Archive for the ‘Perspective’ Category

Can the structure for innovation planning be used to disrupt itself?

This diagram is from Vijay Kumar’s 101 Design Methods. It is the basis for his structured approach for innovation planning, and the essence of what is taught at the methods driven human centered design program at the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago. Today I want to question some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie it – and from the very beginning of the process, not simply at Phase 5 (Explore Concepts) as given in the book. Some notes on this phase are shared below:

Explore Concepts: In this mode, we do structured brainstorming to explore new concepts. The insights and principles framed earlier provide the starting points for ideation, as well as guides to ensure we’re on track with matching concepts to needs. This helps make our concepts defensible and grounded in reality. In addition to the product and service, ideas for branding, communication, and even business models, are explored. This is the first stage we begin to construct rough (low-fidelity) prototypes – they help focus the team discussions, and provide probes for early user feedback or help the client clarify and refine their product development strategy whilst giving us feedback on the technical aspects.

And the mindsets recommended for this mode include:

Challenging assumptions
Standing in the future
Exploring concepts at the fringes
Seeking clearly added value
Narrating stories about the future

Yet, what I question today is whether these mindsets that encourage experimentation and exploration should come up so late in the process, at the concept development stage, long after research and analysis have been completed? It is true that Vijay says the process is non linear and that a conceptual brainstorm (mode 5) may lead the way into research designed to validate its viability, feasibility and desirability, but this is at the tactical level of business innovation rather than at the strategic level. I question whether its possible to use this powerful and methodical approach to begin with a structured and rigorous questioning of our initial assumptions at the very inception itself in order to over turn the often implicit and tacit drivers of consumption driven growth seeking only to maximize profitability.

Let me share an earlier variation of this diagram first, where the real and the abstract are also mapped on to the process.

It is here, at the real stage, where we seek to understand what is what – through research, before we can analyse it and synthesize our narratives and concepts, where we have the opportunity to question our assumptions regarding the ‘system’. The lower left quadrant where we seek to “understand the real” is where we have the power to make the change that can genuinely disrupt business as usual. Not in the sense of a business model that disrupts but still holds the premise that all profits should flow to the shareholders, or a shift in the corporate’s focus to services from manufacturing but without the explicit articulation of environmental impact or resource conservation. To disrupt business as usual in today’s world would mean starting to question Whom are we serving? Why? For whose benefit? from scratch rather than leaving them unasked, resulting in default assumptions that a business only seeks to innovate to increase its own profits rather than seeking to serve a greater good such as the planet and the wildlife.

The triple bottomline approach captures the end results for those corporations who are already oriented in this way but is there a structured and rigorous planning approach to ensure their near future innovation and strategies align with these corporate goals and visions? And, is there such a flexible tool that the smallest startup can use it to think of how they will choose to do business – after all, it is a choice, and framing it up front in the product and service development process means that it now becomes an explicit choice, a considered decision to be taken, rather than one after the fact or halfway down the process when some inadvertent outcome leads to challenges that were not foreseen.

Sustainable product development already has numerous robust and validated systems and processes, from green buildings to recyclable packaging, what is missing however is the holistic integration of design and manufacturing (which hold the maximum power for good for the planet and the people) with the business thinking and the sustainable revenue generation strategies that can ensure that probability of the innovation’s success is maximized.

And, if we can design the fuzzy front end to be customized to the priority needs of any particular operating environment then following through with this adapted approach to innovation planning for the informal economy or for sub Saharan Africa’s consumer markets will be a cakewalk. Half the current challenge of business planning and corporate strategy in disparate operating environments with very distinctly different conditions is that the methods, tools, and frameworks available to us are all the same, and primarily developed in the context of highly industrialized and information rich consumer markets. They leave assumptions on the conditions and constraints of the operating environment untouched and implicit*.

Thus, going back to the first diagram, where the first mode is Sense Intent:

Sense Intent: Before jumping straight into a project, we pause to consider the world in which our intended users reside. We scan the horizon, looking at technological & socio-economic trends, precursors, competing products, and a variety of other factors that can affect our topic area. All of these offer us a way to reframe our initial problem and help us think of our initial intent and the direction in which we should be moving. This is where our research questions are mapped out, and the problem space described.

