.
The real hotel will not open until 2008 - plenty of time for Starwood to gather all the customer inputs and creating something that customers really crave for. What a great concept? For instance, at their website, the designers heard one question a few times on "why there wasn't a door in the bathroom." They immediately responded that "there will be a sliding door in the real hotel" and explained why it was missing in the first place. Co-Creation at work.
Timex and The Future of Time
Timex, as part of its 150th Anniversary celebration, and to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to design and innovation, conducted a global design competition: Timex2154: The Future of Time (2004+150 years=2154). Designers from more than 72 countries explored and visualized personal and portable timekeeping 150 years into the future and submitted 640 entries. An assembled world-class design team evaluated the entries in three categories: wrist-based, wearable, and conceptual, and chose the winners. Timex could not have done this alone (if they would have tried to design a futuristic watch). Instead, they were able to obtain 640 creative ideas from some of the world's best designers in a timely manner. Further, Timex created a leadership position as a Watch company by creating such a campaign and getting the inputs from some of the best designers. Co-Creation driving innovation.
Diversity drives Innovation
Gschwandtner compares the past and the present of customer innovations: "In the past, customers have been limited to communicating their wants and needs in surveys and focus groups; today, brands deploy existing technologies to map their customer’s imagination. Brands no longer view consumers as targets with a wallet, but as co-creators of exciting and profitable solutions." This is a tremendous shift. Rather than simply aiming customers for profits with obsolete products, now you are learning from them in real-time and creating better products that will in turn create profitable customers. And today's customer who is digitally engaged and enjoys personal service would not have it any other way. Gschwandtner aptly quotes the term "Diversity drives Innovation" from the book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson to demonstrate the effect of Co-Creation.
Bottomline
As Co-Creation demonstrates tangible results, more mainstream businesses will experiment and adopt it - not just technology companies. The best side effect of Co-Creation is it brings you that much closer to your customers and creates a positive business environment. The business should not become overzealous about deploying Co-Creation. It has to make observations and decisions based on sampling size and customer type on whether to go all out with customer inputs or experiment.
iPod - Apple's Best Innovation
iPod - Apple's Best Innovation
Apple is the World's Number One Innovative Company, two years in a row according to BusinessWeek's 2006 list of the world's 25 most innovative companies. BusinessWeek proclaims "their creativity goes beyond products to rewiring themselves." BusinessWeek ranks the innovative companies based on the responses received from over 1,000 global executives of the largest global corporations; survey questions include innovation metrics on process, product and business model innovations.
According to BusinessWeek, innovation today is “much more than new products.” Innovation is also “reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs.” The ubiquity of the Internet and globalization of the business expand generation of new ideas. Innovation is then “selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.”
iPod driving Apple to Number One Innovative Company
iPod, powered by Apple, introduced in 2001 and masterminded by Steve Jobs, combines outstanding design, easy-to-use interface, superb performance, and an experience like no other. Apple assumed the world’s number one innovative company position and held it again in 2006 in large part due to the exponential growth of iPod – aptly called the iPod phenomenon. Just ask the tens of millions of fans walking, driving, jogging, exercising, chatting, playing, humming, relaxing, singing, rocking, screaming, and above all enjoying their daily iPod experience. Imagine if they were to miss their iPod for a day, or even for a few hours. iPod is oxygen – pure and simple – the source of life for these millions of fans. Not to mention iPod has become associated with personal status and symbol that speaks of cool, hip, polished, and different. What began as a new product quickly became a revolution. iPod is by far the best commercial innovation the world has seen in the last few years, and perhaps is the best innovation from Apple dating back through its storied history of innovation firsts. Apple one-upped the iPod design innovation by creating new innovations in business model with the launch of iTunes online service enabled by strategic partnerships with the Music, TV and Movie industry.
A Glorious History of Innovations
Apple has created great innovations beginning with the first Apple computer in 1976, Graphical User Interface (GUI) along with the popular Macintosh introduced in 1984, the reliable PowerBook introduced in 1991, the PDA named Newton that created a new industry of handhelds in 1993, the new millennium revolution beginning with the iMac in 1998, the new iBook hot on the heels of the iMac in 1999, the iPod that put an oomph in the MP3 players and essentially changed music as we know it in 2001, iTunes software and Music store service that changed the Music industry business model and made it easy for fans to listen and buy music piecemealed in 2003, iPod mini, iPod (U2 Special Edition) and iPod photo in 2004, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod with Video and Mac Mini in 2005, the new iMac with Intel core Duo processors and the new MacBook with Intel processors in 2006.
