The Ambidextrous Organization

To achieve successful R&D and real innovation (bringing new things successfully to markets) is easy on paper but very hard in practice. Thousands of enterprises are struggling with this using a variety of methods, methodologies, instruments and organizations. Typical problems include how to ensure proper technology transfer, how (de)centralized should R&D and innovation be, how to initiate and foster new business, what is the right balance between short (improving existing business), medium and long term (create new business), etc, etc.

Recently I was recommended to read a 2004 article of the Harvard Business Review called “The Ambidextrous Organization”. It says, among others, that one of the main challenges companies face is to -at the same time- exploit existing business and explore new business. Companies need to be able to look backward and forward at the same time, while those two activities have very different requirements (e.g. in strategic intent, critical tasks, competencies, structure, compensation, culture, etc). Not surprisingly, companies struggle to deal with those conflicting requirements. In this article, the authors have investigated 35 attempts to launch breakthrough innovations in different industries. Their study shows that organizations use one of four possible ways to manage those innovations within their organizational structure. By far, the ambidextrous organization is the most (and only) successful one. An ambidextrous organization isolates the operation of the new business from the existing business by giving it freedom to organize and structure itself as appropriate, while it uses top-level executive involvement to keep the new business connected to the organization. Top-level involvement ensures visibility of the new business to the decision organs and evidences importance of the initiative to the organizations. 

This makes a lot of sense and seems relatively straightforward to apply. But how easy is it to put in practice in real organizations ….?

 Enjoy!

Google's Innovation Machine

The April edition of The Harvard Business Review features an article about how Google performs and manages its innovation: Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine. The article explains Google’s innovation ecosystem, which includes Content Providers, Consumers, Advertisers and Innovators. The ecosystem helps Google to know and involve its customers, to serve as a platform for third parties for delivering their services, and to provide value for advertisers. All information passes through Google’s infrastructure providing it with a wealth of relevant information on user preferences, actual use of services, etc.

It describes Google’s 1200 quarter forecast (300y), which provides the company with a long term vision and mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Part of this vision is currently being monetized through advertisement.

It also details to some extent the famous 20% that Google employees have to spend on innovation (other things than their daily business).

An interesting case study, especially for telcos, which are currently reflecting on whether they should continue to be only a “dump pipe”, or, in addition, a “smart pipe”, or even a “service provider”.

Enjoy!

Business in Bottom of Pyramid Countries?

Recently I read a paper of Prahalad and Hammond that was already published in the Harvard Business Review as early as 2002. Now in 2008, it still seems very interesting, actual and worthwhile pursuing. The title of the article “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.” The paper tells that large multinational companies can do good for the poorest people in the world. A free version of the paper can be downloaded from the World Resources Institute (http://pdf.wri.org/whatworks_serving_profitably.pdf). In this post I will briefly write the things that most attracted my attention.

Being poor is expensive. In the Indian city of Mumbai, prices of the same articles are consistently higher in poor areas than in upper-class areas. Articles include credits, water, phone calls, diarrhea medication and rice and prices range from 1.2x to 53x more expensive. The main reason is the lack of efficient distribution channels.

The world pyramid. 100M people have an average annual salary of more than 20.000$. 2 billion people earn between 2.000-20.000$, and 4 billion people earn less than 2.000$. Usually, multinational corporations serve the 100M rich people, assuming that the bottom of the period (BOP) cannot afford their services. The paper shows that this is not necessarily true (on the contrary) and that many poor people do want to spend some money on services and/or products. E.g., in the same town of Mumbai, 85% of the household own a TV set, while not having a proper house. The telco Grameen provides many BOP people with mobile access by having villagers in rural areas share one mobile line. Whereas each person maybe spends very little money on communication, a large village may spend as much as 1000$ per month.
The paper argues that one should not underestimate the improvements that for example communications infrastructure can provide to the poorest people. Globalization is often (rightly) associated with outsourcing part of the value chain to cheap (and thus poor) countries. But Prahalad and Hammond show that it can also be different.

