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Chip War - why chips are interesting again

Over the last 20 years we have been all too focused on software while the hardware chips that run the software have been seen as the uninteresting plumbing that increasingly often sits in the "cloud" and develops with speed of the famous Moores law. Nothing to care about, right? WRONG!

In Chip War - the fight for world's most critical technology Chris Miller reviews the fascinating history of chips from transistors to the dominance by US-led companies, to the rise and dominance of TSMC. Rarely a household name but a Taiwanese company that has become the prime manufacturer of world's most advanced semiconductor processor chips for companies like Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. If you thought the chip shortage during Covid was problematic and slowed the economy, that was nothing. If a major earthquake or Chinese invasion would hit Taiwan it would send the world's car, computer, electronics, white goods etc markets in free fall due to a lack of chips. Replacing the chip fabs, and rearranging the supply chains would take closer to a decade than a year or two. That is how consolidated the industry has become. The book describes the amazing story of the rise of Taiwan and its geopolitical implications for China and US relations.

The book describes the early days of Silicon Valley, the pioneers like Morris Chang, William Shockley, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Andy Grove, and many many more. How the Texas Instrument, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and many others got started and later missed critical turns as the business shifted. If you want to know what FinFETs are and if you are interested in how the dutch company ASML got into a defacto monopoly position in the most advanced EUV lithography systems that bend the laws of physics by using 13.5nm wavelength extreme ultraviolet light that enables etching the smallest transistors in 3D on the silicon wafers - this book is for you. It also discusses X86, ARM, and Risc-V processor architectures, the rise of fabless chip companies like ARM and Nvidia and related business models.

So why haven't you heard more about the chips previously? It is not because there wouldn't be much interesting happening, on the contrary! Chips are embedded in almost everything today and the technology behind them is way beyond rocket science in terms of how advanced it is. I can't think of anything else that would be more complex to produce and more expensive to set up a manufacturing facility (in the billions) for. When everything works we get cheap chips that go into every device we use and can't live without. What is crazy is that due to the complexity there are only a few companies in the world that can produce chips like these and the industry is dependent on even single suppliers for some of the critical machinery. As long as no geopolitical or actual earthquakes interrupt the production of the latest chips, hardly anyone will notice the amazing development in the chip industry. But, if something happens, silicon chips - world's most critical technology, will soon be a household discussion topic.

How to avoid a climate disaster?

The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need

Bill has put a lot of his time and money into figuring out how to solve the warming climate problem. The book promises solutions, and while it offers solutions in the end, those are maybe not the most interesting part of the book. I want to touch upon three things I think the book explains well: 1) why it’s hard, 2) what is the big picture of the problem, 3) concept of green premiums.

Why is it hard?

51 billion to zero – in 20-30 years. Getting rid of almost every source of CO2 emission and offsetting the few ones we can’t get rid of. That is what countries are pledging to do, and that is what is needed as a minimum. This is hard because it is not only about doing quite a bit, we really have to get down, to ZERO, and then CO2 negative. The good metaphor here is the bath tub that is filling up, and we don’t want it to spill over. We can’t just reduce our speed of emitting, we need to stop and start removing CO2 in absolute terms from the atmosphere and with a blazingly fast speed compared to how the world so far has developed.

What is the big picture of the problem?

When we talk about human generated CO2, we mostly think about electricity and transportation. The book splits the CO2 emissions into 5 categories we need to solve:

(31%) Making things (cements, steel, plastics)

(27%) Plugging in (electricity)

(19%) Growing things (Plants and animals)

(16%) Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships)

(7%) Keeping warm and cool

In the biggest category of “Making things”, we are barely out of the R&D phase for the first replacement materials.

Electricity generation needs a wide mix of green alternatives but it looks very difficult to reach green electricity without strong nuclear investments in addition to the wind, solar, and battery that have been developing fast over the last 20 years.

Growing things with less CO2 means less meat production and agricultural practices sinking carbon into the soil. Changing our diet to animal substitutes is happening but is it fast enough?

Green premium

The concepts of green premium is useful when comparing new and old technologies. While governments, companies and consumers can choose green products either by free choice or due to legislation it is bound to create problems if the green premium (price of a green product vs a non green) is significant. Many can’t afford the green option for a reason or another and as a business or country your competitiveness will suffer. All innovation has to target cost efficiency and a negative green premium, meaning that selecting the environmentally friendly product is more affordable.

Summary

The book managed to provide an overall framework how to think about climate solutions, what is big and what is small. The actual solutions are fairly simple on paper and Bill does a good job on summarizing his view. As we all know, the problems are not as much technical in nature, rather political. I can only hope Covid19 has brought the world together in solving global problems and we can soon smoothly transition our focus from vaccines to effective global climate policies.

The approach of the book was very much for the average Joe, which felt a little too simplified for someone who knows the difference between kilowatts and megawatts. I felt I learned a few things about potential solutions but not much in depth. There could have been deeper technology reviews and predictions on what technologies will succeed better than others.

#book #book review #bill gates #climate science

Endurance. A year in space, a lifetime of discovery - book review

Scott Kelly has the world record of longest spaceflight. 340 days, almost a full year. Just recently astronaut Kristina Koch came quite close with 328 days.

The book Endurance tells two parallel stories: about the year in space 2015/16, and the life story of Scott and how became an astronaut together with his twin brother Mark.

A year in space doesn’t sound like such a feat when we consider that there are people traveling to the International Space station ISS all the time and soon we are planning to go to Mars. The story about the year in space gives a very personal story on the risks and challenges with space travel and shows that space travel is still far away from easy and risk free.

When Scott gets home after the year in space he can hardly walk despite 2 hours of exercise he has done every day during his year in space. The book begins with him at a welcome home dinner 2 days after returning to earth. Every joint in the body hurts, legs are swollen and he has fever. When he is laying down his skin burns from a rash over his back as it is not used to gravity and pressure. The body has adapted to zero gravity in many ways by reducing bone mass, muscles etc and getting used to gravity again takes months.

Scott also gives a personal account of how difficult it is to be isolated both mentally and physically. Having your spouse and kids back on earth and trying to keep up the distance relationships despite reasonable connectivity. Being away from nature, from fresh food, inside a small metal structure floating in space. If something happens to your health, there is no doctor to examine you and perhaps perform surgery or give you a specialized drugs to treat. Supplies are not as certain as they might seem. Several cargo rocket launches failed during Scotts year in space and supplies were running out. It is also interesting to understand how frail the ISS is as a living environment. There is a constant risk of fire, a collision with space debries and particles and In order for astronauts and cosmonauts to be able to live, there are many processes that need to work seamlessly 24/7. Many are things we don’t need to worry to much about on earth. These are things like producing oxygen from water, removing excessive CO2 from the air, recycling water, ensuring solar panels are working, to working toilets, waste disposal etc. Everything has to work, all the time otherwise there will be serious problems very fast.

Scotts life story that is told in parallel to the year in space is encouraging for someone who hasn’t succeeded that well in early school years. He is barely managing his school and lacks vision of what he wants to do with his life until one day as freshman in college he picks up a book about a test pilot who went to space and gets excited, and finds his passion. He envisions himself as a fighter pilot and astranout and starts planning on what it takes to become one. Due to poor study performance he has to really put in all efforts. He only gets into a Maritime College but after working on his study technique and working hard, he gets into a flight school from where he graduates and gets to fly F14 Tomcat on aircraft carriers. After missions in e.g. Persian Gulf he becomes a test pilot and a few years later he applies to NASA to become a space shuttle pilot. He manages to get in to NASA at the same time as his twin brother. Scott goes onto flying two pace shuttle missions, first in 1999 fixing Hubble and second in 2007. Before his year long journey on ISS in 2015/16 he spent 3 months on ISS in beginning of 2011. It is quite a story of twin brothers becoming astronauts from growing up in a modest blue collar family with a father who is an alcoholic police officer and a mother who pushes herself to become a police officer in her mid career.