Five years of iPod Innovations
2006 marks five years of iPod innovations. Apple's Hardware engineering chief Jon Rubinstein assembled a team of engineers to design and build the first iPod in less than a year, and it was unveiled by CEO Steve Jobs on October 23, 2001 as a Mac-compatible product with a 5GB hard drive that put "1,000 songs in your pocket." Since then, Apple has introduced fourteen different models of iPods in various colors, displaying photos, downloading and playing videos, branded and signed by U2, with numerous forms and shapes, different capacities for holding songs, pictures and videos, with connectors, next generation models with better wheels, and more. For instance, the new iPod video introduced in 2005 was the first iPod that could download and playback full-motion video with a larger color screen and better display resolution – an innovative package under $300 for the base model. Or the innovation in the wheel that is akin to the driving wheel on a car – from an original mechanical scroll wheel to the current touch-sensitive click wheel. According to PC Magazine, “In the years since (2001), the iPod's market share has grown tremendously, iPods have shrunk in size, Apple's iTunes Music Store has taken the lion's share of legal digital music downloads, and the iPod accessory market has exploded and taken on a life of its own. All this has made the iPod as synonymous with "MP3 player" as Kleenex is with facial tissues.”
The love for iPod
Why do people love iPod perhaps more than their spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend or children? It has to do with the simple yet elegant design that makes it extremely easy-to-use (Toyota’s Innovation Factory), exceptional sound, video and imagery, and the amazing experience. The flexibility provided by the iTunes software and service that allows you to try and download any music and video with the click of a button from any computer or the Internet to your iPod. And all the available accessories from wireless headsets, remote controls, beautiful skins, acoustic speakers, to connectors that can literally take your iPod music and videos anywhere – inside the room, in the car, in the office, on the plane, even while taking shower. iPod fans can’t live without their iPods literally. And the search is still on for a music fan that has switched from an iPod to another MP3 player. And there is that small sharing thing: hard-core iPod fans don’t like to share their iPods with others. BYOiPod. Bring your own iPod.
iPod’s Topline
In the latest quarter ending September 2006, Apple sold 8.7 million new iPods, generating $1.5 Billion in sales, a third of Apple’s total quarterly sales. By the end of 2006, there will be over 67 million iPods in the world; Apple is poised to eclipse the 100 million iPods mark in 2007. iPod has revived Apple from the depths in 2001 when annual sales had plummeted to $5.36 Billion and Apple was losing money. Apple’s shares were under $10. Compare this to 2005, when Apple had sales of $13.9 Billion, and profits of over $1 Billion. Apple’s shares have climbed sixteen folds. The Apple machine is kicking into high gear, in large part due to iPod Innovation Revolution. iPod’s halo effect is even evident in the latest quarter when Apple sold more Macs than it has ever sold before: 1.61 million.
The next generation iPods
What innovations can be expected from iPod? Can Apple create jazzier, easier, feature-rich iPods?
How about iPods that beam songs and videos to each other, to a computer or even to a TV? Or iPods that deliver Presentations and Live Videos in team meetings. iPods with GPS Navigation system. iPods that combine as cell phones. iPods that can receive satellite radios. What innovations will Apple bring out next? Steve Jobs indicated in the latest quarterly earnings press release that 2007 will be an exciting year full of great new products. The world will be watching.
Apple is the World's Number One Innovative Company, two years in a row according to BusinessWeek's 2006 list of the world's 25 most innovative companies. BusinessWeek proclaims "their creativity goes beyond products to rewiring themselves." BusinessWeek ranks the innovative companies based on the responses received from over 1,000 global executives of the largest global corporations; survey questions include innovation metrics on process, product and business model innovations.