The business interest is manifold. First, there is a huge opportunity for growth in terms of customers. Second, usually conditions of operating in BOP countries are very harsh, forcing companies to provide innovative solutions. Once those solutions work in the difficult environments, moving those solutions to more friendly markets may result more efficiency and in significant savings. Many large companies, therefore, setup an R&D centre in BOP countries focused on local opportunities. There exists a telecommunications operator that is only operating in poor countries that has an EBITDA as high as 65%

My conclusion is that while many of us rule out the possibility to do business in BOP countries because 1) we think there is no business, 2) conditions are very difficult (humanitarian, political, nature), 3) we want (or need) to be a social responsible corporation, and 4) the kind of managerial skills needed are totally different, it actually makes a lot of sense to consider BOP markets seriously.

The authors’ answer to the question “is it worth the effort?” “Big corporations should solve big problems.”

Patents in Spain

The other day I had a meeting with the Spanish Office for Patents and Trademarks. They gave me some high-level indicators of the situation of patents in Spain. The figures are taken from the notes I took during the conversation, so they may not be accurate. Nevertheless, they are interesting and show the (poor) state of play in Spain.

• 3000 Patents per year in Spain
  —CSIC: 130 patents/y
  —All univs: 300 patents/y
  —Grupo Antolin: 20/y
  —Most patents are in pharma sector
  —350 patents/year in ICT area
• EPO denies 20% of patents
  —What is accepted usually is modified since original filing
• ICT patents typically last around 7 to 8 years
• 5% of patents reach market
• Two types of patents
  —High quality (with exam)
  —Low quality (no exam)
• Filing patent in Spain costs 480€, legal support up to 3000€
• 12-18 months between filing patent in Spain and decision of world-wide coverage (involves costs)

Judge for yourself, but I think we have some work to do here ...

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all of you. May 2008 bring tolerance, health, happiness to all of you, and peace to the world.

Trip to South Korea

From 19-23 November, 2007 I will visit South Korea in search for the latest developments in ICT. We will visit several small and large companies. I will post some multimedia information on my TV channel@kyte (clicking on the channel activates the control to move backward and forward through the content).

Beyond the (current) web

End of October, I gave a lecture at the University CarlosIII in Madrid -in the context of a Master in Web Engineering- about what I consider to be beyond the current web. In a nutshell, it means more intelligence, everywhere (operationalized in this lecture by Semantic Technologies and Ambient Intelligence). If you understand Spanish you can see the lecture (60 min) here.

Everybody can be a journalist and publisher (in realtime)

I started testing out kyte, a web/mobile application that let's you post multimedia content (pictures, text, movies, sound, etc.) in realtime. Content can be uploaded from a browser (drag and drop), and from mobile phones and PDAs; it is straightforward. In a sense, it gives anyone his/her personal TV channel. Mine is here (only test material so far).

And below I embed the channel (http://www.kyte.tv/rbenjamins) directly.



If you don't see anything, it isn't that easy, afterall...

Use and Abuse of Internet

The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords has published an extensive report on Personal Security on the Internet in the context of crime and organized abuse (pdf here). Their conclusion is that e-crime is increasing in a rapid way, but there is still time for governments to take appropriate action:

"The threat to the Internet is clear, but it is still manageable. Now is the time to act, both domestically, and internationally, through the European Union and through international organisations and partnerships."

Whatever measures (no measure is also a measure) are proposed, they will always provoke reactions that go in all directions: from "this will kill the spirit of Internet" to "this still will leave many security holes", and all positions in-between those extremes. Ideal policies do not exist; all of them have advantages and disadvantages. It is the weighing of those (dis)advantages that makes the policy. A useful question to ask oneself in such situations is: “What is worse?” which in this case translates to:

What is worse? Making Internet so secure that no abuse is possible, but that at the same time kills the proper nature of Internet? Or, keeping Internet open, thereby taking for granted that some abuse will occur?

How much abuse are we willing to tolerate? To what extent do we accept to limit new possibilities and opportunities offered by this new instrument, for the sake of security?

