Designing for disruption mindsets for thinking about innovation

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require unprecedented degrees of creativity"Capitalising on Complexity - 2010 IBM CEO Study

create entirely new situations..."converging and influencing each other to

at us faster or with less predictability; they are

"events, threats and opportunities aren't just coming

"...these first-of-their-kind developments

“The big shift”Measuring the forces of long-term change

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison

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Source: The Power of Pull; An Examination of Firms in the Brave New World of 21st Century Internet Economics by John Seely Brown

years

creation of new infrastructural technology

period of rapid disruption

stability

stability

~60 yrs

Stable s-curve over decades

• 18th, 19th 20th century infrastructure

• goal was to develop scalable efficiency

The past

years

stability?

stability?

period of rapid disruption

creation of new infrastructural technology

• 21st century driven by continuous exponential advances of computation, storage, bandwidth…

Rapid set of punctuated moves(potentially never ending?)

The present

Source: The Power of Pull; An Examination of Firms in the Brave New World of 21st Century Internet Economics by John Seely Brown

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Three mindsets for thinking about design and innovation in times of great uncertainty and opportunity.

Mindset 0.1

Desire paths

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obsolete, and fast.” - Seth Godin“The extraordinary revolution of media choice”

program our consumption is becoming“The idea that someone can

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the balance of power has shifted...

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we can no longer expect customers

predictable manner...

in a linear, exclusive, or

to interact with our creations

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to create experiences for them...

users no longer have to wait for us

26 Amazon Dash Button Hacks You Probably Didn't Know About

1. Call Uber 2. Order pizza 3. Order beer 4. Order anything from Amazon 5. Track baby data 6. Log your habits into a Google Spreadsheet 7. Add things to a grocery list 8. Track music practice 9. Log your time spent studying 10. Track your work hours 11. Control any power outlet in your home 12. Control Philips Hue lights 13. Control your Tesla's Air Conditioning 14. Netflix and chill 15. Something else…

(and can find instructions for online)

they can change itif something doesn't suit them,

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…enhance it

Kindle teleprompter

http://twitter.com/#!/joindiaspora

…compete with it

Shopping mall app storeCuration & tech support

Social discovery

Serendipity...(and fun!)

replace it

…or maybe even

New Matter $400 3D printer

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necessarily a bad thing...this isn’t

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people don't necessarily want the perfect product..."counterintuitive but there is growing evidence that

incomplete, and possibly even substandard seems"Issuing your customers with something that is rough,

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around the edges that they can adapt or improve."

"...they prefer to deal with something ragged

Loose, Martin Thomas

a pragmatic mix of beautiful, and ‘good enough’

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some of the world’s largest brands

thrive by designing products that reflect

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“we want to give customers

the kind of satisfaction that comes

out as “this will do”, not “this is what I want”.It’s not appetite, but acceptance.”Kenya Hara, Designer, MUJI

Whether you embrace this mindset or not…people will always find their own uses for a thing.

…like this man who

sells sheep—on Instagram

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“…if you have an Instagram account, you can slap a tag

on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it...” – Fatima Al Qadiri, Mousse magazine

more than 10,000 similar businesses

are powered by Facebook...

over in Thailand,

Neither of these examples have been implicitly facilitated by the platform…they’ve simply been fuelled by the ability to communicate and share, on any device, and with a wide audience.

Find a social vendor1

Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

2

Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

Browse products

3

Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

Inquire via messaging(WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Messenger, SMS etc.)

4

Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

Get payment details(PayPal, WeChat, Alipay, bank account etc.)

5

Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

Confirm payment

Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

6 Ship and track

behaviours desire paths…

city planners call these ad-hoc

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and provide clues to faults,

footprints that reveal actual usage

gaps or opportunities

behaviours desire paths…

city planners call these ad-hoc

Here’s an example of a company that leveraged desire paths to completely re-imagine their business…

Meet yy.com—a “Google Hangouts” style platform with over 300 million users and 11 million channels, and programs ranging from karaoke, to “talk radio” and educational topics.