According to BusinessWeek, innovation today is “much more than new products.” Innovation is also “reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs.” The ubiquity of the Internet and globalization of the business expand generation of new ideas. Innovation is then “selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.”
iPod driving Apple to Number One Innovative Company
iPod, powered by Apple, introduced in 2001 and masterminded by Steve Jobs, combines outstanding design, easy-to-use interface, superb performance, and an experience like no other. Apple assumed the world’s number one innovative company position and held it again in 2006 in large part due to the exponential growth of iPod – aptly called the iPod phenomenon. Just ask the tens of millions of fans walking, driving, jogging, exercising, chatting, playing, humming, relaxing, singing, rocking, screaming, and above all enjoying their daily iPod experience. Imagine if they were to miss their iPod for a day, or even for a few hours. iPod is oxygen – pure and simple – the source of life for these millions of fans. Not to mention iPod has become associated with personal status and symbol that speaks of cool, hip, polished, and different. What began as a new product quickly became a revolution. iPod is by far the best commercial innovation the world has seen in the last few years, and perhaps is the best innovation from Apple dating back through its storied history of innovation firsts. Apple one-upped the iPod design innovation by creating new innovations in business model with the launch of iTunes online service enabled by strategic partnerships with the Music, TV and Movie industry.
A Glorious History of Innovations
Apple has created great innovations beginning with the first Apple computer in 1976, Graphical User Interface (GUI) along with the popular Macintosh introduced in 1984, the reliable PowerBook introduced in 1991, the PDA named Newton that created a new industry of handhelds in 1993, the new millennium revolution beginning with the iMac in 1998, the new iBook hot on the heels of the iMac in 1999, the iPod that put an oomph in the MP3 players and essentially changed music as we know it in 2001, iTunes software and Music store service that changed the Music industry business model and made it easy for fans to listen and buy music piecemealed in 2003, iPod mini, iPod (U2 Special Edition) and iPod photo in 2004, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod with Video and Mac Mini in 2005, the new iMac with Intel core Duo processors and the new MacBook with Intel processors in 2006.
Five years of iPod Innovations
2006 marks five years of iPod innovations. Apple's Hardware engineering chief Jon Rubinstein assembled a team of engineers to design and build the first iPod in less than a year, and it was unveiled by CEO Steve Jobs on October 23, 2001 as a Mac-compatible product with a 5GB hard drive that put "1,000 songs in your pocket." Since then, Apple has introduced fourteen different models of iPods in various colors, displaying photos, downloading and playing videos, branded and signed by U2, with numerous forms and shapes, different capacities for holding songs, pictures and videos, with connectors, next generation models with better wheels, and more. For instance, the new iPod video introduced in 2005 was the first iPod that could download and playback full-motion video with a larger color screen and better display resolution – an innovative package under $300 for the base model. Or the innovation in the wheel that is akin to the driving wheel on a car – from an original mechanical scroll wheel to the current touch-sensitive click wheel. According to PC Magazine, “In the years since (2001), the iPod's market share has grown tremendously, iPods have shrunk in size, Apple's iTunes Music Store has taken the lion's share of legal digital music downloads, and the iPod accessory market has exploded and taken on a life of its own. All this has made the iPod as synonymous with "MP3 player" as Kleenex is with facial tissues.”
The love for iPod
Why do people love iPod perhaps more than their spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend or children? It has to do with the simple yet elegant design that makes it extremely easy-to-use (Toyota’s Innovation Factory), exceptional sound, video and imagery, and the amazing experience. The flexibility provided by the iTunes software and service that allows you to try and download any music and video with the click of a button from any computer or the Internet to your iPod. And all the available accessories from wireless headsets, remote controls, beautiful skins, acoustic speakers, to connectors that can literally take your iPod music and videos anywhere – inside the room, in the car, in the office, on the plane, even while taking shower. iPod fans can’t live without their iPods literally. And the search is still on for a music fan that has switched from an iPod to another MP3 player. And there is that small sharing thing: hard-core iPod fans don’t like to share their iPods with others. BYOiPod. Bring your own iPod.
iPod’s Topline
In the latest quarter ending September 2006, Apple sold 8.7 million new iPods, generating $1.5 Billion in sales, a third of Apple’s total quarterly sales. By the end of 2006, there will be over 67 million iPods in the world; Apple is poised to eclipse the 100 million iPods mark in 2007. iPod has revived Apple from the depths in 2001 when annual sales had plummeted to $5.36 Billion and Apple was losing money. Apple’s shares were under $10. Compare this to 2005, when Apple had sales of $13.9 Billion, and profits of over $1 Billion. Apple’s shares have climbed sixteen folds. The Apple machine is kicking into high gear, in large part due to iPod Innovation Revolution. iPod’s halo effect is even evident in the latest quarter when Apple sold more Macs than it has ever sold before: 1.61 million.