This is where the power resides to remake our world. What if we began with the mindset that:

Challenged assumptions
Stood in the future
Explored the fringes
Sought added value and began with articulating for whom (all stakeholders)

And began with the story (5. Narrating stories about the future) about the changes we wished to see, and the impact we wished to have, on our own future, thus inspiring and informing the scope and shape of the research we conducted in order to know people (mode 2) and know context (mode 3) so as to gather the type of forward looking insights we would need in order shape and craft something wholly different from the ground up.

What if we thought about innovation very differently from the current context of a new product or a new service, of looking to disrupt the existing even while seeking to exist within the conventional frameworks of success – profits, scale, reach, impact, fundraising et al

We need new narratives and new goals but ad hoc design fictions and scenarios aren’t going achieve the kind of new we need for the way our planet has changed. Along with the limits of what can be, we have also reached the limits of where our existing methods and tools can take us. And without changing those, at the systemic level, we’ll still be trying to come up with changes within the constraints of what has already been established. We don’t need the existing tools that help us to think outside the box, what we now need are the tools to build new boxes.

*This is the tyranny of dominant logic CK Prahalad spoke about.

Open-Source on Hyperspeed: Next generation innovation lessons from Shenzhen

In Shenzhen, 山寨 (shanzhai) has a different meaning than mountain stronghold—yet the term so eloquently expresses a continuity, a history, and a genesis. Shanzhai is a Cantonese term, originally used as a derogatory word for knock-offs — because people from rural mountain villages couldn’t afford real Louis Vuitton or officially produced DVDs of Friends. As a result, there was the cheaper, 山寨 version that was a mere imitation, coming from low-end, poorly run 山寨 factories.

David, along with the scholar Silvia Lindtner, has been researching the innovation ecosystem in Shenzhen for the past few years, and they have proposed the term “new shanzhai.” Part of the original shanzhai economy began with copying DVDs. Since copied DVDs couldn’t be played by name-brand players (an attempt to control piracy or simply due to DVD quality issues), a whole set of products were created to support the copied DVDs — and from there, a wildly creative ecosystem appeared.

This is the new shanzhai. It’s open-source on hyperspeed — where creators build on each other’s work, co-opt, repurpose, and remix in a decentralized way, creating original products like a cell phone with a compass that points to Mecca (selling well in Islamic countries) and simple cell phones that have modular, replaceable parts which need little equipment to open or repair.

Shanzhai’s past has connotations of knock-off iPhones and fake Louis Vuitton bags. New shanzhai offers a glimpse into the future: its strength is in extreme open-source, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology. As startups in the Bay Area scramble to make buckets of money, being in this other Greater Bay Area makes it clear why there’s so much rhetoric about China overtaking the US. It is.

So writes Xiaowei R. Wang in her Letter from Shenzhen. Its a timely reminder of the way innovation and invention can play out when there are no secrets left to keep. Pragmatism implies that such extreme openness is not the only path open for intellectual property, but its success in the hyper competitive Chinese market does provide us with clear evidence that such a path is viable and feasible.

What can we learn from an informal market?

Documenting Busia Market, Kenya, January 2016 (Photo Credit: Niti Bhan)

I took this photo of Rinku taking photographs during our visit to Busia’s bustling cross border market as a means to document our own work documenting the borderland’s informal trade ecosystem. Sometimes we’re so immersed in our work that we forget to look up and recognize we’re participants too. Document everything, I tell people interested in the how and what of our work, you never know what will be important to capture until later in your analysis, usually when its too late to go back to the field for another look.

So, what can we learn from a visit to an informal market?

The subtext to that question would be “when using human centered design approach to observation and analysis as compared to a regular market visit”?

We’re looking for opportunities. We’re keeping an eye out for what might be missing, a gap or an unmet need. We’re watching closely, often sitting down for a while, or chatting up shopkeepers as often as the fancy strikes us. Its not just window shopping or wandering around aimlessly with a camera. Its entering the market place with a clear focus on learning how it works – what’s the organization of the layout? why are the all these products clustered over there? what is the underlying rhythm of the seeming chaos?

