I discovered this from a paper by Dr Chris Burgoyne, “The Bicycle Wheel as a Prestressed Structure”, published in 1993, (www-civ.eng.cam.ac.uk/cjb/papers/p20.pdf) which I came across during some work I’m doing for the University of Cambridge. By the way – the tyre is a pre-stressed structure too.

 
Now I wonder what Cayley’s mental model was?

While the next steps for such organisations depends upon their progress along a journey, central to the workshop’s debates was the question of identifying and assessing competencies of those with safety-critical roles.  While there’s no silver bullet, today’s working groups developed ideas for identifying the roles, the competencies and the approaches to assessment.

I think there’s a potential framework for thinking about this by combining the ideas behind asset integrity, corporate capability and risk management.  Competence and culture become links between maintaining integrity and resilience, and delivering performance.  The real beauty of such a framework is that it leads quickly to prioritised and pragmatic action – within management structures that are already in place.

Thinking continues to flesh this out.

(http://www.abc.net.au/tv/wideopenroad/episodes/ – brilliant series!)

Maybe it’s just a reflection of my interests, but I wonder if other charities would get a good response from their supporters (and others) by explaining how they innovate to solve problems, rather than just continuing the familiar approaches?

Then there was Michelin’s effort – the ‘tweel’ touched on in an earlier post here (http://innovationcoaching.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/innovation-and-system-boundaries/).

Another iconoclast is John Keogh who managed to patent the wheel in Australia in 2001. See (http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/aub/pdf/nps/2002/0808/2001100012A4/2001100012.pdf) for a copy of the patent.  He did this to highlight flaws in the then recently introduced ‘innovation patent’.  While the patent won’t stand up to a challenge, it’s a nice example of reinventing the wheel!

Innovation is a dance between developers (of a product or a service) and their consumers and users.  The innovators seek new things to offer, either to do a job better or perhaps to do a job that the consumer didn’t recognise was possible.  And the consumer is on the lookout, consciously or unconsciously, for better ways to do things or new things to do.  Sometimes the innovator leads, think iTunes (sorry for the same old example) and sometimes the innovator follows (“we’re proud to be customer-led”).

But the innovator isn’t the only player in the game.  Competitors shape consumer expectations.  Shaped well, expectations and familiarity can be very powerful.  For example, admittedly some years ago, Nokia built a loyal following of consumers who liked the Nokia mobile phone interface.  Many refused to switch brands because they liked the Nokia experience.

But competitors teach consumers to want different things.  Perhaps the most compelling example is in the range of apps available for smartphones.  Many apps offer things to do that you simply didn’t know you needed.  Standing in London on a wet night and can’t find a taxi?  There’s an app that will tell you what buses are nearby and will take you to your destination.  Knowing that teaches consumers several things; they needn’t walk and they needn’t pay the premium for a taxi.

Which also illustrates that competition comes from strange places in a complex world.  A smartphone app enables a bus to compete with a taxi on new terms.

So when you’re thinking about the users of your products or services you need to be aware that they will learn.  And the best teacher will have an advantage.  And teachers from elsewhere will change the game.

Are you thinking about how your customer learns? From whom? And what?

As it happens I’ve also been working across the Engineering Department to help them develop and launch their new research theme and initiative to optimise their research practices to make their work more immediately accessible, useful and applicable to industry.  So this Forum was a good example of the theme in action.

Tim and his team managed an excellent process to focus in on the needs and questions from industry (the first day) and to articulate research experience and interests (second day) to arrive at a series of candidate research projects pulling together teams from across the world.  The candidate projects were articulated in terms of the aims and objectives, the methodology and design and the interested parties.  To my mind most interesting of the projects are:

• Open Innovation for corporate growth and renewal
• Open Innovation best practice in new and emerging markets
• Factors influencing how open innovation is implemented (comparing the dynamics, tempo and structure of different sectors)
• Leadership in open innovation

Next steps are to complete the definition of the research proposals and to find sponsors (so, if you’re interested in the topics  please contact me or Tim Minshall)