The next generation iPods
What innovations can be expected from iPod? Can Apple create jazzier, easier, feature-rich iPods?
How about iPods that beam songs and videos to each other, to a computer or even to a TV? Or iPods that deliver Presentations and Live Videos in team meetings. iPods with GPS Navigation system. iPods that combine as cell phones. iPods that can receive satellite radios. What innovations will Apple bring out next? Steve Jobs indicated in the latest quarterly earnings press release that 2007 will be an exciting year full of great new products. The world will be watching.
Creativity Driving Innovation In Business: Toyota's Innovation Factory
Toyota's Innovation Factory
How does an organization implement one million new creative ideas each year? And become a perennial top ten profitable companies of the world. And achieve market leadership while relentlessly pursuing perfection and delivering some of the best new innovations the world has ever seen.
Welcome to Toyota’s Innovation Factory. The world knows Toyota as the car maker that produces such great brands as Camry, Lexus, Prius, Scion, Rav4 and more. For example, the introduction of the Hybrid car back in 1997 when other car makers had not even put together a design for a hybrid car, much less a concept car.
Matthew E. May, a senior University of Toyota advisor, and the author of “The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation” puts forth a passionate perspective on how Toyota creates new innovations at the breakneck speed of over 2,500 new ideas implemented every day. How is this possible? Innovation at Toyota has to do with the history, foundation, guiding principles and practice.
Foundation of Elegance and Innovation
Toyota was founded by Sakichi Toyoda as a handloom company. In 1898, Toyoda created Japan’s first steam-powered loom. Toyota Motors began as Toyota Automatic Loom Works, a company whose looms were of the “highest quality, lowest cost, and easiest to use.” Sound familiar. Hence the term “Elegant Solution” which according to May is about “finding the aha solution to a problem with the greatest parsimony of effort and expense.” And May argues that at Toyota, you get elegance from creativity, simplicity, intelligence, subtlety, economy, and quality. Further, May lays the groundwork for the term Innovation, which according to David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue means: "Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it's ever been done before." Indeed. This has become one of the guiding principles at Toyota.
Guiding Principles for Driving Innovation
Three guiding principles drive Innovation and create elegant solutions at Toyota, which were originated and finessed by Toyoda:
1. The Art of Ingenuity
May asserts that in order to succeed in an ever complex business world with competing pressures to innovate amidst competitive pressures and yet manage risks and uncertainty, an individual has to be both an artist and a scientist. Ingenuity creates images of cleverness, resourcefulness, initiative, originality, inventiveness, creativity, skill and even cunning – resulting in innovation. Sound contradictory. The key is to continually ask the question: “Is there a better way?”
This is possible if the individual fully leverages their domain knowledge and expertise, continuously pursues every possible way to innovate and perfect, challenges opposition tactfully, does not accept the status quo, and uses organizational efficiencies to drive new ideas and methods. Toyota has made ingenious vehicles such as Camry, RAV4, 4-Runner, RX which have become perpetual favorites in the market place.
2. The (relentless) Pursuit of Perfection
May argues that for a business to succeed at innovation, it has to rigorously search for an optimal solution – one that yields low-cost, low-risk, high-impact breakthrough. Innovation happens at Toyota through systematic pursuit of perfection at every level, every department, in everything Toyota does. Perfection equates to excellence, precision, flawlessness at Toyota. And it is this chase for perfection that creates better processes, products and services for tomorrow, today. It takes many small steps (Collins - Built to Last) to create sustainable innovation. For example, the Lexus cars made by Toyota epitomize perfection in the form of car design, function, performance, service and total satisfaction.