The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in astronaut life, how it is to live on ISS and inspiring personal success stories.

Links:

Scott Kelly reflects on his year in space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mupWhk2cbT0

Stunning views from ISS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg9R4yykvqU

#space ISS

Global fishing crimes – and using satellite technology to combat them

I attended the Fisheries Crime symposium in Copenhagen October 2018 where fishing ministers, legislators, police, coastal guards, experts, and service providers, in total 350 people, gathered to share challenges and solutions related to national and transnational fishery related crimes such as illegal fishing.

STS-50, illegal fishing vessel

What is Illegal fishing and IUU?

Illegal fishing is often called IUU fishing, meaning Illegal Unregulated and Unreported fishing which already explains the ambiguity of the problem. Some of the problems are not regulated by policy sufficiently in the relevant countries, and there is landing of more fish than what is actually reported. In total the problem is estimated to amount to $23B annually.

Illegal fishing includes problems like

using illegal fishing gears, such as bottom trawling in areas where this is forbidden or even using explosives or chemicals

non-licensed fishing where the fisher doesn’t have the right to fish in the area

fishing illegal catch like fishing shark only for their fins

fishing in protected areas

There are different types of illegal fishing. There are the artesan fishermen, who in many developing countries are the majority of the illegal fishers, who don’t bother to get the licenses and don’t want to have the obligations related to having the license. They fish in the local waters and sell to the local markets. On the other side of the spectrum are the real bad guys, the large fishing vessels hoovering the sea they are fishing in without permits, with illegal fishing equipment, often using slavery crews, under convenience flags, turning off their AIS transmitters and being financed by criminal organizations. In addition to the actual illegal fishing there is the trans-shipment where often large fish factory vessels meet with smaller shipping boats at open sea to get the fish catch, maybe mix legal and illegal fish. Later they land the frozen fish products somewhere far away from where the fish were actually caught. Many countries forbid transshipment.

What is the Impact of illegal fishing for the countries?

Illegal fishing is devastating for many countries and is one of our top global problems. We all share the benefits of healthy oceans, and humankind could not survive without them.

Ecological impact is the obvious. This means for example overfishing which causes fish stocks to be depleted or destroying nursing habitats through fishing with illegal fishing gear. FAO estimates that of the global fish stocks, already 90% are fully or overexploited.

Tax evasion means that the nation misses out on direct license fees from fishers as well as taxes from the industry and economic activity that would exist if the fish was landed in the country.

Food security is not necessary obvious but what happens with significant illegal fishing is that the fish that would be catched by local fishermen and consumed by the locals, is exported to foreign market, the money goes abroad and the local communities need to import food to meet the protein needs. This causes financial distress on the local communities and can cause local fishermen communities to pursue illegal activities to get their income when fishing doesn’t provide them with food on the table.

Tourism – Many countries have an important tourism industry that relies on having a living sea to for example divers or sport fishers.

Corruption, money laundering etc are related crimes to illegal fishing and organized crimes.

In summary, the impact of illegal fishing is much more severe than someone just catching some of the nation’s fish. Short term it hits the local communities and the nations ability to have healthy economics, and long term it influences the ocean’s ecology that affects all of us.

Transnational crimes and fishing

Interpol considers fishing crimes as one of the major focus areas for their environmental crimes combatting efforts. Why is illegal fishing of interest for Interpol who mainly focuses on transnational organized crimes. It seems that there are a host of serious crimes related to illegal fishing such as slavery, drugs, weapons and human trafficking. Drug, weapon and human trafficking has been an expansion business area for illegal fishers, as they know the seas and ports and can move without officials taking notice. These activities are mainly handled by transnational organized crime.

Unfortunately, slavery still exists and seems to flourish in illegal fishing. After the worker has entered a fishing vessel, there is no place to run and no way to ask for help. Especially in South East Asia this is a common problem.

Crimes mostly pays in area of illegal fishing. There are several reasons for that. Chance of getting caught is small. Prosecution is difficult due to lack of legislation regarding fishing crimes in high seas or EEZ which are not within country borders- In addition, the sentences are mostly financial like fines or losing fishing gears, seldom prison.

How satellites can help

There are several satellite related systems that relate to fishing vessels: GPS, AIS and VTS where AIS is a global standard for larger vessels and focuses on broadcasting location and is mandatory on larger vessels. VTS systems are nation specific fishing monitoring systems for reporting catch, monitor vessel locations etc.

Optical and radar satellite imagery is often the only way to see non-collaborative vessels out at sea unless a plane flies out or a patrol vessel happen to notice suspicious activity where it happens to patrol. A non-collaborative vessel is a vessel that chooses not to broadcast VTS or AIS signals for others to see where it is. This is where radar satellites and near realtime comes. The ability to monitor specific areas day and night reliably is critical in detecting illegal fishing activities. Having a radar satellite constellation that can monitor on frequent basis, on demand, and deliver potential targets in near realtime. Also NASA VIIRS sensor on Suomi satellite is used for seeing fishing vessels at night as there is strong lights used during squid fishing.

Also radio signals from vessels can give away their position. Ship radars emit strong radio signals that can be detected by satellites like HawkEye360 and NordSat3 are planning to launch. It is risky for vessels to turn off all radio emitting devices at sea to avoid being seen by these RF sniffing satellites.

In summary, illegal fishing a huge ecological, economical and increasingly national security related problem where radar satellites can play a vital role in detection of illegal fishing activities by providing near realtime monitoring of sea areas at risk of being exploited illegally.

Links

http://fishcrime.com Illegal fishing conference

www.skylight.global Paul Allen's Vulcan venture to combat illegal fishing

http://www.oceans8films.com/ghost-fleet/ Documentary on slavery onboard fishing vessels

http://www.he360.com Hawkeye-360

https://www.utias-sfl.net/?p=2730 NorSat-3 satellite

https://earthdata.nasa.gov/viirs-dnb VIIRS instrument

#IUU fishing satellites illegal

Virtual reality 1.0, 10.000 BC.

Was it VR 1.0 that made hunter gatherer groups settle down and enabled them to form societies?

Hunter gatherers lived in small groups but were not able to form societies. It was their ability to create fictional stories that the groups collectively believed in that changed the game. Early on there were stories about beliefs, what we now call religions, explaining the unexplainable. Later on there were stories about the worth of particular goods, for example seashells, that enabled exchange of goods and when the fictional story of value of these seashells in exchange of goods was shared in the community the concept of money became a reality. There were stories about the people, what was right and wrong, things we nowadays code in the law. What all these have in common is that they are the human created stories that have become truths of our lives but are only so because we collectively believe in these. If our society wouldn’t believe in the value of the dollar bill or the code of law they would both be worthless pieces of paper. To build larger societies you need common norms and beliefs that keep the societies together and move them in the same direction. Without the capability to create these initially fictional stories, the virtual reality 1.0, humans would still live in small groups of less than 100 people of hunter gatherers.

Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens (2012) is truly fascinating with it’s history of humankind. A similar book is Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel from 1997 but Sapiens is more analytical in it’s approach. Dr Harrari (b. 1976) teaches history in Jerusalem and I was expecting a jewish perspective – however what I got was one of the most insightful and non-biased views one could imagine without being boring for a second. I really like his style.

