Enter Exponential Innovator (ExO), the “Mixed Martial Arts” (MMA) of Innovation Processes


Imagine a thrilling Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) match, where skilled fighters seamlessly pull techniques from Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, Wrestling and more to bring themselves to peak martial prowess.  Moves are expertly mixed & matched across traditions -- reflecting a flexibility of mind not available from traditional martial arts.

Surprisingly, this multifaceted approach to fighting has parallels in the world of innovation processes. As a graduate of Stanford University, my expertise in innovation revolved around Design Thinking. However, it wasn't until I embarked on Corina Almagro's Exponential Innovator (ExO) course from EADA that I grasped the existence of a methodology that interwove what I'd perceived to be orthogonal innovation approaches like Design Thinking, Lean Product Development, Business Model Canvas, Agile, and the Purpose Dashboard into a coherent whole.

MMA fighters draw from a multitude of disciplines to adapt to various opponents. Similarly, ExO fuses together a range of innovation processes, each possessing unique strengths, to create a powerful and versatile multi-threaded framework. This approach resonates with me deeply, as I believe in embracing flexibility and improvisation—adapting to the needs of the moment rather than sticking to rigid rules.

  • My own innovation foundation is firmly rooted in Design Thinking from my time at Stanford University, where I earned a Masters Degree in Product Design under the tutelage of design luminaries like David Kelley (co-founder of IDEO) and Michael Barry (design ethnography). Design Thinking taught me to empathize with users, brainstorm creative solutions, prototype, and iterate based on feedback. These principles became the pillars of my approach to problem-solving and product design. However, I soon realized that while Design Thinking was invaluable, there were other constructs like Lean Product Development and Agile.  I didn't know how to fit these pieces together.

Enter ExO, the MMA of innovation processes.  ExO shifted my orientation on how to think across innovation lines:

  • By integrating Lean Product Development, I discovered the art of efficiency - streamlining processes and maximizing value while minimizing waste. It was like honing my strikes, ensuring each move counts and delivers the most significant impact.  

  • But innovation is not just about being efficient; it's about being agile, adaptive, and ultimately EXPANSIVE. One of the most compelling aspects of ExO is its integration of Exponential Attributes. ExO harnesses the power of exponential attributes like the IDEAS and SCALE frameworks to open doors to new possibilities and expansive ways of thinking. I felt like we were unlocking the door to a previously unacknowledged reserve of Chi, a framework for drawing power and strength from an untapped source that had been lying in plain sight. All this made sense to me intuitively. It’s just that I had never heard it explicitly systematized and named. I no longer needed to feel like a fish swimming upstream. These were my peeps!

As I delved deeper into the ExO framework, I experienced firsthand the magic of synergy - the true hallmark of any MMA champion. The seamless blending of Design Thinking's human-centered approach with Lean Product Development's efficiency and Agile's adaptability brings a level of harmony and coherence that I had unknowingly been scratching for. It was an epiphany – that flash of clarity where everything makes sense in the world.

Today, I stand humbled. Like a fledgling MMA student, I’m working on honing and diversifying my skill set across these innovation methodologies, including to new ones (to me) like Purpose Dashboard. I’m eager to see what the future will hold.

But one thing’s for sure; it will be exponential and non-linear. The sky’s the limit!

Gasoline Chipper Shredder


Gasoline Chipper Shredder

Choosing a gas shredder

When should you consider buying a gasoline-driven shredding machine? If over the season you collect a significant amount of sticks and branches that fall or are pruned from your many trees or shrubs, you might consider buying a chipper/shredder machine. While not cheap, they last for decades and might help keep your organic waste on the property instead of sending it out to the trash. It makes wonderful mulch.

Shredders come in all sizes and shapes. Since this is not a low-cost item, it is wise to get a feel of your options.

• Electric chipper/shredders: I do not recommend the little electric chipper/shredders. I've tested a half dozen over the years and because they are under-powered they clog up too easily no matter how careful you might be in feeding material into the machine's hopper.

• Gas chipper/shredders: I have had good experience with gasoline-driven chipper/shredders over the years. All kinds of organic yard waste can be shredded into particles the size of a nickel. In most cases, the leaves, weeds, and twigs will be reduced at a 10-to-1 ratio. In other words, 10 bags of leaves when shredded produce one bag of shredded leaves. In the best machines, the shredding function is joined by a chipper attachment, allowing larger branches to be chipped into more mulch. Depending on the model, homeowner units can accept branches up to 3 inches in diameter.

The two variables to consider when making a selection are: horsepower and size of the chipping hopper.

