May

26

Incremental improvements .. meh

Filed Under entrepreneurship, innovation, product management, startup, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

As far as innovation goes, I prefer major disruptive innovations over incremental improvements (not to say the latter does not have it place, it does). As a keen observer of human behavior, I’m interested in understanding in general why people do they things they do, with a focus on human interaction with technology–such as factors that affect the adoption rates of new technology.

I long discovered (the painful way) during my time as an academic in computer science that just because one builds something super well, that by no means guarantee that “they will come”. In fact, my favourite quote then became, “So what if it doesn’t do anything? It was made with our new Triple Shielded Core Blowfish Encrypted Reduced Internal Resistance 26 Level On-Die Cache 512 1024bit Registers Supercharged Iso Bifurcated Krypton Gate Metal Oxide Semiconductor process …” (souped up version from something similar I read from a UNIX fortune cookie, but I digress).

Thus, I found this blog post by Andrew McAfee, a HBS faculty to be quite interesting. I’m going to summarize the key takeaways, although I highly recommend you read the original post.

Changing the status quo is extremely difficult and often leaders get “carried out on their shields” (from an awesome and inspiring Carly Fiorina talk about change and leadership at Stanford, that I’ve quoted her before here). Let’s examine one of the traits of the status quo:

We are loss averse. A $50 loss looms larger than a $50 gain. Loss aversion is virtually universal across people and contexts, and is not much affected by how much wealth one already has. Ample research has demonstrated that people find that a prospective loss of $x is about two to three times as painful as a prospective gain of $x is pleasurable.

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Makes sense, it takes a non-status quo person with a vision or be hungry enough to be prepared to lose $50 for the upshot of potentially gaining another $50. The willingness to feel fear and keep going forward distinguishes the living from the merely breathing :)

.. behavioral economist Richard Thaler has called the “endowment effect:” We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute.

If you’re introducing a mere replacement of an equal product, it’d better be .. uhh, just realize that you’re fighting an uphill against change. Make sure you have incentives for people to change.

As if all this weren’t enough, Gourville also highlights that the people developing new products are very dissimilar from the products’ prospective consumers. You don’t go work for TiVo (to use his example) if you don’t ‘get’ the potential of digital video recorders and think they’re a really good idea. And after working for the company for a while, having TiVo becomes part of your endowment; you think of things in comparison to TiVo, instead of in comparison to a VCR. Both of these factors make it harder for developers to see things as their target customers do.

Many techies suffer from this, falling in love with their own creation and failing to see that it could perhaps actually be fundamentally, how should I put this gently, a completely useless product. If it’s not solving a real person’s pain point that he/she is willing to pay for a solution, then monetization may be a challenge. Doesn’t matter how snappy the UI is, or the fact that you’ve just spent a month shaving off 10 CPU cycles on the algorithm that calculates the number of molecules in a can of soda, I highly doubt anyone would pay you to compute out the exact number of modules in a can of Mountain Dew just before they pop the can. I’m sure the algorithm is still very cool, though!

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see
–Leonardo da Vinci

As an innovator, train yourself to see the things that you cannot see. Ok, so that’s admittedly difficult, so at least try to see the things that other people see that you don’t see.

This last point is one of the reasons why I strongly believe that techies should actually get out there (at least occasionally) to go talk to real human beings, such as the paying customers. Be aware of your own inherent bias and need to protect your “baby” (the product), but don’t forget that you are also creating value for someone else.

The bottom line is: if you’re developing something new, you’ll have an easier time if the benefits of the product surpasses the existing solution by (at least) a factor of 10.

May

25

100% odds

Filed Under execution, failure, fear, perseverance, quotes, regular reads | Leave a Comment

Being a computer scientist and math nerd, I like numbers. I like stats. I like probability, and I like to calculate risks. However, life is not so simple such that everything can be nicely fit into a mathematical equation that would compute and balance (although I wish!)

I think that’s the main reason techies don’t cope very well with uncertainty and when things are ambiguous. Anything that don’t fit the cookie cutter mould is shied away from. However, as an entrepreneur, one *must* thrive in a fast-paced and dynamic environment, watching out for land mines and charging ahead into the unknown. I saw this quote on YC/Hacker News today and loved it.

100% of people who succeeded tried. 100% of people who did not try failed.