3. The Rhythm of Fit
May propounds that great innovation has to fit – fit the innovator, the times and the larger system. How can a great innovation shape and then change the attitudes and behaviors of people, the way they think, they work, they live? A change that fits in the current time and environment. For example, the Toyota Prius car. A hybrid car that provides plenty of room in the inside, shows solid performance on the highway, provides all the safety features, and gives great gas mileage and range. Toyota envisioned the changing environment of higher gas costs and pollution that wanted a car which is economical to drive, is environmentally friendly (green innovation), and does not sacrifice the inherent need for roominess, safety and performance.
The three principles create both the policy and framework at Toyota for driving innovation and creating elegant solutions. How would you find and drive innovation at your organization? Here are six ways to find innovation. If you are a technology company, read about how Intuit creates innovations and achieves market leadership using similar principles. May asserts that these three principles are non-negotiable and must be adhered to by everyone at Toyota.
Blocking Innovation
May also talks about the obstacles that hinder sustainable business innovation which Toyota has tactfully avoided through out its history. He calls these innovation blockers “temptations”, which are about taking short cuts, trying to hit a home run every time, creating products too complex that are top loaded with extra dressing, and without a real understanding of the innate customer need.
Here are the three Innovation blockers (does your organization block creativity and innovation? Here are some tips to unblock creativity and innovation) that Toyota has avoided over the years:
1. Swinging For Fences
High risk. High reward. NOT. When a company only focuses on trying to go all out for home runs every time at bat, you will strike out more often than not. The key is to build a sustainable batting average -- lasting innovation, and not just go out swinging every time at bat.
2. Getting Too Clever
Every product manager at one time or the other is guilty of adding all those extra "bells and whistles" that the customer does not care about. This happens when you bow in to competitive pressures, or needs of specific customers that are not indicative of the mass market. The company ends up creating products that customers actually run away from.
3. Solving Problems Frivolously
May calls this the "brainstorm" trap, which is creating something that is out of line with the company’s core values, not serving customer’s true needs, and worse yet, something that is created hastily without rigor and analysis.
Ten Practices for Making Innovation
May showcases the following Ten Practices that Toyota has adopted on its core principles towards making Innovation happen:
1. Let Learning Lead
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first.” Education and Learning can drive substantial innovation.
2. Learn to See
“Elegant solutions often come from customers -- get out more and live in their world.” The key is to unearth the latent needs of the customers, and perceive the emerging needs.
3. Design for Today
“Focus on clear and present needs, or your great ideas remain just that.” Innovation that drives business in today’s market is likely to get funded and succeed.
4. Think in Pictures
“Make your intentions visual -- you'll surprise yourself with the image.” In Six ways to find innovation, we talked about the need for visual imagery.
5. Capture the Intangible
“The most compelling solutions are often perceptual and emotional.” This is where the product manager needs intuition and the ability to read their customers’ minds.
6. Leverage the Limits
“Restraining forces rule -- resource constraints can spur ingenuity.” It is critical to know what you can deliver, how you can deliver and by when.
7. Master the Tension
“Breakthrough thinking demands something to break through.” In Failures and Stumbles driving innovation, we talked about the five takeaways stimulating innovation. Accept that mistakes will be made.
8. Run the Numbers
“Think for yourself -- temper instinct with insight, focus on facts, and do the math.” A sound technical analysis is critical before you begin a new product innovation. This should take into account such factors as risks, probabilities of success, and lessons learned from past projects.
9. Make Kaizen Mandatory
“Pursuing perfection requires great discipline -- create a standard, follow it, and find a better way.” A process is a must have. Think Six Sigma. Think Rigor at Intuit.
10. Keep It Lean
“Complexity kills -- scale it back, make it simple, and let it flow.” Innovation happens when you can simplify the intended application and make it so easy-to-use that it becomes a no-brainer.
Bottomline:
Toyota has become the dominant car maker today based on large part due to the Innovation Factory. A Factory based on a foundation of creating elegant solutions through three guiding principles, avoiding three “temptations” and driving ten production practices.
"Toyota is becoming a double threat: the world's finest manufacturer and a truly great innovator . . . that formula, a combination of production prowess and technical innovation, is an unbeatable recipe for success."
* Fortune, February 2006
References:
Matthew E. May: “The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation”. Free Press. 2006.