One visit won’t do if you’re looking for opportunities for innovating new products or services for one or more target segments of the market’s population. You might want to make a first recce to get a sense of the whole, and then come back to drill down further into a particular thematic area – is it the delivery men you’re interested in, or the logistics of egg transportation? Or, is it the fresh produce section where you’ve noticed greens wilting in the sun and think you have an idea for a cold chain solution – what would be its business model in this context?

Already, the ideas flow just from thinking about the market. Don’t let the chaos distract you from keenly discerning the system and the structure. That’s where the secret lies.

IKEA in India: Culture Centered Design Strategy

Its taken more than 10 years for single brand retail stores to enter the Indian market, and this year sees India’s first IKEA opening in Hyderabad. TS Ninan introduced their retail challenge succinctly, though he left me wanting more. And this snippet from an interview with the market opening CEO of IKEA in India (who, having laid the groundwork for 6 years, has now left – an interesting and thoughtful strategy right there imo) caught my attention.

In Europe, businesses look at the past, their systems and processes to plan ahead. India does not have a legacy. People don’t look backwards. Here you create the future as you go

Was IKEA’s product, design, and brand strategy going to be as human centered as reports of their 1000 home visits made it seem, or, as the groundbreaker Juvencio Maeztu implies, committing to India means a “culture centered strategy” – that too, one that is customized for each different culture, centered around a metropolitan area. For those who think India is a country, I like to remind them that its closer in concept to the EU, its a single market and currency, but each city has its own languages, culture, cuisine, and clothing, not to mention each state.

Ikea’s global designers meet artisans in co-creation workshops to handhold local artisans design products that meet global quality and design standards.via

I see familiar names in the design article. And I do like the photographs though I recognize my eye is taken aback because the years in Finland have influenced my aesthetic sensibilities closer to the Nordic norm. What I can say is that if this what the Swedes came up with after distilling down their hundreds of home visits, its an excellent integration of two extremes of design language. IKEA will have fun in India, and I suspect they intend to. The takeaway for culture centered design isn’t that “India” will receive one singular design aesthetic or product line but that each one of India’s cultures, both traditional and modern, will be catered to. That is powerful.

Moving from Unbranded to Branded

There’s a larger story here as well. The changes occurring in the Indian consumer market, for instance, and the increase in aspiration, purchasing power, and most importantly, design sensibilities. Back in 1990, during my first job after leaving the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, I faced barriers to marketing industrial design services that I suspect don’t even exist now. Product design was imitable and not something one paid good money for oneself. There were corporates who understood our value as a design studio but they were few and far between. Now, IKEA’s entry isn’t into a completely untapped market – there’s competition that’s been born in the last decade, both online and off. And, finally, there’s the handmade artisanal informal sector, who have long copied IKEA products from hand me down catalogs. On the other hand, unlike most consumer brands entering the Indian (or the African market) IKEA recognizes the competition offered by the informal (unorganized, as its known in India) economy, and seems to have addressed it.

What’s interesting about the Wharton analysis from October 2017, is that all the issues it raises seem to have been covered now that IKEA is finally revealing its India strategy as the first store prepares to open this month.

Unlike my concerns back in 2006/7, this time I’m a lot more confident that IKEA will achieve something wholly unexpected in India. I look forward to visiting.

Tecno and Nokia: The tale of two brands

Chinese mobile maker’s original brand strategy succeeds in Africa: Transsion’s Tecno

This year, Nokia got shoved out of the top 10 most admired brands in Africa list, not bad for a company that had lost its way in emerging markets 7 or 8 years ago. As an old (in all senses of the word) Nokia fangirl, here are some of my favourite posts from the heyday of following Jan Chipchase around Africa vicariously through his blog. These days, I tramp my own paths in Africa.

Luthuli Avenue, Nairobi, Kenya, July 2012 [Photo Credit: Niti Bhan]

What’s interesting about this list is Tecno, a mobile phone brand that’s unknown outside of Africa. Transsion Holdings, the Chinese manufacturer that owns this brand has a clear strategy and focus. They own Itel and Infinix brands of phone in addition to the Tecno brand and focus only on the African consumer market. You’ll note Itel is listed at number 16 in the chart above.