When we think about humans impact on the earth, driving animal species to extinction we typically think that this is something we humans have done only very recently. Unfortunately the rise of homo sapiens came at a cost for other spieces already tens of thousands of years ago. When humans first reached Australia 45.000 years ago, 23 out of 24 local larger animals (>50kg) went extinct. You probably haven’t heard about the Diprotodon or the marsupial lion because they went extinct. Same things happened when humans arrived in the Americas around 14.000 years ago. Humans were so effective hunters that 34 out of the 47 larger mammals in North America and 50 of the 60 in south America went extinct. When Yuval concludes that we are as a species an ecological serial killer it is sadly easy to agree. However, with our cognitive superpowers comes a responsibility we need to carry.

An interesting point in the book Sapiens I hadn’t thought about before was that one key reason Europeans and the European way of living came to dominate the world from the 1500’s was the cultural attitude that was emerging. We started acknowledging that we didn’t know everything, it was the early days of curiosity and the scientific method. And the first step was recognizing that there were things to discover and that the church didn’t have monopoly on knowledge. Still 1775 the Asian economy was 80% of world economy, Europe was a dwarf but over the next 200 years things turned around. By 1950 Europe and US where half of the world economy while China was only 5%. While the Asian and Persian societies had the wealth and technologies they lacked explorer and science culture, society structures such as investment banking to support the expansion that the Europeans succeed with in Africa, Americas, Asia and Australia. It is only recently that Europeans have been outcompeted in many areas and we all know the story of China becoming the world’s largest economy – again.

Biggest bluff in history according to the book – was the progress made from hunter gatherer life style to the more productive life of farmers. It is estimated based on how easy it was to hunt animals and gather fruits, nuts etc that hunter gatherers spent less than 40 hours a week working – living a relatively simple life in small groups of tens of people. Everything changed from the day people settled down. Domesticating animals and growing wheat was no easy feat. Women got more children to feed that could then work on the fields, and there we were in the productivity increasing loop where we are still today working more efficiently but still as hard because we never get enough wheat, money or fame – at least most of us.

I can highly recommend Yuval’s book to anyone who wants to get a longer perspective on who we are as humans and how the world got to where it is today.

#book #mankind #history

Practical applications behind the Blockchain hype

The Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin and has far more potential than disrupting governmental central banks in issuing money. While blockchain has been high on the hype curve for some time now, only recently other applications than virtual currencies, like Bitcoin, started to pop up. The Blockchain technology is a distributed database (a ledger) where you establish trust without having a central organization establishing identity and trust – think authentication. In the Bitcoin world the database contains the currency linked to an owner of the bitcoin. Nobody keeps a central repository of whom the bitcoins are, but everybody participating in mining the bitcoins does that job.

The maybe most exciting feature of blockchain is it’s ability to create trust in a distributed system without a central organization. Morten Christiansen, CFO, Maersk Line gave a good example at a blockchain conference in Copenhagen on Blockchain:

A typical consumer good shipped in a container has 8% container logistics costs of the wholesale price. The logistics costs have declined significantly over the years due to efficiency gains in the container shipping business. What is interesting is that paper handling costs account for 22% of the overall logistics costs (the 8%). That is quite staggering considering the heavy investments in ships, ports etc You would think information handling could be a percent or two, but no, 22%! It is easy to see where the low hanging fruit would be in efficiency gains. In a case example when a container of flowers shipped from Nairobi to Antwerpen was followed, it ended up with a pile of 25cm of A4 paperwork. Handling this paper, finding the missing papers, sending them to the right place etc can be a nightmare.

Blockchain can provide the technical foundation for a solution here. It would be enough that the company producing the flowers trust the local shipping company, who is trusted by the Nairobi port, who are trusted by the Kenyan customs, who is trusted by the Netherlands customs, who is trusted by the Antwerpen port authorities etc. Now all the parties in this chain of trust can access the chain of documents electronically, see that they are the right document from the beginning and are signed by the different parties during the journey. Setting up a system like this is neither difficult nor expensive. It immediately provides a more effective solution than paper handling but when integrated into each parties own systems can reduce most of the current document handling costs, and prevent most of the practical problems today caused by missing paper work.

Blockchain can provide technical foundation for databases shared between consumers, businesses, and public sector. All kind of data can be shared and privacy of that data controlled by the parties involved. Think about for example your insurance company automatically having access to information about your address, ownership of house, car, etc and you wouldn’t have to fill in information into many databases but the databases would talk to each other - but only with your explicit consent of course. This scenario becomes possible when you don’t have to build one central database with secure authentication anymore but you have distributed databases with trust built in to them.

The Blockchain technology has a lot of potential, but as with many technologies, it will take some years before they start to make some real big scale business impact. In the meanwhile startups will attempt the disrupt the big players, and some of the incumbents will succeed in learning “the new tricks” and avoid being disrupted. The game is on.

More on blockchain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_74nhJaIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJSXg4_NR24

#blockchain #bitcoin #technology

Astronaut’s guide to life on Earth

“Houston, I have a problem”. Chris Hadfield is on his first spacewalk installing the Canadarm2, a big robotic arm onto ISS. For no clear reason his left eye becomes irritated by a water blob flying around in his helmet and he can’t open the eye for more than a second. In a few minutes also his right eye tears up. With no gravity the tears just stay on the eyes no matter how much you blink. There he is on a space walk with the earth spinning under his feet, and the whole purpose of the space shuttle mission, installing the robotic arm seems to be at risk for a small problem in the eyes.

The book is a great collection of stories over Chris’ 20 year long astronaut career at NASA in a number of different roles. Hadfield became famous through his popularized TEDtalks and youtube videos on how it is to be an astronaut, and what they do at ISS. The first music video done in space, the cover of David Bowies Space Oddity was also done by Hadfield and was quite a hit.

Some of the interesting stories are about the training they put into a mission, starting 4 years before and training on everything from simulations of death on ISS, to spacewalks in the pool, to learning about geology. He describes how astronauts on the ground work with supporting other missions, developing future missions, doing PR stunts etc.

Chris was also several years in Star City outside Moscow as the local NASA operations commander. US and Russia are working quite pragmatically and well together on the space programs despite their conflicts on the political arena. After the shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA doesn’t have an option to get people to ISS or home without the Russian Souyz rocket.

Some of the things you can definitely can learn from the book are:

1) Sweat the small things – train, simulate. Prepare for every detail, run simulations in order to try out how teams react in different situations. All to prepare for intensive situations when you need to be prepared and also to avoid some of the situations by good preparation.

2) The power of negative thinking – Prepare for the risks. Thinking through things that can go wrong, in order to avoid these situations is. Train for these failure situation to be prepared when something happens.

3) Aim to be a zero – Don’t be overconfident. If you group people into -1, 0 or +1, a “minus” is someone who creates problems, a “plus” is someone who adds value to the team by his active contribution. Chris’ advocates for aiming to be a “zero”, someone who is neutral, doesn’t try to be the “plus”, value adder and in the process tries to show off and is likely to screw up because of his self focus. Instead focusing on own job, attempting to be a “zero”, earns you the reputation for being a “plus”. This can be a good advice for creating better teamwork in an environment with a lot of alpha males trying to lead.

