Innovate the
unexpected
Booted by
Wellington.
Some
time after the battle of Waterloo,
Arthur Wellesley, The Duke of
Wellington was working at his desk when he was disturbed by an
unexpected interruption. A visitor barged in to the room and cried "I
must kill you!".
"Does
it have to be today?"
Wellington asked, barely raising his gaze
from his papers. "Well, they didn't tell me," the assassin replied,
apparently confused, “But soon, surely”
“Good”, Wellington remarked laconically,
“A little later on then, I'm busy at the moment."
The jobs not done
until…
Wellington may have been quick witted enough to be able to use an
innovative reply to alter the course of history, but most of us need to
have a plan or framework along which our wits are channelled.
Dotcom Kaboom!
next
During the dotcom boom many media houses thought that there was an easy
buck to be made on the Internet.
What tended to defeat them was the amount of software that
was needed on the server to underpin their creative front ends. Coupled
to that, the average bandwidth to the home was pretty appalling, which
further complicated matters. This was the position when I was asked to
help them to innovate their way out of a fix.
To these
lovely people, there was no obvious solution,
because they
were tied by of the things that I mentioned above. Creative it was, and
the front end looked really smart when it ran locally, but put it on a
server over a 56k link and boy oh boy did it suck.
Wolf
the technical
director, and Andrew the studio directorwere
feeling pretty exposed by
the time they contacted Rob, but they wanted to make sure that they
understood what they had to do to get the project back on track. Using
the techniques from “The Innovation Project” and a
little time from Rob, they harness their collective cerebral intellect
to cool down their development and get it back on track.
Getting
to Platform 13 ¾.
next
Rob had been working with an Air Transport firm who delivered Departure
Control Systems to airports. Desperate
to win against their competitors it was important for them to show that
their solution could work on their competitors’ hardware and
software platform. But convincing the potential client was not going to
be easy, because no one knew how to solve the problem.
Rob
brought
in the principals of “The Innovation
Project”, which
allowed for some lateral thinking between the
developers and product sales team. With Rob’s assistance Ian
and his team came up with a solution that could be easily explained by
using a real world analogy using everyday objects to explain the
solution.
There
was
no need to reveal the technical solution,
because the analogy
delivered the principal. Getting to platform 13 ¾ may seem
an impossibility, but sometimes a parallel route will get you through.
Tickets
please….
next
It might have seemed straightforward, some years ago, when one of my
customers was in a pickle,
having
won an important contract. They were a premier ticketing organisation
who supplied access gates and computers for the Metro, which was about
to undergo a makeover.
But
technology
had moved on in the fifteen years since they developed
their last product, and it
was becoming clear that they were swimming
out of their depth. This new Object Oriented stuff was way over their
head, so they needed a framework that they could use to translate from
the old technology to the new. Facets of “The Innovation
Project” were brought to bear, so that they could use a
parallel to work against.
Being
all at sea with the next technology generation is a scary place
to be, even if you still have
the old technical skills in place. By
exploring the ways in which the brain work they were able, with a
little hep from Rob to work out props that they could all use as a
handy translation tool.
Don’t
stop there next
it’s
not only businesses that can use “The
Innovation Project”.
If
you need new ideas and can’t work out how to get
started, then “The Innovation Project” is yor next
step forward.
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