Half Time In America,,,,

Whenever a discussion begins about the future it always includes technology, the internet, start ups and entrepreneurship.

It also seems that the focus ends up being on Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston.

Its as if the future belongs to the two coasts and the great vast land mass between the coasts will be left in the past.  

Then you find that Detroit, the city that most of us believe is boarded up, decaying, and nothing more than a collection of crumbling buildings is actually one of the fastest growing centers for technology start ups in the United States!

What makes Detroit special?  Maybe its because the city and its citizens knew they had nowhere to go but up?  But, if anything the following articles about the start up revolution in Detroit not only prove that the future can belong to any city or town willing to put out the effort, and Detroit provides a road map of how to embrace a technology renaissance:

          How The Motor City Got Its Groove Back

          Start Up City USA

          Detroit's Education Edge

          Inside Detroit's Start Up Culture

Most cities seek to support their existing businesses and or attract existing businesses from other locales to populate their industrial parks.  But the reality is the future belongs to those communities, both big and small, who find a way to break with the traditions of the past and seek to create a culture of innovation.  

Most local communities depend on a Chamber of Commerce and or a some quasi official economic development group both of which operate on traditional principles of creating economic growth which do not foster opportunities and innovation.  An analysis of Detroit offers the following roadmap for changing the existing pattern:

          The Downside Of Tradition

          Seven Steps To A Culture Of Innovation

The reality is the future belongs to those communities that create a culture of innovation, regardless of their size, demographics, or geography.

Technology, Retail, and Ecommence

Women account for roughly 75 cents of every dollar spent at retail and women are early adopters of the IPad tablet; in less than a year the IPad, or Tcommerce will revolutionize retail.

The IPad, or tablet, is not just an ebook reader, or something to surf the web with, it is;

If you're fortunate and hip enough to own an iPad -- or have otherwise experimented with one -- the preference for this shopping device will come as no surprise. The nearly 10-inch display offers a comfortable environment for web-surfing and product consideration, overcoming the size restraints that can frustrate shoppers on mobile phones. Compared to point-and-clicking from a laptop, the touch-screen functionality provides a more immediately satisfying and tactile shopping experience. Lightweight and compact, tablets with 3G/4G connectivity are also inherently free from the constraints of the desktop; they can be comfortably schlepped from commuter trains to airport lounges to kitchen counters, facilitating purchases at every venue.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg would have you believe that Fcommerce is the next thing to "blow up"  and Facebook even commissioned a study that showed that while Facebook showed a 92% increase in referrals in August 2011 over the same month a year earlier the reality is that Facebook only accounts for 1.2% of Ecommerce conversions.  Twitter only accounted for .5% but it did achieve the highest purchase average of $121.33.  Social Media conversions represent impulse purchases, not planned purchases; planned purchases are the domain of Google and search.  An explanation of an "impulse purchase" is:

Consumers on Facebook and Twitter don’t intend to make a purchase, but rather share information. A spontaneous shopper might see an ad and get pulled into the retailer’s Web site. The shopper’s personality, combined with impulse and influence from the ad, prompts the sale or conversion.

The IPad or tablet, will totally change retail from a radically different perspective; now a consumer, armed with an IPad, can shop at any brick and mortar establishment and use their IPad to scour the internet for the same product at a cheaper price.  Thus even impulse buys will become rational.

With the announcement of the new Amazon Tablet for $199 Amazon could have become the internet based "Walmart" if their new tablet had included 3G/4G rather than Wifi.

Then of course, you will have the experts going on about "the shopping experience" and multi-channel retail, but I always refer back to an article, Don't Compete On Price, from 2007 that made the same claims and then used Circuit City as a successful case in point!

The reality is that technology, especially the tablet but also mobile technology, have the ability to turn brick and mortar retail stores into nothing but browsing catalog showrooms, much like Service Merchandise, where the purchases are made online from ones cheaper competitor.

The forces of innovation and technology always start out creating more choices and opportunities but they always end up favoring the bigger lower cost competition.  Whether one is talking about trains, automobiles, or the internet, the opportunities once created for many end up leaving only a few.

The only way a manufacturer or a retailer can compete is to focus on a niche, specialization, and  exclusivity.

Innovation, Change, And Disruptive Hypotheses

I have always been fascinated with what makes some companies and or organizations so successful and why other companies struggle and then never quite achieve their potential, then you have those companies that, for a period of time, are doing everything right and growing by leaps and bounds, only to end up being an eventual cultural relic.

Innovation and change are disruptive; they involve someone somewhere asking the question, “what if….”  That then becomes the basis for a disruptive hypothesis; a disruptive hypothesis being an intentionally unreasonable statement that is designed to upset your comfortable business equilibrium which in turn leads to a change in direction of your thought process.

Innovation starts with a disruptive hypotheses and the process of creating one involves:

1.      Defining the situation;

2.      Searching for clichés;

3.      Then twisting those clichés around.

Every industry has its "best practices" and every industry has its stereotypical way of doing business; we seek out consultants, we seek out employees, and we seek out solutions to problems by believing that success derives from being better, more experienced, or more like everyone else in our industry.

Exactly then how do you question clichés if you reinforce "...that's the way we have always done it..." through your hiring practices?  Stealing the expertise of a competitor is not innovation.

I remember when I first was introduced to the concept of self funding employee health insurance, I was informed that we were not "big" enough.  But, when I asked why and what does the number of lives covered have to do with it I never could get an answer other than, "...because that is the way it is...."

Eventually, we sat down and worked up the numbers and came to understand why the number of lives covered is important but we also found that we could benefit from shifting to a self funded plan.  Then we went on and found that by working with a local hospital we could create a "gatekeeper" network that involved our employees naming a primary care physician who managed their health care and who was paid a higher fee to do so; this in turn lowered our health care costs!

If you find yourself struggling with a growing company, where it seems that the different departments are not coming together then why not institute a 'job swap' program; a program where, on a regular basis employees work with their counterparts in other departments?  If shipping and customer service are always at loggerheads, then let them spend a day, on a regular basis, in the shoes of the other.

In the apparel industry sales will always demand new products; new colors and or something new every few months.  Then when you analyze sales you realize that 75% of your sales come from the same 10 products; obviously the desire for newness is only a motivation to get your sales people out selling the same products they have always sold.  But, so many apparel companies end up growing to the point that their inventory and product line ends up being their downfall.

What if, rather than sending professional sales people to a trade show, you sent company employees?  Who better to sell your product but the people who make the product?