A 5-horsepower machine will handle the load for an average property that is less than an acre (Yard Machines, $550). It can chip branches up to 2 inches in diameter. If you have a large number of trees to maintain, you should look at machines with 8.5 horsepower (Craftsman, $800) or even 10 horsepower (Troy-Bilt, $900). These machines will chip branches up to 3 inches in diameter. Shredding and chipping requires significant power to be done effectively. The higher the horsepower, the easier it is to handle larger volumes of material, especially if it is wet, which is often the case.

To get an idea of all the sizes of shredders available, check out the shredder section of Amazon.com. Most tool rental outlets will have one or two gas shredders for the home landscape. I used to go in with a neighbor and rent one for a day and cover both properties.


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iPhone Rumors? Finally! - Technology News - redOrbit


Excerpt:

It’s this “finally” that makes Apple such a great company, misunderstood as they may be. Apple isn’t ashamed or scared of Finally. At times it even feels as if they revel in Finally, taking great pride not in being the first to market, but the best in the market.

Apple is willing to take their time to make sure they get it right. It’s quite cunning, really, and extremely simplistic. Apple has no problem letting other companies make mistakes in being the first to market. Apple will patiently sit and watch, learning from the other guys’ mistakes. While Apple customers are always the benefit for this patience, it can often be frustrating, especially as we wait for new features or new products. Our crying out for new features and functionality normally has no effect on Apple. They’ll make the changes when they feel good and ready, making adjustments and implementations only when they believe it will improve the product on the whole. It is in this way and only this way that Apple tries to make their customers happy. They believe they know how to make a great product, and the customers will not be happy until they get the product in their hands. 

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Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman Has A Lot To Say - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD

http://allthingsd.com/20120605/hewlett-packard-ceo-meg-whitman-has-a-lot-to-s...

Excerpt:

And I think the other thing about HP is that this is not about the network or the database. It’s about our customer. This is something that I bring to HP, because I’m not an enterprise salesperson. At eBay I was a customer, and so, I think we can be completely differentiated by saying it’s not our agenda, but your agenda. And I think that’s very authentic to HP.


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Stop asking “But how will they make money?” | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)


Excerpt:

Business models are important, but today they’re commoditized
Let me first state: Business models are important. Of course businesses have to make money, that’s a given. But that’s not my point – my point is:

Business models are a commodity now, so “how will they make money?” isn’t an interesting question. The answers are all obvious.

So when you see the next consumer mobile/internet product with millions of engaged users, let’s stop asking about their business model expecting a clever answer – they’ll have dozens of off-the-shelf solutions to choose from – and instead, let’s start asking about the parts of their business that aren’t commoditized yet. (More on this later)

Outsource your monetization
Between the original dotcom bubble versus now, a lot has changed for consumer internet companies. Thankfully, monetization is now a boring problem to solve because there’s a ton of different options to collect revenue that didn’t exist before:

  • There’s 200+ ad networks to plug into
  • Payment providers like Paypal, Amazon, Stripe
  • “Offer walls” like Trialpay
  • Mobile payment solutions like Boku
  • … and new services coming out all the time (Kickstarter)

Not only that, consumers know and expect to pay for services, something that was novel back in the late 90s. If you offer some sort of marketplace like Airbnb, they’ll expect a listing fee. If you are making a social game on Facebook, they’ll expect to be able to buy more virtual stuff. They’ll expect to pay $0.99 for an iPhone app.

Contrast this with the dotcom bubble, in which you were creating brand new user behavior as well as building these monetization services in-house. In eBay’s case, people just mailed each other (and eBay) money for their listings. Small websites had to build up ad sales teams in order to get advertising revenue, instead of plugging into ad networks. Building apps for phones involved months of negotiation with carriers to get “on deck.” At my last startup, an ad targeting technology company, we encountered companies like ESPN which had written their own ad servers because they didn’t have off-the-shelf solutions when they first started their website back in the late 1990s.

Let me repeat that: They wrote their own ad server as part of building their news site. And that means they had engineers writing lots of code to support their business model rather than making their product better.


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The Internet: A Series Of 'Tubes' (And Then Some)

Great story on the physical Internet!

The Internet: A Series Of 'Tubes' (And Then Some)

NPR - May 31, 2012

Increasingly, Internet users are working "in the cloud" — creating and sending data that isn't stored on local hard drives. It's easy to imagine our emails and photos swirling around in cyberspace without a physical home — but that's not really how it works. Those files are still stored somewhere, but you can only find them if you know where to look....