YY.com began as a social gaming site with video chatrooms so gamers could discuss strategy. The site grew very fast.They had growth…but no profit.

chatrooms, people weren’t just chatting—

some people were singing”

“…until they realised that inside some of the

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— NPR Planet Money

So the yy team decided to experiment…

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virtual tickets so they could vote for their

on sale [on TaoBao*] for about $0.25 a piece!”favourite singers…a little later, they found the tickets

“…they gave their users free

*giant C2C e-commerce marketplace

YY now offers its own virtual currency.

Users purchase credits and use them to show affection for their favourite stars by buying them virtual gifts such as roses and lollipops.

Gifts range in cost from mere pennies to as much as $50 (£35) and yy gets a cut of each transaction.

“top Karaoke singers regularly make $20K (£15K) a month

off of virtual gifts, with one college student reportedly

earning an astonishing $188K (£150K) per month

using the site to give Photoshop lessons”- The largest social network you’ve never heard of

In 2014, yy IPOed and more than 50% of their revenue now comes from their virtual currency enabled music business.

DiversityMidset 0.2

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of a product into society...of 50 million to mark the "penetration"

marketers often use an audience

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(which was usually a good thing)

historically, market penetration took time,

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the development of social norms,

with time came stronger mental models,

laws, infrastructure…

a product or technology might…and an understanding of how

fit into our lives...

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time is now often a luxury...for better or worse

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a market penetration of 50 million...it took radio 40 years to reach

Source: ReWired, Larry D. Rosen

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahreido/4566354684Source: ReWired, Larry D. Rosen

10 years to 'adapt' to television...

by comparison, we had only

while the iPod took only 5 years...iconic

Source: ReWired, Larry D. Rosen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU

less than 6 months...

and YouTube,

Source: ReWired, Larry D. Rosen

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html

in less than half this time...

Google+ reached that milestone

Google + in fact reached this milestone in about 3 months... to the tune of 2million new users a day!

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is now also increasingly diverse

our reach increasingly wide, our audiencesocial ,and the internet, not only isbut thanks to mobile,

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at a pace that was once unheard of...

technology adoption is creating 'generation gaps'researchers are discovering that our rapid

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Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center, Internet and American Life Project

experiences with technology."are having completely different"People two, three or four years apart

How different age groups think about technology is important, but in a global marketplace, it’s the cultural, historical and societal differences that will often make or break a product.

China has 14 cities with populations

over five million...

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...a whopping 41 cities with

more than 2 million inhabitants

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...and a “middle class” growing at a rate of

80,000 people a day

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tahini/10468208216 Source: China Connect

rural residents can be challenging

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reaching China’s 600 millionfor brands in this market,

its close to 700 million urban residents

but no more so than

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opening enough stores to service

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to many Chinese, shopping online

isn’t so much an electronic version of commerce,

it *is* commerce, pure and simple

it’s therefore not surprising that

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...and using their mobile to do so isn’t just

a modern alternative to using a PC, it’s their primary

(or sometimes only) means of using the internet

…these factors combined help to explain why Chinese e-commerce has developed quite differently than in Europe or N America

76%of online retail involves individual merchants

of online retail involves online marketplaces90%

Marketplaces—such as Alibaba’s TMall and TaoBao—provide an economically, socially and technologically appropriate alternative to missing infrastructure: high visibility, high traffic, customizable, social-media + mobile optimized commerce.

apple.tmall.com

Which is why even Apple has a storefront on TMall.

…but what’s important here isn’t China, its the group of characteristics it represents.

Find similar conditions elsewhere, and you may be able to replicate aspects of this model.