Chris Hadfield packs the stories from the little 9 year old boy watching the first moon landing and from that moment working extremely hard to become an astronaut and later the commander of ISS in 2011 into around 300 pages of entertaining reading. It’s a story of incredibly hard work, a lot of sacrifice by the family, but still a man with his feet mostly solidly on the ground. Chris seems like a humble nice guy you would like to grab a beer with. Strong read recommendation for every space enthusiast.

See:

Youtube videos https://www.youtube.com/user/ColChrisHadfield Space oddity music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo TEDTalk What happened on the spacewalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo62S0ulqhA

#space #book

AI is the game changer - and we are all using it already

Artificial intelligence (AI*) is going to change the world of computing as we know it. AI technologies will accelerate the pace of development and devices around us will become human like. Companies that want to thrive need to understand how AI will change their business.

AI is new paradigm in computing. Traditional computing is based on strict rules with if-then logic that has taken us amazingly far in the last 30 years. However, traditional computing has been limited to strict rules based problems while more fuzzy problems that human brains can easily solve have been out of reach until the last few years progress in AI. Now there are emerging advanced solutions for image recognition (is it a cat or a dog), face recognition (is it our neighbor), voice recognition (speech-to-text), and translations (English-to-Chinese) to mention a few. More advanced AI usage areas are for example self driving cars, computer generated news reporting, music composing, tumor imaging diagnostics. Mostly AI is still assisted learning but there are also emerging unassisted self learning algorithms that find patterns in data by them selves.

We don’t necessary recognize that AI is present already in our everyday lives. The iPhone has voice assistant Siri, lookup of an incoming call contact info from our emails, photo face recognition as well as remembers where you parked your car without you telling it about it. These are based on deep learning algorithms. When you go online shopping the website is often be optimized for you based on AI algorithms. Everytime your browse Facebook the feed has been optimized for you based on AI. More traditional usages of AI can be hand writing recognition of addresses when sorting letters at the post office.

What makes AI a game changer and a new computing paradigm is that now computers can take on way more complex and human like problems than before and it is likely that AI based technologies will be able to reach and maybe surpass human intelligence in a few decades. We also see AI take on creativity tasks that were considered impossible by machines just few years ago. Traditional computing has brought enormous gains in efficiency and during the last mobile computing has made us first versions of cyborgs as we effectively are inseparable from our smartphones 24/7. The smartphones have given us super powers to manage our lives effectively through thousands of services, to limitless communication and to access infinite information sources globally.

It is likely that AI technologies will accelerate the pace of development and devices around us will become human like and more proactive in interacting with us. First we will get human like interaction with applications and services through voice and text. Just look at Amazon Alexa for inspiration. Then think of daily applications like what we should make for dinner (based on what people like to eat, what ingredients we have home, what is healthy and a little variation to previous weeks menu), or a skin rash you’d like to ask a qualified medical opinion on, or someone who could teach you Spanish, or act as your personal trainer, or help you make chose the best candidate to recruit at work. All these are practical examples where AI will be there to help us significantly within the next ten years. You can of course see first versions out there already.

AI will disrupt products, services and applications. Incumbent companies who are not paying attention will get disrupted while innovative new kids on the block get to disrupt the dinosaurs. The challenge for many is lack of competence and capabilities since only few IT people and data scientists have experience in working with big data, advanced analytics and machine learning.

The future is intelligent.

*) Footnote. AI is a more broad concept than machine learning. Sometimes AI is defined to be intelligence like humans have and therefor something that will not be achievable for a decade or two. In this post I consider advanced machine learning applications to be AI.

Further reading on AI:

Google Deepmind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnUYcTuZJpM

IBM Watson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXcDir9Y9CI

Singularity http://www.kurzweilai.net/futurism-the-dawn-of-the-singularity-a-visual-timeline-of-ray-kurzweils-predictions

AI talks on TED http://www.ted.com/playlists/310/talks_on_artificial_intelligen

AI is changing big giants. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-facebook-microsoft-remaking-around-ai/

#AI #artificial intelligence

Race against the machine

Book by Brynjolfsson and McAfee

Computers and robots are taking over our jobs. It’s not anymore the blue collar assembly line jobs that are replaced by robots. It’s the real estate agents, shop keepers, truck drivers, lawyers, engineers who’s jobs are gradually being replaced by computers. What can and should we do about this?

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee take a first stab at the history and the future in their brief book Race Against The Machine. They explain how our history contains similar inflection points with early industrialization in 19th century and the 20th century. A quite striking quote from a well known economist “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come-namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses of labour” John Maynard Keynes, 1930. This could very well be a recent quote from 2016.

The examples of computers doing jobs previously done by humans is all over the place, the fact that it happens fairly slowly makes it feel natural. We don’t have secretaries typing anymore. We don’t need physical shops and people working there to buy things when we do it online or handle the checkout in the store with a self service POS. Junior lawyers who previously were employed doing standard agreements like NDAs, limited corporation founding documents are not needed anymore because there are services that can help you write your own basic agreements. Engineering design tasks have been hugely simplified with CAD and simulation software. Something that previously required ten or even hundreds of engineers can now be done by one person and his computer.

The world is full of these examples. The reason we don’t see the employment effect so clear is that on individual level computers doing more is only reducing our workload from simple tasks and enabling us to do more advanced things, making us more productive. On a society level however, there is traditional work being done more and more by computers while humans do more advanced tasks. As a society we can already see that there is problem with employment in the less demanding fields.

The book concludes that there is no economic theory that suggests that capitalism and growth would create full employment. In its most radical form growth and productivity could continue with unemployment of 90%, in theory. There are of course good reasons why big unemployment is unsustainable. Two main reasons in my view are 1) unsustainable income gap and it’s social implications, and 2) wasted untapped human potential in the society. Even with basic income schemes where redistribution of wealth would keep the unemployed from the streets it doesn’t make sense to waste the potential. The only logical conclusion is that we need to structure the job market in such a way that we strive for full employment. Whatever that means.

A powerful analogy used in the book is the “other half of the chess board”, referring to the price the chess inventor asked the king, one grain in the first box, two in the second, 4 in the third etc. Exponential growth. As computers processing power is doubling every 18 months according to Moores law, although it has slowed down with some months recently. The analogy is that we might have reached half of the chessboard of rice doubling, ie equal a field of rice. But in 5 years the computing power is 10x today, in 15 years 1000x. What are computers 10-1000x able to do better and more reliably than humans. The answer is for sure “a lot”.

A key learning since Big Blue beated Kasparov in Chess is that the world best chess player isn’t anymore a computer, neither is it a person. It is a team combining a computer and a person. This illustrating that raw computing power isn’t everything. Combining the best of humans and computers makes a killer combination. Especially pattern recognition is something computers have a difficulty with. In a complex real world with everything influencing everything there is even extremely simplified an infinite amount of possibilities.

I recommend the book.

#book #digitalization #ai

Successful lean transformation in a service organization

Customer experience in the service industry is largely determined by how each service organization’s frontline employees think and act. Yet they are often not involved in planning of the service delivery in terms of its efficiency or customer experience. Transforming the service delivery means changing how people do their daily work. Changing behaviors is never easy!

Based on experience from working together with clients to implement Lean, I have distilled some key lessons that are especially relevant for healthcare and other service-oriented industries. When planning lean transformation programs, three key areas need to be carefully planned and executed:

Engaging people at the grassroots level

Scalable model where learning takes place

Support for local project managers

What is special about engaging people at the grassroots level?