According to a report released by market analysis company Canalys, Tecno, iTel and Infinix, which are all sub-brands of Transsion, overtook Samsung with a 38 percent market share in the first quarter, compared with a 23 percent share for Samsung. Via

Rather than the old Nokia strategy of a product aimed at every price segment whilst keeping hold of the mother brand, Transsion has broken branding rules by deploying three brands each with their own persona – Itel for example is very popular for its featurephones among border market traders in Kenya and Uganda due to its week long battery life. Few are aware of Transsion itself. Until its time to add up the numbers.

This brand and design driven original manufacturing strategy reminds me of the work Prof. John Heskett had done in the Pearl River Delta before his untimely death.

John, posing for me when we met in Singapore, back in 2009

This slide captures the essence of his teaching. I only have my class notes.

Transsion’s focus, rise, and brand strategy are all hints of his influence, either directly or indirectly in their approach and work. I’m very glad to be reminded of him today, and I recognize that I will be back writing on more of his work in the very near future.

The comparative global impact of Alibaba vs. Amazon

Alibaba Business School and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) brought 29 young entrepreneurs from 11 countries across Africa to the Alibaba campus in Hangzhou, China for the third eFounders Fellowship cohort.

Chinese corporate soft power influence is production driven, not consumption focused. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant with digital payment tentacles, has been graduating cohorts of young entrepreneurs from Asia and Africa this past year. This initiative is the outcome from Jack Ma’s seminal visit to Nairobi last year, when thousands of young Kenyans waited for him in the sun.

Photo Credit: Abdishakur Mohammed, July 2017, University of Nairobi grounds, Kenya

He talks about entrepreneurship in a digital world, and personally shows up to meet visiting cohorts to talk about taking the lessons learnt from e-commerce in the most challenging environments in China (rural, mobile, social) back home to their own not dissimilar operating environments.

Contrast this with the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Amazon these days – a desperate workforce unable to take a leak, afraid to lose their low waged jobs as worker bees in a humongous warehouse. It keeps prices down and the consumption that runs the billions flowing, but whom does it benefit beyond the shareholders?

It struck me when I saw the news about “Alibaba Global Leadership Academy” that Chinese soft power was increasingly about driving production and growth aka development along their entire value chain, even among putative new consumer markets, whilst the American model was still stuck in a consumption driven mindset of the 1980s first wave of globalization. Buy more cola, wear our jeans, use our credit card, say the American brands in Jakarta or Accra or Nairobi.

The difference in mindset is stark when you think about the tech giants of Silicon Valley looking to uplift with low cost connectivity and internet basics for free, and compare to the Chinese giants thinking about raising the purchasing power first. The english language media would have you believe its all about neo-colonialism for natural resources, but the recent shifts in tactics and strategy seem to imply a less demoralizing mindset than anything evidenced by charitable good works handing out goodies to the downtrodden. Because whatever the agenda, the bottomline will be that at end of the exercise there will be a group left inspired to build their own markets on their mobiles, versus a group left holding a palliative goodie.

“My experience here has shifted my thinking. Before, we were focused on pleasing the investors, but now I see the importance of putting our customers first, then my employees, then the investors,” said Andreas Koumato, 26, from Chad , the founder of Mossosouk, an e-commerce platform. “Let others [benefit], then later, we will gain.”

Production driven social impact is far more powerful than consumption driven. Human centered productivity even more so.

Ibn Battuta in Timbuktu

An ongoing project has me immersed in the history of West African trade, and of course, contemporary accounts of regional cross border trade. Rather than not blog, here’s a link heavy post on Ibn Battuta‘s travels in the region back in the 14th Century. Click on the image for a larger version of the map.

“Histories and biographies there are in quantity, but the historians for all their picturesque details, seldom show the ability to select the essential and to give their figures that touch of the intimate which makes them live again for the reader. It is in this faculty that Ibn Battuta excels.”