May

13

Pulau Pandan jauh ketengah

Filed Under pantun | Leave a Comment

Pulau Pandan jauh ke tengah
    Gunung Daik bercabang tiga
Hancur badan dikandung tanah
    Budi yang baik di kenang juga

May

11

iPhone apps for healthcare technology — plus some robots

Filed Under changing the world, healthcare technology, innovation, mobile, regular reads, technology | Leave a Comment

Cell phones, mobile phones, hand phones, whatever they are called, wherever they are in the world–can change the world! We already see it help drive economic development in microfinance, and now, we’re making strides with healthcare technology, another field I’m interested in because I love seeing technology change lives. The convergence of sophisticated UX-centric mobile devices, Internet/Web 2.0, Software as a Service, cloud computing — not to be missed!

From the article:

Despite all the advances in medical diagnostics, two-thirds of the world’s population has no access to imaging technologies. Worse, about half of the imaging equipment sent to developing countries goes unused because local technicians aren’t trained to operate it or lack spare parts, according to the World Health Organization. But thanks to the proliferation of cellular and other wireless networks, researchers are stepping up efforts to deliver crucial medical services from afar. “You go through India, anywhere, in the middle of the road, there’s someone with a cell phone. A friend calls me from the jungles of Costa Rica,” says Rubinsky. “I can see so many applications in which the cell phone becomes an integral part of a medical device. A cell phone can cut the cost of almost every [diagnostic] device.”

We have the $10Mil fbFund for Facebook apps, $100Mil iFund for iPhone apps, $10Mil for Google Android apps, and the to be announced $150Mil Blackberry apps fund — will we see a fund to drive healthcare technology apps?

With the iPhone spurring more handset makers to introduce similarly robust devices, the U.S. market for medical cell-phone software is expanding rapidly. Sales of phone applications for medical professionals are expected to rise from $111.8 million last year to $276 million in 2011, according to consultancy Ambient Insight.

On the “heavier” tech side, we’re definitely making huge strides in having robots that can now operate on people.

Consider this: Suppose there are only 10 surgeons in the world that specialize in this really complicated brain disease, affected by not that many people, but the number of victims dying from it is significant enough (say, 5,000 deaths a year worldwide). There’s only so many surgeons to go around, and with that many victims around the world, even if these surgeons worked themselves to death to save the world, they can’t possibly help everybody with just two hands and only 24 hours in a day. Seriously, it takes almost a day to just travel halfway across the world, and that’s just a one-way.

The solution: remote surgery. In terms of supply and demand, the supply is scarce (the Ph.Ds in this very narrow field) and the demand far exceeds the supply, and the number of victims is probably going to grow at a rate faster than the rate Ph.Ds in this field can be minted. Technology here serves to increase supply, that is, not by letting universities churn out more doctors (although that would work too), but rather by increasing the “utilization rate” of the existing doctors by allowing them to perform their work anywhere at anytime, by saving on travel time and expense. Even if we had an infinite amount of money to spend on the fastest jets, nobody can buy more than 24 hours in a day. 10 hours on a jet spent traveling is 10 hours that could be spent operating on a patient.

“If you are looking at the future, it’s hard to envision a hospital not offering robotics,” said Robert Glenning, chief financial officer at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey

Technology, changing lives and making the world a better place–I love it!

May

7

Return to Innocence - Enigma

Filed Under songs | Leave a Comment

Love - Devotion
Feeling - Emotion
Don’t be afraid to be weak
Don’t be too proud to be strong
Just look into your heart my friend
That will be the return to yourself
The return to innocence
If you want, then start to laugh
If you must, then start to cry
Be yourself don’t hide
Just believe in destiny
Don’t care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don’t give up and use the chance
To return to innocence
That’s not the beginning of the end
That’s the return to yourself
The return to innocence

May

6

Cognitive Surplus

Filed Under regular reads, things to ponder about, things to remind myself, time management, winds of change | Leave a Comment

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, .. I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

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May

1

Innovation lessons from Pixar

Filed Under changing the world, entrepreneurship, failure, fear, google, innovation, people i like, perseverance, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

The McKinsey Quarterly has a really interesting piece on innovation at Pixar–the company who brought you Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille. Keep in mind that Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company from Steve Jobs, the turn around artist and saviour of Apple (Apple Computer, who brought you the iPod), whose company in turn have Eric Schmidt (the CEO of a small little company despised by the behemoth Microsoft) on their board of directors.

Google and Apple are both well known for being innovators in their respective core markets, and suffice to say that they both share some innovation DNA from the top–and Pixar, through its relationship with Steve Jobs would probably have benefited from some of the common DNA between the two. Here are some of the highlights of this article, in which Oscar-winning director Brad Bird was asked about how he managed innovation.

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, “Is The Incredibles too ambitious?” Ed Catmull said, “I don’t know” and looked over at me. I just said, “No! If there’s one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is ‘too ambitious,’ it’s this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

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