Transformation always starts by getting the leadership behind an initiative. The issue is that management often believe they know best, and therefore the details of how to act are planned by people far from the front line. In a Lean transformation program, management play a key role in showing commitment to the change and in setting objectives and direction – but a lot of the “How” needs to come from the grassroots. The challenge is how to ensure that people are genuinely engaged, that they find solutions and are continuously involved in implementing them. Success in this area provides the right conditions for Kaizen (continuous improvement).

What is meant by a scalable model where learning takes place?

A transformation program involves many people who invest their time on lean development instead of their other duties.

The model you set up to scale the transformation needs to consider tools and structures such as program organization, steering meetings, face-to-face training, training materials, video meetings, web training, online courses, knowledge sharing practices, leveraging existing internal communication channels, launch events, etc.

You need to be effective in getting people excited and engaged in order to ensure that results are achieved. At the same time you need to have a balanced approach to ensure that service operations are not compromised and that costs don’t sky rocket. Customers won’t wait while you make the transformation and shareholders won’t approve if the costs outweigh the benefits.

Learning is key when you fine-tune the approach and train people to think for themselves. The fact that every healthcare patient is different is no excuse for failing to improve efficiency. But it does require an approach where employees can apply lean and sound judgement, instead of just copying practices without thinking.

How do you support the local managers and ensure they succeed?

Training is an obvious answer, but it goes beyond that. Creating explicit networks among peers in the same situation, establishing coaching roles, helping with materials, providing support at weekly meetings during the core implementation phase can help to ensure that local managers implement solutions successfully. Clear metrics, objectives and follow-up practices are also key for early identification of issues and the provision of support before such issues become too big to fix.

A lot of effort is put into transformation programs initially, but maintaining the momentum is challenging. Failures can often be attributed to insufficient focus on the areas described above.

The blogpost was originally posted at synergy.fi/blog

#lean #service business

Innovation takes more than a few tools

Have you felt that people in the company have good ideas or potential that is not being utilized? Have you struggled with how ideas should be collected and implemented? Innovation doesn’t happen just because you implement an innovation funnel or start using a tool for collecting ideas. Processes and tools are often required to support innovation, but the work of changing how people think and act remains.

I will focus on three typical challenges companies face when seeking good concepts to implement: 1) getting useful ideas from the organization, 2) idea development, and 3) a note on idea process discipline.

Getting useful ideas

Many companies have a process for submitting ideas, but very few have a way of working that produces great results. What matters is what ideas get implemented and what the business impact is. If you only measure the number of ideas implemented and their business case, you will miss out on the potential, and you might be easily satisfied because you don’t have a reference point for what it should be. When it comes to ideas, there is merit in the quantity because it indicates how many brains are engaged in the process. Measuring quantity per function and geographical unit is a good early indicator of innovation eagerness. When you split it up by unit you can easily see if e.g. the sales people don’t submit many ideas, and you can easily dive into that specific function or region to understand why they don’t participate, and then take appropriate action to encourage new ideas.

Companies often discuss whether there should be either a continuous general idea process or idea challenges, or competitions where you rally ideas around one or a few themes for a short period of time. It is not an either/or question; rather you should start out with challenges that are timebound. This requires clear goal-setting by management and inspires people to dig deep for ideas that also meet management demands. Putting the ideas into practice is also easier to organize professionally, since the process can be assigned as a project rather than including it in someone’s job description. After running a number of these challenges it makes sense to resource the process properly and create more general continuous idea sourcing. Running idea challenges has a long history – back in 1809 Napoleon set the challenge of how to preserve food for the army, and rewarded the inventor of the ‘tin can’.

Idea development

Ideas are usually raw. Using a metaphor related to diamonds, you don’t know if you have a real gem in your hands before it has been cut and polished. There are different ways of doing this, but what we find is that, by collecting a variety of ideas and people in the room at the same time, together with a good facilitator, we create the best concepting approach. You can set a clear objective for a concepting workshop (e.g. developing a new product X for customer segment Y) and find ideas that would help in developing this product X, or you can have a more “let’s see what we could innovate” approach and let the workshop be about exploring completely new ideas. In practice, idea concepting can be started online with good tools. People get to know the existing ideas online, and discussing and further developing them is a fruitful practice if the organizational culture supports it. It also makes it easier to filter out and prepare for face-to-face concepting workshops. When ideas and people are collided with each other, it can be like a nuclear reaction. Many atoms don’t interact with each other, but some form great compounds, and really good ideas combined with the right people can create a critical chain reaction for the company.

Idea process discipline

Very few companies have only one idea process. Most have several ways ideas are handled, often depending on who submits it. Typically anyone in management can just raise their idea and push it through outside of the official idea handling process. This creates a challenge for the innovation process – should you insist on every idea going through the official process, or should you allow ideas to enter freely at any point? The challenge of having official and unofficial ways is that the official way gets diluted when people in leadership positions circumvent it. This often also leads to an undesirable situation in which the official process ideas are more like 2nd class ideas. There is always a need to be able to insert new ideas during the process, as the whole point of idea concepting is to further develop and get new ideas. However, to avoid the dilution of the official process, leaders should be strongly encouraged to use the official process, and no ideas should initially be taken up for discussion as new ideas unless they have been submitted through the official process. However, you can come up with lots of new ideas in the idea development workshops if you wish, and, at every decision-making point, management can have their say about these ideas.

Getting ideas from the organization and further developing them into useful concepts that can be planned and developed requires agreed upon practices, good tools, and strong leadership. You need to create a culture where people can experiment, where people around the organization can contribute, where you take risks and often fail, in order to win big every now and then. In the end it takes more perspiration than inspiration!

The blog post was originally posted at orchidea innovations blog

#innovation

Innovation lessons from Nordic Business Forum

Visited Nordic Business Forum and one intresting topic brought up in some of the speeches was innovation. Here is my summary on three speeches.

Malcolm Gladwell - Why underdogs succeed author of The Tipping point, and David and Goliath

Malcolm told a great story about a doctor Freireich, who in the 1950s when childhood leukemia had a 100% mortality rate, had a hypothesis on a cocktail treatment that his colleagues thought was crazy. He had the urgency and courage to do something that was extremely controversial and risky but turned out to be the start for the cure. Today childhood leukemia mortality is at 2%.

The key traits commonly found in entrepreneurial and innovative people are

Openness. Open creative mindset. Seeing solutions to problems.

Execution. Drive to follow through on your ideas.

Sense of urgency. No time to waste mindset.

Disagreeable. Not relying on acceptance from peers but stands behind a radical idea others might think is crazy.

Money doesn’t bring innovation. Rather the lack of it. If money would bring innovation the world top R&D spenders 5 pharma companies as well as Nokia, Microsoft, Panasonic would be doing great but they all have one thing in common – lack of innovation.

Another interesting example by Malcolm on disagreeable people was Ingvar Kamprad who didn’t get any Swedish furniture manufacturers to produce his furniture in early 1960s. He decided to go to Poland to start factories with western standard efficiency to produce high-quality furniture. This in in a communist country, during worst cold war times. That is being different!

Prof Vijay Govindarajan (VG) - Reverse Innovation

See a similar talk from TEDx

Reverse innovation is when developing countries innovate and sell to the developed world. VG talked about three great examples

ECG machine. In US a ECG machine for measuring heart electrical activity costs roughly 20.000 USD and is used in hospitals. In rural India a machine like that is not feasible for a number of reasons, despite that people have the same heart problems and need a solution for that also in India. The solution invented was a 500USD machine (40x price reduction), that is easy to use and a nurse can operate, that is portable, battery powered etc. Now this machine, apart from being used in India is sold e.g. to ambulances in US. See story covering the topic

Open heart surgery. Costs around 150.000 USD in US to perform. In India Devi Shetty has created a specialised Hospital, NH Bangalore specialising in cardiac surgery. By more efficient use of the equipment and specializing he has been able to bring price down to 3.000USD (50x). A third of the patients can’t afford this for local standard still high price, and he treats them for free. The hospital is luxurious for local standards, uses same equipment as in US and still the hospital makes a gross margin of 55%. The mortality of patients treated is 1.2% vs 2.0% on average in US. Amazing example!