How does an organization implement one million new creative ideas each year? And become a perennial top ten profitable companies of the world. And achieve market leadership while relentlessly pursuing perfection and delivering some of the best new innovations the world has ever seen.
Welcome to Toyota’s Innovation Factory. The world knows Toyota as the car maker that produces such great brands as Camry, Lexus, Prius, Scion, Rav4 and more. For example, the introduction of the Hybrid car back in 1997 when other car makers had not even put together a design for a hybrid car, much less a concept car.
Matthew E. May, a senior University of Toyota advisor, and the author of “The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation” puts forth a passionate perspective on how Toyota creates new innovations at the breakneck speed of over 2,500 new ideas implemented every day. How is this possible? Innovation at Toyota has to do with the history, foundation, guiding principles and practice.
Foundation of Elegance and Innovation
Toyota was founded by Sakichi Toyoda as a handloom company. In 1898, Toyoda created Japan’s first steam-powered loom. Toyota Motors began as Toyota Automatic Loom Works, a company whose looms were of the “highest quality, lowest cost, and easiest to use.” Sound familiar. Hence the term “Elegant Solution” which according to May is about “finding the aha solution to a problem with the greatest parsimony of effort and expense.” And May argues that at Toyota, you get elegance from creativity, simplicity, intelligence, subtlety, economy, and quality. Further, May lays the groundwork for the term Innovation, which according to David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue means: "Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it's ever been done before." Indeed. This has become one of the guiding principles at Toyota.
Guiding Principles for Driving Innovation
Three guiding principles drive Innovation and create elegant solutions at Toyota, which were originated and finessed by Toyoda:
1. The Art of Ingenuity
May asserts that in order to succeed in an ever complex business world with competing pressures to innovate amidst competitive pressures and yet manage risks and uncertainty, an individual has to be both an artist and a scientist. Ingenuity creates images of cleverness, resourcefulness, initiative, originality, inventiveness, creativity, skill and even cunning – resulting in innovation. Sound contradictory. The key is to continually ask the question: “Is there a better way?”
This is possible if the individual fully leverages their domain knowledge and expertise, continuously pursues every possible way to innovate and perfect, challenges opposition tactfully, does not accept the status quo, and uses organizational efficiencies to drive new ideas and methods. Toyota has made ingenious vehicles such as Camry, RAV4, 4-Runner, RX which have become perpetual favorites in the market place.
2. The (relentless) Pursuit of Perfection
May argues that for a business to succeed at innovation, it has to rigorously search for an optimal solution – one that yields low-cost, low-risk, high-impact breakthrough. Innovation happens at Toyota through systematic pursuit of perfection at every level, every department, in everything Toyota does. Perfection equates to excellence, precision, flawlessness at Toyota. And it is this chase for perfection that creates better processes, products and services for tomorrow, today. It takes many small steps (Collins - Built to Last) to create sustainable innovation. For example, the Lexus cars made by Toyota epitomize perfection in the form of car design, function, performance, service and total satisfaction.
3. The Rhythm of Fit
May propounds that great innovation has to fit – fit the innovator, the times and the larger system. How can a great innovation shape and then change the attitudes and behaviors of people, the way they think, they work, they live? A change that fits in the current time and environment. For example, the Toyota Prius car. A hybrid car that provides plenty of room in the inside, shows solid performance on the highway, provides all the safety features, and gives great gas mileage and range. Toyota envisioned the changing environment of higher gas costs and pollution that wanted a car which is economical to drive, is environmentally friendly (green innovation), and does not sacrifice the inherent need for roominess, safety and performance.
The three principles create both the policy and framework at Toyota for driving innovation and creating elegant solutions. How would you find and drive innovation at your organization? Here are six ways to find innovation. If you are a technology company, read about how Intuit creates innovations and achieves market leadership using similar principles. May asserts that these three principles are non-negotiable and must be adhered to by everyone at Toyota.
Blocking Innovation
May also talks about the obstacles that hinder sustainable business innovation which Toyota has tactfully avoided through out its history. He calls these innovation blockers “temptations”, which are about taking short cuts, trying to hit a home run every time, creating products too complex that are top loaded with extra dressing, and without a real understanding of the innate customer need.