• Neil Taylor of TheWriter (www.thewriter.com) with a call to better use of language and some compelling examples or how to communicate more effectively.  (and one of the most attractive and useful brochures I’ve ever seen)
• Cory Doctorow with some worrying thoughts about the value proposition behind Digital Rights Management and who really benefits

• David Butler (VP Design at Coca Cola) with perfect clarity that design, in his mind, is targeted at improving the bottom line and some interesting examples of designing ‘systems’ to underpin both innovation and commonality / scaleability across a huge organisation
• Tom Wright and Vinay Gupta, the entrepreneurs behind WhipCar (www.whipcar.com) explained the amazingly rapid take-up of their business, in which private individuals rent their car to other individuals to the benefit of both. It seems to me to require a view of the car as just another consumer durable (and the difficulty I have with that says more about me than about their business model and target users)

Fascinating conversation over lunch with Hannah Macmurray of Green Car Design who described the new dynamic open to designers as the distributed components of the electric car (e.g. wheel motors) removes the constraints that have plagued designers of the IC powered car.

Well run and well facilitated.  A good one

The first person went on to complain that he had achieved all the efficiency savings he could find and from here he would be cutting into corporate capability. Maybe, just maybe, innovation could contribute to the search for efficiency?  Indeed innovation might be the only alternative to cuts that would further damage the firm??  Maybe, but his board colleagues wanted efficiency, not innovation.

The second person was happy to support innovation, but not if it cost anything.  So we explored the costs of cutting instead (redundancy, management attention) and the risks (lost service levels, missed opportunities, increased organisational fragility).  Maybe the cost of innovation wasn’t so high after all?  Maybe, but he’d rather pursue innovation later, perhaps if the next round of cuts frees up some cash.

Innovation is now being seen as an end in itself.  Not helpful.

Overall it was nice to hear people focusing much more about context and execution of innovation rather than just on creativity and ideas – indeed this was one of the emergent themes of the day.

Highlight for me was Richard Seymour’s presentation which covered an amazingly wide range of topics, and from which there were a number of useful take-aways:

• ­ “we see things not as they are but as we are” – which chimed also with the conversation I’d had with Laura Gelder-Robertson (www.glowinnovation.com) before the first session about the importance of watching customers and consumers and avoiding the bias brought by companies steeped in their own beliefs about their company’s product or service attributes.

• ­People’s competence in adaptation blinds us to their work-arounds that suggest innovation opportunities.  He also highlighted what he calls the ‘standing waves’ – what I would describe as technological lock-in – where the designs we live with today are the residue of past constraints or decisions (QWERTY is the usual example)

• Emergent behaviour is then evident when the change comes or the constraint is removed.

• And the emergent behaviour we will see in future will arise from a generation that is profoundly different to the generations before.

• Consider ‘emotional functionality’ as well as ‘technical functionality’  – with Seymour attributing Apple’s success to Steve Job’s ability to build this into ‘the ethos, of which the products are just souvenirs’  (lovely phrase!)

But perhaps his most important point is the centrally pivotal role of belief in bringing an innovation to success.  The vital component is not the business case – instead it’s the belief of the champions making innovation happen.

This latter point came up again and again from the social entrepreneurs describing their activities and the commitment that underpins their persistence.

Chris Anderson of TED explained how TED grew phenomenally after they started ‘giving away’ the content.  Also there was Matt Ridley, the ‘rational optimist’ describing his ideas – see him on TED at www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html.  And the various panelists adding perspectives and insights from their particular histories.

A good event – a source of insight and different viewpoints, stimuli and prompts.

One thing I noticed – the landmark used to identify the entrance to the conference was, and I quote, “Lewis Hamilton’s F1 car”.  It struck me as a pity that the label referred to the driver rather than to the team of innovators who kept the McLaren MP4-23 at the peak of the game for the season.  Functionally the Economist was right in their labeling of the landmark because the public cares much more about the drama of the drivers – Hamilton versus Button and whether Schumacher can make a comeback.  But for a conference saluting innovation it would have been nice to recognise Doug McKiernan, the chief aerodynamicist at a time that F1 cars reached their peak of aerodynamic sophistication under that set of rules.  Especially since the emergent theme from the conference was context, belief, commitment and persistence; attributes displayed by the innovators behind the scenes in that most public of sports.