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/31/153701673/the-internet-a-series-of-tubes-and-then-some?sc=17&f=13

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Where to Draw the Line

The most important thing a product manager does is decide where their product stops and someone else’s product takes over.

If an app does too little then it isn’t be worth the cost of installation, or registration let alone the actual purchase price. Similarly if it does do too much, then it will clash with some other pre-existing software or workflow that users are already happy with. It’s a Goldilocks problem, you need to find the product that’s just right.

EXAMPLE: TIME TRACKING

At an absolute minimum time tracking is just totaling a list of numbers. Now, if that was all a web app had to offer, it would be useless. Excel or Google docs does that job already. It’s at this point we realise simplicity is overrated. No amount of web fonts, HTML5 transitions, or sound effects can help a product that simply isn’t earning its keep.

At a maximum, time tracking can involve project management, budgets, contractors, invoicing, receipt tracking and employee monitoring. Applications that incorporate so many surrounding tasks tread on the toes of products already in place, in this case, Xero, Ballpark, Basecamp, etc.

Products exist to solve problems that occur in a workflow. They have a start and end point within that workflow. To understand where these points should be, you must understand the entire workflow. Let’s look at the workflow for a team ordering lunch every day…

If you’re building an app that helps teams order lunch every day, the workflow might look like this…

  1. Someone gets hungry.
  2. He or she communicates this to the rest of the team.
  3. Debate ensures about whether to go out or order in.
  4. Second debate about where to order in from.
  5. Menus for different places are passed around.
  6. A decision is arrived at quickly
  7. One person is appointed to gather everyone’s orders.
  8. That person then places order.
  9. That person communicates delivery team & cost to everyone
  10. Time passes.
  11. Food arrives, and is eaten.
  12. Orderer checks if everyone paid enough & who still owes money.
  13. Finances are settled, or the settlement is postponed until tomorrow.
  14. Some will talk about the food on Twitter or Facebook. Some will post pictures on Instagram. Others will review on Yelp.
  15. Everyone returns to work.

When you understand the full workflow, you can focus on the most concise painful subset your product solves, or alternatively the piece you can make more fun or interesting. Don Dodge has a great article titled “Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller” that discusses the difference here.

WHERE SHOULD YOU START?

Start your product at the first step where you can add value. For our lunch example, this is probably step four. Starting any earlier would mean taking on chat products or email, rarely a good idea. (Side-note: Unstructured communication always falls back to email or chat. You can count on no fingers the amount of products who have changed this over the years.)

A real world example would be TripIt. TripIt solves travel management. Their app could start with flight search, but TripIt couldn’t add value there. The first point they can add value is right after a booking is made. By understanding the entire workflow, Tripit designed a great solution. The last thing that happens before TripIt can add value is “User opens booking confirmation”. This is the first point TripIt can add value, so they start with that email and import from there. Similarly, Instragram starts with importing your social network, or time tracking can start by importing projects from Basecamp. Good APIs and import features help your users get off to an easy running start.

WHERE SHOULD YOU STOP?

Your budget, whether time or money, should restrict but never define your scope. A large budget should define how well a problem is solved, never how many problems are tackled. Attempting to tackle an entire workflow from start to finish for all types of users is near impossible.

Your product should stop when the next step…

  • - has well defined market leaders looking after it (e.g. PayPal, IMDB, Expedia), and you don’t intend to compete.
  • - is done in lots of different ways by lots of different types of users (e.g. trying to process salaries in a time tracking app would be tricky)
  • involves different end-users than the previous steps (e.g. managers, accountants etc.)

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Where to Draw the Line | The Intercom Blog

http://blog.intercom.io/where-to-draw-the-line/

So much is written about the pursuit of simplicity these days but often there is a confusion.There is a fundamental difference between making a product simple, and making a simple product.

Making a product simple emphasizes removing all unnecessary complexity so that every users can solve their problems as efficiently as possible. Making a simple product, however, is about scoping down and choosing the smallest subset of the workflow where your product delivers value. This MVP approach runs the risk of being labelled a point solution, or worse, ‘a feature but not a product‘.

When shooting for a “simple product”, be careful where you draw the line.

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What Do Consumers Really Want? Simplicity - Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird - Harvard Business Review

Excerpt:

 In fact, we found that the single biggest driver of "stickiness" — customers' likelihood of following through on a purchase, buying the product again, and recommending it — was, by far, "decision simplicity," the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently navigate their purchase options.

The bottom line: These days making a purchase decision easy is what makes customers choose your brand.

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