Thus begins the book, “Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354” published by Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, was a Moroccan Muslim scholar and traveler. He is known for his traveling and going on excursions called the Rihla. His journeys lasted for a period of almost thirty years. This covered nearly the whole of the known Islamic world and beyond, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, India, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance readily surpassing that of his predecessors. After his travel he returned to Morocco and gave his account of the experience to Ibn Juzay.

He wrote what was possibly the world’s first account of globalization.

His adventures reveal, as Dunn writes, “the formation of dense networks of communication and exchange.” These networks “linked in one way or another nearly everyone in the hemisphere with nearly everyone else.

“From Ibn Battuta,” Dunn continues, “we discover webs of interconnection that stretched from Spain to China, and from Kazakhstan to Tanzania.” Even in the 14th century, an event in one part of Eurasia or Africa might affect places thousands of miles away.

Battuta crossed over 40 modern countries and covered over 70,000 miles. He became one of the greatest travelers the world has ever seen. He left behind a travelogue of his life’s journeys filled with details on the places, people and politics of medieval Eurasia and North Africa.

Trained judge (qadi), scholar, and observer, he’s been called a true Renaissance man, surpassing his contemporary, that other, more famous traveler Marco Polo.

Ecodesign, Ecolabels and the Environment: How Europe is redesigning our footprint on earth

What do chopped fresh green beans have in common with high definition flat screen TV’s? And how does this relate to design? In Europe, they’re both considered consumer products whose journey from raw material to shopwindow requires energy to process—emitting greenhouse gases that can have an adverse impact on the environment—and are considered to possess a ‘carbon footprint.’ In other words, they are products of a larger global industrial ecosystem.

When the postal service is setting down guidelines on the creativity and production of direct mailers so that their customers can better recycle them, it signals that graphic design needs to evolve the way its practiced entirely.

Acronyms and Initiatives
The European Union’s chosen approach to address the issue of environmental degradation and climate change is a combination of regulations, directives and voluntary activities. Industrial designers and engineers around the world are familiar with many of many of these already in effect—the EU Directive on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and the EU Directive on the Waste from Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are top of mind in the field of consumer electronics and other energy consuming products (EUPs)—the first sector to be addressed by these rules.

Just ratified is the new European law on chemicals, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), which covers the toxicity and hazards of chemical substances, touching the nascent field of green chemistry. Also to be enforced is the EU Directive on the Ecodesign of EUPs – this will directly regulate the negative contribution to the environment across the entire lifecycle of the product, not just the use phase.

Supporting activities include the Ecolabel—a voluntary certification for a wider range of products beyond those that merely consume energy during their use—helping consumers identify products that have considered all aspects of environmental impact toward minimum ecological footprint, compared to other products in the same category. This includes the chopped green beans, as their total carbon footprint assessed across the supply chain would take into account the energy expended to grow them, process them, package them and deliver them to the neighbourhood supermarket.

All of these and more come under the holistic approach of the Integrated Product Policy (IPP), which can be considered the foundation for such decision-making and the design of the various directives, programs and certifications. The IPP is a systemic look at the environmental impact of the entire supply chain and life cycle of any given product, taking all aspects of the global industrial ecosystem into account: raw materials, manufacture, transportation, distribution, marketing, sales, delivery and waste treatment at the end of life.

The Power of Design
While design has been picking up speed in addressing issues of sustainable development, a quick purview of the larger ecosystem helps in understanding the long-term consequences of the decisions made in the studio. It is recognized that a significant proportion (ranging from 70% to 90%) of any given product’s ecological footprint can be addressed at the design stage. But the considerations mentioned above take into account factors all along the product chain that can directly or indirectly contribute to environmental degradation; decisions made at the design stage now become crucial in ensuring the best outcome throughout the entire system.

Carbon Trust UK‘s simplified diagram of the lifecycle of a typical can of cola, for example, enables us to visualize and correlate the relationship between product design choices and energy consumption at every stage of the supply chain.

Read On…

Primer on African Fintech: Myths, Misconceptions, Opportunities, Hotspots and Roadblocks

As we prepare to start work for our third African fintech client, I thought it was time to quickly and briefly introduce the opportunity space and clear up some misunderstandings around fintech in Africa.