Prostetics. Amputee leg in US costs 20.000 USD, in Thailand Dr J created prosthetics for 30USD (600x) which were more convenient in the rural areas and on non-paved roads, were better fitted on the patients, and made of recycled plastics.

VG emphasized that it is not low cost that is the main thing, but the value equation that is totally different. The products were invented with a completely different mindset, taking the local environment as key design parameters. Often in the west the abundancy creates over engineered solutions slowly, whereas limitations and lack of resources can create a radically better solution to the same core problem.

The implications for western companies are two-fold:

to compete locally in developing markets you often need to rethink your approach and products completely to turn non-consumers into consumers,

if you don’t innovate, others will and those innovations in developing markets will be exported to the developed world because of their radically better value proposition.

Professor Alf Rehn - Saving innovation from itself

Alf Rehn, known for his colorful choice of words, made a parallel between pornography and media portrayed innovation. In the same way as pornography is easy, with beautiful people, flawless, and just happens. When you compare to real sex which isn’t always easy, includes complicated feelings, people who aren’t perfect, and can be difficult to get started and it might be messy in the end.

Innovation is portrayed in media and management literature as something you just pick up and do. You read about the role models like Apple, Southwest Airlines or some other great company who succeeded with innovation and try to copy that formula to become instantly successful. As Alf puts it, innovation isn’t easy, you can’t copy what others have done but you need to come up with your own way. It’s messy and complex.

I got two takeaways from Alfs speech:

Innovation is often considered something done by a small group of people in the company, like innovation is some project you start and do and the company suddenly becomes innovative – that is nonsense. Innovation includes the whole personnel, is long term oriented in building capabilities, emphasizes building the right culture and environment.

Innovation is not about just copying what others have done. You can get ideas but it is unlikely that what someone else has done and succeeded with would bring success in a totally different environment. You need to figure out your own approach. The analogy here might be the hammer and the carpenter. Just by learning to use the hammer well you don't become a great carpenter. Learning to use 10 other tools well might bring you closer to be a reasonable carpenter, but if the innovation context is in another field, like metals for the carpenter you might need more tools and skills a smith has.

The Nordic Business Forum conference in Jyväskylä was just amazing, two days of business rock and roll, with top notch speakers and great networking. Kudos to the organizers!

#innovation

Teleporting and 3D printing

Take your mobile phone cover off your phone and teleport it to your friend in Auckland in a matter of minutes. Science fiction? Not at all! Scifi movies in 20th century were full of teleporting concepts where people are teleported or beamed somewhere else. Now, you can fairly easily arrange a 3D object scanner in Helsinki, let it scan your mobile phone cover and send the object digitally to New Zealand in seconds and let a 3D printer print it out there. You have created a copy of the original object on the other side of the world. It is a crude first version of teleporting as it doesn’t work on either you or your cat, but doing simple object teleporting like this was science fiction 10 years ago. (See Star Trek vision of teleportation)

3D printing is not new but origins are from 70´s with computer steered CNC machines carving materials from a block according to a CAD model. There are two different approaches to creating 3D objects by computers, additive and subtractive. Additive is where fine layers are added on top of each other and it is the method mostly commonly referred to as 3D printing. Subtractive is when you, typically mechanically, carve material from a block of some material to create the desired object. What has changed in the last couple of years is not that you can create 3D objects from a computer model, but that the printers have become affordable to consumers, and that there is now a broad range of different materials you can produce in. Previously the materials were simple plastics but now you can print in materials like ceramics, steel, glass and silver. Monochrome plastics printing has evolved into colour printing (See intro to 3D printing) Also the creation tools on the computer side have become more accessible with freeware (try out SketchUp Make, really easy) and online tools for creating 3D models whereas in the past the tools were for professionals only, and required learning difficult CAD tools. There are also 3D scanners emerging that can build 3D models from 3D visuals or laser beams (see mobile consumer 3D scanner)

Applications for 3D printing are still being dreamed up from micro to macro scale. In micro scale there are for example microelectronics being printed to create simple electronics or bionic applications (see printed ear). Macroscale 3D printing examples include robots printing concrete houses or building blocks (See concrete 3D printing). Most of the applications are in smaller handheld objects up to a few tens of centimeters. It can be toys, jewelry, lamps, clothing fabric (see examples). An experimental area is printing your food where you have some basic ingredients as ink for the printer and then the printer can prepare the food layer by layer. A laser could even cook the food. (See printing food)

Are we all becoming 3D designers? Yes and no. I think there is an analogy with the digital 2D world were most of us can draw some charts in e.g. powerpoint or tune the digital photos, but few of us dare to take the pencil or brushes to start drawing or painting from scratch. 3D design tools will become as easy and common as our office tools are today. Kids and youth will learn to design in schools and universities. For the most parts we will modify existing designs by others. Online libraries of 3D models like Googles 3D warehouse or Thingiverse are already commonly used. Scanning existing objects with 3D scanners becomes available to consumers. Enabling 3D copying and modification. Copying also creates issues with IPRs. How to think about copied objects where there has been a lot of design going into the product and then it is copied for the cost of the material, and with the speed of light the copied design is spread around the world to be printed out? While this is something people have to take into account as a new phenomenon infringing on designs and IPRs is not new and something other industries have learned to deal with. In the case of 3D printers IPR issues are not likely to fundamentally revolutionize like digitalization did to the music industry in less than a decade because there is still a significant material cost associated with 3D printing and in most cases materials used in mass manufactured products are difficult to print. There are also opportunities created for people with new ideas and designs. They can start trying out a new idea, sell early products in low volumes without having the big upfront investment in tooling and manufacturing associated with mass production.

The two key drivers for 3D printing are

Ability to create unique objects fairly inexpensively. Unique objects are typically attractive because unique is intrinsically attractive - the only of its kind. Unique often also means well designed, as well intrinsic value. Well designed and unique often means the design is adapted to the use, best fit for the purpose – again valueable and in some cases absolute must have feature. E.g. healthcare application where printed skeleton part must fit perfectly.

to create standard objects locally and fast. This is a driver for applications like spare parts where you instead of keeping an expensive inventory maybe on a country level, that and can be accessed in 24-48h, you print out the spare part in an hour at the repair shop.

Will everyone have a 3D printer? In 20 years pretty much yes because the benefits of printing out immediately will be so beneficial. The limitations of home printers will be huge to cut cost. In the same way as you have print shops for business cards, posters, photos etc today you will have 3D print shops in shopping malls or in business districts where you pick up your creation at the end of the day. The reason is simply that the printers for printing in harder materials like metals, printing in high precision, or printing larger objects will be unaffordable for the average consumer and not practical to have at home to use maybe once a month. Today with the 3D printing boom just in early phases we see 3D printing factories set up serving several countries and delivering by courier with a week lead time than in hours. This is just because the volume is not big enough and the 3D printers need to be used 24/7 to be commercially viable.