Here are the three Innovation blockers (does your organization block creativity and innovation? Here are some tips to unblock creativity and innovation) that Toyota has avoided over the years:
1. Swinging For Fences
High risk. High reward. NOT. When a company only focuses on trying to go all out for home runs every time at bat, you will strike out more often than not. The key is to build a sustainable batting average -- lasting innovation, and not just go out swinging every time at bat.
2. Getting Too Clever
Every product manager at one time or the other is guilty of adding all those extra "bells and whistles" that the customer does not care about. This happens when you bow in to competitive pressures, or needs of specific customers that are not indicative of the mass market. The company ends up creating products that customers actually run away from.
3. Solving Problems Frivolously
May calls this the "brainstorm" trap, which is creating something that is out of line with the company’s core values, not serving customer’s true needs, and worse yet, something that is created hastily without rigor and analysis.
Ten Practices for Making Innovation
May showcases the following Ten Practices that Toyota has adopted on its core principles towards making Innovation happen:
1. Let Learning Lead
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first.” Education and Learning can drive substantial innovation.
2. Learn to See
“Elegant solutions often come from customers -- get out more and live in their world.” The key is to unearth the latent needs of the customers, and perceive the emerging needs.
3. Design for Today
“Focus on clear and present needs, or your great ideas remain just that.” Innovation that drives business in today’s market is likely to get funded and succeed.
4. Think in Pictures
“Make your intentions visual -- you'll surprise yourself with the image.” In Six ways to find innovation, we talked about the need for visual imagery.
5. Capture the Intangible
“The most compelling solutions are often perceptual and emotional.” This is where the product manager needs intuition and the ability to read their customers’ minds.
6. Leverage the Limits
“Restraining forces rule -- resource constraints can spur ingenuity.” It is critical to know what you can deliver, how you can deliver and by when.
7. Master the Tension
“Breakthrough thinking demands something to break through.” In Failures and Stumbles driving innovation, we talked about the five takeaways stimulating innovation. Accept that mistakes will be made.
8. Run the Numbers
“Think for yourself -- temper instinct with insight, focus on facts, and do the math.” A sound technical analysis is critical before you begin a new product innovation. This should take into account such factors as risks, probabilities of success, and lessons learned from past projects.
9. Make Kaizen Mandatory
“Pursuing perfection requires great discipline -- create a standard, follow it, and find a better way.” A process is a must have. Think Six Sigma. Think Rigor at Intuit.
10. Keep It Lean
“Complexity kills -- scale it back, make it simple, and let it flow.” Innovation happens when you can simplify the intended application and make it so easy-to-use that it becomes a no-brainer.
Bottomline:
Toyota has become the dominant car maker today based on large part due to the Innovation Factory. A Factory based on a foundation of creating elegant solutions through three guiding principles, avoiding three “temptations” and driving ten production practices.
"Toyota is becoming a double threat: the world's finest manufacturer and a truly great innovator . . . that formula, a combination of production prowess and technical innovation, is an unbeatable recipe for success."
* Fortune, February 2006
References:
Matthew E. May: “The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation”. Free Press. 2006.
09 October 2006
Climatechange: shock report
Climatechange: shock report
Rosslyn Beeby
Monday, 9 October 2006
Leading aid agencies are calling for an urgent review of Australia's immigration program, warning millions of people in the Asia-Pacific region will be left homeless by climate change in the next 40 years.
World Vision chief executive, Reverend Tim Costello said yesterday, "Climate change is emerging as a significant threat to political stability and security in the region.
"The Australian Government cannot hope to win a war on terror in the Asia-Pacific region if it isn't prepared also to wage a war against global warming."
Mr Costello warned Australia would need to assist with relocating and retraining people in developing countries affected by climate change and "develop flexible immigration programs that will help address these needs".
According to a CSIRO report, commissioned by aid and conservation agencies forming the national Climate Change and Development Roundtable, more than 150,000 million people in the Asia-Pacific region would be displaced by rising sea levels by 2050.
It warns that climate change impacts on human security in a region - where 60 per cent of the world's population lives - could be "sufficiently severe" to induce or contribute to violence and armed conflict threatening national and regional security.
Regional impacts would include intensification of tropical storms and cyclones, water shortages, rising sea levels, increased spread of dengue fever and malaria, crop failures, food scarcity and threats to national economic productivity.