Those are the real questions, but there is nothing new to those questions. Politicians deal with them on a daily basis (not saying that they take the right decisions …)

Monitoring for Technological Strategy

To be competitive in a fast changing, global environment requires monitoring many different things (competitors, technology, social trends, economies, countries, etc) in different places (physical, virtual). In this post, I am concerned with technology. How does one know what technology to monitor? There are many considerations, aspects, view points, trade-offs to take into account. The sketched figure shows the main ideas (to be improved).

Many large organizations have a strategic focus for a particular time frame. This focus provides an overall context for what technologies to monitor. It is important to notice that monitoring a technology involves much more than the technology alone. Monitoring a technology because it seems a nice technology does not help. Important notions to consider while monitoring include the business context, potential applications, market readiness, economics, society aspects, legal issues, etc. In this sense, the word “technology” is too limited to express what we need to cover. It would be more appropriate to refer to technological trends in a market, society and business context.

Apart from the strategic focus, additional factors that determine what technology trends to monitor include what your competitors are doing and what technological trends are emerging.

All those inputs help us in deciding what technologies (or “concepts”) to monitor. The result can be seen as a “technology/concept map”. This map tells us where we should put our effort in our monitoring activity. Notice that the map itself is a living thing, which needs regular updates, and in particular upon changes of the strategic focus, new emerging technologies, social changes that make existing technologies suddenly relevant, competitor activities, etc.

Once we know what to monitor, we still need to find out the best way to monitor each technology, i.e. what antennas to use and where. The following dimensions for characterizing technologies may be of help in this respect:

- Market readiness
- Technological maturity
- Legal aspects related to the use of the technology
- Social acceptation
- Applicability for the different business lines (the more the better)
- Applicability horizon for the business
- Technologies potentially provided by providers (especially for those with a short horizon, e.g. less than one year)
- Skills available in-house
- Available partners
- Etc.

All those factors help us in deciding when we should know about the technologies/concepts. Before it becomes business, before it appears in popular press, or before appearing in specialized press, before it enters the blogosphere, before it enters the research world, or before it enters garage startups, or even before it happens … It is common sense that the earlier one wants to be informed, the more expensive and difficult it is. It is simple to discover that a company offers a new service by reading it in the technology supplement of a newspaper. Low cost, low risk, but also low strategic value. On the other hand, to discover that a small startup constructs key technology for building a competitive edge in your business (and before the whole world knows it) is difficult and expensive. High cost, high risk, but high potential strategic value.

Corresponding to the different time frames desired for monitoring things, different methods apply from using Internet (reading blogs, search engines, intelligent agents, etc, to having your people in situ close to where things tend to happen. Those are two extremes in between which there are many different options, each with its advantages and disadvantages. This trade-off requires explicit decisions.

Once decisions are made, we have all parameters defined for setting up our Technology Observatory relevant for our strategic focus. The result of the observatory is a set of actions and/or recommendations for each technology concerned, such as passive monitoring, setting up a consortium, pursuing standards, partner with other organizations, buy a company, delete, etc. This can be expressed in another map, let’s say the technology/concept recommendation map. Moreover, sometimes it is possible to find external funding and partners to monitor a certain technology or relevant aspect of it.

The technology observatory may provide relevant information for different target audiences. The obvious one is the top management of the organization, but other targets include middle management, the whole company, partners and even the outside world. Each audience may require its own format, in order to ensure that the information arrives, and is actively consumed by the right people at the right time. The whole enterprise of technology monitoring is a waste of effort and money if this last step is not taken care of.

There are two relevant feedback loops to be aware of, and to stimulate. Monitoring the technology trends may change the technology/concept map by additions, deletions or modifications. Another and more profound feedback is to modify the strategic focus of the organization based on the technology observation performed. It may be the case that some observation suddenly opens a new business perspective to such extent that the strategic focus needs to be changed accordingly.

Technological Strategy 2.0

There are many ways to make a strategical technology plan for a company. One can analyze lots of relevant information, do a synthesis and come up with a plan. One of the key points is to decide what information to analyze, and what aspects to include.