The first point is the common confusion between Fintech and financial inclusion. Investopedia’s definition of Fintech says financial inclusion, that is, affordable and accessible financial services to the underserved and unbanked is only one of the many areas fintech is actively addressing. While technology helps provide cheaper solutions for emerging markets such as those on the African continent, all fintech cannot be said to be equivalent to financial inclusion.
This leads us to a clarification on what exactly is Fintech. I prefer to quote Investopedia since the entry in Wikipedia defines it as the industry itself. “Fintech is a portmanteau of financial technology that describes an emerging financial services sector in the 21st century. Originally, the term applied to technology applied to the back-end of established consumer and trade financial institutions. Since the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the term has expanded to include any technological innovation in the financial sector, including innovations in financial literacy and education, retail banking, investment and even crypto-currencies.“
Thus, while financial inclusion is a key untapped opportunity space for fintech innovation of all kinds, there are numerous other opportunities along the entire value chain of financial service provision both B2B and B2C, including intermediary services, which are ripe for disruption in the African context.
Beyond the conventional preference for disruption of the existing context, there are as many if not more opportunities for meeting the unmet needs of African businesses and consumers. History, geography, economics and conventional wisdom have together combined to create a vacuum of solutions and services that address the unique circumstances of the African operating environment which still tends to be heavily cash dependent and is described commonly as “informal”. And this commercial environment has lagged in custom designed tools and services for small business productivity or household enterprise management.
Hotspots: Kenya overwhelming leads in mindshare as the leading fintech innovation market on the continent, and grabs the lion’s share of investments in East Africa. However, the GSMA’s latest report implies West Africa is rapidly catching up, and may outspend East Africa. The WAEMU region is a hidden hotspot, and Ghana leads the anglophone countries.
The largest market opportunity, by population, remains a challenge however, for a variety of reasons including policy and regulation. Nigeria’s payments innovators have made a name for themselves but their domestic market has not felt the impact of their efforts. Even mobile money, introduced more than 5 years ago, has only achieved 1% penetration. On the other hand, it took India years and years before digital payments reached visibly transformational critical mass. There’s hope.
Lastly, Chinese investment has just entered the African fintech space, talking up financial inclusion – a clear sign of its economic importance for the future development of trade and industry.

Implications of Mobile Money Interoperability in Kenya?

Mobile money pioneer Kenya, has finally gone live this month with account to account interoperability between mobile money services. Neighbouring Tanzania pioneered interoperability between the mobile money services offered by local telcos with a soft launch back in 2014. Fears of cannibalization and zero sum scenarios were unfounded, as documented in an early evaluation report by the GSMA. On the other hand, perhaps that assessment of impact was far too early as little else is mentioned in the rather thin report. Fellow East African Community member Rwanda too has had interoperability for a couple of years now. Now, its Kenya’s turn.

In a market where mPesa services posted a market share of 80.8%, what, if any, will be the impact of this newfound ability to send money directly from wallet to wallet without cashing out?

Talking points in news media articles and various interested non profit bodies point to “increase in financial inclusion” and “increase in competitiveness” with lower transaction costs as the benefits to end users, but these seem to be just that, talking points.

Safaricom, the telco behind mPesa, has long maintained a stranglehold on the market, and even now continues raising barriers to frictionless payments. In the decade since mPesa’s launch and unchallenged dominance, the vast majority of Kenyans have had no choice but to set up their own account even if it means using a separate SIM*.

In a different market, such a move would be cause for a celebration- the potential benefits clearly outweighing any drawbacks to individual service operators, and the future potential for digital commerce and trade enabled by a frictionless payments platform to be realized in time. In fact, mobile money usage is only growing in both Tanzania and Rwanda, though in each the numbers of subscribers is less unevenly distributed across the telcos.

But in Kenya, beyond providing ~20% of mobile subscribers with the ability to send money to mPesa (more or less) seamlessly, the overall impact on platform and service innovation within the local economy is likely to remain limited. Providing the service takes the edge off Safaricom’s issues with monopolization of the market but will in no way change much of the daily transactional reality on the ground. Habits are hard to break. And mPesa has become a Kenyan habit.

* mPesa has a penetration rate of ~81% as compared to Safaricom subscriber penetration of ~72%, as of January 2018

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