The report, by scientists with CSIRO's Marine and Atmospheric Research division, says coastal areas most at risk from rising sea levels were low-lying river deltas in Vietnam, China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Among Pacific Island nations, Tonga and Papua New Guinea have both recorded sea level rises of 8mm per year over the past 12 years. The Federated States of Micronesia has recorded a rise of 21mm per year since 2001.
"With 30-50cm of sea-level rise, the economic costs in the Asia-Pacific region rise to the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year and over 100,000 kilometres of coastline experiences the effects," the reports says.
It warns "there is little room for optimism", with climate models predicting temperatures are likely to warm more quickly in the arid areas of northern Pakistan, western China and India.
China could lose up to 70 per cent of its high-altitude forests and some Pacific Island nations would lose more than 50 per cent of coastal mangrove ecosystems.
The report says hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change have already caused an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires in Asia. Fires associated with higher temperatures caused by the 1997-98 El Nino released 2.1 billion tons of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, with 60 per cent coming from wildfires in South-East Asia.
The Australian Conservation Foundation's Asia-Pacific program coordinator Lee Tan said villages in rainforest areas of Papua New Guinea had received no rain for the past four months and were experiencing water shortages. "These are rainforest areas, and they are in drought," she said. "Australia is the region's biggest contributor to greenhouse emissions and therefore we have an obligation to support countries that are being affected by climate change."
According to the CSIRO report, Australia has the highest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide - 17.2 tonnes for each person - for the Asia Pacific region.
Rosslyn Beeby
Monday, 9 October 2006
Leading aid agencies are calling for an urgent review of Australia's immigration program, warning millions of people in the Asia-Pacific region will be left homeless by climate change in the next 40 years.
World Vision chief executive, Reverend Tim Costello said yesterday, "Climate change is emerging as a significant threat to political stability and security in the region.
"The Australian Government cannot hope to win a war on terror in the Asia-Pacific region if it isn't prepared also to wage a war against global warming."
Mr Costello warned Australia would need to assist with relocating and retraining people in developing countries affected by climate change and "develop flexible immigration programs that will help address these needs".
According to a CSIRO report, commissioned by aid and conservation agencies forming the national Climate Change and Development Roundtable, more than 150,000 million people in the Asia-Pacific region would be displaced by rising sea levels by 2050.
It warns that climate change impacts on human security in a region - where 60 per cent of the world's population lives - could be "sufficiently severe" to induce or contribute to violence and armed conflict threatening national and regional security.
Regional impacts would include intensification of tropical storms and cyclones, water shortages, rising sea levels, increased spread of dengue fever and malaria, crop failures, food scarcity and threats to national economic productivity.
The report, by scientists with CSIRO's Marine and Atmospheric Research division, says coastal areas most at risk from rising sea levels were low-lying river deltas in Vietnam, China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Among Pacific Island nations, Tonga and Papua New Guinea have both recorded sea level rises of 8mm per year over the past 12 years. The Federated States of Micronesia has recorded a rise of 21mm per year since 2001.
"With 30-50cm of sea-level rise, the economic costs in the Asia-Pacific region rise to the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year and over 100,000 kilometres of coastline experiences the effects," the reports says.
It warns "there is little room for optimism", with climate models predicting temperatures are likely to warm more quickly in the arid areas of northern Pakistan, western China and India.
China could lose up to 70 per cent of its high-altitude forests and some Pacific Island nations would lose more than 50 per cent of coastal mangrove ecosystems.
The report says hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change have already caused an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires in Asia. Fires associated with higher temperatures caused by the 1997-98 El Nino released 2.1 billion tons of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, with 60 per cent coming from wildfires in South-East Asia.
The Australian Conservation Foundation's Asia-Pacific program coordinator Lee Tan said villages in rainforest areas of Papua New Guinea had received no rain for the past four months and were experiencing water shortages. "These are rainforest areas, and they are in drought," she said. "Australia is the region's biggest contributor to greenhouse emissions and therefore we have an obligation to support countries that are being affected by climate change."
According to the CSIRO report, Australia has the highest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide - 17.2 tonnes for each person - for the Asia Pacific region.
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