If web3.0 already existed in its full extent, I could just type in some phrase such as "Find me relevant aspects for defining a Technological Strategy in the Telecommunitacions sector taking into account concepts like ICT, Internet, Multimedia, Ambient Intelligence, Intelligent neworks", and I would get relevant information to consider. Unfortunately, web3.0 is not yet there in this extent.

But maybe web2.0 can help out? Maybe there is a community out there that can suggest interesting things to take into account for defining such a plan.

Open innovation? Innovation 2.0? Name it what you want. I invite everybody to react with relevant concepts, notions, technologies, trends, business ideas, etc, etc. to contribute to such a technological plan in an innovative way ...

Thank you in advance!

Change of focus

Due to my professional change, I have adapted the topic of the blog to the more general topic of technological innovation.

A typical story on Innovation: Europe versus US

Business Week has published an interesting article on the battle between Europe and US concerning Semantic Web (or Web3.0) technology. A nice illustration of how innovations usually happen, with some hope for a change in favor of Europe.

Enjoy!

Change

Last month it has been silent on my blog. That usually happens when something is cooking ... Today is my last day working at iSOCO as I will move to Telefonica Research and Development. Below you can find the "official" announcement.

I will continue to write this blog, but the topic may shift a bit. See you in August.

Stay tuned!

________________________________________
Dear friends and colleagues,

After 7 years of full time dedication to iSOCO, I will leave its daily operations from end of July, 2007. I will remain, though, a member of iSOCO’s Board of Directors.

I accepted a new position as Director of Technological Strategy at Telefónica R&D.

I am sure we will stay in touch, either through opportunities arising from my new position, or through my continued involvement in iSOCO.

Kind regards,
-- Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apreciad@s amig@s,

Después de 7 años de dedicación completa en iSOCO, dejaré el día a día de la empresa a partir de finales de julio, 2007. Seguiré, no obstante, formando parte del Consejo de Administración.

He aceptado un nuevo reto como Director de Estrategia Tecnológica en Telefónica I+D.

Estoy seguro de que seguiremos en contacto, ya sea con las nuevas oportunidades que nos vayan surgiendo, o bien a través de iSOCO.

Cordialmente,
-- Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beste vrienden en collegas,

Na 7 jaar toewijding aan iSOCO, trek ik me –per eind juli 2007- terug uit de dagelijkse leiding van het bedrijf. Ik blijf wel lid van de Raad van Bestuur.

Ik neem de positie in van Directeur “Technologische Strategie” in Telefónica Onderzoek en Ontwikkeling in Madrid, Spanje.

Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat we contact zullen houden; vanwege mogelijkheden in mijn nieuwe positie, of via mijn blijvende verbondenheid aan iSOCO.

Vriendelijke groeten,
-- Richard

Invited talks of ESTC 2007, Vienna

The first European Semantic Technologies Conference is over. We had 220 registered visitors, of which 80% from industry. A big success taking into account that it was the first edition.



The Invited talks can be downloaded in pdf.

Prof. Frank van Harmelen, Semantic Technologies anno 2007: main streams, popular falacies,
current status, future challenges (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Dr. Mark Greaves, The Relationship Between Web 2.0 And the Semantic Web (Vulcan Inc.)

Ora Lassila, From the Semantic Web to a Broader Vision of Personal Computing (Nokia)

Dave Pearson, Delivering Business Value with Semantic Technology (Oracle)

Dr. Susie Stephens, Integrating Enterprise Data with Semantic Web Technologies (Eli Lilly)

Dr. Benjamin Grosof, Commercializing Semantic Web:Rules, Services, and Roadmapping (MIT, Vulcan Inc.)

Dr. Michael Brody (Verizon)

Also downloadable from the ESTC 2007 website.

Enjoy!

W3C SWEO Publishes Case Studies

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group (SWEO) of the World-Wide Web Consortium, headed by Tim Berners-Lee, publishes a list of concrete applications based on Semantic Technologies, presented by clients, rather than by technology vendors/providers. The list will be augmented as new applications are submitted. As of June 6, 2007, the list contains 18 applications, of which five are using semantic technology of iSOCO.