“...most of the people have phones but

there are only 3 malls per 20 million inhabitants*…

It’s a unique time...the right time to leapfrog over ‘offline’.”- jumia.com co-founder

THE BIGGEST ONLINE SHOPPING MALL IN AFRICAEgypt | Kenya | Uganda| Ivory Coast| Nigeria | Morocco

*that’s 60K people per retail outlet compared to 7K in APAC and 389 in the U.S.)

brands in these markets can experiment…

ignore what’s “normal” and find

the most locally appropriate

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with little baggage to weigh them down,

path to profit

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on Instagram [and WhatsApp] with our customers…

we literally have some customers who have ordered

multiple times and never spoken to us…

- How WhatsApp helped Jumia disrupt Africa

“…our [agents] chat all day long

never placed an order online”

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a pair of shoes, return it, and then buy the next size…

so we thought let’s encourage them to order two

or three sizes…and pay only for what they accept- How WhatsApp helped Jumia disrupt Africa

“...we saw that customers would order

(just in case this still feels like an edge case…)

Russian e-commerce brand Lamoda has turned poor postal infrastructure into an excuse to deliver items you didn’t even ask for and up-sell you at the door as you try them on…

ResilienceMindset 0.3

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interdependent systems of experience...

designing multi-layered and tightly

while companies such as Apple are successfully(for the moment) still

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their success relies in great part on

most touch points and interactions...

their ability to control and contain

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have this luxury...

most products will not

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be the first to fail...

orchestrated products may in fact

today the most perfectly

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for each layer of experience

there will be trade-offs

in complexity

actors in the ecosystem...

and an increasing reliance on other

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cost of aluminium?

environmental lobby, recycling?

IP battles, user ‘hacking’, knock-off capsules

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that have become all too common

...reducing a product's ability to react

to the abrupt changes in environment

fuel costs?

autonomous vehicles, sharing economy, union protests

economic slowdowns

…unless, you design your product, from the ground up to thrive amidst disruption.

On August 11 2014, online media company BuzzFeed closed a $50M funding round and announced the creation of a new group called BuzzFeed Distributed.

The aim of the group would be to address a growing problem…

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forever changed the way we communicate

mobile and social have

(this can be both a blessing and a curse)

60M

Referrals to BuzzFeed.com

349M

12.5M

Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015

60M

349M

Impressions in the social stream

847M 11.3B

6.4B

12.5M

Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015

Instead of trying to lure eyeballs to its own website, BuzzFeed would experiment with ways to publish original content directly to where its audience already spent their time—some 30 different global platforms.

BuzzFeed also built Pound*, a sharing-analysis technology that goes beyond traditional analytics that only capture traffic….

what traditional analytics show…

*Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion

Source: Buzzfeed

Instead, Pound captures how stories spread on the social web from one person to another, including downstream visits across networks and 1-2-1 platforms like Gchat and email.

what is actually happening

Source: Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed uses this data to inform new experiments and continuously improve content fit, and placement.

People making stuff Apps

Distributed

Webcontent

data, learnings,

$$$

contentdata, learnings, $$$

content

data, learnings, $$$

Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015

“…it increasingly doesn’t matter where our content lives…and that can be a huge advantage and it’s something that I think lots of media companies get scared of…but we think it can make us a stronger company” — Jonah Peretti

https://www.flickr.com/photos/43097880@N02/13884849857/Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015

A few parting thoughts….

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the future is rarely

short on narratives…

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…and a great many of them

are currently about data

the future will be full of

opportunities to measure…

Twitter: Bill Gross

Proteus Digital Health - Digital health feedback system

to track…

swallow a smart pill

wear a patch

…track these things using our app

…to anticipate, to recommend,

to test and to optimize…

Almax - EyeSee Mannequin

Photo: Mashable

…it may even be tempting to believe

that data will be all you need

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“You have to use a lot of intuition and a lot of creativity,

and the data is one part of the input…”

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“…data will tell you, if you're very lucky,

what happened. It won't ever tell you why.

If you want to understand why, that requires a different set

of skills, largely in your brain and in your heart”. Dao Nguyen, BuzzFeed data maven, courtesy Wired

“You have to use a lot of intuition and a lot of creativity,

and the data is one part of the input…”

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hello@yiibu.com thank you

http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/letting-go-9109114

many thanks to the amazing photographers on

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0

licensed under

available on

@yiibu

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