It is not surprising that with the 3D printing and scanning technologies maturing people are finding increasing amount of applications for the technology. Cities and universities are investing in workshops for 3D printing where people can go an learn to make 3D stuff. It has become what Chris Anderson calls it - the maker movement. See Chris Anderson explaining the maker movement

#3dprinting #3D

Professional buying one-on-one

Last week I happened to host some meetings and discussions with a bunch of sourcing VPs and directors. We discussed about the current situation and future of sourcing in Finnish companies. I wanted to summarize a few of my findings:

Sourcing is not boring. Sourcing and procurement is not boring buying. It is actually central part of the business of companies. Sourcing can be at the core of a successful corporate strategy and execution of it.

Procurement vs. sourcing. Sourcing is the strategic part of buying, when you select what kind of suppliers you want for what products and services. E.g. do you buy travel through one travel agency or do you let everyone buy wherever they like. Procurement on the other hand is the more tactical buying when most has already been agreed upon, you make orders, e.g. buy that flight to London.

Ensure quality supply. One of the critical roles of sourcing is to ensure there is availability of the raw materials, products and services the business needs to operate. This is surprisingly hard when you talk about non-bulk products or services. It’s about ensuring you get what you want, with consistent quality, at the right time, to the right place, at lowest cost.

Social responsibility. Many companies want (and are pressured to) to act in a responsible way what comes to ecological and social topics. To do that most companies need to work with their suppliers to get them to follow the same norms what come to e.g. child labor, reduction of CO2 emissions etc. Sourcing plays a vital role in working with suppliers to setup programs, educate, follow up and monitor.

Consultant role. Sourcing people are often experts in knowing the suppliers, knowing what the suppliers are offering, and might be able to consult internally WHAT to buy, not only HOW to buy.

Transparent supply chain. Most companies have problem with transparency. What you buy, from whom, to what price, how much, what the agreement is, are all key basic information that doesn’t necessarily exists in a datawarehouse easy to access. To buy efficiently you need to have the constant transparency in the system, and sourcing can be the leader in setting up this transparency in terms of supporting IT systems, KPIs and management structure.

Innovation facilitated by sourcing. Many companies use big suppliers with a lot of research about the end market as well as insights into similar companies as yours that are their customers. Leveraging this knowledge and insight, e.g. through joint innovation workshops can be a great source for external ideas for a company.

Partnership vs bidding. Buying bulk products is mostly about price. When it comes to more complex complementary services, think airline catering as an example, you might say that it should not be a simple buyer defines product and asks for cheapest bids, but a partnership where the supplier of catering food works in a partnership, developing their offering according to airline’s customer service strategy. Partnerships are difficult because they create dependency, they don’t optimize purely for cost, ….

Price. This is often the #1 topic when talking about sourcing. Getting savings through better buying. At it’s easiest form the mechanism to achieve savings is to ask for new offers and get suppliers to compete, and lower their margins. The more sophisticated methods include pooling demand into bigger deals the suppliers are more interested in, sharing information to reduce supplier risk, or other structural changes that truly reduce cost or risk of cost at the supplier side.

While sourcing as a function gets more relevant the bigger the company, already a 50 people company typically need some strong sourcing competence, although it is more a part time job for some people rather than a function.

As women have known for a long time - shopping can be fun!

#sourcing #management

The Finnish Miracle – 'naked through the wedding crowd'

Canadian André Noel Chaker who has been living in Finland for 20 years has collected the achievements Finns should be proud of, into an easy to read book 'The Finnish Miracle'. The background research and interviews are combining many things not even many Finns know about. André combines personal stories, with near term history, and sometimes going even a little further back into the 19th century. He has interviewed people like Sauli Niinistö, Hjallis Harkimo, Matti Alahuhta, and Kirsti Paakkanen to mention a few.

The story when André attends the first wedding in Finland, where he practically knows no-one, but gets invited into sauna during the wedding, and following the example of his host, runs through the wedding party naked to get a swim in the nearby lake, is a story I remember - and something I still wait to experience as a Finn.

André starts off with saying that it’s quite a an achievement for Finns, who at end of 19th century were used to famine and poverty, then in 1918 as a few weeks old independent country fought a bloody civil war, twenty years later 1939 fought two wars against Soviet Union and one against Nazi Germany during World War II, only to pay the war debts in the 50’s - then fifty years later were awarded:

The best country in the world. Newsweek 2010

Best basic education in the world. PISA 2003, 2006

Happiest country in the world, together with Denmark, Gallup World Poll 2010

Least corrupt country in the world. Transparency International 2007.

Top ten most competitive country in the world. World Economic Forum 2000-2011.

I think that is a story to be proud of!

In the book André talks about the Finnish education system achievements with top scores and ranking in PISA. He talks about Lordi,the heavy metal band that brought Finland victory in Eurovision song contest. He brings up sport examples from ski-jumping, Formula 1 drivers from Rosberg to Räikkönen, to long distance runners like Paavo Nurmi and Lasse Virén. He talks about the world class conductor like Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Finnish legend Mannerheim who was the Finnish army commander during WWII and Finnish president after the war.

The book covers industry history from roots of Nokia started in 1875 with innovations in paper business through rubber boots, cables and finally into electronics with TVs and telephony in the 1960’s. There is a whole chapter dedicated to Sisu, ‘persistence’ in it’s many forms. How Finns have succeeded at war with ‘sisu’, sportsman examples of ‘sisu’, as well as ‘bad sisu’. It’s interesting as a Finn to reflect upon things which are part of your own culture, and probably useful for foreigner who want to understand Finns on a deeper level.

André has been able to celebrate the positive aspects of Finland in his book without going over the fence. He also recognizes the challenges Finland face as well as some of the weaknesses. Refreshing however to read a book with such a positive story. I think the story is powerful to create a positive picture of Finland. It is healthy for our self confidence as Finns to see such a collection of truly outstanding world achievements.

Great achievements looking back, now the current generation of Finns need to see what previous generations have done, and work to develop the society into an even more prosperous and happy nation.

Order the book

#finland #finnish miracle

Why is innovation difficult?

Constantly creating new requires managed disciplined risk taking and great leadership. Both something only few companies are good at.

Being innovative on products, services or business models is the foundation for competitiveness and long term growth of any company. Still many companies are outright bad at innovating. In this post I am focusing on innovation in medium and large companies as the dynamics and issues are very different for startups. I focus on innovation as an in-house process although there are many good strategies on outsourcing innovations but that’s another discussion.

Innovation is not ideas or patents

Innovation is not the same as coming up with ideas or inventing something that might be patentable. Coming up with ideas is only the first step in the innovation process. An innovation is a new and somewhat unique commercially successful product or service. To create an innovation you typically start from an idea that you develop into concepts, further into mini business plans and projects, that you spend months or years on to develop into products or services that you finally launch to customers and succeed commercially with. Innovation is the whole thing.

What is successful innovation?

Successful innovation boils down to how fast you can get new products out of the door successfully, how predictable your innovation process is in terms of time, cost and quality, how well you are able to generate new sales and profits from new products (e.g. launched in last 3 years), and how your customers perceive you in terms of innovativeness.

Basics - managed innovation

Every company would like to manage their innovation, in contrary to not being in control of the process of turning ideas into successful products. Managed innovation is about having a way of working that you follow of how innovative product ideas are developed and launched. You have defined how you make decisions on assigning resources, killing bad projects, follow up costs, measure project KPIs etc. This sounds extremely boring and not innovative at all! Very much so, that’s why you need to manage these basics, similarily as we all manage reading and writing. Boring tasks if you have to focus on the process. But when you manage the basics (like reading and writing) you can start focusing on the content and work on that level. The process provides the common language and framework for how you work. Things like project phases, deliverables for decision gates, criteria etc. Without this structure you can’t repeat, learn and improve. And that’s where most companies are today. They don’t manage their innovation processes well enough to be able to measure, learn and improve.