The announcement has been made by Susie Stephen of Eli Lilly and is reproduced here:

"The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group is pleased to announce the first set of Case Studies and Use Cases giving some examples of how the Semantic Web of machine readable data is used today. Applications are presented in areas ranging from automotive to health care, and from B2B systems to geographical information systems. The SWEO Interest Group will continue to publish new Case Studies and Use Cases in the future; an RSS feed for new submissions is available. A short overview is also available in Open Document Format, PDF, and HTML formats. "

1st European Semantic Technology Conference

This week, on Thursday, May 30 and Friday, June 1, the First European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2007) takes place in Vienna. The final, detailed program can be found here (pdf, 3MB).

70% of the participants is coming from industry, which is the target audience. Major companies attending include SAP, Nokia, Oracle, France Telecom, British Telecom, T-Systems, Vodafone, Siemens, Telefonica, Verizon, and Atos Origin. Spanish organizatinos involved include among others Vodafone, Bankinter, City of Zaragoza, Fundación M. Botín, Atos Origin and Telefonica.

Sectors where Semantic Technology is applied and that present at ESTC include Public Sector, Telecommunications, Automotive, Aerospace, Cultural Heritage, Healthcare & Lifesciences, Media and eBusiness.

Countries well represented include Austria, Germany, UK, Spain, France, Norway and the Netherlands.

Press release in El País can be found here (pdf).

New Gartner Report on Semantic Technologies

In a recent report of May 9, 2007, Gartner gives its view and recommendations to organizations concerning “Finding and Exploiting Value in Semantic Technologies on the Web”. You can buy it here. My interpretation of this report is:

Value Proposition

Semantic Technologies will are gradually being taken up by organizations.

It will offer extraordinary advances for exploitation and visibility of information, in particular regarding the automatic interpretation of documents (unstructured information), i.e. without human intervention.

This will unleash information in organizations that currently is hidden in documents such as html, doc, ppt. pdf, xls, etc.

Industry Uptake and Recommendation to Organizations

Industry uptake will be gradual starting with focused applications using semantic hypertext (microformats, a Web2.0 technology) that embeds semantic tags in web pages

By carefully selecting focused projects to start with, Industry can already gain significantly today

Prediction

In the next 10 years, web-based technologies will be increasingly able to embed semantics in documents.

By 2012, 70% of public web pages are expected to include some level of semantic mark-up

The full blown public semantic web, using OWL, will take several more years to come to maturity.

In short, the web will gradually incorporate semantics starting with lightweight semantic hypertext (microformats) to more heavyweight ontologies. This vision is consistent with my own experience with clients: start small and simple, but with the big picture in mind. Semantic technologies owe to Web2.0 technologies -where semantic tags are attached to content out of pure necessity- in the sense that it is now widely recognized that (some kind of) semantics is needed to keep the web a friendly place to be. Some people (e.g. Mor Naaman of Yahoo!Research) express the same trend in a (very) different way, but the essence of the message is the same.

Free Office to PDF converter

http://www.pdf995.com/
In my experience, much quicker and more robust than Adobe's. The reason for posting this on my blog, while it has nothing to do with Intelligent Applications, is that I generate lots of PDF documents from MS Office (Word, PPT), and more often than I want, I waste time in this process through slowness and errors of PDF writer (at least on my machines).

So I thought maybe others experience the same problems in execution of this boring task.

EC publishes statistics of FP7, ICT, Call1 Submissions

In total, 1838 proposals have been submitted. Popular areas include: Future Network (175), Software and Services (184), Cognitive Systems (184), Digital Libraries (191), Content and Semantics (149), and Ageing (152).

Lots of competition! Who is going to evaluate all this, with so many experts involved in the proposals. For all evaluators, make sure you reserve your hotels in Brussels as soon as possible. It will be crowded in June ...

The overview can be downloaded (pdf) from the CDTI website (among others, I am sure).

Enjoy!