Innovation leadership

Managing innovation is only having the basics in place. It provides the framework. Applying the framework is people business, and that’s where innovation leadership comes in. Great leadership makes all the differences for successful innovation.

Let’s split it up in pieces. Leading the innovation process of a company can be simplified into 1) the ideas (input), 2) new products or services (output), 3) gate decisions (portfolio management), 4) guiding the individual projects.

The ideas. If you have too few or crappy ideas coming in you will not develop a large range of great products. It’s not that changes couldn’t occur for the better during the development but that is more a happy co-incidence than the rule. There are many sources of ideas starting from internal teams to customers, to partners. Important is that you have a clear vision for the organization what the direction of the company is in order to provide sufficiently clear direction but not too narrow of scope for new ideas to bubble up. You also need to have a way of taking in the ideas, that everyone in the organization knows.

New products or services. If you don’t plan well what you are going to launch when and where it easily leads to too many or few products at the same time in a certain product portfolio. Planning in terms of your future product portfolio at any certain time is important.

Gate decisions is where the portfolio is managed, or should be. This a tricky area where you have to be smart about how you set this up. Decisions have to be made in the decision meetings where there is sufficient mandate to make go-no go, resourcing etc decisions. Typical pitfalls are that decisions are not made, projects are not killed early enough, too many projects too thinly resourced are started or continued and the list could go on.

Guiding the projects. Project or program managers running the development project on day-to-day basis need coaching and concrete management support. Assigning senior leadership sponsors providing the support and facilitating the discussion between top management and the teams is a good practice.

Innovation is a tricky business but not real magic

Innovation compares to many other forms of complex organizational skills than can be learned and developed. In most companies the current state makes big improvements not only possible, but with some concentrated effort and experience realistically achievable. It's surprising that almost all CEOs name innovation being among top priorities, still the innovation capabilities and results leave a lot of room for improvement. As the Nike slogan from 1988 puts it "Just do it.”

#innovation #R&D #product #leadership

Podcasts are amazing and fun

What do you do while commuting in the train, car or bus? Or when you work out? I have now for more than five years entertained myself with listening to podcasts and audio books while in the car, walking or running. For me it is fun learning and a form of entertainment. I look forward going running when I know I will listen to something interesting. It is so fun, simple, and useful that I am amazed why so few people actually do it. Let me give you a glimpse into what I listen to and how I do it.

What I listen to

I have split what I listen to into a few different categories and put them in rough priority order.

General topics

TED talks This is my overall favorite podcast series! If you don’t know it, you have missed something in life! Every talk is interesting but about half of them are truly outstanding speeches about technology, society, art, entertainment, science etc. I have watched and listened to more than 1000 episodes of 5-20min each during the years.

Intelligence squared. British discussion series, often with debates about a controversial topic. Very good. My favorite was the discussion about euthanasia. Very thought provoking. Quality varies for different episodes depending on speakers. Drawback is the long format of about 60min.

BBC Documentaries. This is an investigative series mostly about the developing world. Typically 25min long episodes. I pick and choose topics that I find interesting and listen to them.

Freakonomics. Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt, authors of the Freakonomics book (also as film) host a talk where they talk about some interesting topic that is counterintuitive and bust some common beliefs.

Nature & Science

Science talk. Scientific American magazine podcast series with Steve Mirsky taking an interesting topic and interviewing someone related to the article. Interesting science news. Episodes around 20min.

Discovery. Discoveries in a weekly podcast of 18 minutes.

Brainstuff. Brainstuff podcasts are a few minute long podcasts explaining something related to popular science in a few minutes.

Backpacking Light Magazine. Interviews with interesting backpackers like Andrew Skurka on their backpacking experiences. Not updated anymore but has some good episodes for backpackers.

Technology

BBC Click. Click is a technology podcast series typically focusing on 2-3 subjects per podcast with Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson in the studio. The guys are interesting to listen to and they have relaxed but still interesting style of discussing new consumer tech stuff, mainly related to IT. Each episodes is around 25min. Previously the series was knows as Digital Planet.

Business & leadership

The Economist. I listen to short episodes of 5-15min from what is hot in the latest issue of the Economist.

The critical Path. Horace Dediu, an old colleague of mine has created a new successful career for himself as an analyst and blogger about Apple and the ecosystem around mobile tech. I don’t like the long format but like to listen to the insights Horace has. He has very original and great thinking and gets referenced by top silicon valley guys as a “on of the top blogs to follow”.

Knowledge at Warton. Often interviews with business leaders. Often very high profile and interesting.

HBR Ideacast. Harvard Business Review topics. Good high quality discussion, quite academic approach.

McKinsey Quarterly. Articles and research by McKinsey discussed in a short format.

Manager tools. I have stopped listening to this but I am sure many people in management positions can get lots out of it. Hundreds of episodes on how to deal with daily people or self management issues.

BCG perspectives. Boston Consulting Group issues a sometimes interesting podcast series on topics they have done research on.

BBC Peter Days World of Business. A little long for my taste but occasionally interesting light business oriented topics.

Startups

Entrepreneurial thought leaders series. This one I pull from iTunesU, the educational podcasts. I just love this series! If you want to understand silicon valley and who is who, this is where you should start!

This week in startups, great talk show with tier one entrepreneurs and VCs from silicon valley.

This week in venture capital. Mark talks with great entreprenurs and VCs.

Startup slingshot. William Griggs interviews entrepreneurs on practical topics useful for startups.

Audio books

Audiobooks are not podcasts but I thought you might be intrested in a selection of the best I have listened to:

JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows. Seeing the movies is not enough. I warmly recommend either reading or listening to some of the audiobooks. I listened to the last Harry Potter book red in English by Jim Dale, and I have to say that the performance of the reader was amazing! He broke the world record for speaking 146 different characters, each with different voices, extremely well throughout the book.

Bill Clinton: My Life.

Jim Rogers Adventure Capitalist. Jim combined roadtrip around the world exploring with economic insights. Good relaxing combination.

Richard Feinman: Surely your joking Mr Feinman. I just fancy this amazing Nobel physics prize winner and bongo drum player. He is so funny in a geeky but down to earth way.

Howard Zinn: Peoples history of United States. Different and deserved perspective on US history.

Bill Bryson: A short history of nearly everything. Extremely interesting audio book on general topics of how we got here.

How to start listening

While you can listen to all on your computer that’s where I very seldom listen to anything. I just don’t want to sit in front of the screen. Rather get out running or while driving to work.

Device: I use my iPhone but you can use any music player or smartphone.

Computer: I use iTunes on my computer to find the podcasts and audiobooks but you can use many alternative podcast applications. Just search for podcast applications.

Using iTunes I subscribe to certain podcast series that typically update with one to 10 episodes a month. iTunes downloads the latest podcasts in the podcast series automatically and when I connect my iPhone the latest podcast episodes are synced to my phone.

Listen. I have connected my iPhone to the car stereo through a 3,5mm plug.

In addition to the iTunes podcast library which you find pretty extensive to any taste, you can expand to iTunesU, and audio book libraries like www.audible.com. I have also found good audio books on CDs that I ripped to MP3 to listen to on the go.

And yes, there is at least one downside to podcast. You get fast addicted to it! Have fun and send me your recommendations to me using comments below, email or twitter.

#podcasts #startup #business #self development

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